What even words aren't even paintbrush handles? At least not for ourselves (for relaying info to other people it still works this way). They are more like... generated after the fact that we've imagined something, describing them in order to be able to forward the info to others.
I've heard about a case about someone, after having stroke I think, had his speech centers "offline", and while he couldn't think (or even imagine words), according to a later description, he could think surprisingly intelligently at that time too. (No reference unfortunately... maybe a Pinker book?) So we might mix up thinking in words with thinking itself because the former happens automatically when we direct attention somewhere?
By the way, has anyone heard about experiments in order to ensure that people who report inability to imagine things not just only have a lack of introspection of that? (like an "imagination" version of blindsight ).
Eliezer was talking about communicating the other way - building images from words you hear or read.
Some people think directly (at least at the first awareness-accessible level) in words, some in something else with later translation to words, some in something else with words only used to communicate. Some people alternate between these. I think all models that predict more unified behaviors come from the one psyche fallacy.
Today's post, Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles was originally published on 01 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
You think that words are like tiny little LISP symbols in your mind, rather than words being labels that act as handles to direct complex mental paintbrushes that can paint detailed pictures in your sensory workspace.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Conditional Independence, and Naive Bayes, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.