Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-words-to-think/

by orcul • 2 years ago

562 404 2 years ago

scientificamerican.com

fnordpiglet3• 2 years ago

For those who can’t and don’t think in words this is unsurprising.

fsndz2• 2 years ago

absolutely !

neom2• 2 years ago

How would someone think in words? You mean the words in the pictures or...?

mjochim• 2 years ago

By "hearing" words, sentences, dialogues in their mind. Just like imagining a picture, but audio instead.

vivekd• 2 years ago

I think in words. For me during thought there is a literal voice in my putting my thoughts into words.

kjkjadksj2• 2 years ago

Could you imagine the impossibility of riding a bike if you had to consciously put words to every action before you did it?

Razengan4• 2 years ago

Can you count without using a "language"?

Try it now: Tap your hand on the desk randomly. Can you recall how many times you did it without "saying" a sequence in your head like "1, 2, 3" or "A, B, C" etc?

If yes, how far can you count? With a language it's effectively infinite. You could theoretically go up to "1 million 5 hundred 43 thousand, 2 hundred and 10" and effortlessly know what comes next.

kachnuv_ocasek• 2 years ago

Interestingly, I feel like I can "feel" small numbers (up to 4 or 5) easier than than thinking about them as objects in a language.

j_bum• 2 years ago

This is highly anecdotal, but when I lift weights, I have an “intuition” about the number of reps I’ve performed without consciously counting them.

An example of this would be when I’m lifting weights with a friend and am lost in the set/focusing on mind-muscle connection, and as a result I forget to count my reps. I am usually quite accurate when I verify with my lifting partner the number of reps done/remaining.

As OP mentioned, many people have no internal speech, otherwise known as anendophasia, yet can still do everything anyone with an internal dialogue can do.

Similarly for me, I can do “mental object rotation” tasks even though I have aphantasia.

datameta2• 2 years ago

I can remember the sequence of sounds and like a delay line repeat that sequence in my head. This becomes easier the more distinguishable the taps are or the more of a cadence variability there is. But if it is a longer sequence I compress it by remembering an analogue like so: doo doo da doo da doo da da doo (reminiscent of morse code, or a kind of auditory binary). Would we consider this language? I think in the colloquial sense no, but it is essentially a machine language equivalent.

For context I have both abstract "multimedia" thought processes and hypervisor-like internal narrative depending on the nature of the experience or task.

jwarden• 2 years ago

I can. But I do this by visualizing the taps as a group. I don't have to label them with a number. I can see them in my mind, thus recalling the taps. If I tap with any sort of rhythm I can see the rhythm in the way they are laid out in my mind and this helps with recollection.

If I want to translate this knowledge into a number, I need to count the taps I am seeing in my head. At that point I do need to think of the word for the number.

I could even do computations on these items in my mind, imagine dividing them into two groups for instance, without ever having to link them to words until I am ready to do something with the result, such as write down the number of items in each group.

nemo• 2 years ago

Many animals can do some form of counting of small numbers where there's no connection to language possible.

KoolKat234• 2 years ago

An important note. If you're hearing your voice in your head doing this, that's subvocalisation and it's basically just saying it out loud, the instruction is still sent to your vocal chords

It's the equivalent of <thinking> tags for LLM output.

fnordpiglet3• 2 years ago

I don’t make a sound or word in my mind but I definitely keep track of the number. My thinking is definitely structured and there are things in my thoughts but there is no words or voice. I also can’t see images in my mind either. I’ve no idea what an inner monologue or the minds eye is like. I have however over the years found ways to produce these experiences in a way of my own. I found for instance some rough visualization was helpful in doing multi variate calculus but it’s very difficult and took a lot of practice. I’ve also been able to simulate language in my mind to help me practice difficult conversations but it’s really difficult and not distinct.

I would note though I have a really difficult time with arithmetic and mechanical tasks like counting. Mostly I just lose attention. Perhaps an inner voice would help if it became something that kept a continuity of thought.

bonoboTP3• 2 years ago

I can imagine the numbers as figures (I mean that the shape of the characters 1, 2 etc), or the patterns on a dice in sequence.

This is a parallel stream, because if I count with imagined pictures, then I can speak and listen to someone talking without it disturbing the process. If I do it with subvocalization, then doing other speech/language related things would disturb the counting.

slashdave8• 2 years ago

Can you count without using a "language"?

Yes. Seriously, these kind of questions are so surprising. It tells you that everyone's experience is just a little different.

GoblinSlayer8• 2 years ago

I can count to 10 with fingers.

cassianoleal• 2 years ago

I remember back in school, a language teacher once was trying to convey the importance of language. One of his main arguments was that we needed words and languages in order to think. I still recall my disbelief.

I spent the next few days trying to understand how that process worked. I would force myself to think in words and sentences. It was incredibly limiting! So slow and lacking in images, in abstract relationships between ideas and sensations.

It took me another few years to realise that many people actually depend on those structures in order to produce any thought and idea.

truculent• 2 years ago

I once realised that, for me, subvocalising thoughts was a way to keep something "in RAM", while some other thoughts went elsewhere, or developed something else. Perhaps slower speed helps in that respect?

bonoboTP3• 2 years ago

I think people are just using the word "think" differently. They may have picked up a different meaning for that verb than you. For them, thinking == inner vocalization. It's just a different definition. They would not call imagining things or daydreaming or musing or planning action steps as "thinking".

Also, many people simply repeat facts they were told. "We need words to think" is simply a phrase this person learned, a fact to recite in school settings. It doesn't mean they deeply reflected on this statement or compared it with their experience.

HarHarVeryFunny10• 2 years ago

Right, I think it's less than 50% of people that have an "inner voice" - using language to think.

Other animals with at best very limited language, are still highly intelligent and capable of reasoning - apes, dogs, rats, crows, ...

mcswell7• 2 years ago

"Highly intelligent" is not a word to be used with apes, dogs, rats or crows.

fsndz2• 2 years ago

more proof that we need more than LLMs to build LRMs: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/drop-o1-preview-try-this-alternati...

hackboyfly• 2 years ago

Well it’s important to note that this does not mean that our language does not play a role in shaping our thoughts.

“You cannot ask a question you that you have no words for”

- Judea Pearl

m4633• 2 years ago

nurettin• 2 years ago

Next they will argue that your eyebrows are words.

kjkjadksj2• 2 years ago

My cat asks me to go outside. No english words involved of course. She sits and faces the door, meows at it, and paws at the knob. Maybe you can argue they are speaking cat when they ask.

sshine• 2 years ago

I swear my cat says 好玩儿 hǎowá'er? when he lacks stimulation, which means "Fun?"

lazyasciiart• 2 years ago

Now I need to learn about how they convey these questions without language.

m4633• 2 years ago

I like Temple Grandin's "Thinking the Way Animals Do":

https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html

eth0up2• 2 years ago

Considering that, in 2024, if not a majority, then, still, a vast portion of our consciousness is words. Perhaps not for the illiterate, but for many, much of our knowledge is through the written or spoken word. [Edit: Even a hypothetical person, alone and isolated, never having spoken, would still devise internal language structures, at least for the external realm. ]

Base consciousness is surely not dependent on language, but I suspect base consciousness may be extremely different from what one might expect, so much that compared to what we perceive as consciousness, might seem something close to death.

eth0up2• 2 years ago

Well, I'm not sure cognition entirely without language is even possible for non larval humans. Language is a natural tendency and it arises regardless of documentation, scribblings or utterings. It exists whether audible or not. Language itself is manifestation of the thinking process that permits it.

And I'll hold to the notion that the complete absence of language (and its underlying structure) would resemble death if death can be resembled. Perhaps death is only the excoriation of thought, cognition and language, with something more fundamental persisting.

bassrattle• 2 years ago

Is this the death of the Sapir-Whorf theory?

zorked• 2 years ago

Sapir-Whorf is not alive.

xiande04• 2 years ago

No. Just because words are not needed for cognitive processes, does not mean that people still can and do think in language. The properties of that language could then influence thought. This is known as the Weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (note "hypothesis", not "theory").

saghm• 2 years ago

Yep, this pretty accurately describes the way of think. I have a pretty heavy inner monologue, but it's not the only way I think. I've found that words are the way I "organize" my thoughts from muddled general ideas mixed with feelings into concise ideas that I can understand and gain insights from. I often won't fully grasp the significance of an idea I have until I talk it out with someone and find a way to put it into words that distill whatever I'm thinking into a more minimal form.

Somewhat relatedly, I've started suspecting over the past few years that this is why I struggle to multitask or split my attention; while I can ruminate on several things at once, the "output" of my thinking is bottlenecked by a single stream that requires me to focus on exclusively to get a anything useful from it. Realizing this has actually helped me quite a bit in terms of being more productive because I can avoid setting myself up for failure by trying to get too much done at once and failing rather than tackling things one at a time.

numpad03• 2 years ago

This also doesn't say that the non-literal cognitive process is DNA-wired logic. Could very well be culturally constructed as well.

IMO this rather reinforce Sapir-Whorf positions than refute, it means more than literal language/grammar influence thoughts. That's directly against UG theory that predetermined rigid grammar is all you need.

gsich• 2 years ago

It was dead before.

airstrike• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/PsUeX

acosmism• 2 years ago

now I really want to understand the deep thoughts my cat is having

psychoslave8• 2 years ago

But maybe they exceed human cognition abilities?

codersfocus• 2 years ago

While not essential for thought, language is a very important tool in shaping and sharing thoughts.

Another related tool is religion (for emotions instead of thoughts,) which funnily enough faces the same divergence language does.

Right now society that calls itself "secular" simply does not understand the role of religion, and its importance in society.

To be clear, I don't belong to any religion, I am saying one needs to be invented for people who are currently "secular."

In fact, you have the disorganized aspects of religion already. All one needs to spot these are to look at the aspects that attempt to systematize or control our feelings. Mass media, celebrities for example.

Instead of letting capitalistic forces create a pseudoreligion for society, it's better if people come together and organize something healthier, intentionally.

akomtu2• 2 years ago

Materialism is such a religion. It's sciency and emotion-free, so it appeals to the secular minds.

Vecr• 2 years ago

Holding materialism as an axiom, either directly or non-directly (through other axioms) could be called a "religion" (though at that point I'm not sure what couldn't be), and either way that could be considered bad.

Thinking some type of materialism is even mostly correct, with the sum over all mostly materialist theories being close to 1, isn't a religion at all.

GoblinSlayer8• 2 years ago

In secular society art is the language for emotions.

nickelpro• 2 years ago

As always, barely anyone reads the actual claims in the article and we're left with people opining on the title.

The claims here are exceptionally limited. You don't need spoken language to do well on cognitive tests, but that has never been a subject of debate. Obviously the deaf get on fine without spoken language. People suffering from aphasia, but still capable of communication via other mechanisms, still do well on cognitive tests. Brain scans show you can do sudoku without increasing bloodflow to language regions.

This kind of stuff has never really been in debate. You can teach plenty of animals to do fine on all sorts of cognitive tasks. There's never been a claim that language holds dominion over all forms of cognition in totality.

But if you want to discuss the themes present in Proust, you're going to be hard pressed to do so without something resembling language. This is self-evident. You cannot ask questions or give answers for subjects you lack the facilities to describe.

tl;dr: Language's purpose is thought, not all thoughts require language

dse1982• 2 years ago

This. Also the question is what the possible complexity of the question is that you want to convey. As long as it is rather simple it might seem realistic to argue that there is no language involved (i would argue this is wrong). But as soon as the problems get more complex, the system you need to use to communicate this question becomes more and more undeniably a form of language (i think about complexity here as things like self-referentiality which need sufficiently complex formal systems to be expressed – think what gödel is about). So this part seems more complicated than it is understood. The same goes for the brain-imaging argument. As a philosopher I have unfortunately seen even accomplished scientists in this field follow a surprisingly naive empiricist approach a lot of times – which seems to me to be the case here also.

GoblinSlayer8• 2 years ago

You mean communication should happen through language?

K0balt• 2 years ago

A much more interesting hypothesis is that abstract thought (thought about things not within the present sensorium) , or perhaps all thought, requires the use of symbols or tokens to represent the things that are to be considered.

I think this may have been partially substantiated through experiments in decoding thoughts with machine sensors.

If this turns out to-not- to be true it would have huge implications for AI research.

rhelz• 2 years ago

Great point. They even did a bad job of reading the title. The title wasn't "Language is not essential for thought", the title was "Language is not essential for the cognitive processes *underlying* thought."

We'd better hope that is true, because if we didn't have non-linguistic mastery of the cognitive processes underlying thought it's hard to see how we could even acquire language in the first place.

ryandv7• 2 years ago

As always, barely anyone reads the actual claims in the article and we're left with people opining on the title

One must ask why this is such a common occurrence on this (and almost all other) social media, and conclude that it is because the structure of social media itself is rotten and imposes selective pressures that only allow certain kinds of content to thrive.

