I'm a bit reticent to be overly mechanical on this subject but it becomes easier if I settle on what's being discussed rather than the title of the thread. There seems considerable difference between consciousness and thinking. Since the posts so far have dealt with thinking I have to state that thinking by no means requires words. If anyone flatly disagrees I'll seek links to back this up but surely everyone knows that we have at least 5 definable senses and that our brains are capable of processing all of those types of incoming data and even interpreting somewhat non-specific forms such as music and we can all agree that a specific song (or even a chord!) is happy or sad even absent any lyrical content.
Given that the human brain has substantially more "real estate" tied up in the sensory area of vision a case can be made that more of thinking is processed and/or translated into visual scenarios or played out in mini-dramas than in speech or words. If we were so totally word oriented I would expect that dreams would be more like radio than movies and often, if not altogether silent, then certainly in my case lacking in a high degree of dialogue and I rather enjoy words.
Consciousness and especially self-consciousness is a much more mysterious subject since IIRC, how there is evolutionary advantage to awaking with the same sense of self every morning, that disappeared during sleep, is yet to be well understood and a subject of considerable "heat".
At the risk of some monotony, I contend that asserting that thinking, let alone consciousness, being proposed as defined by words is yet another common construct to divorce ourselves from our animal natures and create distance (with humans occupying the "higher ground" of course
) to "lower" life forms, some of whom have measurably superior numbers of neural connections and/or brain mass to body mass ratio. We seem most provincial within our own bodies.
