I think everybody can agree on word chair is not a real chair.
The original question was if mind develops its own way of thinking when there was no language learned, either spoken or visual. Somebody can develop a visual language and you can learn it, but its still a form of language you learn from outside. And hearing babies learn language with no effort. Unless you isolate the baby completely from the world, baby will learn what he hears and develop a way of thinking before he goes to school and starts learning literature.
So the main question is not if there can be a visual language, but what happens in the absence of the language we are used to use. For example if I work on the method SimplyMints described and get so used to it and start thinking in it, then I will be back where I started, I will end up replacing my current method of thinking with another method. But because it is so unusual for me right now, when I try doing it the way she describes, it throws my mind out of its usual pattern. And I observe what is happening there. Something that would make me angry when I think about it, doesnt give me the same emotion when I try using her method. I try creating images in my mind and they lead me to new images but those new images doesnt mean anything to me at the moment (so they do not symbolize anything for me yet) and I do not know how to respond to them emotionally.
I will try to explain further.. Every word has many logical connections to other related words in my mind. Its an automatic process. For example if you call me stupid, I react to you. My mind links "I (ego)" with the concept of being stupid and links them to concept of you are attacking me and connects it to emotion getting angry or irritated etc.. Now I try same thing using pictures. I read you calling me stupid and I try imagining myself as a stupid person. No its not connected to idea of you are attacking me at this time. My logic, perhaps because its not used to it, doesnt follow the same path. It actually stops at that image.
Now let me try changing the image in my mind. I imagine you are trying to make me stupid in my mind. First thing comes to my mind is you are moving my brain out. Its actually a quite funny scene and doesnt feel like you are attacking me, or humiliating me. I think I should work on it more and tell you how it goes. Right now I am trying to simulate it in my mind. I should use it in real situations to see how I react to it.
What is your method of thinking?
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The concepts inside my mind are fluid, and are affected by other concepts similar to the way nouns are affected by every other word type in a sentence. The way it's different is the main concept (the noun) is merged with the secondary concepts to change it. They aren't added to each other, but they become one. For example, if I have a concept of a lake, and I read a passage talking about ripples on the lake, the concept of ripples doesn't attach itself to lake, but the concept of lake in this instance is altered so that the ripples are part of the same concept. Therefore, if the wind picks up causing the ripples to become choppier, that again alters the concept of lake, not ripples. The concept of ripples won't reappear until I choose to focus specifically on a ripple, where I see other concepts that affect it, such as eddies, wind, current, water temperature, lunar gravity, etc. Everything I've ever learned in life affects how these concepts are presented in my mind. As a result, if I were able to impart to you the precise concept directly into your mind exactly as it is in my mind, it would be ambiguous at best to you. Each concept is 100% fluidly influenced by every experience I've ever had. When the lake with ripples concept is being formed, and when the choppy lake concept is being modified, I'll see these new concepts as they approach to meld with the lake concept, and they'll remind me of past experiences that I've had with ripples and choppy lakes. I'll see images of my younger self in these memories, and I'll see the people who are with me. I can let my mind wander, and I might turn my attention to these people and see other events when I was with these same people, other things they've done. Perhaps they've died. I'll see their funeral, their grave, perhaps I'll see what I was doing when I learned they were dead. Perhaps the concept of death will remind me of others who have died, and my focus will turn to them. Then, I'll remember I used to chat on a forum with them. Then, the concept of forum will remind me that I'm typing on a forum right now, and I'd probably better move on from this concept lest I bore my audience, if it isn't already too late.
My point is, your mind is taking the concepts in whatever form of representation it has come up with, and it's interpreting them by linking them in a network. This concept makes sense to me, and I now understand how you would not be overwhelmed by this because your brain has learned to recognise larger more complex concepts by the shape of the network of smaller conceptual symbols. If you were to take the concepts my mind uses and replace them with the ones you use, I think there would be few if any direct replacements, and your network would not work. Similarly, if I were to dump the concepts from your mind into my mind, what my mind would identify as the primary concepts from your mind wouldn't meld with the secondary concepts. It would try to take two concepts and meld them, and they would just sit next to each other with a singular link between them. That's what they were designed to do. Because my mind doesn't have that network that's in your mind, it wouldn't know what to do with this pair of concepts. It wouldn't know to back up and look at the shape of the network. Even if it did, it wouldn't know what the shape of the network represented, and the logic would cease, similar to the trouble you've described having by using visual symbols. Of course, we could retrain our minds, but that requires .. in computer terms, it would be like writing an entire state of the art unique operating system from scratch, which could take years. Though my mind understands this network of "word" symbols that is in your mind, and though I can even follow the flow of logic that would make it function, my understanding of your word network is still just a concept in my mind running under my mind's operating system, and manipulating it would be slow and clunky, and would take a lot of conscious effort. My mind devotes its resources to forming these fluid intermelding concepts the same way your mind devotes its resources to linking word concepts and recognising patterns on that network. I liken it to the way one computer operating system might have code that prioritises system resources to make great fluid graphics. Another operating system might prioritise its resources to always have active links between all of its files, and have massive catalogues on a live search feature that allows you to get instant search results when searching for a file that has been catalogued. If you ask a computer running a live search, like Windows Vista, to run a graphics intensive program over an OS emulator, the graphics will be very clunky and slow. If you ask a graphics-devoted computer (search catalogues disabled in order to free up memory for graphics) to search for a specific file, it will take several minutes to accomplish what could have otherwise been instantaneous had the file been catalogued and stored in a live search subroutine. We can't shut down and run our minds on these new concepts we've created of each other's modes of thinking. It's probably a good thing too because these concepts are no doubt incomplete, and would lead to a crash.
Let's see, the "stupid" concept. If you were to call me "stupid" .... that creates a concept of me and melds it with my concept of "stupid" and compares it with my own concept of me. Each concept is sort of a ball with peeks and valleys all over it, so they get together and roll around on each other and see if they fit together. Since I don't believe I'm stupid, these two concepts of "me" and "meStupid" don't fit together, and that encompasses them into a new concept of "disagree" ----- these words don't appear. I'm just using them to try to communicate more efficiently because this post is getting really long. I'm sure I've already explained the "imagery" involved in my mind's concepts.
I have in my past experienced a change in the way my mind works, so I believe I now have a pretty good idea of three ways minds can organise and function efficiently. I think that how ever our minds work at any given moment, we'll automatically like it the best because we don't choose to operate our minds this way. Our minds are running this way automatically, and that's what we like about it. I could go on, but I fear I'm not saying anything useful, and perhaps I'm not even making any sense. Or I'm doing nothing more than making a fool of myself.
I think my mind is doing a major clean-up operation over these past few months in order to function more efficiently due to the fact that it no longer has to distinguish, process, and recognise various sounds. I've got all these extra concepts floating around that are never used because they're only purpose is to identify sounds that my ears pick up, but my ears don't pick up any sounds now. This is making me a little unstable temporarily, and it may lead to yet another way of thinking. I like my current way of thinking the best, but I know that if it changes, whatever it changes too, I'll like that way the best.
Hmm, I know I talk too much. Only time will tell if that will change any time soon.
A great explanation on the symbolic nature of language.