6 ms·

> 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 separat

> 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.
- TeMPOraL 3mo ago
  It's not a null argument, because LLMs have long moved past "language as in words like english or tamil". Tokens are not units of such language, at least not since visual and audio tokens became first-class objects and there's no actual distinction between them inside the model. That sameness of representation is what it means for a model to be "multimodal".
lanstin 3mo ago
Have you ever had a professor or mentor walk you through some experiences as a way to help you understand some complex concepts? I guess language is used in that but the ideas are conveyed by the process not the language. And I rather disagree that mathematics is language, when I did maths there was a distinct difference from understanding a thing and then writing it down. And modalities that don’t include “where is this body in space” or “I am lonely” don’t seem to capture some essential elements of sensory experience. It is a mistake to separate the interior from the exterior in the analysis of how our thinking works. I think the folks saying these systems have a kind of intelligence, but a non-human kind are correct - whether that can lead to an independent intelligence that can stay stable sane and focused for weeks or months as many people can, without some sort of embodied cognition providing over all wellness checks to keep the system of thinking sane, remains to be seen. In the meantime, in my hands, they can do very nice dataviz programming to make complex systems much more transparent, even as just throwing all the ops data at them and asking what’s up is, several years in, still not worth doing.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  > And I rather disagree that mathematics is language, when I did maths there was a distinct difference from understanding a thing and then writing it down. It is generally the case that there's a difference between "understanding a thing" and "writing it down", as demonstrated by every student who studies for the exam, the Chinese Room thought experiment, and Business Bullshit Bingo. For example, I can copy the next sentence of yours, but I have no idea what: > And modalities that don’t include “where is this body in space” or “I am lonely” don’t seem to capture some essential elements of sensory experience. It is a mistake to separate the interior from the exterior in the analysis of how our thinking works. means, can you rephrase that by as much as possible? Preferably without a double negative? Agree regarding sanity issues of AI. Extremely unlikely we make something "stable" so early in our attempts.
  - TeMPOraL 3mo ago
    > as demonstrated by every (...) the Chinese Room thought experiment Wait, did I miss the Chinese Room suddenly becoming sensible, or relevant? Last I checked it was a failure to accept that the system of "human + room" can in fact understand Chinese, even if the components individually don't.

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.

TeMPOraL 3mo ago
It's not a null argument, because LLMs have long moved past "language as in words like english or tamil". Tokens are not units of such language, at least not since visual and audio tokens became first-class objects and there's no actual distinction between them inside the model. That sameness of representation is what it means for a model to be "multimodal".

lanstin 3mo ago

Have you ever had a professor or mentor walk you through some experiences as a way to help you understand some complex concepts? I guess language is used in that but the ideas are conveyed by the process not the language. And I rather disagree that mathematics is language, when I did maths there was a distinct difference from understanding a thing and then writing it down. And modalities that don’t include “where is this body in space” or “I am lonely” don’t seem to capture some essential elements of sensory experience. It is a mistake to separate the interior from the exterior in the analysis of how our thinking works. I think the folks saying these systems have a kind of intelligence, but a non-human kind are correct - whether that can lead to an independent intelligence that can stay stable sane and focused for weeks or months as many people can, without some sort of embodied cognition providing over all wellness checks to keep the system of thinking sane, remains to be seen. In the meantime, in my hands, they can do very nice dataviz programming to make complex systems much more transparent, even as just throwing all the ops data at them and asking what’s up is, several years in, still not worth doing.

ben_w 3mo ago
> And I rather disagree that mathematics is language, when I did maths there was a distinct difference from understanding a thing and then writing it down. It is generally the case that there's a difference between "understanding a thing" and "writing it down", as demonstrated by every student who studies for the exam, the Chinese Room thought experiment, and Business Bullshit Bingo. For example, I can copy the next sentence of yours, but I have no idea what: > And modalities that don’t include “where is this body in space” or “I am lonely” don’t seem to capture some essential elements of sensory experience. It is a mistake to separate the interior from the exterior in the analysis of how our thinking works. means, can you rephrase that by as much as possible? Preferably without a double negative? Agree regarding sanity issues of AI. Extremely unlikely we make something "stable" so early in our attempts.
- TeMPOraL 3mo ago
  > as demonstrated by every (...) the Chinese Room thought experiment Wait, did I miss the Chinese Room suddenly becoming sensible, or relevant? Last I checked it was a failure to accept that the system of "human + room" can in fact understand Chinese, even if the components individually don't.