6 ms·

"There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought." - Rilke Your assertion that we don't t

"There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought." - Rilke Your assertion that we don't think in language is questionable. It runs counter to the lived experience of developing thoughts through writing ("writing isn't capturing thinking -- it is thinking"). I believe there is more to thought than language alone, but I also feel quite sure that language forms an essential part of thinking beyond a base layer of instinctive animalistic associations. Sophisticated thoughts are impossible to construct or maintain in the absence of language to represent concepts. Edt to add: I cited Rilke because I find the notion [some deep thoughts are beyond language] interesting. But I disagree with the idea that language is only ever epiphenomenal (co-occurring with thought), or akin to a hard-of-hearing scribe attempting to convey thoughts which always have independent existence.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
JohnBooty 3mo ago
This is true and it's barely even debatable. Whatever exact role language plays in our thought processes, it is most definitely nonzero. It's why I think "LLMs are only fancy autocorrect" style takes are really underselling how wild it is that we've, in a roundabout way, sort of crystallized a bit of the human thought process in a way that is genuinely useful for a lot of tasks. Linguistic Relativity — John Lucy https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.291 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.... Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104 Unconscious Effects of Language-Specific Terminology on Pre-Attentive Color Perception https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0811155106 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0811155106 Newly Trained Lexical Categories Produce Lateralized Categorical Perception of Color https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1005669107 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1005669107
- otabdeveloper4 3mo ago
  > sort of crystallized a bit of the human thought process a) LLMs don't think. They predict a most probable sequence of language tokens. Huge difference there. b) Whatever LLMs do doesn't model human behavior whatsoever. LLMs are basically very fancy logistic regressors. I.e., it's a mathematical abstraction first and foremost.
  - buzzin_ 3mo ago
    It's amazing that you can predict a counterexample to an open math problem, all without thinking.
    - swingboy 3mo ago
      Yet they do.
      - lubujackson 3mo ago
        Recalling "They're Made of Weights"
      - andai 3mo ago
        My favourite quote on this subject... I forgot by who. "They don't think, they only seem to think. And likewise, they won't replace the majority of human labor, they will only seem to do so."
      - buzzin_ 3mo ago
        "If only we had a word for that process that happens before the words come out." "Artist Formerly Known as Thinking"
    - otabdeveloper4 3mo ago
      Not really, a shitload of "open math problems" are bounded by constraints of simple text processing or heuristic search. Much of math is just boring routine work.
  - 3mo ago
radio879 3mo ago
There are people who do not have any words in their heads at all when they think, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to disbelieve them. It may have been proven or at least observed in fMRI. Some people think in visuals. I think some of this was discovered somewhat recently
- yurishimo 3mo ago
  And some people can’t see any pictures in their minds! My partner is one of these people. We both really enjoy reading fiction books, often with a fantasy or sci-fi bent and it genuinely amazes me that they can experience these books in a way that feels wholly alien to me. The fun of reading to me is constructing the world in my minds eye and turning the words on the page into a visual experience only found in my mind using imagination. This is a reason why many people get upset when a movie adaptation is made and the actor chosen for their favorite character feels very off or wrong; their mental picture of that character is totally different and it causes dissonance that our brains don’t like. For my partner this is a non issue because they never make a mental image of the person, so the movie is genuinely the first time they are “seeing” a physical representation of the character. The human mind is genuinely amazing and fascinating and I believe that this range of human experience will be the final 20% for “AI” that might never be reproducible.
  - idiotsecant 3mo ago
    Does anyone else just end up with a random celebrity 'playing' characters in your brain image of scenes? I find that I generally picture a person that I have seen on TV, with details that don't nessesarily match book character details. For example, I recently read a novel where there is 'tough lady cop' character and in my brain, entirely involuntarily, the role has been assigned to Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Rosa Diaz in exactly the clothing and context she exists in that TV show. When the character in the book has a certain clothing or whatever it all kinda glosses over until it's back to the character I have seen before. I don't know if this is more a male thing or am ADHD thing or what but details of characters dress and looks are pretty much lost on me once there are assigned a character from 'central casting'
  - 3mo ago
noduerme 3mo ago
I strongly disagree. For one thing, many animals that lack language can still navigate a very complicated natural world using concepts of phenomena like gravity, distance, speed, the threat level of another animal, etc. without needing a linguistic expression of those things. Images and music can convey ideas without language. Math can convey ideas without language. Physically taking apart an object and putting it back together can convey extremely complex ideas without language. This goes back to the whole Tarzan obsession of the early 20th, I guess, or earlier. But we know that apes can make simple tools without the language to describe them, or the thought process that went into them. Thought is multimodal. Language is just one lossy mode.
- TeMPOraL 3mo ago