The actual paper itself is not readily accessible, and properly understanding its claims and conclusions would take substantial time and effort - by which point the article has already slid off the front page, and all the low-effort single-sentence karma grabbers who profit off of simplistic takes that appeal to majority groupthink have already occupied all the comment space "above the fold."

HarHarVeryFunny10• 2 years ago

Language's purpose is thought

Language's purpose - why it arose - is more likely communication, primarily external communication. The benefit of using language to communicate with yourself via "inner voice" - think in terms of words - seems a secondary benefit, especially considering that less than 50% of people report doing this.

But certainly language, especially when using a large vocabulary of abstract and specialist concepts, does boost cognitive abilities - maybe essentially through "chunking", using words as "thought macros", and boosting what we're able to do with our limited 7+/- item working memory.

mcswell7• 2 years ago

Whether language's purpose was communication or thought is not easily answered.

For one, how would you know? It left no fossils, nor do we have any other kind of record from that time.

For another, the very question implies a teleological view of evolution, which is arguably wrong.

As for what 50% of people report (where did that number come from?), we have virtually zero intuitive insight into the inner workings of our minds in general, or of the way we process language. All the knowledge that has been obtained about how language works--linguistics--has been obtained by external observation of a black box. (FMRIs and the like provide a little insight inside that black box, but only at the most general level--and again, that's not intuition.)

pessimizer• 2 years ago

Obviously the deaf get on fine without spoken language.

Why the introduction of "spoken?" Sign languages are just as expressive as spoken language, and could easily be written. Writing is a sign.

But if you want to discuss the themes present in Proust, you're going to be hard pressed to do so without something resembling language. This is self-evident.

And it's also a bad example. Of course you can't discuss the use of language without the use of language. You can't discuss the backstroke without any awareness of water or swimming, either. You can certainly do it without language though, just by waving your arms and jumping around.

Language's purpose is thought

Is it, though? Did you make that case in the preceding paragraphs? I'm not going to go out on a limb here and alternatively suggest that language's purpose is communication, just like the purpose of laughing, crying, hugging, or smiling. This is why we normally do it loudly, or write it down where other people can see it.

slashdave8• 2 years ago

No, language's purpose is to communicate. Isn't this obvious?

habitue3• 2 years ago

Language may not be essential for thought, (most of us have the experience of an idea occurring to us that we struggle to put into words), but language acts as a regularization mechanism on thoughts.

Serializing much higher dimensional freeform thoughts into language is a very lossy process, and this kinda ensures that mostly only the core bits get translated. Think of times when someone gets an idea you're trying to convey, but you realize they're missing some critical context you forgot to share. It takes some activation energy to add that bit of context, so if it seems like they mostly get what you're saying, you skip it. Over time, transferring ideas from one person to the next, they tend towards a very compressed form because language is expensive.

This process also works on your own thoughts. Thinking out loud performs a similar role, it compresses the hell out of the thought or else it remains inexpressible. Now imagine repeated stages of compressing through language, allowing ideas to form from that compressed form, and then compressing those ideas in turn. It's a bit of a recursive process and language is in the middle of it.

ujikoluk• 2 years ago

Yes, dimension reduction.

pazimzadeh2• 2 years ago

Communication of thought is a whole different question. Either way you're making a lot of strong claims without support?

this kinda ensures that mostly only the core bits get translated

The kinda is doing a lot here. Many times the very act of trying to communicate a thought colors/corrupts the main point and gives only one perspective or a snapshot of the overall thought. There's a reason why they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Except the mind can conjure much more than a static picture. The mind can also hold the idea and the exceptions to the idea in one coherent model. For me this can be especially apparent when taking psychedelics and finding that trying to communicate some thoughts with words requires constant babbling to keep refining the last few sentences, ad libidum. There are exceptions of course, like for simple ideas.

habitue3• 2 years ago

Many times the very act of trying to communicate a thought colors/corrupts the main point and gives only one perspective or a snapshot of the overall thought. There's a reason why they say a picture is worth a thousand words.

Yeah! Sometimes the thought isnt compressible and language doesnt help. But a lot of times it is, and it does

akomtu2• 2 years ago

Imo, that's the essense of reasoning. Limited memory and slow communication channels force us to create compact, but expressive models of reality. LLMs, on the other hand, have all the memory in the world and their model of reality is a piece-wise interpolation of the huge training dataset. Why invent grammar rules if you can keep the entire dictionary in mind?

mcswell7• 2 years ago

Why do LLMs (or rather similar models that draw pictures) keep getting the number of fingers on the human hand wrong, or show two people's arms or legs merging? Or in computer-created videos, fail at object preservation? It seems to me they do not have a model of the world, only an imperfect model of pictures they've seen.

psychoslave8• 2 years ago

You can ask whether people who have these severe language impairments can perform tasks that require thinking. You can ask them to solve some math problems or to perform a social reasoning test, and all of the instructions, of course, have to be nonverbal because they can’t understand linguistic information anymore. Scientists have a lot of experience working with populations that don’t have language—studying preverbal infants or studying nonhuman animal species. So it’s definitely possible to convey instructions in a way that’s nonverbal. And the key finding from this line of work is that there are people with severe language impairments who nonetheless seem totally fine on all cognitive tasks that we’ve tested them on so far.

They should start with what is their definition of language. To me it's any mean you can use to communicate some information to someone else and they generally get a correct inference of what kind of representations and responses are expected is the definition of a language. Whether it's uttered words, a series of gestures, subtle pheromones or a slap in your face, that's all languages.

For the same reason I find extremely odd that the hypothesis that animals don't have any form of language is even considered as a serious claim in introduction.

Anyone can prove anything and its contrary about language if the term is given whatever meaning is needed for premises to match with the conclusion.

GavinMcG2• 2 years ago

Just as a data point, my guess is that a very small minority of English-language speakers would define the term as broadly as you do, at least in a context relating the concept to analytical thought processes. At the very least, I think most people expect that language is used actively, such that pheromones wouldn’t fall within the definition. (And actually, that’s reflected when you say language is a means “you can use”.) Likewise, a slap in the face certainly can be interpreted, but slapping doesn’t seem like a means of communicating in general—because a slap only communicates one thing.

psychoslave8• 2 years ago

It's also doubtful that thinking about the concept of analytical thought processes is something most humans do either, at least not in these terms and this perspective.

Should we expect experts in cognitive science exposing their view in a scientific publication to stick to the narrowest median view of language though? All the more when in the same article you quote people like Russell who certainly didn't have a naïve definition of language when expressing a point of view on the matter.

And slapping in general can definitely communicate far more than a single thing depending on many parameters. See https://www.33rdsquare.com/is-a-slap-disrespectful-a-nuanced... for a text exploring some of nuances of the meaning it can encompasse. But even a kid can get that slap could perfectly have all the potential to create a fully doubly articulated language, as The Croods 2 creators funnily have put in scene. :D

dleeftink2• 2 years ago

I'm not sure it's that fringe. Popular addages such as 'language is a vehicle for thought' and 'the pen is mightier than the sword' reveal that language is sometimes implied to be tool-like, with many of our unspoken acts carrying linguistic meaning (e.g. ghosting, not answering a call, sign language, gesturing, nodding, etc.).

Even tools present us a certain 'language', talking to us via beeps, blinks and buzzes, and are having increasingly interesting discussions amongst themselves (e.g. subreddit simulator, agent based modeling). Recent philosophers of technology as Mark Coeckelbergh present a comprehensive argument for why we need to move away from the tool/language barrier [0], and has been part in informing the EC Expert Group on AI [1].

[0] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/97813155285...

[1] https://philtech.univie.ac.at/news/news-about-publicatons-et...

throwaway199723• 2 years ago

For the same reason I find extremely odd that the hypothesis that animals don't have any form of language is even considered as a serious claim in introduction.

I guess I've always just assumed it refers to some feature that's uniquely human—notably, recursive grammars.

psychoslave8• 2 years ago

Not all human languages exhibits recursion though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language

And recursion as the unique trait for human language differentiation is not necessarily completely consensual https://omseeth.github.io/blog/2024/recursive_language/

Also, let's recall that in its broader meaning, the scientific consensus is that humans are animals and they evolved through the same basic mechanism as all other life forms that is evolution. So even assuming that evolution made some unique language hability emerge in humans, it's most likely that they share most language traits with other species and that there is more things to learn from them that what would be possible if it's assumed they can't have a language and thoughts.

earleybird• 2 years ago

I'm inclined to believe that of the animals that exhibit varying degrees of self awareness, they have mental structures isomorphic to a recursive grammar. As such, perhaps using a recursive grammar is not distinctly a human trait.

ryandv7• 2 years ago

They do, in the first section of the journal article itself:

Do any forms of thought—our knowledge of the world and ability to reason over these knowledge representations—require language (that is, representations and computations that sup-port our ability to generate and interpret meaningfully structured word sequences)?

Emphasis on "word sequences," to the exclusion of, e.g. body language or sign language. They go on to discuss some of the brain structures involved in the production and interpretation of these word sequences:

Language production and language understanding are sup-ported by an interconnected set of brain areas in the left hemisphere, often referred to as the ‘language network'.

It is these brain areas that form the basis of their testable claims regarding language.

Anyone can prove anything and its contrary about language if the term is given whatever meaning is needed for premises to match with the conclusion.

This is why "coming to terms" on the definitions of words and what you mean by them should be the first step in any serious discussion if you aim to have any hope in hell of communicating precisely; it is also why you should be skeptical of political actors that insist on redefining the meanings of (especially well-known) terms in order to push an agenda. Confusing a term with its actual referent is exceedingly commonplace in modern day.

psychoslave8• 2 years ago

I don't find these excerpts in the linked article. Are you consulting an other document than the one pointed here?

chongli3• 2 years ago

Language is infinitely productive. Using a finite number of sounds or symbols, humans can produce unlimited utterance chains to communicate novel and complex ideas.

Think about it: almost every nontrivial conversation you’ve had or comment/blog/article/book you’ve read constituted an entirely new (to you) utterance which you understood and which enabled you to acquire new ideas and information you had previously lacked. No non-human animals have demonstrated this ability. At best they are able to perform single-symbol utterances to communicate previously-understood concepts (hungry, sad, scared, tired) but are unable to combine them to produce a novel utterance, the way a child could tell you about her day:

“Today the teacher asked me to multiply 3 times 7 and I got the answer right away! Then Bobby farted and the whole class was laughing. At lunch I bit my apple and my tooth felt funny. I think it’s starting to wiggle! Sally asked me if I could go to her house for a sleepover but I said I had to ask mom and dad first.”

psychoslave8• 2 years ago

Language is infinitely productive. Using a finite number of sounds or symbols, humans can produce unlimited utterance chains to communicate novel and complex ideas.

We maybe disagree, in the sense that it seems to be mixing indefinitely bounded expressiveness with actual unlimited expression production that could potentially be in a bijective relationship with the an infinite set of expression.

We human are mortals and even at the whole humankind scale, we will produce a finite set of utterances.

The main thing bringing so much flexibility to languages, is our ability to reuse, fit and evolve them as we go through indefinitely many inedit experiences of the world. So something like context change tolerance. But if we want to be fair with crediting admirable unknowingly extensive creativeness, we should first consider the universe as a whole, with its permanent flow of novel context, which also include all interpretations of itself through mere mortals as ourself.

jjtheblunt• 2 years ago

The conclusion implied by the title seems self evident for anyone who has seen any (at least) nonhuman mammalian predator.

danielmarkbruce3• 2 years ago

Or anyone who has done any thinking in their own brain.

mcswell7• 2 years ago

Nonhuman predators don't do math, or most of the other cognitive things which (I presume) the author of this article investigated in aphasics.

heresie-dabord• 2 years ago

Whether in the predator or in the prey, the reward system of getting food and surviving through evolution in geological time would strengthen effective thinking.

Then comes the need to transmit/transfer understanding.

From the fine article:

various properties that human languages have—there are about 7,000 of them spoken and signed across the world—are optimized for efficiently transmitting information, making things easy to perceive, easy to understand, easy to produce and easy to learn for kids.

kaiwen1• 2 years ago

Here's what Helen Keller had to say about this in _The World I Live In_:

"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.

It was not night—it was not day.

. . . . .

But vacancy absorbing space, And fixedness, without a place; There were no stars—no earth—no time— No check—no change—no good—no crime.

My dormant being had no idea of God or immortality, no fear of death.

