From Osher Doctorow
Most of us in the "hard" sciences, mathematics, or engineering don't
like to talk about human thought or cognition, not so much because we
don't believe that it exists but because we don't know of any way to
"get a handle on it" or operationalize and measure and control it.
Actually, though, there isn't much doubt that almost everybody will
respond "yes" to a question: "Do you think in pictures?" and similarly
"Do you think in sounds?". Unless everybody has an incredibly
contrived hallucination, there is something that these questions or
questionnaires "tap". They also intuitively tap what almost every
reader of this forum or any physics forum will agree to at least in
private or without "publicity", namely that he or she thinks in both
picture representations and sound representations.
It turns out also that if we give a message in sound, like "The tree
is falling on this house," and then give the same content message in
vision, then the response will be the same, and everybody will regard
these as representating the same message in different form. So
people both hear/read real "external" messages in vision and sound and
subjectively consider that they think in messages (thoughts) which
have both visual and auditory representations.
Why this redundancy in advanced life, and could it go back to
Fundamental properties of life and even beyond that to Fundamental
properties of the Universe? So far, nobody knows. Surprisingly,
however, that in itself is arguably significant, since so many people
have tried to find out. In fact, we can arguably say that there is no
known reason for the light-sound redundancy other than the fact that
both light and sound are Fundamental properties of advanced life!
We don't necessarily have to follow the trail from primitive
unicellular organisms to human beings in order to take a "jump" and
hypothesize that the Universe itself is fundamentally both light and
sound-oriented. After all, we do have that in black holes, and
there's no indication that black holes are not even more "primitive"
than unicellular organisms.
Osher Doctorow
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