  > For one thing, many animals that lack language can still navigate a very complicated natural world So can a cruise missile. Also I think there's like separate part of the brain for that > using concepts of phenomena like gravity, distance, speed, the threat level of another animal, etc. without needing a linguistic expression of those things.* FWIW, AFAIK we haven't shown the ability to think in concept exists anywhere except in humans (because philosophy, reported experience) and LLMs (because we can literally see them forming and activating in patterns, and we've learned to identify them specifically, and experimentally verified through amplifying or suppressing them and observing behavior, etc.). But more importantly: > Images and music can convey ideas without language. Math can convey ideas without language. Physically taking apart an object and putting it back together can convey extremely complex ideas without language. Images and music and math are langauge. If it can convey ideas, it is language. Words and sentences and speech are subset of the idea of language and communication, that for some reason gets routinely confused for the whole thing. At this point I'd say even the "language models" are badly named, simply because people see "language models" think of "token" as number representing a sub-word element in existing human language like English. With multimodal models, at this point tokens are closer to units of sensory experience.
  - porridgeraisin 3mo ago
    Ok, but it is clear the parent meant language as in words like english or tamil. If you expand language to include anything that can convey idea then the argument is meaningless and its a null agreement.
qmmmur 3mo ago
Just because you can think through writing doesn't mean language is the essence of thought itself.
- lanstin 3mo ago
  The virtue of writing is it makes it harder to fool yourself that you have all the important links addressed in your construction/argument/proposal.
Jensson 3mo ago
> It runs counter to the lived experience of developing thoughts through writing Writing requires thought, but writing isn't thought. Just like doing requires thought, but doing isn't thought, writing is a subset of doing. You can also doodle to think things through, or play with toys to think things through, or many other similar things.
roncesvalles 3mo ago
Language is a reductive and lossy serialization of "thought-stuff". Sometimes you need this information-shedding to clear your working memory to make room for more things. Sometimes it's literally just a way to communicate. You're turning something fuzzy into something discrete. E.g. "I'm feeling something. Is it anger? Yes, I'm angry." But in reality anger isn't just one thing. It's a cluster of infinite and varied feelings that we label as "anger". Something is lost when we do this labeling. Notice then that the feeling of "anger" didn't start from your language, you merely used language to label, discretize, classify, standardize, compress it. It's one-way.
- dofm 3mo ago
  Also there are emotions for which society has not developed words because it has a social tendency to deny them. OCD, ADHD and Tourettes, for example are driven by deep, complex, strange destructive emotional needs that are wordless and undescribed. They are reduced to “obsession”, “compulsion”, “urge”, “tic”, etc., words that essentially only describe the appearance of the outcomes to others, which are a completely hollow description of the extraordinary internal experiences. The very fact that we don’t have words for such powerful internal experiences is one of many reasons I find the LLM enthusiasts’ belief that LLMs will one day write indistinguishably from humans to be hollow.
  - dumah 3mo ago
    To me, Alexithymia alone proves this.
Sebastian_09 3mo ago
Are you sure this is Rilke? Couldn’t find anything online - it seems it’s close to a quote by Zora Neale Hurston
andai 3mo ago
When I was young, a friend asked me, "Hey, you speak three languages, which one do you think in?" I paused, confused, and replied, "People think in words?" Fast forward a decade or so, in my twenties, I had lost most of the inner visual sense I had previously used, and developed an overreliance, in my opinion, on language. (I think my dominant sense was some "non visual abstract sense of ideas", but the visual was also very strong.) In other words, I now do think mostly in words, and it feels a lot harder to get any serious work done. The language-ing is involuntary, and I often wish I had a way to shut it off, because it seems to actively interfere with more subtle mental processes. More recently, I often have the experience where I will wake up from a dream with some complex idea fully formed in my mind. I write it down before it fades, and then spend the next hour or two trying to understand it. The best explanation I have right now is that there are at least two minds: one which operates holistically — if it were a 3D printer, it would be like that one with the bath, where the object emerges from the bath, whole. Whereas the other one (the conscious mind) would be the extrusion printer with the tiny nozzle that has to zip around for a long time to achieve a worse result. (And must be constantly cooled, less it overheat!)
- the_gipsy 3mo ago
  You just lack (or lacked) introspection, nothing special. Many people claim to have no inner monologue. When pressed, it always comes out. Simply put, it's impossible to function as a human without it. But many people are not aware, and think it means something like "hearing actual voices".
  - andai 3mo ago
    I'm not sure. I think I had a reasonable amount of metacognition as a child. I remember being eight years old, and having a really cool idea but forgetting it. So I devised a plan to retrieve it. I'm just going to rewind time. I'm going to go back to doing what I was doing when I had that idea, and then it'll come back to me. And so I remembered that I had been fiddling with my seat belt when I had the idea. And so I resumed fiddling, and my cool idea promptly came back. Metaphors and abstractions came to me much later though. (I struggled with OOP for about 10 years until one day it all just clicked.) Symbolism took me another ten years.
Fr0styMatt88 3mo ago
[dead]
dumah 3mo ago
Hand-waving assumptions drawn from narrow subjective experience without awareness of the profound and contradictory results that have come from scientific study of consciousness and causality.
ozgung 3mo ago
I'm not an expert but I saw Yann LeCun shared this recent Neuroscience article on his Facebook page commenting "I don't think in words. Animals don't think in words." Evidence from formal logical reasoning reveals that the language of thought is not natural language https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520095123 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520095123
lelanthran 3mo ago
> Your assertion that we don't think in language is questionable. It's true though; we routinely see people get stuck for a word that they know but can't quite recall at that moment in time. It happens daily across billions of people, yourself included. If we thought in language, it is impossible to be stuck for a specific word. But we all experience this at some point in our lives, hence we aren't thinking in language.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

