There’s a scene in Bablyon 5 where Capt. Sheridan has just met Lorien–who is the first intelligent being to arise in the history of the universe and who is still alive after all these years.
At the moment, Sheridan is quite distracted by recent events and is unable to appreciate a question Lorien is mulling over. Lorien points out to Sheridan that the Universe began with a Word, but which came first? The Word or the Thought behind it? You can’t have words without thoughts or thoughts without words, so there’s a kind of chicken-vs.-egg situation here.
There are several remarkable things about this scene. One is that it was written by Joe Straczynski, who is an atheist but was nevertheless willing to put on the lips of Lorien (a kind of cosmic Adam) a statement about Creation taken from the Gospel of John. As always, kudos to Joe for being willing to treat religion thoughtfully and respectfully in his fiction.
Another remarkable thing about the scene is that Lorien is wrong.
Oh, sure. You hear his view about the interdependence of thoughts and words articulated a lot, and it can seem prima facie justified: We have an awful hard time thinking without an internal monologue going in our heads. Yet it is still untrue that we can’t think without using words.
There are a variety of ways to show this, though I won’t go through them all here. I will mention two, however.
One is the ability of individuals to clearly think and understand complex realities without the ability to articulate them in words. I recently was reading a book by a cognitive scientist who cited the case of a man who had a stroke while he was sleeping and woke up unable to use language, even in his mind. He later regained his language ability and described his experience vividly. As soon as he woke up, he realized something was wrong. He couldn’t use certain parts of his body, and he quickly deduced that he must have had a stroke during the night. He tried to call out to his wife (who had already gotten out of bed) for help, but couldn’t remember how to use words.
He thus understood the concepts I have had a stroke and I can use words to get help without having the ability to cash out these thoughts in linguistic form.
He was (temporarily) reduced to a state of functioning only in what cognitive scientists call “mentalese”–the “language of the mind,” which we frequently experience with an almost-simultaneous accompanying internal gloss in English (or whatever the language is that we’re thinking in at the moment).
Yet it is possible to think without the gloss. Situations in which we have to think very fast are good for bringing this out, as we may be having to think so fast that we don’t have time to do the gloss that we normally reflexively provide.
Lately I’ve been trying to cultivate an awareness of my own thinking in mentalese, and I’ve found that driving offers a lot of opportunities.
For example, this Saturday I was driving up a particularly narrow, twisty road on a mountainside. The road had lots of intersections, and if a car came whizzing through one of these intersections under the control of a careless drive, it could smack into you in no time flat.
Thus as I drove up the hill, I was very sensitive to the cars that might pop in from the right or the left.
Sure enough, as I was rounding one turn that had an intersection, my peripheral vision caught a car coming right up to the intersection at a high rate of speed. Only having a second to decide whether to slam on the breaks or not, I quickly looked down at the roadsurface of the intersection to see if there was a white line at the intersection, blocking the car’s path and signalling it to stop. I realized that if there was a white line that the driver of the other car would be legally required to stop and, unless he was extraordinarily careless, he would stop, meaning that the risk of a collision was low enough that I shouldn’t swerve dramatically or slam on the breaks (which are themselves risky moves in such an environment). I saw that there was such a white line, kept driving, and the other car stopped.
I thought all of this–the need for the white line, its legal implications, its probable implications for the other car stopping, and the ensuing implications for what I needed to do as a driver–in under a second and didn’t have time to cash it out in words.
It was a moment of pure mentalese.
It took me a lot longer just now to articulate in words what happend than it took me to think it all as it happened when unencumbered by words.
And that’s the way it tends to work: We first reason through a situation very fast in mentalese and, upon having a particular insight, we start reflexively cashing it out in words in our internal monologues–unless events (like driving in a complex environment) force us to think about other things. This reflexive translation of mentalese into a verbal language is what generates the illusion that words and thoughts are mutually dependent on each other.
They aren’t.
You know those cool robots they have now?
What would youl think about a “sculpture” that looks like a church building turned upside down?