This is so weird. I am very “In my head” and have generally planned what I’m going to say before I open my mouth.

It makes me feel like I’m not very good at conversation though, especially smalltalk.

Yeah, sometimes I think it in advance, in which case as I'm thinking it, I don't usually know the next word and still arrive at a coherent sentence by the end, just plowing forward from start to finish.

Yeah, I'm like you but definitely know people like parent. I never really fully realized that's what they were doing though. I think I assumed they were way faster at planning their sentences than I was. Now that I know this is an option, I'm interested in giving it a try.

I'm actually very quiet because I do a lot of planning before I speak. The planning comes in complete sentences, one word at a time, though.

I usually know what I'm about to actually say very shortly before I say it. This has occasionally led to emergency course corrections. But I do sense the "shape" of a sentence well before I say it.

I think there's something like a stage design in the brain:

- symbolic or model deliberation

- verbal expression

- vocalization

And each of those stages can be consciously introspected on, but people will naturally develop more or less ability to introspect on it. I think when people say they "don't mentally verbalize", what is actually happening is they just haven't happened to develop conscious introspection of the verbal expression stage. But I'd expect that this can be trained.

(Conversely, sometimes people introspect so much on verbal expression that it becomes an inherent part of the way they think. Brains are weird and wonderful!)

I don't think you are right. I experience the same feeling of focusing on an idea but not having a fixed idea what exactly I'll say, but I can also prepare full sentences if I want to. It's just most of the time I make an effort to put my brain in speech-autopilot mode. I think in fact it's harder to let yourself be lead by it without consciously introspecting, at least I find I'm able to discuss way quicker as I can start talking about a very complex idea without having had to "sort it out" explicitly. I'll just know I know what to say in those cases.

Part of this auto-pilot is learning to recognize if you have the answer or not. I will not launch into a sentence without a strong feeling I understand the topic and know what to say. I just don't need to prepare the exact words in order to do it. I still consciously "check" that I know, but that just requires a boolean answer instead of a word by word crafted sentence.

I don't think it's like ... if an idea gets moved to the verbalization stage, that you're compelled to say it. It's more that some people seem to have little control over what happens at that stage, ie. they can operate on a concept but they can't predict the way it'll be spoken.

Like

[Conceptual stage] --??-- consciousness

V

[Verbalization stage] --??-- consciousness

V

[Vocalization]

So if you don't have conscious access to verbalization, you only realize how a thought "will sound" after you say it. Conversely, if you don't have conscious access to conceptualization, you end up thinking that "thinking" always involves "thinking out loud", because "thinking out loud" (verbalizing) is the only way you have to query your conceptual layer. You literally only become aware of your own thinking after the thought is already pretty far along. At the extreme, you can have conscious access to neither stage and require vocalization to reflect on your own thinking.

I understood your original argument, maybe I just did a bad job describing what I disagree with. In this post it's this:

> Conversely, if you don't have conscious access to conceptualization, you end up thinking that "thinking" always involves "thinking out loud", because "thinking out loud" (verbalizing) is the only way you have to query your conceptual layer. You literally only become aware of your own thinking after the thought is already pretty far along

What I'm saying is that even if you do have conscious access to verbalisation stage, the more you force yourself to let it be handled subconsciously, the better at communicating quickly and effectively. This is what I meant by autopilot.

Spending active conversation time on conscious verbalization seems to me as inefficient as verbalising words and "speaking them out" as you read a book, usually known as subvocalization.

Oh yeah I agree with that. I think the conscious access is primarily important for self-training. So I would expect somebody with conscious access to 1. be better at vocalizing, 2. almost never actually need to use their access to correct a decision.

I tend to think of consciousness as the "debug mode" of the brain.

Yea makes me wonder what data could be used to train this theoretical symbolic model that precedes the language model?

I’m thinking training on movies/tv has the physical element that pure text is missing.

Yep, this is ordinary conversation for most of the time. It's a bit strange to make yourself aware of it, but you have an idea or thought you want to express, and the sentences come out in a semi-automated and coherent fashion.

I think of it a bit like walking. You can think about it, focus on it, control it as you please, but most of the time you just do it without thinking.

A way to think about it is a programmer: your mind is just a lot of functions - written by the `consciousness()` function, that has the main loop. You have the `moveLeftFootUp()` function, that can be called by the `walk(speed="normal")` function, that can be called by the `morningWalk()` function, etc.

Consciousness is the caller. You/It can consciously manually call `moveLeftFootUp()`, then `moveRightFootDown()`. Or maybe you were calling `walk(speed="normal")` and stepped in and started debugging that function's code at that level, step by step. Also, these functions sometimes raise exceptions, which are either handled by the function's caller automatically or bringing it to the caller's attention (i.e. the `conciousness()` main loop).

Learning to walk involves first manually calling `moveLeftFootUp()` and `moveRighFootDown()` order (once you have drafted those functions) in different order to get right how that should be done, then prototyping some `walk()` function code. The initial version of the `walk()` function at the begining isn't very robust and doesn't handle a lot of edge cases, thus raising exceptions all the time and requiring a lot of conscious effort. Of course, you are also adjusting `moveRighFootDown()` and `moveLeftFootUp()` at the same time or maybe creating `moveFoot(feet,direction)` function, etc.

But in the end, after all the fine adjustments of the code, you basically get the code for `walk()` right, it stops raising exception's to the main loop and doesn't require too much effort. You can just call the `walk()` function and it just works automatically (unless you step in with the debugger) - or you can continue creating new functions that call `walk()` inside those, confidently.