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Language then would be the key factor enabling complex learning in meat space too? I feel like I’ve heard this debate before….

agarsev 1y ago
as a researcher in NLP slash computational linguistics, this is what I tend to think :) (maybe a less strong version, though, there are other kinds of thinking and learning). so I'm always surprised when some linguists decry LLMs, and cling to old linguistics paradigms instead of reclaiming the important role of language as (a) vehicle of intelligence.
mindwok 1y ago
I'm no expert but have been thinking about this a lot lately. I wouldn't be surprised - language itself seems to be an expression of the ability to create an abstraction, distill the world into compressed representations, and manipulate symbols. It seems fundamental to human intelligence.
- physix 1y ago
  As a layman, it helps me to understand the importance of language as a vehicle of intelligence by realizing that without language, your thoughts are just emotions. And therefore I always thought that the more you master a language the better you are able to reason. And considering how much we let LLMs formulate text for us, how dumb will we get?
  - highfrequency 1y ago
    > without language, your thoughts are just emotions. Is that true though? Seems like you can easily have some cognitive process that visualizes things like cause and effect, simple algorithms or at least sequences of events.
  - ajuc 1y ago
    > without language, your thoughts are just emotions That's not true. You can think "I want to walk around this building" without words, in abstract thoughts or in images. Words are a layer above the thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. You can confirm this if you ever had the experience of trying to say something but forgetting the right word. Your mind knew what it wants to say but it didn't knew the word. Chess players operate on sequences of moves dozen turns ahead in their minds using no words, seeing the moves on the virtual chessboards they imagine. Musicians hear the note they want to play in their minds. Our brains have full multimedia support.
    - mindwok 1y ago
      It's probably not as simple as just being emotions, but actually there's a really interesting example here: Helen Keller. In her autobiography she describes what it was like before she learned language, and how she remembers it being almost unconscious and just a mix of feelings and impulses. It's fascinating.
- Sophira 1y ago
  In other words, we're rediscovering the lessons from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Language is central to understanding; remove subversive language and you remove the ability to even think about it.
xg15 1y ago
I think it doesn't have to follow. You could also generalize the idea and see learning as successfully being able to "use the past to predict the future" for small time increments. Next-word prediction would be one instance of this, but for humans and animals, you could imagine the same process with information from all senses. The "self-supervised" trainset is then just, well, life.
kazinator 1y ago
I think that the takeaway message for meat space (if there is one) is that continuous life-long learning is where it is at: keep engaging your brain and playing the lottery in order to foster the winning tickets. Be exposed to a variety of stimuli and find relationships.

agarsev 1y ago

as a researcher in NLP slash computational linguistics, this is what I tend to think :) (maybe a less strong version, though, there are other kinds of thinking and learning). so I'm always surprised when some linguists decry LLMs, and cling to old linguistics paradigms instead of reclaiming the important role of language as (a) vehicle of intelligence.

mindwok 1y ago

I'm no expert but have been thinking about this a lot lately. I wouldn't be surprised - language itself seems to be an expression of the ability to create an abstraction, distill the world into compressed representations, and manipulate symbols. It seems fundamental to human intelligence.

physix 1y ago
As a layman, it helps me to understand the importance of language as a vehicle of intelligence by realizing that without language, your thoughts are just emotions. And therefore I always thought that the more you master a language the better you are able to reason. And considering how much we let LLMs formulate text for us, how dumb will we get?
- highfrequency 1y ago
  > without language, your thoughts are just emotions. Is that true though? Seems like you can easily have some cognitive process that visualizes things like cause and effect, simple algorithms or at least sequences of events.
- ajuc 1y ago
  > without language, your thoughts are just emotions That's not true. You can think "I want to walk around this building" without words, in abstract thoughts or in images. Words are a layer above the thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. You can confirm this if you ever had the experience of trying to say something but forgetting the right word. Your mind knew what it wants to say but it didn't knew the word. Chess players operate on sequences of moves dozen turns ahead in their minds using no words, seeing the moves on the virtual chessboards they imagine. Musicians hear the note they want to play in their minds. Our brains have full multimedia support.
  - mindwok 1y ago
    It's probably not as simple as just being emotions, but actually there's a really interesting example here: Helen Keller. In her autobiography she describes what it was like before she learned language, and how she remembers it being almost unconscious and just a mix of feelings and impulses. It's fascinating.
Sophira 1y ago
In other words, we're rediscovering the lessons from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Language is central to understanding; remove subversive language and you remove the ability to even think about it.

xg15 1y ago

I think it doesn't have to follow. You could also generalize the idea and see learning as successfully being able to "use the past to predict the future" for small time increments. Next-word prediction would be one instance of this, but for humans and animals, you could imagine the same process with information from all senses. The "self-supervised" trainset is then just, well, life.

kazinator 1y ago

I think that the takeaway message for meat space (if there is one) is that continuous life-long learning is where it is at: keep engaging your brain and playing the lottery in order to foster the winning tickets. Be exposed to a variety of stimuli and find relationships.