How is this possible?

Except that silly little thing called glass

If this could be reproduced, would it be sufficient evidence that consciousness is a direct product of language?

Couple of things,

the guy is his twenties and he only realised this now?
Also this is obvious to anyone who has ever read a book written in first person.
Not using language to think in most cases is a disadvantage. Language is a basic function of our brains and if you dont use or use it too little then brain function atrophies.

This is also quite common between immigrants like OP and also americans. Immigrants very often use their native language much less in new country and but their skills and knowledge of the new language is also poor.
The american case is also interesting, when you compare vocabulary and general knowledge of americans and and other english speakers (British, australians, new zealanders, south africans) you realise that average american english is extremely poor in vocabulary, in expression, in everything. In this case I think its mostly cultural and also shows how education is regarded in each particalar country.

>Chinese and other East Asians have higher intelligence

The Chinese do not have creativity which is why they will NEVER succeed in the scientific arena. Creativity is more important than intelligence, even Einstein agreed with this. Also... Chinese cheat alot so you should doubt their (((IQ))) tests. All the chinks are good for is their cheap labour.

Thats true, but there are 2 billion of them, statistically its very likely that few will be born with strong creativity trait, and those few will number in tens of thousands and more

The Chinese outpublish Europeans in the fields of math and computer science at this moment

I doubt it. Even if promising people are born. The chinese culture (which focuses on hedonism) will prevent them from prospering unlike the west. Hedonism seems to be in their genes, which is even worse.

1)stagnation due to efficient central government
Europeans were constantly fighting each other militarily, politically, technologically, economically, theologically/philosophically

2)Christianity teaches equality of all human beings and Greece/Rome has republican tradition
Therefore peasants are more likely to demand silly things like equality, which is unprecedented.
Greeks were kinda pissed off at Alexander for adopting asian autocratic traditions at the end.
China didn't really had this European philosophy. China has/had more top-down approach - Emperor did and does everything and when emperor is great everything will be great. Obviously, Emperor was just a figurehead who was really just fucking concubines all day so that he doesn't meddle with actually running the state, that's bureaucrat's job.

>The chinese culture (which focuses on hedonism)
You mean the culture of Confucius and Mozi? That's the culture you're saying is based on hedonism?

yeah, good luck reading their scientific papers. Almost all of them are utter crap and/or low quality. Ask any professor or scientist and he will say the same. The chinks do quantity > quality.

(one little thing compared to everything else isn't a good counter-argument.)
either way quantifying any of these arguments maybe aside from using iq is sort of impossible. You cant scale the importance of inventions. You cant compare peoples thoughts. Without actually showing quantitative correlation and then causation, Veeky Forums just becomes /pol/; The reasoning is biased and gay.

Sci is pol, and pol is sci. I am all for keeping two boards separate, but the foundation of both boards is the same.
Dont ever forget this

You have to go back

Do you ever wonder why the scientific revolution, heck even the industrial revolution never happened in China given that their civilization had a head start? What were the gooks thinking that time? The answers to that is sadly still prevalent today which is why China will never be a scientific power.

this post seems fake
yes and no, asheknazi jews have above average verbal and mathematical intelligence, but average or under average spatial intelligence
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence

Would you say that hedonism is the only barrier to scientific advancement? Is Amish culture hedonistic?

East Asian IQ is only a couple points above the overall European average. Ashkenazi Jews, on the other hand, score a SD above or more, which is much more interesting.
I would hope Chinese outpublish most European countries given their population, but as notes, they're generally shit as you would know if you ever need to reference their work.
And funnily enough, East Asians score relatively high in spatial intelligence, but average in other forms of intelligence.

Wife is Chinese, born and raised in China. She thinks this guy sounds autistic.

iq tests while interesting and i score very high are total bullshit. if norweigians make a test on different typs of snow and proclaim this to be global intelligence tests, then norwegians will score highest. if chins make test of manadarin characters as global intelligence chins will score higher. The main thing IQ tests tell you about is WHO made them not who took them. its just psychobabble fraud like einstein being a genius or germans forced to wear costumes for photo ops are holocaust victims

I've been breaking up my conscious into two to argue with my self since middle school anons

I don't think this is just a Chinese thing. I had a white friend who astonished me by claiming that his first thoughts were never in words, only images and feelings, and that he had to make some mental effort to translate them into words. I'm the opposite, I think almost exclusively in words, and I have to "try" if I want to conjure up some image associated with those words in my "mind's eye".