I remember, also through touch, that I had a power of association. I felt tactual jars like the stamp of a foot, the opening of a window or its closing, the slam of a door. After repeatedly smelling rain and feeling the discomfort of wetness, I acted like those about me: I ran to shut the window. But that was not thought in any sense. It was the same kind of association that makes animals take shelter from the rain. From the same instinct of aping others, I folded the clothes that came from the laundry, and put mine away, fed the turkeys, sewed bead-eyes on my doll's face, and did many other things of which I have the tactual remembrance. When I wanted anything I liked,—ice-cream, for instance, of which I was very fond,—I had a delicious taste on my tongue (which, by the way, I never have now), and in my hand I felt the turning of the freezer. I made the sign, and my mother knew I wanted ice-cream. I "thought" and desired in my fingers. If I had made a man, I should certainly have put the brain and soul in his finger-tips. From reminiscences like these I conclude that it is the opening of the two faculties, freedom of will, or choice, and rationality, or the power of thinking from one thing to another, which makes it possible to come into being first as a child, afterwards as a man.

Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another. So I was not conscious of any change or process going on in my brain when my teacher began to instruct me. I merely felt keen delight in obtaining more easily what I wanted by means of the finger motions she taught me. I thought only of objects, and only objects I wanted. It was the turning of the freezer on a larger scale. When I learned the meaning of "I" and "me" and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me. Thus it was not the sense of touch that brought me knowledge. It was the awakening of my soul that first rendered my senses their value, their cognizance of objects, names, qualities, and properties. Thought made me conscious of love, joy, and all the emotions. I was eager to know, then to understand, afterward to reflect on what I knew and understood, and the blind impetus, which had before driven me hither and thither at the dictates of my sensations, vanished forever.

I cannot represent more clearly than any one else the gradual and subtle changes from first impressions to abstract ideas. But I know that my physical ideas, that is, ideas derived from material objects, appear to me first an idea similar to those of touch. Instantly they pass into intellectual meanings. Afterward the meaning finds expression in what is called "inner speech." When I was a child, my inner speech was inner spelling. Although I am even now frequently caught spelling to myself on my fingers, yet I talk to myself, too, with my lips, and it is true that when I first learned to speak, my mind discarded the finger-symbols and began to articulate. However, when I try to recall what some one has said to me, I am conscious of a hand spelling into mine.

It has often been asked what were my earliest impressions of the world in which I found myself. But one who thinks at all of his first impressions knows what a riddle this is. Our impressions grow and change unnoticed, so that what we suppose we thought as children may be quite different from what we actually experienced in our childhood. I only know that after my education began the world which came within my reach was all alive. I spelled to my blocks and my dogs. I sympathized with plants when the flowers were picked, because I thought it hurt them, and that they grieved for their lost blossoms. It was two years before I could be made to believe that my dogs did not understand what I said, and I always apologized to them when I ran into or stepped on them.

As my experiences broadened and deepened, the indeterminate, poetic feelings of childhood began to fix themselves in definite thoughts. Nature—the world I could touch—was folded and filled with myself. I am inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning one may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent mental sensations. In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves—and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either.

However that may be, I came later to look for an image of my emotions and sensations in others. I had to learn the outward signs of inward feelings. The start of fear, the suppressed, controlled tensity of pain, the beat of happy muscles in others, had to be perceived and compared with my own experiences before I could trace them back to the intangible soul of another. Groping, uncertain, I at last found my identity, and after seeing my thoughts and feelings repeated in others, I gradually constructed my world of men and of God. As I read and study, I find that this is what the rest of the race has done. Man looks within himself and in time finds the measure and the meaning of the universe."

farts_mckensy5• 2 years ago

Stix's claim appears to be unfalsifiable. In scientific and philosophical discourse, a proposition must be falsifiable—there must be a conceivable empirical test that could potentially refute it. This criterion is fundamental for meaningful inquiry.

Several factors contribute to the unfalsifiability of this claim:

Subjectivity of Thought: Thought processes are inherently internal and subjective. There is no direct method to observe or measure another being's thoughts without imposing interpretative frameworks influenced by social and material contexts.

Defining Language and Thought: Language is not merely a collection of spoken or written symbols; it is a system of signs embedded within social relations and power structures. If we broaden the definition of language to include any form of symbolic representation or communication—such as gestures, images, or neural patterns—then the notion of thought occurring without language becomes conceptually incoherent. Thought is mediated through these symbols, which are products of historical and material developments.

Animal Cognition and Symbolic Systems: Observations of animals like chimpanzees engaging in strategic gameplay or crows crafting tools demonstrate complex behaviors. Interpreting these actions as evidence of thought devoid of language overlooks the possibility that animals utilize their own symbolic systems. These behaviors reflect interactions with their environment mediated by innate or socially learned symbols—a rudimentary form of language shaped by their material conditions.

Limitations of Empirical Testing: To empirically verify that thought can occur without any form of language would require accessing cognitive processes entirely free from symbolic mediation. Given the current state of scientific methodologies—and considering that all cognitive processes are influenced by material and social factors—this is unattainable.

Because of these factors, Stix's claim cannot be empirically tested in a way that could potentially falsify it. It resides outside the parameters of verifiable inquiry, highlighting the importance of recognizing the interplay between language, thought, and material conditions.

Cognitive processes and language are deeply intertwined. Language arises from collective practice; it both shapes and is shaped by the material conditions of the environment. Thought is mediated through language, carrying the cognitive imprints of the material base. Even in non-human animals, the cognitive abilities we observe may be underpinned by forms of symbolic interaction with their environment—a reflection of their material engagement with the world.

Asserting that language is not essential for thought overlooks the fundamental role that social and material conditions play in shaping both language and cognition. It fails to account for how symbolic systems—integral to language—are embedded in and arise from material realities.

Certain forms of thought might appear to occur without human language, but this perspective neglects the intrinsic connection between cognition, language, and environmental conditiond. Reasoning itself can be viewed as a form of internalized language—a symbolic system rooted in social and material contexts. Recognizing this interdependence is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of the nature of thought and the pivotal role language plays within it.

slashdave8• 2 years ago

You are just redefining symbols (language) as thought. This is semantic nonsense and purely circular reasoning.

farts_mckensy5• 2 years ago

You're not getting it. The very proposition of discussing cognitive processes as comprehensible without language inherently relies on circular reasoning. The claim that thought occurs without language cannot be falsified. To analyze or describe thought, we must use language, which is the very tool that shapes and defines that thought. The discussion itself becomes impossible if you remove language from the equation, meaning language and thought are co-constituitve.

Just as Gödel showed that no formal system can be both complete and consistent, language as a system cannot fully encapsulate the entirety of cognitive processes without relying on foundational assumptions that it cannot internally validate. Attempting to describe thought without acknowledging this limitation is akin to seeking completeness in an inherently incomplete framework. Without language, the discussion becomes impossible, rendering the initial claim fundamentally flawed.

GoblinSlayer8• 2 years ago

Thought is observable https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.02.429430v1

farts_mckensy5• 2 years ago

I didn't dispute the idea that thought is observable.

Animats4• 2 years ago

This is an important result.

The actual paper [1] says that functional MRI (which is measuring which parts of the brain are active by sensing blood flow) indicates that different brain hardware is used for non-language and language functions. This has been suspected for years, but now there's an experimental result.

What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs. It's not clear what that something else is. But, as the paper mentions, the low-end mammals and the corvids lack language but have some substantial problem-solving capability. That's seen down at squirrel and crow size, where the brains are tiny. So if someone figures out to do this, it will probably take less hardware than an LLM.

This is the next big piece we need for AI. No idea how to do this, but it's the right question to work on.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w.epdf?shar...

HarHarVeryFunny10• 2 years ago

Brain size isn't necessarily a very good correlate of intelligence. For example dolphins and elephants have bigger brains than humans, and sperm whales have much bigger brains (5x by volume). Neanderthals also had bigger brains than modern humans, but are not thought to have been more intelligent.

A crow has a small brain, but also has very small neurons, so ends up having 1.5B neurons, similar to a dog or some monkeys.

card_zero2• 2 years ago

Not sure neuron number correlates to smarts, either.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/

There are 100 million in my gut, but it doesn't solve any problems that aren't about poop, as far as I know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

If the suspiciously round number is accurate, this puts the human gut somewhere between a golden hamster and ansell's mole-rat, and about level with a short-palated fruit bat.

kridsdale1• 2 years ago

Don’t assume whales are less intelligent than humans. They’re tuned for their environment. They won’t assemble machines with their flippers but let’s toss you naked in the pacific and see if you can communicate and collaborate with peers 200km away on complex hunting strategies.

FL33TW00D• 2 years ago

It's probably more relevant to compare intraspecies rather than interspecies.

And it turns out that human brain volume and intelligence are moderately-highly correlated [1][2]!

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7440690/ [2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

yurimo• 2 years ago

Right, but what is also important to remember is while size is important what is also key here is the complexity of a neural circuits. Human brain has a lot more connections and is much more complex.

famouswaffles5• 2 years ago

Dolphins, Orcas, whales and other intelligent cetaceans do not have Hands and live in an environment without access to a technological accelerator like fire.

The absence of both of these things is an incredible crippler for technological development. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are, you're never going to achieve much technologically without these.

I don't think brain size correlations is as straightforward as 'bigger = better' every time but we simply don't know how intelligent most of these species are. Land and Water are completely different beasts.

KoolKat234• 2 years ago

What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs.

Basically we need Multimodal LLM's (terrible naming as it's not an LLM then but still).

Animats4• 2 years ago

I don't know what we need. Nor does anybody else, yet. But we know what it has to do. Basically what a small mammal or a corvid does.

There's been progress. Look at this 2020 work on neural net controlled drone acrobatics.[1] That's going in the right direction.

[1] https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/RSS20_Kaufmann.pdf

danielmarkbruce3• 2 years ago

Is it important? To who? Anyone with half a brain is aware that language isn't the only way to think. I can think my way through all kinds of things in 3-d space without a single word uttered in any internal monologue and I'm not remotely unique - this kind of thing is put in all kinds of math and iq'ish like tests one takes as a child.

voxl• 2 years ago

Before you say things this patiently dumb you should probably wonder what question the researchers are actually interested in and why your average experience isn't sufficient proof.

jebarker3• 2 years ago

What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs

Not to over-hype LLMs, but I don't see why this results says this. AI doesn't need to do things the same way as evolved intelligence has.

weard_beard4• 2 years ago

To a point. If you drill down this far into the fundamentals of cognition you begin to define it. Otherwise you may as well call a cantaloupe sentient

heavyset_go• 2 years ago

It doesn't need to, but evolved intelligence is the only intelligence we know of.

Similar reason we look for markers of Earth-based life on alien planets: it's the only example we've got of it existing.

zbyforgotp• 2 years ago

Ok, but at least it suggests that this other thing might be more efficient in some ways.

awongh• 2 years ago

One reason might that LLMs are successful because of the architecture, but also, just as importantly because they can be trained over a volume and diversity of human thought that’s encapsulated in language (that is on the internet). Where are we going to find the equivalent data set that will train this other kind of thinking?

Open AI O1 seems to be trained on mostly synthetic data, but it makes intuitive sense that LLMs work so well because we had the data lying around already.

uoaei• 2 years ago

in the high entropy world we have, we are forced to assume that the first thing that arises as a stable pattern is inevitably the most likely, and the most likely to work. there is no other pragmatic conclusion to draw.

for more, see "Assembly Theory"

numpad03• 2 years ago

Title doesn't mean bullet trains can't fly, but do imply what call flights could be more than moving fast, and effects of wings might be worth discussing.

lanstin2• 2 years ago

Language models would seem to be exquisitely tied to the way that evolved intelligence has formulated its society and training.

An Ab Initio AGI would maybe be free of our legacy, but LLMs certainly are not.

I would expect a ship-like intelligence a la the Culture novels to have non-English based cognition. As far as we can tell, our own language generation is post-hoc explanation for thought more so than the embodiment of thought.

theptip2• 2 years ago

LLM as a term is becoming quite broad; a multi-modal transformer-based model with function calling / ReAct finetuning still gets called an LLM, but this scaffolding might be all that’s needed.

I’d be extremely surprised if AI recapitulates the same developmental path as humans did; evolution vs. next-token prediction on an existing corpus are completely different objective functions and loss landscapes.

fhdsgbbcaA7• 2 years ago

I asked both OpenAI and Claude the same difficult programming question. Each gave a nearly identical response down to the variable names and example values.

I then looked it up and they had each copy/pasted the same Stack overflow answer.

Furthermore, the answer was extremely wrong, the language I used was superficially similar to the source material, but the programming concepts were entirely different.

