>I'm not trying to be pedantic - how do you know?

That was kinda what my point about zombies was about. It's much easier to assert you have consciousness than to actually have it.

More specifically I think in pragmatic terms most things asserting consciousness are asserting what they have whatever consciousness means to them with a subset of things asserting consciousness by dictate of a conscious entity for whatever consciousness means to that entity. For example 10 print "I am conscious" is most probably an instruction that originated from a conscious. This isn't much different from any non candid answer though. It could just be a lie. You can assert anything regardless of its truth.

I'm kind of with Dennett when it comes to qualia, that the distinction between the specialness of qualia and the behaviour that it describes evaporates from any area you look at in detail. I find the thought experiment compelling about what is the difference between having all your memories of red an blue swapped compared to having all your nerve signals for red and blue swapped. In both instances you end up with red and blue being different from how you previously experienced them. Qualia would suggest you would know which would have happened which would mean you could express it and therefore there must be a functional difference in behaviour.

By analogy,

5 + 3 = 8

3 + 5 = 8

This --> 8 <-- here is a copy of one of those two above. Use your Qualia to see which.

>Do you mean in the sense of working out how they will react to something?

Yeah, of the sort of "They want to do this, but they feel like doing that directly will give away too much information, but they also know that playing the move they want to play might be interpreted as an attempt to disguise another action", When thinking about what people will do I am better amongst those who I play games with in knowing which decision they will make. When I play games with my partner we use Scissers, Paper, Stone to pick the starting player, but I always play a subgame of how many draws I can manage, It takes longer but more randomly picks the starting player.

It's all very iocane powder. I guess when I think about it I don't process a simulation to conclusion but just know what their reactions will be given their mental state, which feels very clear to me. I'm not sure how to distinguish the feeling of thinking something will happen and imagining it happening and observing the result. Both are processing information to generate the same answer. Is it the same distinction as the Qualia thing? I'm not sure.

I’ve thought about this a bit as my wife substantially has anendophasia and aphantasia, though not total. Even having a rich inner voice myself, I realise that it’s not absolute.

Many, in fact probably most experiences and thoughts I have are actually not expressed in inner speech. When I look at a scene I see and am aware of the sky, trees, a path, grass, a wall, tennis courts, etc bout none of those words come to mind unless I think to make them, and then only a few I pay attention to.

I think most our interpretation of experience exists at a conceptual, pre-linguistic level. Converting experiences into words before we could act on them would be unbelievably slow and inefficient. I think it’s just that those of us with a rich inner monologue find it’s so easy to do this for things we pay attention to that we imagine we do it for everything, when in fact that is very, very far from the truth.

Considering how I reason about the thought processes, intentions and expected behaviour of others, I don’t think I routinely verbalise that at all. In fact I don’t think the idea that we actually think in words makes any sense. Can people that don’t know how to express a situation linguistically not reason about and respond to that situation? That seems absurd.

> Yeah, of the sort of "They want to do this, but they feel like doing that directly will give away too much information, but they also know that playing the move they want to play might be interpreted as an attempt to disguise another action",

That is the internal monologue.

Not necessarily.

I have an inner monologue that's my own actual voice*. But I also have a part of my mind which can generate complete ideas.

I know these are two separate things, because at one point I started to notice that I already had a complete idea before the words expressing the idea had been voiced by the inner voice. Indeed, a few times I tried to skip the wasted time/effort of letting the [inner] "voice" do the vocal equivalent of "imagine" those words, only to find that my overall subjective emotional response was annoyance, because apparently that bit of my brain getting annoyed can be felt by the rest of my brain.

* as I perceive it subjectively, not the impression other people get and which I only experience via microphones and playback.

An internal monologue is when that sentence is expressed via words as if you are hearing it said by yourself inside your head. Someone without an internal monologue can still arrive at that conclusion without the sentence being “heard” in their mind.

How?

I can’t say as I have an internal monologue and every word I’m typing echos here in my mind as I type it. But as someone with aphantasia who’s regularly bewildered by questions like “how do you spell” or “how do you get to the grocery store” I understand that people’s modes of cognition vary immensely. To think that you’d need to, or even be able to, visualize a word to spell it is as foreign a concept to me as not having an internal monologue.