JohnBooty 3mo ago

This is true and it's barely even debatable. Whatever exact role language plays in our thought processes, it is most definitely nonzero. It's why I think "LLMs are only fancy autocorrect" style takes are really underselling how wild it is that we've, in a roundabout way, sort of crystallized a bit of the human thought process in a way that is genuinely useful for a lot of tasks. Linguistic Relativity — John Lucy https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.291 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.... Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104 Unconscious Effects of Language-Specific Terminology on Pre-Attentive Color Perception https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0811155106 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0811155106 Newly Trained Lexical Categories Produce Lateralized Categorical Perception of Color https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1005669107 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1005669107

otabdeveloper4 3mo ago
> sort of crystallized a bit of the human thought process a) LLMs don't think. They predict a most probable sequence of language tokens. Huge difference there. b) Whatever LLMs do doesn't model human behavior whatsoever. LLMs are basically very fancy logistic regressors. I.e., it's a mathematical abstraction first and foremost.
- buzzin_ 3mo ago
  It's amazing that you can predict a counterexample to an open math problem, all without thinking.
  - swingboy 3mo ago
    Yet they do.
    - lubujackson 3mo ago
      Recalling "They're Made of Weights"
    - andai 3mo ago
      My favourite quote on this subject... I forgot by who. "They don't think, they only seem to think. And likewise, they won't replace the majority of human labor, they will only seem to do so."
    - buzzin_ 3mo ago
      "If only we had a word for that process that happens before the words come out." "Artist Formerly Known as Thinking"
  - otabdeveloper4 3mo ago
    Not really, a shitload of "open math problems" are bounded by constraints of simple text processing or heuristic search. Much of math is just boring routine work.
- 3mo ago