What this tells me is there is clearly no “reasoning” happening whatsoever with either model, despite marketing claiming as such.

yapyap• 2 years ago

Lol, it’s insane how some people will track everything back to AI

tempodox• 2 years ago

Can't escape the hype.

fhdsgbbcaA7• 2 years ago

My first thought as well - “AGI via LLM” implies that our grey matter is merely a substrate for executing language tasks: just swap out bio-neurons for a few H100s and viola, super intelligence.

mountainriver2• 2 years ago

It’s AGI via transformer

NeuroCoder• 2 years ago

I'm not convinced the result is as important here as the methods. Separating language from complex cognition when evaluating individuals is difficult. But many of the people I've met in neuroscience that study language and cognitive processes do not hold the opinion that one is absolutely reliant on the other in all cases. It may have been a strong argument a while ago, but everytime I've seen a presentation on this relationship it's been to emphasize the influence culture and language inevitably have on how we think about things. I'm sure some people believe that one cannot have complex thoughts without language, but most people in speech neuro I've met in language processing research find the idea ridiculous enough they wouldn't bother spending a few years on that kind of project just to disapprove a theory.

On the other hand, further understanding how to engage complex cognitive processes in nonverbal individuals is extremely useful and difficult to accomplish.

red75prime• 2 years ago

What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs

You mean besides a few layers of LLMs near input and output that deal with tokens? We have the rest of the layers.

alephnerd• 2 years ago

Those "few layers" sum up all of linguistics.

1. Syntax

2. Semantics

3. Pragmatics

4. Semiotics

These are the layers you need to solve.

Saussure already pointed out these issues over a century ago, and Linguists turned ML Researchers like Stuart Russell and Paul Smolensky tried in vain to resolve this.

It basically took 60 years just to crack syntax at scale, and the other layers are still fairly far away.

Furthermore, Syntax is not a solved problem yet in most languages.

Try communicating with GPT-4o in colloquial Bhojpuri, Koshur, or Dogri, let alone much less represented languages and dialects.

CSMastermind2• 2 years ago

When you look at how humans play chess they employ several different cognitive strategies. Memorization, calculation, strategic thinking, heuristics, and learned experience.

When the first chess engines came out they only employed one of these: calculation. It wasn't until relatively recently that we had computer programs that could perform all of them. But it turns out that if you scale that up with enough compute you can achieve superhuman results with calculation alone.

It's not clear to me that LLMs sufficiently scaled won't achieve superhuman performance on general cognitive tasks even if there are things humans do which they can't.

The other thing I'd point out is that all language is essentially synthetic training data. Humans invented language as a way to transfer their internal thought processes to other humans. It makes sense that the process of thinking and the process of translating those thoughts into and out of language would be distinct.

PaulDavisThe1st• 2 years ago

It's not clear to me that LLMs sufficiently scaled won't achieve superhuman performance on general cognitive tasks

If "general cognitive tasks" means "I give you a prompt in some form, and you give me an incredible response of some form " (forms may differ or be the same) then it is hard to disagree with you.

But if by "general cognitive task" you mean "all the cognitive things that human do", then it is really hard to see why you would have any confidence that LLMs have any hope of achieving superhuman performance at these things.

nox101• 2 years ago

It sounds like you think this research is wrong? (it claims llms can not reason)

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/llms-cant-perform-genuine...

or do you maybe think no logical reasoning is needed to do everything a human can do? Tho humans seem to be able to do logical reasoning

threeseed• 2 years ago

It's not clear to me that LLMs sufficiently scaled won't achieve superhuman performance

To some extent this is true.

To calculate A + B you could for example generate A, B for trillions of combinations and encode that within the network. And it would calculate this faster than any human could.

But that's not intelligence. And Apple's research showed that LLMs are simply inferring relationships based on the tokens it has access to. Which you can throw off by adding useless information or trying to abstract A + B.

shkkmo4• 2 years ago

Sure, when humans use multiple skill to address a specific problem, you can sometimes outperform them by scaling a spefic one of those skills.

When it comes to general intelligence, I think we are trying to run before we can walk. We can't even make a computer with a basic, animal level understanding of the world. Yet we are trying to take a tool that was developed on top of system that already had an understanding of the world and use it to work backwards to give computers an understanding of the world.

I'm pretty skeptical that we're going to succeed at this. I think you have to be able to teach a computer to climb a tree or hunt (subhuman AGI) before you can create superhuman AGI.

senand• 2 years ago

This seems quite reasonable, but I recently heard a podcast (https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/06/24/280-...) that LLMs are more likely to be very good at navigating what they have been trained on, but very poor at abstract reasoning and discovering new areas outside of their training. As a single human, you don't notice, as the training material is greater than everything we could ever learn.

After all, that's what Artificial General Intelligence would at least in part be about: finding and proving new math theorems, creating new poetry, making new scientific discoveries, etc.

There is even a new challenge that's been proposed: https://arcprize.org/blog/launch

It makes sense that the process of thinking and the process of translating those thoughts into and out of language would be distinct

Yes, indeed. And LLMs seem to be very good at _simulating_ the translation of thought into language. They don't actually do it, at least not like humans do.

TheOtherHobbes• 2 years ago

Chess is essentially a puzzle. There's a single explicit, quantifiable goal, and a solution either achieves the goal or it doesn't.

Solving puzzles is a specific cognitive task, not a general one.

Language is a continuum, not a puzzle. The problem with LLMs is that testing has been reduced to performance on language puzzles, mostly with hard edges - like bar exams, or letter counting - and they're a small subset of general language use.

shepherdjerred• 2 years ago

What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs.

Humans not taking this approach doesn’t mean that AI cannot.

earslap• 2 years ago

Not only that but also LLMs "think" in a latent representation that is several layers deep. Sure, the first and last layers make it look like it is doing token wrangling, but what is happening in the middle layers is mostly a mystery. First layer deals directly with the tokens because that is the data we are observing (a "shadow" of the world) and last layer also deals with tokens because we want to understand what the network is "thinking" so it is a human specific lossy decoder (we can and do remove that translator and plug the latent representations to other networks to train them in tandem). There is no reason to believe that the other layers are "thinking in language".

sidewndr46• 2 years ago

I believe what this tells is that thought requires blood flow in the brain of mammals.

Stepping back a level, it may only actually tell us that MRIs measure blood flow.

agentcoops• 2 years ago

For those interested in the history, this is in fact the Neural Network research path that predated LLMs. Not just in the sense that Hinton et al and the core of the "Parallel Distributed Processing"/Connectionist school were always opposed to Chomsky's identification of brain-thought-language, but that the original early 2000s NSF grant awarded to Werbos, Ng, LeCun et al was for "Deep Learning in the Mammalian Visual Cortex." In their research program, mouse intelligence was posited as the first major challenge.

avazhi• 2 years ago

It’s impossible to overstate how crude and useless blood flow MRI studies are, at least relative to the hype they receive.

Spoiler alert: brains require a lot of blood, constantly, just to not die. Looking at blood flow on an MRI to determine neural circuitry has to deal with the double whammy of both an extremely crude tool and a correlation/causation fallacy.

This article and the study are arguably useless.

agumonkey2• 2 years ago

The connectome and brain mapping efforts might be a better research path for the coming years I guess

nickpsecurity2• 2 years ago

The projects mapping the brain, combined with research on what areas do, should tell us what components are necessary for our design. Studying the behavior of their specialist structures will tell us how to make purpose-built components for these tasks. Even if not, just attempting to split up the global behavior in that many ways with specialist architecture might help. We can also imitate how the components synchronize together, too.

An example was the problem of memory shared between systems. ML people started doing LLM’s with RAG. I looked into neuroscience which suggested we need a hippocampus model. I found several papers with hippocampus-like models. Combining LLM’s, vision, etc with hippocampus-like model might get better results. Rinse repeat for these other brain areas wherever we can understand them.

I also agree on testing the architectures with small, animal brains. Many do impressive behaviors that we should be able to recreate in simulators or with robotics. Some are useful, too, like how geese are good at security. Maybe embed a trained, goose brain into a camera system.

yarg5• 2 years ago

What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs.

Perhaps, but the relative success of trained LLMs acting with apparent generalised understanding may indicate that it is simply the interface that is really an LLM post training;

That the deeper into the network you go (the further from the linguistic context), the less things become about words and linguist structure specifically and the more it becomes about things and relations in general.

(This also means that multiple interfaces can be integrated, sometimes making translation possible, e.g.: image <=> tree<string>)

necovek5• 2 years ago

You seem to be conflating "different hardware" with proof that "language hardware" uses "software" equivalent to LLMs.

LLMs basically become practical when you simply scale compute up, and maybe both regions are "general compute", but language ends up on the "GPU" out of pure necessity.

So to me, these are entirely distinct questions: is the language region able to do general cognitive operations? What happens when you need to spell out "ubiquitous" or declense a foreign word in a language with declension (which you don't have memory patterns for)?

I agree it seems obvious that for better efficiency (size of training data, parameter count, compute ability), human brains use different approach than LLMs today (in a sibling comment, I bring up an example of my kids at 2yo having a better grasp of language rules than ChatGPT with 100x more training data).

But let's dive deeper in understanding what each of these regions can do before we decide to compare to or apply stuff from AI/CS.

ninetyninenine8• 2 years ago

What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs.

No this is not true. For two reasons.

1. We call these things LLMs and we train it with language but we can also train it with images.

2. We also know LLMs develop a sort of understanding that goes beyond language EVEN when the medium used for training is exclusively language.

The naming of LLMs is throwing you off. You can call it a Large Language Model but this does not mean that everything about LLMs are exclusively tied only to language.

Additionally we don't even know if the LLM is even remotely similar to the way human brains process language.

No such conclusion can be drawn from this experiment.

agumonkey2• 2 years ago

At times I had impaired brain function (lots of soft neurological issues, finger control, memory loss, balance issues) but surprisingly the core area responsible for mathematical reasoning was spared .. that was a strange sensation, almost schizophrenic.

And yeah it seems that core primitives of intelligence exist very low in our brains. And with people like Michael Levin, there may even be a root beside nervous systems.

ddingus5• 2 years ago

We should look to the animals.

Higher order faculties aside, animals seem like us, just simpler.

The higher functioning ones appear to have this missing thing too. We can see it in action. Perhaps all of them do and it is just harder for us when the animal thinks very differently or maybe does not think as much, feeling more, for example.

----

Now, about that thing... and the controversy:

Given an organism, or machine for this discussion, is of sufficiently robust design and complexity that it can precisely differentiate itself from everything else, it is a being.

This thing we are missing is an emergent property, or artifact that can or maybe always does present when a state of being also presents.

We have not created a machine of this degree yet.

Mother nature has.

The reason for emergence is a being can differentiate sensory input as being from within, such as pain, or touch, and from without, such as light or motion.

Another way to express this is closed loop vs open loop.

A being is a closed loop system. It can experience cause and effect. It can be the cause. It can be the effect.

A lot comes from this closed loop.

There can be the concept of the self and it has real meaning due to the being knowing what is of itself or something, everything else.

This may be what forms consciousness. Consciousness may require a closed loop, and organism of sufficient complexity to be able to perceive itself.

That is the gist of it.

These systems we make are fantastic pieces. They can pattern match and identify relationships between the data given in amazing ways.

But they are open loop. They are not beings. They cannot determine what is part of them, what they even are,or anything really.

I am both consistently amazed and dismayed at what we can get LLM systems to do.

They are tantalizingly close!

We found a piece of how all this works and we are exploiting the cral out of it. Ok fine. Humans are really good at that.

But it will all taper off. There are real limits because we will eventually find the end goal will be to map out the whole problem space.

Who has tried computing that? It is basically all possible human thought. Not going to happen.

More is needed.

And that "more" can arrive at thoughts without having first seen a few bazillion to choose from.

afiodorov• 2 years ago

What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs

I am not convinced it follows. Sure LLMs don’t seem complete however there’s a lot of unspoken inference going on in LLMs that don’t map into a language directly already - the inner layers of the deep neural net that operates on abstract neurons.

reverius42• 2 years ago

Interestingly though for AI, this doesn’t necessarily mean we need a different model architecture. A single large multimodal transformer might be capable of a lot that an LLM is not (besides the multimodality).

jll29• 2 years ago

Most pre-deep learning architectures had separate modules like "language model", "knowledge base" and "inference component".

Then LLMs came along, and ML folks got rather too excited that they contain implicit knowledge (which, of course, is required to deal with ambiguity). Then the new aspiration as "all in one" and "bigger is better", not analyzing what components are needed and how to orchestrate their interplay.

From an engineering (rather than science) point of view, the "end-to-end black box" approach is perhaps misguided, because the result will be a non-transparent system by definition. Individual sub-models should be connected in a way that retains control (e.g. in dialog agents, SRI's Open Agent Architecture was a random example of such "glue" to tie components together, to name but one).

Regarding the science, I do believe language adds to the power of thinking; while (other) animals can of course solve simple problems without language, language permits us to define layers of abstractions (by defining and sharing new concepts) that goes beyond simple, non-linguistic thoughts. Programming languages (created by us humans somewhat in the image of human language) and the language of mathematics are two examples where we push this even further (beyond the definition of new named concepts, to also define new "DSL" syntax) - but all of these could not come into beying without human language: all formal specs and all axioms are ultimately and can only be formulated in human language. So without language, we would likely be stuck at a very simple point of development, individually and collectively.