I call bullshit. Another reddit fag looking for attention.

>he still thinks China is in the 1990’s

Absolute brainlet

Wait a fucking second - you guys are saying that you have a voice in your head constantly narrating your next actions, motivations and so forth? That sounds insane. The only time I have words in my mind is during the process of putting my thoughts into speech or writing.

All ancient people were like this. He was a throwback to ancient / pre-conscious bicameral man. Here's a PDF to the relevant Julian Jaynes book:
rational.org/pdf_files/originsjj.pdf
Jaynes was of course never a mainstream authority on cognition, but that book is great and I've never read anyone else who did such a good job explaining all the things that consciousness *isn't*. And you can actually get a lot out of that book just from the first part where he makes those arguments for why all those different things people commonly conflate with conscious awareness aren't really the same thing without even needing to get into the more out there / speculative part that follows where he makes his famous / infamous claim about ancient people not being conscious.
Intelligence and conscious awareness are two different things. You can be very intelligent without ever becoming consciously aware of anything. Just think about what you're like most of the time when you're driving a car or walking or playing a musical instrument and everything's happening on auto-pilot. Sensation, discernment, and decision making can still happen and complex behaviors can still be carried out without you needing to become consciously aware of it.

Nah, I believe it. You hear the opposite account too of people who only ever thought to themselves in words and who were surprised to learn others can conjure up imagery mentally.

>You hear the opposite account too of people who only ever thought to themselves in words and who were surprised to learn others can conjure up imagery mentally
But that is also bullshit!

All humans can think in words, raw feelings and imagery. It feels so retarded to think there are people who can't. I can do it. It makes no sense that someone could not open an image file in their brain when it is so natural. How do you even have memories? All memories come with a slideshow basically.

All of this is bullshit "xD look at me am I not like super special guys please upvote me teehee

>All humans can think in words, raw feelings and imagery.
Why do you believe that?
>I can do it.
That's a terrible reason to believe that.
>How do you even have memories?
Memories are actually known to be a lot more rationalization than literal storage of events as they happened like the photograph / film type scenario you seem to be characterizing them as here. What you think you "remember" is more like a story about how things "must have been."

>Why do you believe that?
Because I can.

>That's a terrible reason to believe that.
Not really. It is a great reason to believe that. Because we are all, roughly, genetically the same. You can jump and I can also jump. Maybe there are people that can jump higher, but we can all jump. Similarly, some people may be able to think more clearly but everyone can think. This includes raw feelings, words, and images.

I mean, the most I would be able to concede is that maybe not being able to think is a birth defect but even then, that's a bit weird. If this was a birth defect you'd hear about it in medical journals.

>Memories are actually known to be a lot more rationalization than literal storage of events as they happened like the photograph / film type scenario you seem to be characterizing them as here. What you think you "remember" is more like a story about how things "must have been."

We've all seen popsci psychology videos man. We all know the meme "Every time you remember something you alter the memory!". What I mean is that it is impossible for me to just remember words, or just images or just feelings. If I remember an event it comes with the words I said or maybe words that describe it, and it also comes with images, sometimes video, and it also comes with the emotions. Like I can have certain memories and immediately make myself angry because that is the emotion that is stored in that memory.

The notion that some brains develop so differently that they can't even remember images, or think in words, is ridiculous to me. It would be something grand. Something you'd hear about in medical journals all the time. It is something psychologists would be studying the shit out of. But it isn't. So I call that guy is just attention whoring.

And it doesn't help that he is on reddit. You know exactly why he did it. He is addicted to upvotes. The only thing he can't properly remember is ever being a decent human being.

Holy shit, I thought I was the only one. For awhile (around 3 years) something snapped in me and I could kind of "think without thinking" if you catch my drift. My mind was completely empty and I thought I was enlightened or something, haha.