radio879 3mo ago

There are people who do not have any words in their heads at all when they think, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to disbelieve them. It may have been proven or at least observed in fMRI. Some people think in visuals. I think some of this was discovered somewhat recently

yurishimo 3mo ago
And some people can’t see any pictures in their minds! My partner is one of these people. We both really enjoy reading fiction books, often with a fantasy or sci-fi bent and it genuinely amazes me that they can experience these books in a way that feels wholly alien to me. The fun of reading to me is constructing the world in my minds eye and turning the words on the page into a visual experience only found in my mind using imagination. This is a reason why many people get upset when a movie adaptation is made and the actor chosen for their favorite character feels very off or wrong; their mental picture of that character is totally different and it causes dissonance that our brains don’t like. For my partner this is a non issue because they never make a mental image of the person, so the movie is genuinely the first time they are “seeing” a physical representation of the character. The human mind is genuinely amazing and fascinating and I believe that this range of human experience will be the final 20% for “AI” that might never be reproducible.
- idiotsecant 3mo ago
  Does anyone else just end up with a random celebrity 'playing' characters in your brain image of scenes? I find that I generally picture a person that I have seen on TV, with details that don't nessesarily match book character details. For example, I recently read a novel where there is 'tough lady cop' character and in my brain, entirely involuntarily, the role has been assigned to Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Rosa Diaz in exactly the clothing and context she exists in that TV show. When the character in the book has a certain clothing or whatever it all kinda glosses over until it's back to the character I have seen before. I don't know if this is more a male thing or am ADHD thing or what but details of characters dress and looks are pretty much lost on me once there are assigned a character from 'central casting'
- 3mo ago

noduerme 3mo ago

I strongly disagree. For one thing, many animals that lack language can still navigate a very complicated natural world using concepts of phenomena like gravity, distance, speed, the threat level of another animal, etc. without needing a linguistic expression of those things. Images and music can convey ideas without language. Math can convey ideas without language. Physically taking apart an object and putting it back together can convey extremely complex ideas without language. This goes back to the whole Tarzan obsession of the early 20th, I guess, or earlier. But we know that apes can make simple tools without the language to describe them, or the thought process that went into them. Thought is multimodal. Language is just one lossy mode.

TeMPOraL 3mo ago
> For one thing, many animals that lack language can still navigate a very complicated natural world So can a cruise missile. Also I think there's like separate part of the brain for that > using concepts of phenomena like gravity, distance, speed, the threat level of another animal, etc. without needing a linguistic expression of those things.* FWIW, AFAIK we haven't shown the ability to think in concept exists anywhere except in humans (because philosophy, reported experience) and LLMs (because we can literally see them forming and activating in patterns, and we've learned to identify them specifically, and experimentally verified through amplifying or suppressing them and observing behavior, etc.). But more importantly: > Images and music can convey ideas without language. Math can convey ideas without language. Physically taking apart an object and putting it back together can convey extremely complex ideas without language. Images and music and math are langauge. If it can convey ideas, it is language. Words and sentences and speech are subset of the idea of language and communication, that for some reason gets routinely confused for the whole thing. At this point I'd say even the "language models" are badly named, simply because people see "language models" think of "token" as number representing a sub-word element in existing human language like English. With multimodal models, at this point tokens are closer to units of sensory experience.
- porridgeraisin 3mo ago
  Ok, but it is clear the parent meant language as in words like english or tamil. If you expand language to include anything that can convey idea then the argument is meaningless and its a null agreement.

qmmmur 3mo ago

Just because you can think through writing doesn't mean language is the essence of thought itself.

lanstin 3mo ago
The virtue of writing is it makes it harder to fool yourself that you have all the important links addressed in your construction/argument/proposal.