EDIT: 2 typos fixed

djtango• 2 years ago

Is beying another typo?

In my personal learning journey I have been exploring the space of intuitive learning which is dominant in physical skills. Singing requires extremely precise control of actions we can't fully articulate or even rationalise. Teaching those skills requires metaphors and visualising and a whole lot of feedback + trial & error.

I believe that this kind of learning is fundamentally non verbal and we can achieve abstraction of these skills without language. Walking is the most universal of these skills and we learn it before we can speak but if you study it (or better try to program a robot to walk with as many degrees of freedom as the human musculoskeletal system) you will discover that almost all of us don't understand what all the things that go into the "simple" task of walking!

My understanding is that people who are gifted at sports or other physical skills like musical instruments have developed the ability to discover and embed these non verbal abstractions quickly. When I practise the piano and am working on something fast, playing semiquavers at anything above 120bpm is not really conscious anymore in the sense of "press this key then that key"

The concept of arpeggio is verbal but the action is non verbal. In human thought where does verbal and non-verbal start and end? Its probably a continuum

lolinder• 2 years ago

I do believe language adds to the power of thinking; while (other) animals can of course solve simple problems without language, language permits us to define layers of abstractions (by defining and sharing new concepts) that goes beyond simple, non-linguistic thoughts.

Based on my experience with toddlers, a rather smart dog, and my own thought processes, I disagree that language is a fundamental component of abstraction. Of sharing abstractions, sure, but not developing them.

When I'm designing a software system I will have a mental conception of the system as layered abstractions before I have a name for any component. I invent names for these components in order to define them in the code or communicate them to other engineers, but the intuition for the abstraction comes first. This is why "naming things" is one of the hard problems in computer science—because the name comes second as a usually-inadequate attempt to capture the abstraction in language.

visarga3• 2 years ago

the "end to end black box" approach is perhaps misguided, because the result will be a non transparent system by definition

A black box that works in human language and can be investigated with perturbations, embedding visualizations and probes. It explains itself as much ore more than we can.

dboreham• 2 years ago

Not sure about that. The same abstract model could be used for both (symbols generated in sequence). For language the symbols have meaning in the context of language. For non-language thought they don't. Nature seems to work this way in general: re-using/purposing the same underlying mechanism over and over at different levels in the stack. All of this could be a fancy version of very old hardware that had the purpose of controlling swimming direction in fish. Each symbol is a flick of the tail.

exe342• 2 years ago

I like to think of the non-verbal portions as the biological equivalents of ASICs. even skills like riding a bicycle might start out as conscious effort (a vision model, a verbal intention to ride and a reinforcement learning teacher) but is then replaced by a trained model to do the job without needing the careful intentional planning. some of the skills in the bag of tricks are fine tuned by evolution.

ultimately, there's no reason that a general algorithm couldn't do the job of a specific one, just less efficiently.

xtrapol8• 2 years ago

You highlight an expectation that the “truer intelligence” is a singular device, once isolated would mobilize ultimate AGI.

All intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty (the potential distributed problem.) if it does not mitigate uncertainty it is not intelligence, it is something else.

Intelligence is a technology. For all life intelligence and the infrastructure of performing work efficiently (that whole entropy thing again) is a technology. Life is an arms race to maintain continuity (identity, and the very capacity of existential being.)

The modern problem is achieving reliable behavioral intelligence (constrained to a specific problem domain.) AGI is a phantasm. What manifestation of intelligence appears whole and complete and is always right? These are the sorts of lies you tell yourself, the ones that get you into trouble. They distract from tangible real world problems, perhaps causing some of them. True intelligence is a well calibrated “scalar” domain specific problem (uncertainty) reducer. There are few pressing idempotent obstructions in the real world.

Intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty.

Uncertainty is the domain of negative potential (what,where,why,how?)

Mitigation is the determinant resolve of any constructive or destructive interference affecting (terminal resolve within) the problem domain.

Examples of this may be piled together mountains high, and you may call that functional AGI, though you would be self deceiving. At some point “good enough” may be declared for anything so passing as yourselves.

erichocean2• 2 years ago

This has been suspected for years, but now there's an experimental result.

You would think the whole "split-brain" thing would have been the first clue; apparently not.

famouswaffles5• 2 years ago

You are getting derailed because of the name we've chosen to call these models but only the first few and last few layers of LLMs deal with tokens. The rest deal with abstract representations and models learnt during training. Language goes in and Language comes out but Language is not the in-between for either LLMs or Humans.

erichocean2• 2 years ago

So if someone figures out to do this, it will probably take less hardware than an LLM.

We have, it's called DreamCoder. There's a paper and everything.

Everything needed for AGI exists today, people simply have (incorrect) legacy beliefs about cognition that are holding them back (e.g. "humans are rational").

https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08381

visarga3• 2 years ago

No idea how to do this

We need to add the 5 senses, of which we have now image, audio and video understanding in LLMs. And for agentic behavior they need environments and social exposure.

NemoNobody7• 2 years ago

This is actually exactly what is needed. We think the dataset is the primary limitation to an LLMs capability but in reality we are only developing one part of their "intelligence" - a functional and massive model isn't the end of their training - its kinda just the beginning.

layer8• 2 years ago

What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs.

Despite being an LLM skeptic of sorts, I don’t think that necessarily follows. The LLM matrix multiplication machinery may well be implementing an equivalent of the human non-language cognitive processing as a side effect of the training. Meaning, what is separated in the human brain may be mixed together in an LLM.

taeric• 2 years ago

I'm curious why "simulation" isn't the extra thing needed? Yes, we need language to communicate ideas. But you can simulate in your mind things happening that you don't necessarily have words for, yet. Right?

mountainriver2• 2 years ago

Transformers are just sequence predictors, it doesn’t need to be language, increasingly it’s not

codebolt• 2 years ago

What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs.

An easy conclusion to jump to but I believe we need to be more careful. Nothing in these findings proves conclusively that non-verbal reasoning mechanism equivalent to humans couldn't evolve in some part of a sufficiently large ANN trained on text and math. Even though verbal and non-verbal reasoning occurs in two distinct parts of the brain, it doesn't mean they're not related.

westurner• 2 years ago

"Language models can explain neurons in language models" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35877402#35886145 :

Recent work has revealed that the neural activity patterns correlated with sensation, cognition, and action often are not stable and instead undergo large scale changes over days and weeks—a phenomenon called representational drift.

[...]

So, I'm not sure how conclusive this fmri activation study is either.

Though, is there a proto language that's not even necessary for the given measured aspects of condition?

Which artificial network architecture best approximates which functionally specialized biological neutral networks?

OpenCogPrime:KnowledgeRepresentation > Four Types of Knowledge: https://wiki.opencog.org/w/OpenCogPrime:KnowledgeRepresentat... :

Sensory, Procedural, Episodic, Declarative

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40105068#40107537 re: cognitive hierarchy and specialization :

But FWIU none of these models of cognitive hierarchy or instruction are informed by newer developments in topological study of neural connectivity;

yarg5• 2 years ago

Is this not obvious?

Language is a very poor substitute for freely flowing electrical information - it is evolved to compensate for the bottlenecks to external communication - bottlenecks that are lacking an internal analogue.

It's also a highly advanced feature - something as heavily optiimised as evolved life would not allow something as vital as cognition to be hampered by a lack of means for high fidelity external expression.

IIAOPSW2• 2 years ago

It is not at all obvious that "freely flowing electrical information" isn't just language in a different medium, much the same as video on a cassette tape.

yarg5• 2 years ago

Yes it is.

Language is designed to be expressible with low fidelity vibrating strings - it is very clear that the available bandwidth is in the order of bytes per second.

Verses a fucking neural network with ~100 billion neurons.

Come on man, seriously - the two communication modalities are completely incomparable.

mcswell7• 2 years ago

"Is this not obvious?"

No. But I'm going to stop there, because there are pages of comments saying the exact opposite (and of course some agreeing with you) above.

slashdave8• 2 years ago

Perhaps. But one could argue that the development of language (as necessary for communication, its original purpose) was the seed that lead to evolutionary development of deeper thinking.

yarg5• 2 years ago

100% deeper thought - and to a large extent the capacity for linguistic categorisation of objects is incredibly helpful in developing a deeper cognitive understanding of the world around us...

But the most fundamental boon that it offered was in terms of planning and organisation. Before language we'd point and grunt and go there and do the thing that we were gesturing that we were going to do.

But that's a very crude form of planning - you're pretty much just going all in on Leeroy Jenkins.

But actually (and horrifically) I think it's the gift of Kane that speaking and planning permitted; well organised humans (the smartest things on the planet) have been figuring out increasingly better ways to both kill each other and not to die themselves in a brutal feedback loop for a very long time now.

It's brutal as fuck, but it's Darwinian gold.

bmacho2• 2 years ago

The claim in the title is indeed obvious.

Also the title is editoralized for no reason. It makes searching, recognizing, citing etc waaay harder, and full of errors. I'll flag it.

psychoslave8• 2 years ago

And in fact, most of the things that you probably learned about the world, you learned through language and not through direct experience with the world.

Most things we know, we are probably not aware of. And for most of us, direct experience of everything that surrounds us in the world certainly exceeds by several order of magnitude the best bandwidth we can ever dream to achieve through any human language.

Ok, there are no actual data to back this, but authors of the article don't have anything solid either to back such a bold statement, from what is presented in the article.

If most of what we know of the world would mostly be things we were told, it would obviously be mostly a large amount of phatic noises, lies and clueless random assertions that we would have no mean to distinguish from the few stable credible elements inferable by comparing with a far more larger corpus of self experiments with realty.

dang• 2 years ago

All: please don't comment based on your first response to an inevitably shallow title. That leads to generic discussion, which we're trying to avoid on HN. Specific discussion of what's new or different in an article is a much better basis for interesting conversation.

Since we all have language and opinions about it, the risk of genericness is high with a title like this. It's like this with threads about other universal topics too, such as food or health.

WiSaGaN• 2 years ago

I think we need to distinguish between the language e.g. the native language the person uses like English and the concept of language. Your information exchanging binary messages over PCI bus is also part of a language.

jostmey• 2 years ago

Progress with LLMs would seem to support the title. The language abilities of LLMs does not seem to lead to higher thought, so there must be additional processes that are required for higher thought or process that don’t depend on language

mcswell7• 2 years ago

You may be right, but there is another hypothesis that would need to be rejected: at question is whether LLMs "do" language the same way we do. For certain they learn language much differently, with orders of magnitude more input data. It could be that they just string sentence fragments together, whereas (by hypothesis) we construct sentences hierarchically. The internal representation of semantics might also be different, more compositional in humans.

If I had time and free use of an LLM, I'd like to investigate how well it understands constructional synonymy, like "the red car" and "the car that is red" and "John saw a car on the street yesterday. It was red." I guess models that can draw pictures can be used to test this sort of thing--surely someone has looked into this?

fjfaase• 2 years ago

As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100). I have struggled my whole life to express my ideas with language. I consider myself an abstract visual thinker. I do not think in pictures, but in abstract structures. During my life, I have met several people, especially among software engineers, who seem to be similar to me. I also feel that people who are strong verbal thinkers have the greatest resistance against idea that language is not essential for higher cognitive processes.

eliaspro• 2 years ago

Growing up, I never used words or even sentences for thinking.

The abstract visualizations I could build in my mind where comparable to semi-transparent buildings that I could freely spin, navigate and bend to connect relations.

In my mid-twenties, someone introduced me to the concept of people using words for mental processes, which was completely foreign to me up to this point.

For some reason, this made my brain move more and more towards this language-based model and at the same time, I felt like I was losing the capacity for complex abstract thoughts.

Still to this day I (unsuccessfully) try to revive this and unlearn the language in my head, which feels like it imposes a huge barrier and limits my mental capacity to the capabilities of what the language my brain uses at the given time (mostly EN, partially DE) allows to express.

ryandv7• 2 years ago

This reminds me of my experiences working with a software developer transplanted from the humanities who was highly articulate and capable of producing language about programming, yet seemed to not be able to write many actual computer programs themselves.

I think that I ultimately developed an obsessive need to cite all my ideas against the literature and formulate natural language arguments for my claims to avoid being bludgeoned over the head with wordcelry and being seen as inferior for my lesser verbal fluency despite having written software for years at that point, since early childhood, and even studied computer science.

kerblang• 2 years ago

During my life, I have met several people, especially among software engineers, who seem to be similar to me

This begs a question though: Since programming is mostly done with language - admittedly primitive/pidgin ones - why isn't that a struggle? Not sure if you're a programmer yourself, but if so do you prefer certain programming languages for some sense of "less-verbalness" or does it even matter?

