How does your internal monologue work? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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For me there's two separate participants, a 'talker' and a 'listener'. My mind identifies more with the talker, because that's the one that has agency. Since there are two participants, both of which are me, I talk in 1st person plural ('we've got to do ...', 'we thought about this earlier'). I stopped being afraid of being alone after I started having an internal dialogue around the age of 11, since having a second participant in the conversation meant I was always in company.

Edit: Wow, looks like there's a lot more diversity in this than I was expecting

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[-] Faux@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago

Sometimes I just talk to myself.

Sometimes I talk with a random character. I can feel agency (or illusion of Independent agency) from anyome at this point, whether I want an anime waifu to "talk back" or to play out a dialogue I'm supposed to have with an IRL person soon.

And sometimes I talk with my inner companions. There are a few characters I have built stable, genuine relationships with over years.

Btw. at some point I started seeing my mind as a process rather than an entity (or set of entities). And like in other complex processes, it would be strange if we couldn't observe any internal contradictions in it.

this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026

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