Jensson 3mo ago

> It runs counter to the lived experience of developing thoughts through writing Writing requires thought, but writing isn't thought. Just like doing requires thought, but doing isn't thought, writing is a subset of doing. You can also doodle to think things through, or play with toys to think things through, or many other similar things.

roncesvalles 3mo ago

Language is a reductive and lossy serialization of "thought-stuff". Sometimes you need this information-shedding to clear your working memory to make room for more things. Sometimes it's literally just a way to communicate. You're turning something fuzzy into something discrete. E.g. "I'm feeling something. Is it anger? Yes, I'm angry." But in reality anger isn't just one thing. It's a cluster of infinite and varied feelings that we label as "anger". Something is lost when we do this labeling. Notice then that the feeling of "anger" didn't start from your language, you merely used language to label, discretize, classify, standardize, compress it. It's one-way.

dofm 3mo ago
Also there are emotions for which society has not developed words because it has a social tendency to deny them. OCD, ADHD and Tourettes, for example are driven by deep, complex, strange destructive emotional needs that are wordless and undescribed. They are reduced to “obsession”, “compulsion”, “urge”, “tic”, etc., words that essentially only describe the appearance of the outcomes to others, which are a completely hollow description of the extraordinary internal experiences. The very fact that we don’t have words for such powerful internal experiences is one of many reasons I find the LLM enthusiasts’ belief that LLMs will one day write indistinguishably from humans to be hollow.
- dumah 3mo ago
  To me, Alexithymia alone proves this.

Sebastian_09 3mo ago

Are you sure this is Rilke? Couldn’t find anything online - it seems it’s close to a quote by Zora Neale Hurston

andai 3mo ago

When I was young, a friend asked me, "Hey, you speak three languages, which one do you think in?" I paused, confused, and replied, "People think in words?" Fast forward a decade or so, in my twenties, I had lost most of the inner visual sense I had previously used, and developed an overreliance, in my opinion, on language. (I think my dominant sense was some "non visual abstract sense of ideas", but the visual was also very strong.) In other words, I now do think mostly in words, and it feels a lot harder to get any serious work done. The language-ing is involuntary, and I often wish I had a way to shut it off, because it seems to actively interfere with more subtle mental processes. More recently, I often have the experience where I will wake up from a dream with some complex idea fully formed in my mind. I write it down before it fades, and then spend the next hour or two trying to understand it. The best explanation I have right now is that there are at least two minds: one which operates holistically — if it were a 3D printer, it would be like that one with the bath, where the object emerges from the bath, whole. Whereas the other one (the conscious mind) would be the extrusion printer with the tiny nozzle that has to zip around for a long time to achieve a worse result. (And must be constantly cooled, less it overheat!)

the_gipsy 3mo ago
You just lack (or lacked) introspection, nothing special. Many people claim to have no inner monologue. When pressed, it always comes out. Simply put, it's impossible to function as a human without it. But many people are not aware, and think it means something like "hearing actual voices".
- andai 3mo ago
  I'm not sure. I think I had a reasonable amount of metacognition as a child. I remember being eight years old, and having a really cool idea but forgetting it. So I devised a plan to retrieve it. I'm just going to rewind time. I'm going to go back to doing what I was doing when I had that idea, and then it'll come back to me. And so I remembered that I had been fiddling with my seat belt when I had the idea. And so I resumed fiddling, and my cool idea promptly came back. Metaphors and abstractions came to me much later though. (I struggled with OOP for about 10 years until one day it all just clicked.) Symbolism took me another ten years.

Fr0styMatt88 3mo ago

[dead]

dumah 3mo ago

Hand-waving assumptions drawn from narrow subjective experience without awareness of the profound and contradictory results that have come from scientific study of consciousness and causality.

ozgung 3mo ago

I'm not an expert but I saw Yann LeCun shared this recent Neuroscience article on his Facebook page commenting "I don't think in words. Animals don't think in words." Evidence from formal logical reasoning reveals that the language of thought is not natural language https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520095123 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520095123

lelanthran 3mo ago

> Your assertion that we don't think in language is questionable. It's true though; we routinely see people get stuck for a word that they know but can't quite recall at that moment in time. It happens daily across billions of people, yourself included. If we thought in language, it is impossible to be stuck for a specific word. But we all experience this at some point in our lives, hence we aren't thinking in language.