23 ms·
Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
- fnordpiglet 2y agoFor those who can’t and don’t think in words this is unsurprising.
- fsndz 2y agoabsolutely !
- neom 2y agoHow would someone think in words? You mean the words in the pictures or...?
- mjochim 2y agoBy "hearing" words, sentences, dialogues in their mind. Just like imagining a picture, but audio instead.
- Teever 2y agobut words, sentences, and dialogues are all features of language.
- vivekd 2y agoI think in words. For me during thought there is a literal voice in my putting my thoughts into words.
- BarryMilo 2y agoAre there really people who don't know about inner monologues?
- IAmGraydon 2y agoI think it's more likely that they lack the awareness to recognize it.
- jerf 2y agoI have the standard internal monologue many people report, but I've never put much stock in the "words are necessary for thought" because while I think a lot in words, I also do a lot of thinking in not-words. We recently put the project I've been working on for the last year out into the field for the first time. As was fully expected, some bugs emerged. I needed to solve one of them. I designed a system in my head for spawning off child processes based on the parent process to do certain distinct types of work in a way that gives us access to OS process-level controls over the work, and then got about halfway through implementing it. Little to none of this design involved "words". I can't even say it involved much "visualization" either, except maybe in a very loose sense. It's hard to describe in words how I didn't use words but I've been programming for long enough that I pretty much just directly work in system-architecture space for such designs, especially relatively small ones like that that are just a couple day's work. Things like pattern language advocates aren't wrong that it can still be useful to put such things into words, especially for communication purposes, but I know through direct personal experience that words are not a necessary component of even quite complicated thought. "Subjective experience reports are always tricky, jerf. How do you know that you aren't fooling yourself about not using words?" A good and reasonable question, to which my answer is, I don't even have words for the sort of design I was doing. Some, from the aforementioned pattern languages, yes, but not in general. So I don't think I was just fooling myself on the grounds that even if I tried to serialize what I did directly into English, a transliteration rather than a translation, I don't think I could. I don't have one. I'm also not claiming to be special. I don't know the percentages but I'm sure many people do this too.
- binary132 2y agoLike, at the speed of speech?
- neom 2y agoI'm an idiot. I thought this meant, for some reason unknown to me... written words, something I couldn't imagine being able to think in. Spoken words, sure.
- perryizgr8 2y agoSo if you want to look at your phone there's a voice going "I shall pick up my phone and swipe the lock away now."? Trying to understand if ALL thinking is in words or some subset.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoCould you imagine the impossibility of riding a bike if you had to consciously put words to every action before you did it?
- Razengan 2y agoCan 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 2y agoInterestingly, I feel like I can "feel" small numbers (up to 4 or 5) easier than than thinking about them as objects in a language.
- 082349872349872 2y agoBy feel, I can without language or counting, play mostly X . . X . . X . . . X . X . . . and every so often switch out for variations, eg: X . . X . . X . X . . . X . . . or X . . . X . . . . . X . X . . . but I'm no good for playing polyrhythms, which many other people can do, and I believe they must also do so more by feel than by counting.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoPractice a few polyrhythms, get used to things like: X . X X X . X . X X X . A . . A . . A . . A . . B . B . B . B . B . B . and: X . . X . X X X . X X . X . X X . . X . X X . . X X . X X . X . . X . X X . . X X . X . . X . . X X X X . . X X X X . . X . . X . X X . . X X . X . . X . X X . X X . . X X . X . . X X . X . X X . X X X . X . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . Learn to do them with one limb (or finger) per line, and also with all the lines on the same limb (or finger). And then suddenly, they'll start to feel intuitive, and you'll be able to do them by feel. (It's a bit like scales.)
- cassianoleal 2y agoI 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 2y agoI 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?
- bonoboTP 2y agoI 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.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoRight, 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, ...
- mcswell 2y ago"Highly intelligent" is not a word to be used with apes, dogs, rats or crows.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoIf that's your opinion, then define intelligence in a meaningful/reductive fashion (not just "i know it when i see it"), then defend this opinion based on that!
- fsndz 2y agomore proof that we need more than LLMs to build LRMs: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/drop-o1-preview-try-this-alternative https://www.lycee.ai/blog/drop-o1-preview-try-this-alternati...
- hackboyfly 2y agoWell 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
- m463 2y ago<raises eyebrows>
- kjkjadksj 2y agoMy 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 2y agoI swear my cat says 好玩儿 hǎowá'er? when he lacks stimulation, which means "Fun?"
- lazyasciiart 2y agoNow I need to learn about how they convey these questions without language.