At the core it seems to me there’s a strong difference between abstract thinking and any particular verbalizing or visualizing implementation of it. I’d even venture to say that visualizing and verbalizing are slower, less precise methods to approximate the optimal thinking strategy of “knowing the answer already”, as compared to the non-visual/verbal methods that aphantastics/anendophanstatics are forced to use (and if others use it to some extent, it must be without realizing it based on their inability to comprehend aphan/anendo minds).

Evidence for the claim? When HN user Lerc describes gameplay analysis: "They want to do this, but they feel like doing that directly will give away too much information, but they also know that playing the move they want to play might be interpreted as an attempt to disguise another action", it’s very clear that this sort of long winded verbalization of a thought process is not the ideal mental exercise, my impression is that Lerc’s mind is able to do that entire exercise much more quickly and simply know the answer, and know that it could be verbally justified if needed, without wasting the time to verbalize that a priori. This is that indescribable thinking approach.

Similarly, I personally am aphantastic and things like navigation come very easy to me, a surprise to many. (I’ll admit i’m not a great speller, but neither is my dad who has a very visual mind). Moreover, I’m a moderately talented hobbies woodworker and it’s very easy for me to think through the full construction details of most any project, going down to any level of detail required and coming up with solutions to any relevant corner/edge cases, all internally without any words or visualization. I don’t have many people to compare this act to as it’s a fairly solo endeavor, but I do know that one person I made a project for has a very visual mind and is able to do that full “solid works in my head” visualization process. However, when we talked through a project she wanted together I pointed out several conflicts and ambiguities that she did not understand until I drew up the plans on paper.

Also, it’s worth bringing up the classic “bicycle test” as evidence the standard “visualization” method is woefully inaccurate: nearly everyone has seen a bike at some point in their life, but when asked to draw it provide absolute nonsense. Aphantastics, in my experience, never fail to sketch out a fully mechanically sound contraption. Pointing again to the idea that we somehow are closer to that platonic idea though process of knowing the answer than typically visualizers.

To provide perspective on that, as part of an employment thing I was given an an assessment in my abilities, this wasn't a simple questionnaire but a multi hour one-on-one with a professor (who did it as a side gig to fund his research)

My abstract reasoning scored beyond the measuring ability to test. At the time I did not know that aphantasia was even a thing, the term may not have even been coined yet I can't remember the exact year it was, but he recorded his results on a palm pilot.

Interestingly I answered some questions not exactly incorrectly but differently, due to perceiving a question as asking for a different class of information than how most people interpret it.

Examples were I considered building a house or a garage to be the same use for a brick (as opposed to as a weapon or as paving) which was deemed unusual. I also learned that it is normal to say the sun rises "in the east", and not "at the horizon". Not usual, but also not wrong.

When it comes to drawing I can do a decent snowy the dog, but I can't picture it I'm my head. I just know things like the eyes are black ovals stretched vertically and there are two lines in the ears that do not connect to the outline.

I could easily draw a diagram of a bike, but not one coming towards me, I believe that is a particular skill of artists to draw things as they appear instead of how they are.

> my impression is that Lerc’s mind is able to do that entire exercise much more quickly and simply know the answer, and know that it could be verbally justified if needed

My impression, is that the process is never complete without verbalization. So far, that I believe it is impossible to function as a human being without it - those that claim to have no inner monologue simply are either less aware of it, or expect it to be an actual audible hallucination. Whenever questioned to introspect and explain how they navigate tasks that require planning, it either comes out that indeed there was some inner verbalization, or evasives.

But you also have the quick thinking which can reach to correct answers faster than inner monologue could. Or otherwise what you might think is intuition. Frequently the verbalization or monologue part is just to explain to others or verify to yourself.

I think you're very close.

I don't think that as words. I'm just aware of the facts simultaneously. It's rather hard to type my awareness without converting it to words though.

I'm interested in this "simultaneous awareness of facts".

How simultaneous is it really? A 100% as in, the whole chain of thoughts is condensed into one "symbol"? Or simply less elements or "atoms"? Or is it equally long but just connects faster than words? Or something else entirely?

And a second question, how do you expect the inner monologue to be like? An audible hallucination? A different person talking in your head? Something else?

Thank you for sharing this!