Just wondering, not attacking your claim per se.

alserio3• 2 years ago

The idea that programming languages and natural languages are processed with the same wetware should be testable with something like the tests described in this submission. I don't expect it to be true, but only expecting something is not science

superb_dev• 2 years ago

A programming language has a ton more rules and way less ambiguity than a speaking language.

makeitdouble2• 2 years ago

I see your general point on needing language proficiency to program, but I think it's just a very low requirement.

Parent isn't saying they can't handle language (and we wouldn't have this discussion in the first place), just that they better handle complexity and structure in non verbal ways.

To get back to programming, I think this do apply to most of us. Most of us probably don't think in ruby or JS, we have a higher vision of what we want to build and "flatten" it into words that can be parsed and executed. It's of course more obvious for people writing in say basic or assembly, some conversion has to happen at some point.

eacnamn• 2 years ago

Programming is moreso based on recursive problem solving. (Most) language does have some recursive structures, but these become quite difficult to think about after just a few levels, and really aren't what you'd normally consider to be "good language", e.g.

The dog's owner's house's roof's angle's similarity to an equilateral triangle is remarkable.

tines• 2 years ago

As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100)

I used to rationalize to myself along similar lines for a long time, then I realized that I'm just not as smart as I thought I was.

NemoNobody7• 2 years ago

I'm a brilliant genius according to IQ tests. Think me arrogant or conceited or whatever - that is literally the truth, fact - proven many times in the educational system (I was homeschooled and didn't follow any sort of curriculum and was allowed to do whatever I wanted bc I kept testing higher than almost everyone) and just for kicks also - the last time I took an IQ test I was in my late 20s and a friend and I had a bet about who could score higher completely stoned off of our ass. We rolled enough blunts apiece that we could be continuously smoking marijuana as we took the IQ test, which followed several bongs finished between the two of us. I was so high that I couldn't keep the numbers straight on one of the number pattern questions - it was ridiculous. I scored 124, my lowest "serious" attempt ever - all of this is 100% true. I need anyone to believe me - take this how you will but I have an opinion that is a bit different.

I'm brilliant - I've read volumes of encyclopedias, my hobbies include comparative theology, etymology, quantum mechanics and predicting the future with high accuracy (I only mention stuff I'm certain of tho ;) but so much so it disturbs my friends and family.

The highest I scored was in the 160s as a teenager but I truly believe they were over compensating for my age - only as an adult have I learned most children are stupid and they maybe in fact didn't over compensate. I am different than anyone else I've ever personally met - I fundamentally see the world different.

All of that is true but that's a rather flawed way of assessing intelligence - fr. I'm being serious. The things we know can free us as much as they can trap us - knowledge alone doesn't make a man successful, wealthy, happy or even healthy - I'm living evidence of this. That doesn't cut it as a metric for prediction of much. There are other qualities that are far more valuable in the societal sense.

Every Boss I've ever worked for has been dumber than me - each one I've learned invaluable stuff from. I was a boss once - in my day I owned and self taught/created an entire social network much like FB was a few years ago, mine obviously didn't take off and now I'm a very capable bum. Maybe someday something I'm tinkering with will make me millions but prolly not, for many reasons, I could write books if I wanted ;)

At the end of the day, the facts are what they are - there is an optimal level of intelligence that is obviously higher than the bottom but is nowhere near the top tier, very likely near that 100 IQ baseline. What separates us all is our capabilities - mostly stuff we can directly control, like learning a trade.

A Master Plumber is a genius plumber by another name and that can and obviously is most often, learned genius. What you sus about yourself is truth - don't doubt that. No IQ test ever told me I lacked the tenacity of the C average student that would employ me someday - they can't actually measure the extent of our dedicated capacity.

I kno more than most people ever have before or rn presently - I don't know as much about plumbing as an apprentice with 2 years of a trade school dedicated to plumbing and a year or two of experience in the field, that's the reality of it. I could learn the trade - I could learn most every trade, but I won't. That's life. I can tell you how you the ancients plumbed bc that piqued my curiosity and I kno far more about Roman plumbing than I do how a modern city sewer system works. That's also life.

It isn't what we kno or how fast we can learn it - it's what we do that defines us.

Become more capable if you feel looked down on - this is the way bc even if what you hone your capabilities of can be replicated by others most won't even try.

That's my rant about this whole intelligence perception we currently have as a society. Having 100 IQ is nowhere near the barrier that having 150 IQ is.

Rant aside, to the article - how isn't this obvious? I mean feelings literally exist - not just the warm fuzzy ones, like the literal feeling of existence. Does a monkey's mind require words to interpret pain or pleasure for example. Do I need to know what "fire" or "hot" is in a verbal context to sufficiently understand "burn" - words exists to convey to to others what doesn't need to be conveyed to us. That's their function. Communication. To facilitate communication with our social brethren we adopt them fundamentally as our Lego blocks for understanding the world - we pretend that words comprising language are the ideas themselves. A banana is a - the word is the fruit, they are the same in our minds but if I erase the word banana and all it's meaning of the fruit and I randomly encounter a banana - I still can taste it. No words necessary.

Also, you can think without words, deliberately and consciously - even absentmindedly.

And LLMs can't reason ;)

Truthfully, the reality is that a 100 IQ normal human is far more capable than any AI I've been given access to - in almost every metric I attempted to asses I ultimately didn't even bother as it was so obvious that humans are functionally superior.

When AI can reason - you, and everyone else, will kno it. It will be self evident.

Anyways, tldr: ppl are smarter than given credit for, smarter and much more capable - IQ is real and matters but far less than we are led to believe. People are awesome - the epitome of biological life on Earth and we do a lot of amazing things and anyone can be amazing.

I hate it when the Hacker News collective belittles itself - don't do that. I rant here bc it's one of the most interesting places I've found and I care about what all of you think far more than I care about your IQ scores.

torginus2• 2 years ago

if you're not a native english speaker, it's normal to score lower on the (English) verbal tests

sva_• 2 years ago

That was a difficult thing for me as well -- if you have such great ideas in your head but they fall apart once you try to bring them down on paper, maybe those ideas simply aren't that great.

makeitdouble2• 2 years ago

I think people who can manipulate complex structures but struggle with language tend to see language in a more formal way, putting more effort into understanding its structure and inner working.

Basically what to most people is so obvious that it becomes transparent ("air") isn't to us, which apparently is an incredible gift for becoming a language researcher. Or a programmer.

bertylicious• 2 years ago

I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100).

I very strongly suspect that you're overestimating yourself.

GoblinSlayer8• 2 years ago

IME fast talking people simply give half assed formulations of half assed ideas.

segalord• 2 years ago

You’d still be reasoning using symbols, language is inherently an extension of symbols and memes. Think of a person representing a complex concept in their mind with a symbol and using it for further reasoning

jbreckmckye• 2 years ago

Although I fit the profile of a verbal thinker (English degree, education in the humanities) I don't exactly find language the primary aspect of my thought.

It seems more like a complement to it: the idea arises, and then I have this compulsion to verbalise it, which gets quite frustrating as it takes several iterations. Clearly words do matter to me as a way to structure and record my ideas but there is something that pre-empts verbalisation and to some extent resists it.

I cannot provide insight on how I arrive at ideas. Even when I did literary criticism, the best I can say is that I absorbed lots of text and then suddenly a pattern would spring out. But the same things would happen for me studying maths or the hard sciences.

Software engineering is actually a bit different for me because I am not naturally a good algorithmic problem solver. Really I am somebody very passionate about computing who has a near-compulsion to see and collect more and more technology. So for me it is as simple as saying "this resembles a reader monad" or "this puns on the active record pattern". Less impressive than my humanities intelligence but worth maybe 10x the amount in the labour market :-)

mmooss• 2 years ago

A concept in every human culture - i.e., created in every culture, not passed from one to some others - is mentalese [0]: "A universal non-verbal system of concepts, etc., conceived of as an innate representational system resembling language, which is the medium of thought and underlies the ability to learn and use a language." [1]

If you look up 'mentalese' you can find a bunch written about it. There's an in-depth article by Daniel Gregory and Peter Langland-Hassan, in the incredible Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on Inner Speech (admittedly, I'm taking a leap to think they mean precisely the same thing). [2]

[0] Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002)

[1] Oxford English Dictionary

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/inner-speech/

andai2• 2 years ago

When I was 13 or so, a friend asked me, "So, you speak three languages. Which one do you think in?" and the question left me speechless, because until that moment I hadn't considered that people think in words. It seemed a very inefficient way to go about things!

Much later, I did begin to think mostly in words, and (perhaps for unrelated reasons?) my thinking became much less efficient.

Also related, I experienced temporarily enhanced cognition while under the influence of entheogens. My thoughts, which normally fade within seconds, became stretched out, so that I could stack up to 7 layers of thought on top of each other and examine them simultaneously.

I remember feeling greatly diminished, mentally, once that ability went away.

etcd• 2 years ago

With the drugs were you able to be more efficient for example code quicker, or was it more like better insights. Or perhaps both?

andai2• 2 years ago

It might be that my working memory was temporarily expanded. Research has found its possible to massively increase it by disabling parts of the brain with electronmagnets.

What it seemed like subjectively though is that my thoughts themselves became "longer", imagine planks of wood. You can stack them (slightly offset, like a video timeline with layers), and the wider they are, the more ideas you can stack before it topples over.

I have unfortunately been unable to replicate the experience. There were after-effects for a few weeks where my senses and cognition were markedly enhanced, but this faded after a few weeks.

My main take-away here is "why are we trying to make machines smarter than humans, we should try to make humans smarter"! (I guess Neuralink kinda does that, but it doesn't actually make the human part smarter...)

aniijbod• 2 years ago

Thought and language are intertwined in ways we don’t fully grasp. The fact that certain cognitive tasks, like comprehension, can proceed without engaging traditional language-related brain regions doesn't mean thought doesn't use language—it just means we might not yet understand how it does. Thought could employ other forms of linguistic-like processes that Fedorenko's experiments, or even current brain-imaging techniques, fail to capture.

There could be functional redundancies or alternative systems at play that we haven't identified, systems that allow thought to access linguistic capabilities even when the specialized language areas are offline or unnecessary. The question of what "language in thought" looks like remains open, particularly in tasks requiring comprehension. This underscores the need for further exploration into how thought operates and what role, if any, latent or alternative linguistic functionalities play when conventional language regions aren't active.

In short, we may have a good understanding of language in isolation, but not necessarily in its broader role within the cognitive architecture that governs thought, comprehension, and meaning-making.

dragonwriter• 2 years ago

The fact that certain cognitive tasks, like comprehension, can proceed without engaging traditional language-related brain regions doesn't mean thought doesn't use language

All other things being equal, its is a reason to provisionally reject the hypothesis that those kinds of thought use language as introducing entities (the ties between those kinds of thought and language) into the model of reality being generated that are not needed to explain any observed phenomenon.

adrian_b2• 2 years ago

Moreover, I believe that one should distinguish between "language" and "words".

The parent article is mostly about thinking without "words", not necessary without a "language".

Some thoughts might be completely different from sentences in a language, probably when they have a non-sequential nature, but other thoughts are exactly equivalent to a sentence in a language, except that they do not use the words.

I can look and see to things that I recognize, e.g. A and B, and I can see that one is bigger than the other and I can think "A is bigger than B" without thinking at the words used in the spoken language, but nonetheless associating some internal concepts of "A", "B" and "is greater than", exactly like when formulating a spoken sentence.

I do not believe that such a thought can be considered as an example of thinking without language, but just as an example that for a subset of the words used in a spoken language there is an internal representation that is independent of the sequence of sounds or letters that compose a spoken or written language.

jumping_frog2• 2 years ago

I would like to propose that reasoning needs an intermediate representation for it to be effective. Consider the scene graph representation in computer graphics. This scene graph is the intermediate representation. The algorithm is not reasoning about individual pixels of two objects interacting in the scene graph. It uses IR. Now for some that IR takes the form of language/words. For some it takes the form of visuals. For some, these are just abstract feelings.

mannyv• 2 years ago

Imo just like in computers, language can make certain thoughts easier to think.

orwin• 2 years ago

I will add an anecdata, then ask a question.

I could enter what we all here call the "Zone" quite often when i was young (once while doing math :D). I still can, but rarely on purpose, and rarely while coding. I have a lot of experience in this state, and i can clearly say that a marker of entering the zone is that your thoughts are not "limited" by language anymore and the impression of clarity and really fast thinking. This is why i never thought that language was required for thinking.

Now the question: would it be possible to scan the brain of people while they enter the zone? I know it isn't a state you can reach on command, but isn't it worth to try? understand the mechanism of this state? And maybe understand where our thought start?

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

Also known as “Flow”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

riiii• 2 years ago

Nice idea. In the zone, I don't think about the code. I am the code and the code is me.

