People often talk as though their thoughts were a constant stream of an inner voice speaking aloud in their heads. I find this strange, because unless I am rehearsing what I want to say or write, or am trying to imagine a debate between two or more people, there aren't ever any voices in my head. When I think about things, the thoughts aren't verbal; they're just there, both like weighted, kinetic mechanisms and like colors at once. I don't think: "Today I have to feed the cat, read Wittgenstein and do the dishes, and I would like to find the time to watch a movie with my girlfriend." That would be bizarre. The thoughts are just there, maybe flashes of cats and the word "Wittgenstein" and some vague notions of duty and cleaning and my girlfriend's name. I know them, without hearing them or seeing them written. So why do people talk as though there were a voice in their heads? I thought only schizophrenics heard voices.

well, SOME thoughts are 'inner monologues," it seems; especially the most articulated, clearest thoughts we have; so it seems reasonable to treat that as a significant category of "thoughts". Or at least they SEEM to be articulated verbally, even if not out loud; your point that they are not literally 'heard' is a very good one, but the similarity to what is or can be heard is striking enough that it doesn't seem misplaced to imagine these thoughts quite literally expressed verbally, even if silently. But just the same you are surely right that not ALL 'thought' can fit this model (if any at all can) -- so to me a related question might be why it is, exactly, that some thinking seems so closely affiliated with language while other thinking does not .... Julian Jaynes has a great book from the 1970s: "Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" in which he suggests (amongst other things) that schizophrenia results in people being unable to distinguish their inner monologue from ...

When I am awake I see up and down and all the three dimensions as a present and irrefutable reality. In a dream I also experience those very same three dimensions but when I reference that experience in waking I correlate it with my physical body(brain) and not with a real independent feature of reality. While the idea that dreams represent the possibility that the world is an illusion is a persistent philosophical question I am more concerned here with how an abstract feature that seems to convey a part of the essence of what we call physical reality, that is to say dimensionality, is undermined by our dream experience. It seems that dreams demonstrate that dimension is not necessarily as commonsensical a feature of physical reality as it appears. Isn't dimension a feature which is central to our modern scientific understanding of physical reality and then don't dreams then call into question much of scientific understanding?

Not sure I fully follow your question, esp your premise. You seem to say that our dreams are 'of', represent, have the content of, the same three-dimensional space of which we're aware when awake; but then you're worried about how we 'correlate' dreams with our bodies/brains. Is your worry that though we dream 'of' a three-dimensional space, our dream is in fact entirely located (if that makes senes) within our brain? (which is of course 3-d but that doesn't seem relevant to your concern) ... But if so, why is waking experience any different, since all our waking experience also 'occurs within' or 'is correlated with' our brain activity? If I've understood you correctly, maybe we should distinguish between 'what are experiences represent or are about' from 'what is their causal source' -- and then we can recognize that both waking/dream experience can be 'about' three-dimensional space even when being 'caused by' brain activity .... (Or if I haven't understood your concern, pls feel free to...

Why do we, psychologically/philosophically speaking, put such an emphasis on things being "real"? What got me thinking about this question is the nature of our memories - while I can certainly recall some "half-memories" which probably never actually happened or even simply fabricate some, why do we place less value on these memories than "true" ones, even though they could theoretically have the effect on us?

great question ... we might make some useful distinctions -- whether memories, beliefs, etc. are 'true' does NOT make an immediate difference to the individual, psychologically: we act on what we think, believe, remember etc., and in that sense the false thoughts/memories are just as 'valuable' or 'real' or important as the true ones .... however in many ways we like to orient ourselves towards the truth, to get our beliefs to be true, etc.; and thus when we discover some belief/memory is false we want to correct it .... (why we do or should care about truth in general is a separate issue; but most people simply do) -- so from that perspective, there's a large difference between the true ones and the false ones, as we seek to overcome the latter .... the "idealist' tradition in philosophy -- esp figures such as George Berkeley -- would ultimately deny the difference between the true ones/false ones (or at least reconstrue it very differently from the way I've implicitly done here) -- so if you want...

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