>Not really. It is a great reason to believe that. Because we are all, roughly, genetically the same. You can jump and I can also jump. Maybe there are people that can jump higher, but we can all jump.
Using that logic you don't believe synesthesia or color blindness are real either, and both are verifiable through relatively straightforward tests.
Also here's some evidence for the opposite claim to OP's post of people who *don't* report having visual imagery:
sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945217303581
The self-reporting questionnaire stuff obviously doesn't prove shit, but they had a non-subjective component in a test they did on imagery-based rivalry priming that constitutes legitimate evidence:
>Unlike, the general population, experimentally naive aphantasics showed almost no imagery-based rivalry priming.
There are also cases of people reporting losing the ability to produce mental imagery later in life following brain injury.

>The notion that some brains develop so differently that they can't even remember images, or think in words, is ridiculous to me.
You're assuming this has to be the result of some dramatic difference in brain structure or functionality.
Your own subjective sense of how you think might seem very important / fundamental to you, but you're probably overrating how important it is relative to the brain functioning that supports it. I'd personally lean more towards the opposite suspicion that there isn't much difference at all physically between one form of subjective sense of one's own thinking and another. Both are mostly just reporting behavior still, with some mild loss of functionality probably in mental rotation tasks for example. And it's not like you need to be really good at mental rotation tasks in order to be a functioning human being. You probably need to be good at them to be a good automobile driver or a good athlete even, but for the everyday living most of us participate in it's something that's pretty negligible. And part of why I think this is because I'm absolutely shit at mental rotation tasks (I always failed those parts of standardized testing growing up with either none or almost none of those questions answered correctly) or managing directions myself, yet I've been living on my own and making a decent salary in the same profession at the same company for the past decade now

You're saying that a country that's launched multiple space stations, has large-scale next gen nuclear research facilities, just built the first quantum encryption test satellite, will never be a scientific power? What would need to happen to falsify your opinion?

>Using that logic you don't believe synesthesia or color blindness are real either
Those are birth defects though, which as I said, I was willing to concede.

>Unlike, the general population, experimentally naive aphantasics showed almost no imagery-based rivalry priming.

Then those people have birth defects and are mentally retarded. And I am fine with that, as my belief was that a normal human being should be able to do all I can do. If these people are mentally retarded then that's just what I'd expect. But still, the fact that the post is in reddit at least persuades to think that the guy in question is just faking it for attention.

Is this something people with schizophrenia and autism experience too, at least to a degree? (I am professionally diagnosed)

I have a tremendous trouble putting my thoughts into words, I also have a lot of trouble just finding words in conversations.

You moved the goal post.

From
>everyone can do it because I can
to
>they're retards so they don't count.

>You moved the goal post.
I didn't move any goal post because I don't have a goal post. I'm not trying to win anything.

I said back in that
>I mean, the most I would be able to concede is that maybe not being able to think is a birth defect

And you told me it is a birth defect and they even have their own brand of autism, "aphantasics".

So that's fine, you were right. I just wanna make it clear that I wasn't trying to win anything and if you were then please stop taking the internet so seriously.

>Those are birth defects though
I wouldn't call synesthesia a defect. It can be a major benefit to have e.g. that Daniel Tammet guy who can do ordinarily unintuitive / astronomical mathematical calculations automatically based on the number associated imagery that pops up in his head. Who wouldn't want to be able to do that?
abcnews.go.com/2020/autistic-savant-daniel-tammet-solves-problems-blink-eye/story?id=10759598
>Tammet doesn't need a calculator to solve exponential math problems such as 27 to the 7th power -- that's 27 multiplied by itself seven times -- he'll come up with the answer, 10,460,353,203, in a few seconds.
>Tammet visualizes numbers in their unique forms and then melds them together to create a new image for the solution. When asked to multiply 53 by 131, he explains the solution in shapes and textures: "Fifty-three, which is round, very round...and larger at the bottom. Then you've got another number 131, which is longer a little bit like an hourglass. And there's a space that's created in between. That shape is the solution. 6,943!"
>Then those people have birth defects and are mentally retarded.
Even with the cases of deficit in normal abilities it's not all a bad thing. You're probably more likely to excel in the ways of thinking you're limited to when you have diminished or altogether absent instances of other ways of thinking.
Not sure why all this bothers you so much, I think it's a pretty interesting topic personally. There are all sorts of neat quirks in how difference people are able or not able to use their minds, and a lot of times the differences are able to give you a better idea of how the given mental process works in general. There's much weirder shit than what's already been covered in this thread too, which you can check out by reading Oliver Sacks books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
The guy you're responding to in this post isn't me.

