Eli5: If we use language as instrument of thoughts, how did our ancestors think?
In: 8
This brushes up against a lot of philosophical questions we don’t really have firm answers to. E.g., what do you mean by “think?”
I assume you really are asking “what would I experience if I were that person?” We don’t even know for sure what it is like to be a cat. We can’t *really* say what it was like to be our ancestors.
That said, language probably isn’t a requirement to have an experience. Even among modern humans, some people self-report that they do not think very often in words except when they write or talk out loud. They still think, but it’s in concepts, images, sounds, etc.
Wordless thoughts should make sense: words are just **symbols** that represent concepts. The concept itself exists in the brain and isn’t entirely stored “inside” the word (ever know what you’re referring to but forget the word for it?).
I can’t really describe it much better, though.
There is an innate mechanism in humans that we learn before we think in words: thinking in pictures.
Since those are the only two options we have, it’s safe to assume that our ancestors and animals today use one or both of them as well. Birds for example have an excellent memory of foraging places so they probably think in pictures. But they are also very vocal and develop complex individual melodies, so they probably think vocal as well. The more vocal an animal is, the more likely it is that it thinks vocal as well.
You don’t actually think in language. It’s an abstraction layer above thought.
The way your mind actually works is by having a large number of connections of varying strength between a large number of elements in your brain. The actual ‘thoughts’ are the sum of what is traveling along those connections at any given time. These complex connections are unique to every person, so they can’t be used as a form of communication – everyone needs to use them as a base for building up skills like language.
Never happened to you that you did not really “say” anything in your head but got an answer to a question. You can think without talking to yourself. If just feels like it since you use the language in your head.
Abstract thought including language is one of the tent poles of human intelligence. As we made the leap from something that we might recognize as “animal” to something that we might recognize as “human” language was developed. It has a assumed that early humans may have communicated abstractly with non-verbal language earlier like using hand signals while hunting
It is possible that spoken language developed and became complicated as our brains became larger. I’ve read that the Neanderthal had larger brains but limited speaking ability. This was due to the structure of the vocal mechanism. But there could be more information discovered that suggests this is not correct
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