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My own personal theory of mind is heavily inspired by David Eagleman's Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. There he describes a model of mind in which a multitude of independent "agents" propose "ideas", which bubble up to our consciousness (the top-level agents), which pick some of these ideas according to some (to us) opaque key.

In this model, I imagine that many of these low-level ideas start in a non-language form, and as they bubble up to the higher levels of the mind, they get wrapped in language, as they are processed by consciousness. But since things are not simple, the higher-level agents can modulate the lower-level ones, and that's how the language parts of our minds can influence the non-language (emotional?) parts. I have experienced several instances of purely rational cognition imprinting into my emotional perception of reality.


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