
Intuition, Incubation, and Insight: Implicit Cognition in Problem Solving (1996) - lainon
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/Underwood96.htm
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danharaj
A tangential question: to what extent are conscious processes conflated with
symbolic/linguistic processes which have an explicit reification that can be
conveyed to others?

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adrianratnapala
I think there is a very close (but not identity) between consciousness and
symbolic/linguistic processes.

It comes from the tautology all that dicourse about conciousness experience
(and even much of our internal deliberation) comes down to what we can express
in verbal reports (here "verbal" includes writing, sign language etc). And
those reports are derived from the tiny subset of brain-info that gets put
into memory in a form that can be processed and re-interpreted as the verbal
reports.

If we have conscious experience outside of this, then that experience only
contributes to "functional" memory (skills and habits) rather than the any
kind of narrative memory. And we never talk about it. I'd say that whatever
that experience is, it is a very different kind of consciousness from what we
usually talk about. In fact it might be what Freud and folks called the
"unconscious".

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jacobolus
I don’t buy it. A huge amount of my understanding of technical topics is
visual/graphical (but definitely “conscious”!), and takes significant amounts
of effort to serialize and simplify into something that I can write down (or
speak) in language or symbols, to the point that it’s often not worth
bothering unless I’m trying to explain myself to someone else. If I’m just
trying to externalize such topics so I can reason about them with less stress
to working memory, vague schematic doodles are often more useful than written
prose.

Usually explanations of technical solutions to problems (e.g. math proofs or
code comments) leave most of the actual understanding unstated, and someone
trying to understand the solution for themselves has to painstakingly
reconstruct their own understanding, which often ends up somewhat different
than the author’s.

Many conscious graphical memories and structures (e.g. details of the
appearance of someone’s face) are all but impossible to faithfully relate,
except sometimes through drawing or the like for expert illustrators.

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adrianratnapala
> I don’t buy it. A huge amount of my understanding of technical topics is
> visual/graphical (but definitely “conscious”!), and takes significant ...

You're quite right and I'm sorry my comment seened much more "everything is
text" than I really wanted.

To me the central thing is not those verbal reports, it is the recording into
symbolic memory. The symbols need not be verbal, they can be records of our
internal representations of geometry or whatever. But whatever they are, they
are "parsable" \-- i.e. it's not just neural wiring that makes you able to do
stuff like catching a ball, it's stuff that you could re-interpret
(imprefectly) into a verbal report.

And you are right, if the thing was a record of geometry, then you are almost
always better off drawing a picture than trying to describe it in words.

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dschuetz
Is there any expert to comment on this one? I’d like to know the opinion of a
professional in that field.

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coretx
Does anyone have a mirror? The host is overloaded.

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dschuetz
Try google cache. There is a full cached copy of the linked webpage.

