Talking to Yourself isn’t Communication
There are many ways to define a thing. We can define by function, by emergence, by form, or by content.
Ideally, any definition will be comprehensive enough to fulfill all criteria, but in some cases we do not need to include all dimensions when expressing the definition to another; only the necessary dimensions are sufficient.
Which are necessary ultimately depends on the communicative act we are performing. The emergence of chairs is not as interesting or important as its form if defining chairs to a carpenter, but the emergence of chairs may be a more significant story to, say, an aquatic alien life form with no need to ever sit.
The attempt to define in accordance with the needs of the audience and the function of the definition itself — to motivate the audience to see a thing in one way or another — is ipso facto communicative. But attempts to define a thing for oneself are very different in nature.
If the limits of my language are the limits of my world, I may want to improve my idiolect to extend my world. My goal is now not to communicate, to make a statement of the arrangement of facts that can be understood by another. My goal is creation; to produce a new localized semantic field that I can then use to describe the world.
Artificial discretization, then, helps me expand my world by introducing new forms to the facts. Reality works this way as well; from the Big Bang to now, as we currently understand it, we have seen new forms imposed on the world of facts, that the universe is composed of 10⁸⁵ or so particles that can be combined in various ways due to the three fundamental forces and gravity in a spacetime where complex forms increase in number and complexity, a tendency that is expressed as entropy when applied to energy specifically.
The self-referential act of discretizing empirical phenomena in the physical world is a, if not the, defining feature of consciousness and is observed in all living entities; on the Savannah animals will discretize into “food”, “predator”, “water”, “potential mate”, and so on. Humans create more structures but the process is identical.
At the lower level, we see particles doing this as well; an electron discretizes the field of potential orbits around a nucleus into different energy states and settles in the one appropriate for its nature.
Forming discrete structures based upon pre-existing rules is a fundamental act of consciousness and the universe.
There are a lot of bigger and deeper questions about the fundamental nature of reality that this perspective opens up, but I just want to highlight one of the smaller of these: if the use of language with others is an act of communication, or of an attempt at transmitting information, what is language spoken to oneself? Self-communication is a glib and nonsensical answer, for a better term for this act of further discretization for one’s own benefit would be refinement. Conscious entities refine ideas and make them better and better over time; animals will do this to their own ends, getting better at identifying predator and prey as they age, for instance.
The topological spaces humans create in their own minds have more dimensions and more conditionality, but the process is identical. Thinking, or speaking, to oneself is not merely talking to oneself; it is the process of extending one’s understanding of the world, thereby extending the world itself both for the subject and for the object. That extension also grows the world of facts, literally making the universe larger.
The mind often, perhaps always, arranges the inner monologue into a story, which defines the monologue in terms of its self-regulating structure; stories (the vector) are produced by the mind to create durable connections (the points along the vector) between ideas. That this reflects the basic function of angular momentum is interesting.
When you talk to yourself, know what you are doing: you are not talking to yourself, you are creating new mental maps and modalities for navigating your world. Because our linguistic world is always a map onto reality whose accuracy is <100%, and because our linguistic world is infinitely productive and inherently incomplete, and because communicating ideas is fundamentally different from creating them, know that talking to yourself is not the same as talking to others. It is much more important: it makes your world larger in a real, material sense.
