Quote: (10-11-2018 06:57 PM)BortimusPrime Wrote:
The internal monologue must be maladaptive in some cases. I can think of a couple that hit me:
"Okay, now that someone's listening to me play the piano I'd better not make a mistake so think about each key I'm going to press instead of using muscle memory. Shit, I fucked up."
"Gee, I sure better to go to bed now that it's 3 AM. I'll just lie here in this dark bedroom and fall asleep. Just gotta get sleepy. ... I wonder if the aliens in Interstellar had accidentally rotated Matthew Mcconaughey in the fourth dimension before spitting him out of the Tesseract, would all the chiral molecules in his body be flipped? I bet someone else has thought of this, I should get up and google it."
So are the people who don't have the internal monologue just doing something equivalent nonverbally with imagery or something? Or are they actually just zombies that react to stimuli without qualia?
There's a book called The Intelligence Paradox by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa that is kind of about this: there are many evolutionarily maladaptive traits or behaviors that are for whatever reason linked to higher levels of intelligence. Ex. being a night owl as opposed to an early bird, being homosexual, being a scatterbrain/keeping a cluttered workspace, and a bunch of others I can't recall offhand. I'm not sure the author comes to this conclusion but the impression I got was that these genetic traits (which should ensure your genes are not passed on) have survived because they are linked to higher IQ, i.e. the bonus of higher IQ offsets the drawbacks of these traits.