- m463 2y agoI like Temple Grandin's "Thinking the Way Animals Do": https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html
- eth0up 2y agoConsidering 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.
- eth0up 2y agoWell, 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 2y agoIs this the death of the Sapir-Whorf theory?
- zorked 2y agoSapir-Whorf is not alive.
- xiande04 2y agoNo. 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 2y agoYep, 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.
- numpad0 2y agoThis 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.
- airstrike 2y agohttps://archive.is/PsUeX https://archive.is/PsUeX
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- acosmism 2y agonow I really want to understand the deep thoughts my cat is having
- psychoslave 2y agoBut maybe they exceed human cognition abilities?
- codersfocus 2y agoWhile 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.
- akomtu 2y agoMaterialism is such a religion. It's sciency and emotion-free, so it appeals to the secular minds.
- Vecr 2y agoHolding 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.
- GoblinSlayer 2y agoIn secular society art is the language for emotions.
- nickelpro 2y agoAs 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 2y agoThis. 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.
- GoblinSlayer 2y agoYou mean communication should happen through language?
- K0balt 2y agoA 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.
- habitue 2y agoLanguage 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 2y agoYes, dimension reduction.
- pazimzadeh 2y agoCommunication 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.
- habitue 2y 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
- psychoslave 2y 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.
- GavinMcG 2y agoJust 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.
- psychoslave 2y agoIt'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-analysis/ 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
- jjtheblunt 2y agoThe conclusion implied by the title seems self evident for anyone who has seen any (at least) nonhuman mammalian predator.
- danielmarkbruce 2y agoOr anyone who has done any thinking in their own brain.
- mcswell 2y agoNonhuman 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 2y agoWhether 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 2y agoHere'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."
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- farts_mckensy 2y agoStix'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.
- Animats 2y agoThis 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?sharing_token=1BwycCwx1wQ2Sfnub1-o0NRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MYYopL5qENCL5gCQ3HDKyBWf6AQLs-HC3fMMzU9skb40K1DK-HWblYUyHTAQuuliWeLXeg5lXVNFOTa3fVek1R0et9kPjIgQljFd2wX1hSlqWjpOKSrRjz8t2mUDQ6Vr6DlhIlAndISxjxnRU2FPd2XMQFK5UDTh5Osiq6IYOksvy1nGE68d0y9YuJvr4Zrok%3D&tracking_referrer=www.scientificamerican.com https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w.epdf?shar...
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoBrain 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_zero 2y agoNot sure neuron number correlates to smarts, either. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/ 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_neurons 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.
- yarg 2y agoIs 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.
- IIAOPSW 2y agoIt 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.
- yarg 2y agoYes 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.
- IIAOPSW 2y agoVersus a fucking phone network with ~10 billion active numbers. Come on man, seriously - the two communication modalities are completely incomparable. Clearly the information traveling around on the phone network couldn't possibly be the same as the low bandwidth vibrating strings used in face to face communication. Obviously.
- yarg 2y agoThere's a major difference - the phone network takes in prerequisite constraints on the nature of the information that it's encoding; it is forced by its functionality to be a reflection of spoken language. The internal communications of the mind have no need for such constraints (and evolved hundreds of millions of years beforehand). Anyway, I don't know what you were actually trying to argue here: you just built a simulated brain out of people, and the massively multi-agent distributed nature of the language of that machine is (emergently) incomparable with vocalised language.
- psychoslave 2y 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 2y agoAll: 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoProgress 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
- mcswell 2y agoYou 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 2y agoAs 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 2y agoGrowing 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.
- ryandv 2y agoThis 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.
- mmooss 2y agoA 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/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/inner-speech/
- andai 2y agoWhen 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 2y agoWith the drugs were you able to be more efficient for example code quicker, or was it more like better insights. Or perhaps both?
- andai 2y agoIt 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 2y agoThought 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 2y 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_b 2y agoMoreover, 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.
- joelignaatius 2y ago[flagged]
- joelignaatius 2y agoAlso the crow. Yes the stupid movie. Stalking with idiots quoting the movie or acting out parts of it. Neat. You're assholes. I already knew that and now I can't enjoy this movie. Gee whiz you're so fucking sophisticated. What a waste of talent. You could have been doing literally anything else. Ugh. This would also explain making me repeatedly sick and then seeing if you can field test a cure on me and use that as a pay off not to have me murdered. Like tin tin from the movie. Wonderful. Am I going to be made sick and hurt to every death of a character in every film ever until I die? This is what they're doing rather than make buildings that don't fall over. slow clap. And the water at 555 Beule street in San Francisco has been making me sick so I've been drinking large amounts of milk and now I wonder if it has morphine in it. I'm in physical pain all the time. These people are just so fucking evil and shitty. If I had a billion dollars I'd just put it in front of the ferry building and burn it out of spite. They're probably just having sick homeless cough on my things when I'm not looking. They're a walking public health hazard. The best part is when idiots will cough on each other, throw a mask on so no one coughs on them, and then cough on someone else on the other side of the city. It's just so fucking sad.
