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Without descending fully into epistemology, I tend to think that there is no proper "idea" in your head before it's phrased in language - the act of initially d
by falcor84 2y ago
Without descending fully into epistemology, I tend to think that there is no proper "idea" in your head before it's phrased in language - the act of initially describing something in natural language *is* the act of generating it.
- antonvs 2y agoResearch on LLMs suggest that's probably not the case. See the work on reasoning in latent space, and on shared concepts between languages being represented independently of the individual language. Of course one might argue that even if LLMs are capable of ideation and conceptualisation without natural language, doesn't mean humans are. But the fact that up to 50% of people have no inner monologue seems to refute that.
- card_zero 2y agoHumans can't share ideas directly, they pass through language. Some idea is created at the other end, nominally the same one, but there's no reason to suppose a universal internal format. Even translating between human languages loses details, where words in one language map imperfectly to words in another. Moving ideas directly from one brain to another probably can't happen. So the statement in language doesn't map very well to the idea (whichever person's version of the idea). And at some point before the idea is formed there has to be some sort of proto-idea or potential, with less definite boundaries. So "there is no proper idea" sounds right to me. There's something idiosyncratic, not the formal idea that's frozen when put into words.
- antonvs 2y agoSure, you can define "proper" and "idea" to the claim post-facto to change what's being claimed, but the point is we do have ideas without language, and converting into language is not creating the idea.
- card_zero 2y agoWhy not both? Yes, we have ideas without language: and, creating a form of words to express the idea is creating a new and somewhat different version.
- yencabulator 2y agoAre you saying it's impossible to program without first formulating a natural language sentence? That sounds dubious at the very least.
- falcor84 2y agoThat's a really deep question. Obviously there are types of creativity that don't require words, like painting or sculpting, or improvising music, but I'm having real difficulty imagining programming without something at least resembling natural language. The closest my imagination gets is Scratch/Blockly, but even then you're essentially creating an AST composed out of statements and expressions, even if they're pictorial. Can you imagine the (intentional) creation of a program entirely without language? Or, I suppose, if you're ok with it not being intentional, you can program via an evolutionary algorithm - is that what you have in mind?
- yencabulator 2y agoI think you're the kind of person who has an internal voice talking in their head, and can't imagine any other kind of thought? Math is all about abstract shapes and properties, for me. So is much of programming.
- toasterlovin 2y agoYeah, just chiming in to say the same. Essentially all of my thinking is geometric in nature. The only time I have any internal monologue is as a mnemonic device to remember a sequence.
- falcor84 2y agoYeah, I suppose you're right and I'd love to understand more. Do you imagine a modality of programming a computer in an abstract (pictorial? diagrammatic?) way that fully bypasses the current need to form statements?
- yencabulator 2y ago