That is, until the code refuses to work. Then the code is a bitch and I need a break.

AnimalMuppet• 2 years ago

Makes sense. If I am the code and the code is me, and the code doesn't work, then I'm done working too.

soared• 2 years ago

I also wonder - is the flow state for work the same as the flow state in other domains? IE team sports flow state is very similar - actions flow smoothly and feel automatic. Flow state in cycling feels really similar, but doesn’t create the same outputs.

Razengan4• 2 years ago

Those without, do you feel “jealous” of people with a “mind’s eye”?

Or vice versa?

HKH2• 2 years ago

You seem to be conflating inner monologues and imagination.

I don't use an inner monologue but my imagination is fairly good at creating new images.

slashdave8• 2 years ago

What? No. The idea that your thoughts have to be expressed in something as crude as language sounds very tedious and limiting.

YeGoblynQueenne• 2 years ago

> They’re basically the first model organism for researchers studying the neuroscience of language. They are not a biological organism, but until these models came about, we just didn’t have anything other than the human brain that does language.

I think this is completely wrong-headed. It's like saying that until cars came about we just didn't have anything other than animals that could move around under its own power, therefore in order to understand how animals move around we should go and study cars. There is a great gulf of unsubstantiated assumptions between observing the behaviour of a technological artifact, like a car or a statistical language model, and thinking we can learn something useful from it about human or more generally animal faculties.

I am really taken aback that this is a serious suggestion: study large language models as in-silico models of human linguistic ability. Just putting it down in writing like that rings alarm bells all over the place.

upghost3• 2 years ago

I've been trying to figure out to respond to this for a while. I appreciate the fact that you are pretty much the lone voice on this thread voicing this opinion, which I also share but tend to keep my mouth shut since it seems to be unpopular.

It's hard for me to understand where my peers are coming from on the other side of this argument and respond without being dismissive, so I'll do my best to steelman the argument later.

Machine learning models are function approximators and by definition do not have an internal experience distinct from the training data any more than the plus operator does. I agree with the sentiment that even putting it in writing gives more weight to the position than it should, bordering on absurdity.

I suppose this is like the ELIZA phenomena on steroids, is the only thing I can think of for why such notions are being entertained.

However, to be generous, lets do some vigorous hand waving and say we could find a way to have an embodied learning agent gather sublinguistic perceptual data in an online reinforcement learning process, and furthermore that the (by definition) non-quantifiable subjective experience data could somehow be extracted, made into a training set, and fit to a nicely parametric loss function.

The idea then is that could find some architecture that would allow you to fit a model to the data.

And voila, machine consciousness, right? A perfect model for sentience.

Except for the fact that you would need to ignore that in the RL model gathering the data and the NN distilled from it, even with all of our vigorous hand waving, you are once again developing function approximators that have no subjective internal experience distinct from the training data.

Let's take it one step further. The absolute simplest form of learning comes in the form of habituation and sensitization to stimuli. Even microbes have the ability to do this.

LLMs and other static networks do not. You can attempt to attack this point by fiatting online reinforcement learning or dismissing it as unnecessary, but I should again point out that you would be attacking or dismissing the bare minimum requirement for learning, let alone a higher order subjective internal experience.

So then the argument, proceeding from false premises, would claim that the compressed experience in the NN could contain mechanical equivalents of higher order internal subjective experiences.

So even with all the might vigorous hand waving we have allowed, you have at best found a way to convert internal subjective processes to external mechanical processes fit to a dataset.

The argument would then follow, well, what's the difference? And I could point back to the microbe, but if the argument hasn't connected by this point, we will be chasing our tails forever.

A good book on the topic that examines this in much greater depth is "The Self Assembling Brain".

https://a.co/d/1FwYxaJ

That being said, I am hella jealous of the VC money that the grifters will get for advancing the other side of this argument.

For enough money I'd probably change my tune too. I can't by a loaf of bread with a good argument lol

cognitif• 2 years ago

What does consciousness or subjective experience have to do with the relationship between language and cognition? I’m not following your argument.

gibsonf1• 2 years ago

The key to human intelligence are concepts. We just use whatever language we choose to symbolize the concepts.

shsbdncudx• 2 years ago

When we eventually nail agi, I think we will look at llm’s as nothing more than the interface to ai, how we interact with it, but we won’t consider it to be ai.

Tagbert• 2 years ago

I’ve been hearing/reading about people who don’t have an inner monologue. Their experience of cognition is not verbally-based.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/inner-monologue-...

slashdave8• 2 years ago

Honestly, for some of us the idea that all your thoughts have to filter through language sounds very tedious.

I want to remind everyone that your experiences are unique and do not necessarily translate to all other people.

crooked-v2• 2 years ago

As one of those people most of the time (communicating with other people is the main exception), I still find it astounding that it's hard for some people to understand.

Take riding a bike: I presume even people with an overactive inner monologue aren't constantly planning their actions (brakes, steering, turns) in words. Then just extend that out to most other stuff.

chongli3• 2 years ago

What about when reading and writing? My inner monologue internally voices the words as I’m reading and writing. Do you not do that?

ryandv7• 2 years ago

It's worth noting the precise and narrow sense in which the term "language" is used throughout these studies: it is those particular "word sequences" that activate particular regions in the brain's left hemisphere, to the exclusion of other forms of symbolic representation such as mathematical notation. Indeed, in two of the studies cited, [0] [1] subjects with language deficits or brain lesions in areas associated with the "language network" are asked to perform on various mathematical tasks involving algebraic expressions [0] or Arabic numerals [1]:

DA was impaired in solving simple addition, subtraction, division or multiplication problems, but could correctly simplify abstract expressions such as (b×a)÷(a×b) or (a+b)+(b+a) and make correct judgements whether abstract algebraic equations like b − a = a − b or (d÷c)+a=(d+a)÷(c+a) were true or false.
Sensitivity to the structural properties of numerical expressions was also evaluated with bracket problems, some requiring the computation of a set of expressions with embedded brackets: for example, 90 [(3 17) 3].

Discussions of whether or not these sorts of algebraic or numerical expressions constitute a "language of mathematics" aside (despite them not engaging the same brain regions and structures associated with the word "language"); it may be the case that these sorts of word sequences and symbols processed by structures in the brain's left hemisphere are not essential for thought, but can still serve as a useful psychotechnology or "bicycle of the mind" to accelerate and leverage its innate capabilities. In a similar fashion to how this sort of mathematical notation allows for more concise and precise expression of mathematical objects (contrast "the number that is thrice of three and seventeen less of ninety") and serves to amplify our mathematical capacities, language can perhaps be seen as a force multiplier; I have doubts whether those suffering from aphasia or an agrammatic condition would be able to rise to the heights of cognitive performance.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17306848/

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15713804/

upghost3• 2 years ago

Well this comment is about the article not LLMs so I doubt it will have much in the way of legs, but this work has already been covered extensively and to a fascinating depth by Jaak Panksepp [1].

His work explores the neuropsychology of emotions WAIT DON'T GO they are actually the substrate of consciousness, NOT the other way around.

We have 7 primary affective processes (measurable hardware level emotions) and they are not what you think[2]. They are considered primary because they are sublinguistic. For instance, witnessing the color red is a primary experience, you cannot explain in words the color red to someone who has not ever seen it before.

His work is a really fascinating read if you ever want to take a break from puters for a minute and learn how people work.

PS the reason this sort of research isn't more widely known is because the behaviorist school was so incredibly dominant since the 1970s they made it completely taboo to discuss subjective experience in the realm of scientific discourse. In fact the emotions we are usually taught are not based on emotional states but on muscle contractions in the face! Not being allowed to talk about emotions in psychological studies or the inner process of the mind is kinda crazy when you think about it. So only recently with neuroimaging has it suddenly become ok to acknowledge that things happen in the brain independent of externally observable behavior.

[1] https://a.co/d/6EYULdP

[2] - seeking - fear - anxiety and grief - rage - lust - play!!! - caring

[3] if this sounds familiar at all it's because Jordan Peterson cites Jaak Panksep all the time. Well 50% of the time, the other 50% is CG Jung and the final 50% is the book of Exodus for some reason.

sebmellen• 2 years ago

Fascinating comment and I’m glad I caught it! Thank you!

ziofill• 2 years ago

I'm wondering about the "non-verbal language" that scientists use to communicate with people affected by aphasia. What makes a brain with aphasia understand it? Do brains have dedicated circuitry to process words? (as opposed to, say, sounds which are a more general concept)

necovek5• 2 years ago

While getting confirmation of this relationship (or lack of it) is exciting, none of this is surprising: language is a tool we "developed" further through our cognitive processes, but ultimately other primates use language as well.

The one thing I wonder is if it's mostly "code duplication": iow, would we be able to develop language by using a different region of the brain, or do we actually do cognitive processes in the language part too?

In other words, is this simply deciding to send language processing to the GPU even if we could do it with the CPU (to illustrate my point)?

How would one even devise an experiment to prove or disprove this?

To me it seems obvious that our language generation and processing regions really involve cognition as well, as languages are very much rule based (even of they came up in reverse: first language then rules): could we get both regions to light up in brain imaging when we get to tricky words that we aren't sure how to spell or adapt to context like declensions of foreign words

But you can build these models that are trained on only particular kinds of linguistic input or are trained on speech inputs as opposed to textual inputs.

As someone from this side of the "fence" (mathematics and CS, though currently obly a practicing software engineer), I don't think LLMs provide this opportunity that is in any way comparable to human minds.

Comparing performance of small kids developing their language skills (I've only had two, but one is enough to prove by contradiction) to LLMs (in particular for Serbian), LLMs like ChatGPT had a much broader vocabulary, but kids were much better at figuring out complex language rules with very limited number of inputs (noticed by them making mistakes on exceptions by following a "rule" at 2 years of age or younger).

The amount of training input GenAI needs is multiple orders of magnitude larger compared to young kids.

Though it's not a fair comparison: kids learn language by listening, immitation, watching, smelling, hearing and in context (you'll talk about bread at breakfast).

So let's be careful in considering LLMs a model of a human language process.

keepamovin• 2 years ago

When I was in junior high, I remember a friend saying to me “you can’t think in images, you think in words.” She insisted, and couldn’t believe that I actually thought in images a lot of the time. she was pretty smart and creative.

But I thought in images and I still do in part. so I don’t think you need words to think.

I thought the people who did were overly computerized, maybe thinking in an over defined way.

Peteragain• 2 years ago

I know a little about this area and there is certainly a movement (glacial) away from thinking that thinking uses symbols, distributed or not. The argument cannot be made in a popular science article and so such articles inevitably fall back on popular ideas of what thinking is. The alternatives: the embodied nature of reasoning is one direction and many talk of an "enacivist" approach. There are certainly some kinds of thinking that require symbols, but a surprisingly large and diverse range of intelligent behaviour can be done by just wiring stuff up. Interestingly, a significant amount seems amenable to a mechanism based on "glorified auto-complete" (cf Hinton) and I have written something on the sociological variant - something readable I hope - arxiv.org/abs/2402.08403

adrian_b2• 2 years ago

I can think without language about all the things that I have experienced directly through some of my senses, but there is a huge number of things that I have never experienced directly and about which I can think only using language.

I doubt that this is different for other people. I believe that those people who claim that they never think using language are never thinking about the abstract or remote things about which I think using language.

For instance, I can think about a model of CPU without naming it, if it has been included in some of the many computers that I have used during the years, by recalling an image of the computer, or of its motherboard, or of the CPU package, or recalling some experiences when running programs on that computer, how slow or how responsive that felt, and so on.

I cannot think about a CPU that I have never used, e.g. Intel 11900K, without naming it.

Similarly, I can think without language about the planet Jupiter, which I have seen directly many times, or even about the planet Neptune, which I have never seen with my eyes, but I have seen in photographs, but I cannot think otherwise than with words about some celestial bodies that I have never seen.

The same for verbs, some verbs name actions about which I can think by recalling images or sounds or smells or tactile feelings that correspond with typical results of those actions. Other verbs are too abstract, so I can think about the corresponding action only using the word that names it.

For some abstract concepts, one could imagine a sequence of images, sounds etc. that would suggest them, but that would be like a pantomime puzzle and it would be a too slow way of thinking.

I can look at a wood plank thrown over a precipice and I can conclude that it may be safe to walk on it without language, but if I were to design a bridge guaranteed to resist to the weight of some trucks passing on it, I could not do that design without thinking with language.

Therefore I believe that language is absolutely essential for complex abstract thinking, even if there are alternative ways of thinking that may be sufficient even most of the time for some people.

crooked-v2• 2 years ago

but there is a huge number of things that I have never experienced directly and about which I can think only using language.