- joelignaatius 2y agoOh and the black guy that was in hackers was ton tin in the crow. So what he "learned" was essentially bird flu. And milk makes you sick because birds don't drink milk. Did I mention there are swarms of crowd flying all over the city. Also someone put a rusty spring in the bathroom and so now I'm wondering if the headaches are caused by iron filings in my food that respond to radiation that end up in my brain. Anyway. I'll keep writing this all out because A) based on this stupid fucking movie there may or may not be bird flu in San Francisco B) I don't like being poisoned and stalked across the city by idiots re enacting every type of media they can think of (oh look this "crow"/phylactery is the way you kill people good fucking job) C) it encourages people to stay the fuck out of San Francisco which is a dangerous hell hole D) no one is helping me and everyone actively is attempting to harm me F) it's the right fucking thing to do and if I can encourage as many people as I possibly can not to come here I will E) yes they did in fact say alphabetical order when they killed tin tin. Did I mention there a stupid fucking wizard of Oz play and security company? I just don't want to be sick. I'm going to write all this shit out so long as I'm ill and hurting. So. Bird flu. Fucking wonderful. It's probably nothing, the hundreds of crows on the embarcadero are just there for no reason. Is someone going to give me rabies? Are my kidneys going to fail now? When I write shit people don't like do they hack the free phone I have to fuck with the iron filings in my head? I'm sick and I hurt. 555 Beule street San Francisco.
- mannyv 2y agoImo just like in computers, language can make certain thoughts easier to think.
- orwin 2y agoI 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 2y agoAlso known as “Flow”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
- riiii 2y agoNice 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 2y agoMakes sense. If I am the code and the code is me, and the code doesn't work, then I'm done working too.
- soared 2y agoI 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.
- Razengan 2y agoThose without, do you feel “jealous” of people with a “mind’s eye”? Or vice versa?
- slashdave 2y agoWhat? No. The idea that your thoughts have to be expressed in something as crude as language sounds very tedious and limiting.
- HKH2 2y agoYou 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.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y 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.
- upghost 2y agoI'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 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
- gibsonf1 2y agoThe key to human intelligence are concepts. We just use whatever language we choose to symbolize the concepts.
- shsbdncudx 2y agoWhen 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 2y agoI’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-experience-science-1.5486969 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/inner-monologue-...
- slashdave 2y agoHonestly, 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-v 2y agoAs 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.
- chongli 2y agoWhat about when reading and writing? My inner monologue internally voices the words as I’m reading and writing. Do you not do that?
- Izkata 2y agoThat's how I start reading, but once I'm really into it, no - I'm seeing a (low-quality) version of the scene in my head and not even registering that I'm still reading words and turning pages.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ryandv 2y agoIt'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/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17306848/ [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15713804/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15713804/
- upghost 2y agoWell 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 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 2y agoFascinating comment and I’m glad I caught it! Thank you!
- ziofill 2y agoI'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)
- necovek 2y agoWhile 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 2y agoWhen 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 2y agoI 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_b 2y agoI 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-v 2y 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
- bmacho 2y agoThere 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.
- ryandv 2y agoJulian 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-system-of-the-aa https://archive.org/details/a-a-the-mystical-and-magical-sys...
- zmmmmm 2y agoKnowing 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 2y agoMan, 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 2y agoOne 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 2y agoThanks, 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 2y agoOne 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 2y agoA 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 2y agoCame 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.
- ryandv 2y agoThis 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/30-the-progress-of-insight/2-cause-and-effect/ https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iv-insight...
- jumping_frog 2y agoThis "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 2y agoA 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.
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- swayvil 2y agoDoes 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 2y agoHow 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 2y agoWasn’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 2y agoI’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 2y agoI 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.
- Izkata 2y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41869237
- photochemsyn 2y agoIs 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 2y 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 2y agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
- wnmurphy 2y agoI 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.
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- stevebrown 2y agoLanguage 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 2y agooh how many people have been oppressed and suppressed from a misguided understanding of the alternative… who cares right?