Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

Take a detailed look at an abstract painting and you might form thousands of unlabeled concepts per second; examine life in a microscope; listen to complex instrumental music; taste spicy/tingly XiAn noodles; smell a forest in the fall after the rain: there is a ton of thought involved in common human function without the need or ability of using language. A serialized version of language is too slow to capture parallel complex ideas that can race through your brain in an emergency and save your life. Learning how to use words is useful but there are not enough combinations of words in the world for the richness of thought you can experience in a single morning, in a single breath. We have way too many smell receptors in our genome and way too few words formed for the smell combinations we experience daily. We can recollect experiences, or we can visualize generate experiences in our mind; I dont see a reason we would label every internal or external experience and we certainly dont have to forget or not imagine all the parts we havent labeled yet.

I think this is largely correct, but may miss some higher-order concepts related to language and the structure of one’s complex thoughts.

To me they appear to go hand-in-hand, similar to the way a backend’s logic may inadvertently be structured to support an API. Another metaphor may be Conway’s Law, where the way one is forced to communicate, may in turn shape the way they structure their (brain) processes.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that speakers of different languages seem to “think” more similarly than not. For instance, native speakers of non-English Germanic languages appear to think more similarly compared to those native speakers of Romance languages, and vice-versa.

Obviously I’m using English as a middle-man, and am likely projecting on what their internal thoughts actually are, but the pathways they take to express an idea or a solution is oftentimes more similar than not within the same base language background.

Now is language necessary for complex thought? Absolutely not. We’ve seen evidence from many different life forms that show complex problem-solving, pattern matching, and novel tool use that all seem to happen without having a seemingly complex language background (i.e. Zipf’s Law).

We don't have better tooling to transfer information between humans though. We have language, and we have art. It seems that art transcends humans in some ways: happy / sad music seems to affect animals, and we've seen animals contemplating things. Without language, we can't really create a mapping to what that means though. We simply don't have a better way to compress multiple concepts into few bits of information we can pass around.

Interestingly, removing language as a tool for communication is a cool thought experiment. I imagine one could use maths, or music, as a way of expressing thoughts and ideas. Would that process of condensing information not be language-making though?

The crux of their argument is that the language faculty and other faculties (math/logic/abstract, theory of mind/social reasoning, spatial/temporal imagination, and other cognitive abilities) all evolved in parallel, so the most plausible explanation is that language is mostly independent of all those other faculties which are activated in distinct neural network areas of the human brain, based on brain scan studies in the last 20 years.

I imagine a counterargument (or complication) to that is that such parallel evolution would require the neural networks to independently evolve certain breakthroughs multiple times before reaching the Homo sapiens stage. For example, language is recursive and yet human mathematical reasoning is recursive, but these use two different brain areas (according to the paper). So in their figure of two different brain regions for language processing versus math/code thinking, both regions had to somehow evolve the "wetware" for recursive computation. How did natural evolution manage that in general?

Side note, but I enjoy papers with meta-contrarian theses like these.