This makes me think of the Tao Te Ching, which opens with (translation dependent, of course)

   The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
   The name that can be named is not the eternal name

bmacho2• 2 years ago

There is a non-verbal me. E.g. who moves my limbs, feels the feelings (hunger, happiness, ..), and sometimes helps my verbal me to think (in math or in chess the answer just appears for the verbal me), or in sudden situations it takes over, and it makes decisions very fast.

Since it controls my limbs, I consider it to be the real me. My inner monologue is a bit frustrated that it can't control my limbs, and it can't really communicate with whoever controls my limbs.

Then there is my inner monologue, which does my thinking almost always, in an auditory way: imagine the sound of spoken words in an ~5 sec long duration, and let the answer appear. I consider it as an auditory deducing thingy, and also an intelligence on its own.

I am mostly fine with this, tho I am curious about my non-verbal me, and I wish I'd know more about it.

ryandv7• 2 years ago

Julian Jaynes has written on this verbal/non-verbal dichotomy in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, in which he literally defines god to mean those phenomena related to right hemispheric structures and activities in the brain that are communicated over the anterior commissures and interpreted by left hemispheric language centers as speech; hence the many mystical reports of "hearing the voice of god" as passed down through the aeons. Such phenomena have gone by many other names: gods, the genius, the higher self, the HGA... though this metaphysical and spiritual terminology is best understood as referring to non-verbal, non-rational, non-linear forms of cognition that are closer to free association and intuitive pattern matching (similar to Kahneman's "System 1" thinking). There even exist certain mystical traditions which purport to facilitate deeper connections with this subsystem of the mind; see for instance Eshelman's accounting of the western esoteric tradition in The Mystical and Magical System of the A.'.A.'. at [0] (currently defunct pending the restoration of the Internet Archive).

[0] https://archive.org/details/a-a-the-mystical-and-magical-sys...

zmmmmm• 2 years ago

Knowing someone with a brain injury, something that is hugely apparent is how much we take for granted "sequencing" - that is, the ability for the brain to hold a sequence of events, ideas or actions in a coherent order over a period of time. It's much more fragile than you would think. People with specific brain injuries suddenly can't work out whether to put their shoes on before their socks etc.

Why I mention this is that I see both language and reasoning as rooted in this more fundamental cognitive ability of "coherent sequencing". This sits behind all kinds of planning and puzzling tasks where you have to project forward a sequence of theoretical actions and abstractly evaluate the outcome.

Which is all to say, I don't think language and reasoning are the same, but I do think it is likely they stem from the same underlying fundamental mechanisms in our brain. And as a consequence, it's actually quite plausible that LLMs can reconstruct mechanisms of reasoning from language, in a regressive model kind of fashion. ie: just because their are other ways to reason doesn't exclude language as a path to it.

mstipetic• 2 years ago

Man, brain is so weird. The weirdest brain injury symptom I can’t wrap my head around is when people lose the ability to understand the number 0. Like everything else works but this is beyond their understanding. Like what’s so special about this number?

ajb• 2 years ago

One interesting corollary of this is the need to rethink the underpinnings of therapy. Eg, CBT is based around verbal thoughts and replacing bad ones with good ones. I've had CBT practitioners insist to me that thoughts always include words. But once you recognise that there are kinds of thinking, both processing and "mental actions" , not linked to words, it's not so easy. How do you identify and replace a maladaptive mental process, if it's not linked to a verbalisation? If it is, does replacing the verbalisation really do anything?

This I think is why so much popular psychology is so vacuous - the slogans are merely things that triggered some people to figure out how to improve their mental actions, but there's no strong linkage between the two.

SecuredMarvin• 2 years ago

Thanks, dang.

I think that using a LLM as the referred telepathy device to a wolfram-alpha/mathematica like general reasoning module is the way to AGI. The reasoning modules we have today are still much to narrow because of the very broad and deep search trees exploding in complexity. There is the need for a kind of pathfinder which could come from common knowledge already encoded in LLMs, like in o1. An system playing with real factual reasoning but exploring in directions coming from world knowledge.

What is still missing is the dialectic between possible and right, a physics engine, the motivation of analysed agents, the effects of emergent behavior and a lot of other -isms. But they may be encoded in the reasoning-explorer. And of course loops, more loops, refinement, working hypotheses and escaping cul-de-sacs.

There are people with great language skills and next to no reasoning skills. Some of them have general knowledge. If you ever talked to them, for a at least an hour freely meandering topics you will know. They seem intelligent for a couple of minutes but after a while you realise that they can refer fact, even interpret metaphors, but they will not find an elegant one, to navigate abstraction levels, even to differentiate root cause from effect or motivation and culture from cold logic. Some of them even ace IQ or can program but none did math so far. They hate, fear or despise rational results violation their learned rules. Sorry, chances are if you hate reading this, maybe you are one (or my English is annoyingly bad).

I love talking to people outside my bubble. They have an incredible broad diversity in abilities and experiences.

ilaksh• 2 years ago

One thing that always seemed important to these discussions is that the serial structure of language is probably not an optimization but just due to the reality that we can only handle uttering or hearing one sound at a time.

In my mind there should be some kind of parallel/hierarchical model that comes after language layers and then optionally can be converted back to a series of tokens. The middle layers are trained on world models such as from videos, intermediary layers on mapping, and other layers on text, including quite a lot of transcripts etc. to make sure the middle layers fully ground the outer layers.

I don't really understand transformers and diffusion transformers etc., but I am optimistic that as we increase the compute and memory capacity over the next few years it will allow more video data to be integrated with language data. That will result in fully grounded multimodal models that are even more robust and more general purpose.

I keep waiting to hear about some kind of manufacturing/design breakthroughs with memristors or some kind of memory-centric computing that gives another 100 X boost in model sizes and/or efficiency. Because it does seem that the major functionality gains have been unlocked through scaling hardware which allowed the development of models that took advantage of the new scale. For me large multimodal video datasets with transcripts and more efficient hardware to compress and host them are going to make AI more robust.

I do wish I understood transformers better though because it seems like somehow they are more general-purpose. Is there something about them that is not dependant on the serialization or tokenization that can be extracted to make other types of models more general? Maybe they are tokens that have scalars attached which are still fully contextualized but are computed as many parallel groups for each step.

smallerfish• 2 years ago

A little late to the thread, but this is obvious if you've done any reasonably serious mindfulness practice. When you are meditating, you can get to the point where the internal monolog (the yabbering of the "crazy monkey mind") is completely silenced. "You" are still present, and can direct your attention, and can observe all of the perceptions with full comprehension, without the verbal layer interpreting for you.

zeroxfe• 2 years ago

Came here to say something similar. You also notice that before any verbal thoughts arise, there are "primordial" thoughts, which are "felt" (sometimes as emotions.) These can instigate huge chains of verbal, visual, auditory thought, in turn generating more emotions, causing a (occasionally vicious) feedback loop.

ryandv7• 2 years ago

This sounds similar to a fairly early realization in the practice of meditation. Daniel M Ingram refers to it as "Cause and Effect" in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: [0]

In the stage of Cause and Effect, the relationships between mental and physical phenomena become very clear and sometimes ratchet-like. There is a cause, such as intention, and then an effect, such as movement. There is a cause, such as a sensation, and there is an effect, namely a mental impression.

Trying to increase the frequency at which you oscillate between physical sensations and mental sensations is a fascinating exercise.

[0] https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iv-insight...

jumping_frog2• 2 years ago

This "feeling" of full comprehension can be an illusion. Similar to how we think we are taking in 140 degree of full visual information through our eyes. In truth, we can only take in accurate information about the size of our thumb at arms length. The so called saccades phenomenon.

talkingtab• 2 years ago

A very long time ago I took a programming aptitude test, supposedly from IBM. The test was essentially detecting pattern anomalies. Two straight lines, one crooked. Pick the crooked. The patterns became increasingly more complex. I remember a little voice in my head verbalizing "two straight, one crooked". But at some point the voice stopped but I was sure which item broke the pattern.

My take away is that language is secondary to thinking - aka intuitive pattern detection. Language is the Watson to Sherlock.

The corollary is that treating language as primary in decision making is (sometimes) not as effective as treating it as secondary. At this point in my life (I'm old) I seem to have spent much of my life attempting to understand why my pattern matching/intuition made a choice that turned out to be so superior to my verbal language process.

swayvil• 2 years ago

Does the act of assigning meaning to any thing count as language?

What if the things are part of a set, chosen for uniqueness and distinguishability. Meanings determined by tradition?

There's a lot of territory between the two.

alok-g• 2 years ago

How specifically do you define 'meaning' and (the domain of) 'any thing'? Pls. consider if your definition of language would lead to an inference that most animals have language abilities.

kensai• 2 years ago

Wasn’t this known at least empirically for centuries? I mean obviously persons and animals without language capabilities (uneducated, deaf, mute) manage some cognitive processes that underlie thought. They might not be the brightest, but it’s there.

I guess this was the experiment the proved the point.

orobus• 2 years ago

I’m not a neuroscience expert, but I do have a degree in philosophy. The Russell quote immediately struck me as misleading (especially without a citation). The author could show more integrity by including Russell’s full quote:

Language serves not only to express thoughts, but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it. It is sometimes maintained that there can be no thought without language, but to this view I cannot assent: I hold that there can be thought, and even true and false belief, without language. But however that may be, it cannot be denied that all fairly elaborate thoughts require words.
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits by Bertrand Russell, Section: Part II: Language, Chapter I: The Uses of Language Quote Page 60, Simon and Schuster, New York.

Of course, that would contravene the popular narrative that philosophers are pompous idiots incapable of subtlety.

usgroup• 2 years ago

I think it’s a nicely summarised challenge to boot.

It’s doubtless to me that thinking happens without intermediary symbols; but it’s also obvious that I can’t think deeply without the waypoints and context symbols provide. I think it is a common sense opinion.

Izkata2• 2 years ago

"Language" is a subset of "symbols". I agree with what you said, but it's not representative of the quote in GP.

Just a few days ago was "What do you visualize while programming?", and there's a few of us in the comments that, when programming, think symbolically without language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41869237

photochemsyn• 2 years ago

Is Russell aligned with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."? Is he talking about how to communicate his world to others, or is he saying that without language internal reasoning is impossible?

Practically, I think the origins of fire-making abilities in humans tend to undermine that viewpoint. No other species is capable of reliably starting a fire with a few simple tools, yet the earliest archaeological evidence for fire (1 mya) could mean the ability predated complex linguistic capabilities. Observation and imitation could be enough for transmitting the skill from the first proto-human who successfully accomplished the task to others.

P.S. This is also why Homo sapiens should be renamed Homo ignis IMO.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell answered the question with a flat yes, asserting that language’s very purpose is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” But even a cursory glance around the natural world suggests why Russell may be wrong.

I don't know why Russell is catching strays. Saying language exists to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it does not in any way imply that you can't think without language.

Geee• 2 years ago

The important question is: what is considered a language?

You can ask whether people who have these severe language impairments can perform tasks that require thinking. You can ask them to solve some math problems or to perform a social reasoning test, and all of the instructions, of course, have to be nonverbal because they can’t understand linguistic information anymore.

Surely these "non-verbal instructions" are some kind of language. Maybe all human action can be considered language.

A contrarian example to this research might be feral children, i.e people who have been raised away from humans.[0] In most cases they are mentally impaired; as in not having human-like intelligence. I don't think there is a good explanation why this happens to humans. And why it doesn't happen to other animals, which develop normally in species-typical way whether they are in the wild or in human captivity. It seems that most human behavior (even high-level intelligence) is learned / copied from other humans, and maybe this copied behavior can be considered language.

If humans are "copy machines", there's also a risk of completely losing the "what's it like to be a human" behavior if children of the future are raised by AI and algorithmic feeds.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child

wnmurphy• 2 years ago

I think the argument is in whether "thought" only applies to conscious articulation or whether non-linguistic, non-symbolic processes also qualify.

We only consciously "know" something when we represent it with symbols. There are also unconscious processes that some would consider "thought", like driving a car safely without thinking about what you're doing, but I wouldn't consider those thoughts.

I find an interesting parallel to Chain of Thought techniques with LLMs. I personally don't (consciously) know what I think until I articulate it.

To me this is similar to giving an LLM space to print out intermediary thoughts, like a JSON array of strings. Language is our programming language, in a sense. Without representing something in a word/concept, it doesn't exist.

"Ich vermute, dass wir nur sehen, was wir kennen." - Nietzsche, where "know" refers to labeling something by projecting a concept/word onto it.

stevebrown• 2 years ago

Language plays a role similar to that of paper and pen in solving certain math problems. As a tool, it aids deeper thinking. It serves two key functions: facilitating communication and enhancing thought processes. This is why "chain of thought" type of intermediate language prompts improve reasoning in OpenAI's o1 model.

tekknik• 2 years ago

oh how many people have been oppressed and suppressed from a misguided understanding of the alternative…

who cares right?

Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

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