>Who wouldn't want to be able to do that?
I agree it is pretty impressive but that is also very similar to those super genius autistics. Some autists can do great things, but does that mean that autism is not a defect? I disagree. It is a defect that came with some positive side effects.

>Not sure why all this bothers you so much
What can I say, I did not know this was a thing and it sounded pretty ridiculous to me. But looking at the wikipedia it makes sense

>The phenomenon was first described by Francis Galton in 1880,[2] but has remained largely unstudied since

You have to agree that it sounds pretty weird. To me it sounds like what something would lie about for attention. I guess I've been using the internet too much lately. But what I find interesting is that the guy who first studied aphantasia was a psychologist and he said:

"To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied, protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words 'mental imagery' really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They had no more notion of its true nature than a colour-blind man who has not discerned his defect has of the nature of colour."

I wonder if this means that psychologists are retarded? Because now that is something I 100% agree with.

>Is this something people with schizophrenia and autism experience too, at least to a degree? (I am professionally diagnosed)
>I have a tremendous trouble putting my thoughts into words, I also have a lot of trouble just finding words in conversations.
There's a famous case of someone with autism (Temple Grandin) who reports thinking in imagery as opposed to language:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin
She believed this made her more similar / able to understand non-human animals and how they think, and turned it into a career by improving the design of slaughterhouses so the cows wouldn't get anxious or freeze up and disrupt the process.

>Some autists can do great things, but does that mean that autism is not a defect?
It depends. Some autists are definitely crippled by their condition. Someone like Daniel Tammet though doesn't seem disabled much to me anyway.
I think most extremely useful abilities probably come with a cost. Like Tesla being a recluse or Newton being a perma-virgin or Godel dying from starvation over a delusional fear of being poisoned through his food or Nash's schizophrenia etc.

This is how I fucking feel when I'm alone, like not a single fucking thought passes through my head, and then sometimes I realise that I almost haven't been conscious for some time, I'm also good at visualising, geometry and such, not so good at being social though, I really rarely think in words when I'm left alone

Forgot to mention:
>I agree it is pretty impressive but that is also very similar to those super genius autistics.
Daniel Tammet's actually unique among autists because in all other cases that have been studied, the autist doesn't have any insight into how they're able to know the weekday of a given random calendar year or the answer to a given large mathematical calculation for example. Tammet in contrast has a concrete imagery based explanation for his different mental feats and was able to depict the images in his head (one experimenter had him do this with different colored clay and then had him back at a later date and without warning him in advance had him do the same clay molding task again, with him being able to successfully reproduce the same shapes and colors for the same numbers / mathematical concepts the second time around).

Is it possible people who learned language late in life just don't understand the question? Maybe the concept is perfectly fine to them but they answer "B" because they think the question is "what box is the doll in?" And don't understand that it's "what box does Sally think the doll is in?"

And this might be the coolest thing he was able to pull off, learning Icelandic in a single week and then having what sounds like a reasonably fluent conversation with native speakers on live television:
youtube.com/watch?v=_GXjPEkDfek

>muh IQ tests
meanwhile in the real world whites are responsible for 95% of the most important and complex inventions as well as the vast majority of scientific and mathematical discoveries.

i don't usually think in language because i smoke too much weed

I've noticed on large doses of DXM that all verbal thought stops. It's like coming out of the clearing and realizing suddenly that you've been spending all your time buried in self-narration, and you can actually look around and see and hear the external world without all the mental chatter standing in the way. It's sort of similar to if you ever wore glasses and let them get dirty and only when you finally get around to cleaning them do you realize how badly your view of everything was distorted by the dirty lenses.

I know that feel.

This is an area of interest for me. I'm bad at math, but good at visualizing things. I can visualize complex geometries, engines, colours in my head, but mathematics is difficult for me. Integrals are "mute" for me. I'm thinking about developing some kind of "image-crutch" for mathematics and control theory. I'd benefit from that, if I could manipulate math in my head like I could forms.

Once I helped someone move his furniture. That person needed to model his future room layout, not on a piece of paper, but in some 3D-software on his computer. That meant measuring all rooms, and windows, and furniture for his sketch. I got quite mad, because of this waste of time. Why not just move it "all in your head"? Find the best solution without moving a finger.