Is inner speech a quale?

Question

I experience inner speech as I am composing speech and also reading text.

This experience of inner speech is similar to experiencing the sound my mind experiences when it hears spoken words.

Sound is considered a qualia, such as the falling of a tree or the language a human uses to communicate.

Is therefore my experience of my inner speech a qualia, since sound is considered a qualia?

If inner speech, an element of consciousness, is qualia, then is at least part of our conscious experience qualia?

Answer 1

The paper Inner Speech by Alderson-Day and Fernyhough from 2015 seems a comprehensive survey about the phenomenon of “Inner speech” from the viewpoint of current psychology:

Inner speech can be defined as the subjective experience of language in the absence of overt and audible articulation.

The authors deal with two theoretical approaches under the title “Comparing Vygotskian and Working Memory”. They do not consider inner speech a quale.

See also the entry Inner Speech at Stanford Online Encyclopedia.

Answer 2

More or less, yes. I'd say inner speech is qualia - plural. It is a batching of different kinds of qualia at the same time: sensory and emotional/attitudinal. It has parallels to speaking to another person, which is where I am getting my sense it is plural. Perhaps your inner speech is reminding, chastizing, worrying, etc., yourself. My own experience is that even fairly neutral inner speech has an attitude and this can be felt if one focuses on that aspect of it. In addition it has a kind of 'sound' quale. That seems like the minimum number of qualia at any given moment. There can also be images, at least for me. If my inner speech is along the lines of 'Oh, my God, what have I done?' I may also be getting an image of my boss' face. Perhaps it should be called 'inner communication' in that case.

Answer 3

I have a thorough understanding of inner speech, as it was the topic of my Master's thesis. However, I do not have a good recollection of the notion of qualia. Therefore I will focus on the inner speech aspect and hopefully it will indirectly address the connection between the two.

Inner speech definitely has a subjective component and it is also measurable in the brain. As a matter of fact, it lights up nearly precisely the same regions of the brain as actual speech. For instance, the temporal lobe responsible partly for hearing is activated (We imagine that we hear our inner speech, and the brain seems to be fooled into thinking we are really hearing it). This comes as close to being subjective, private conscious experience as one can possibly have without actually measuring consciousness.

In the middle of the 20th century, there were also attempts being made to measure the vocal chords and other speaking apparatuses to see if inner speech and its close cousin "thinking" could be measured by miniscule movements. Some of these studies seemed promising, though fMRI studies decades later far dwarfed these efforts.

Furthermore, the process of voice hearing for schizophrenic patients even lights up similar regions to everyday inner speech of neurotypical people. The only difference is that a person with schizophrenia on some level loses the notion that it is them creating the inner speech, and also loses the ability to predict what the inner speech is going to be. So if a schizophrenic voice could reasonably be defined as a qualia (again, I don't know much about what qualia actually are), the inner speech could also be close to that.

Finally, preliminary studies show that each person has a descriptive for their inner speech. Almost everyone does experience inner speech and some will say it sounds like their own voice, some like a generic nondescript voice, some will say it sounds like different characters such as if they are thinking about Lord of the Rings it may sound British, or if they are saying something deep it may sound like Morgan Freeman.

In my opinion, inner speech does classify as an experience. Some people have particularly rich inner voices, such as writers, academics, and those in contemplative traditions.

Answer 4

Yes. Everything that can be felt is a quale, including thinking, recalling, etc.

Answer 5

When reading up on qualia to see whether there is a definition that is well suited for this question, I had to chuckle when it says that "[...] the importance of qualia hinges on the definition of the term". It seems like every answer I write here contains that aspect - it depends. Philosophers...

That said, one particularly practical definition (or rather approximation) of what qualia are is Daniel Dennetts: "the ways things seem to us". According to Dennett, qualia have these four attributes (more or less, exceptions notwithstanding):

• ineffable – they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any means other than direct experience.
• intrinsic – they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience's relation to other things.
• private – all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.
• directly or immediately apprehensible by consciousness – to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.

Inner Speech certainly does "seem to be something to (at least some of) us", and those four criteria also seem to match.

So yes, Inner Speech is a quale.