Sam Iglesias
@sam
I’m curious, for those interested in Neuralink type things: why do people assume that the brain can generate thoughts and intentions faster than speech? Speech: 125-150 WPM Typing: 65-75 WPM Wouldn’t we have evolved some level of parity whereby we more or less think in language at roughly the rate of speech?
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Eric Platon
@ic
Difficult question, as hitting semantics issues from the start on what thought and intention are. Thought as symbol manipulation is “slow” compared to thought formed from raw sense (contentious wording here too). One reason is that symbols manipulation is often sequential.
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Eric Platon
@ic
When we look straight ahead for example, it is “faster” to feel what we see than to describe it in symbols, first in language and then as mechanical speech.
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Eric Platon
@ic
In the other hand, it may be that some people “think as they speak”.
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Eric Platon
@ic
This could be (not aware of literature) related to the “extended mind” (Clark and Chalmers), “extended phenotype” (Dawkins), Uexküll’s Umwelt, where we use the surrounding environment to reason, like writing on a board, but with speech and memory here.
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Eric Platon
@ic
And by the way in Neuroscience, there is this “magic number” 7 plus/minus 2 on the maximum sequence we can keep in mind actively, which indicates we may be buffering between “thoughts” and outputs like “speech”.
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