Out of curiousity, I raised this topic with my eldest tonight.
Surprise #1 was that he had already read about it.
His thoughts were roughly thus (I didn't record it, so you will just have to put up with my paraphrasis.
He said that he considered it to be the oddest thing, since neither he nor I could imagine what it would be like to have no internal monologue.
But take the cat (who was at the time curled under a blanket) He can communicate when he wants in, or out, or food or a cuddle perfectly well, it follows that he must have some mental map of what those are and how to indicate which he wants. But he has no language, so clearly cannot have the internal monologue you or I would have. He may instead be operating from a language of concepts, desires, mental images and so forth, not anything we would immediately recognise as an internal monologue.
Given that he will start his degree in Applied Languages next October, I found his thoughts quite interesting.
Surprise #1 was that he had already read about it.
His thoughts were roughly thus (I didn't record it, so you will just have to put up with my paraphrasis.
He said that he considered it to be the oddest thing, since neither he nor I could imagine what it would be like to have no internal monologue.
But take the cat (who was at the time curled under a blanket) He can communicate when he wants in, or out, or food or a cuddle perfectly well, it follows that he must have some mental map of what those are and how to indicate which he wants. But he has no language, so clearly cannot have the internal monologue you or I would have. He may instead be operating from a language of concepts, desires, mental images and so forth, not anything we would immediately recognise as an internal monologue.
Given that he will start his degree in Applied Languages next October, I found his thoughts quite interesting.
