Let's do a mental experiment: Put 2 year old Einstein on a remote island, all alone, and come back 30 years later. Assume he survives. Will he impress you with his insights? They say we don't use language for thought, but language informs our strategies and choices, and collective experience is essential for progress. We only add small increments of insight from our own experiences to the pool, but the experience cap…
Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
101–110 of 404 posts
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#102It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…
> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue at all?
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brevity is key for words that aid thinking. Consider Chinese 成语 (Chengyu) [1] or Japanese 四字熟語 (Yo Ji Juku Go) [2]: - 指桑骂槐 (Zhi Sang Ma Huai) - Pulling the shoots to make the rice grow = helicoptering - 拔苗助长 (Ba Miao Zhu Zhang) - Point at the mulberry tree to curse the locust tree = deflective criticism These condense a whole story with moral lesson in them, and they facilitate recall of that concept. The trick is om…
So you're effectively saying that Chinese is compressed Tamarian ? Like, instead of writing "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" you'd put their initials together, so you're saying the Chinese-equivalent of "DJT" and the listener instantly knows the story, and therefore the message, it refers to?
in a different vein, "Tony and Manny, at the pool" might refer to:
这个国家:
先拿到钱,
得到力量,
然后淫乐。
[at least in "Antonio Montana's Journey to the West" (1983)]Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue at all?
I definitely have an inner monologue im some situations, reading is a good example. I can speed read in which case I don't really have a perception of the sounds, but if I'm closely reasing something then I do have a sense of the sounds if words as I'm reading. The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for…
While I seem to be a fast reader relative to people I know, I very much feel my reading speed is limited by sounding the words in my mind, so I agree - it's near-unbearably slow.
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#105^ Reference types in the language seems pretty good at this...
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them. If those concepts would exist you wouldn’t be able to explain them using words, no matter how complex the phrase may be. Taking a phrase and expecting it to have a single word replace is unrealistic. You can’t just asign a word to every possible sentence/phrase. Having a direct translation means you don’t necessa…
How did Michelangelo create his masterpieces? Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language. I suspect the same happens in many other fields. Even in an abstract field like mathematics, intuition often forms in the mind before verbal description or articulation.
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#107So it sounds like LLMs will not achieve AGI.
RIP art and poetry.
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#108 We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly
co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.What is the difference between "language is a cognitive adaptation used for communication" and "language is the communication enabled by a cognitive adaption", really? Other than a, as Chomsky would call it, "terminological dispute"
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#109It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…
The inner voice and mind's eye don't surprise me, I'm among the more hyperlexic people I know and seem to have total aphantasia, but I didn't realize (though I guess it seems like an obvious possibility in retrospect) that there were people who processed words as text in their head - I guess the survey itself said that surprised them too.
I also didn't consider that there could be a large degree of variability in representational manipulation, and assume that this kind of inevitably leads to some pretty hard to bridge inferential gaps when speaking across that divide. Honestly maybe I'm misunderstanding what's meant by that, because the other extreme sounds to me like there are some people who just can't do metacognition which sounds insane. I'm guessing however that this is similar to an experience I had with a (now ex-)lover who was shocked when I mentioned I don't have visualization, and asked "So you're telling me you have no imagination at all?", which like, I wouldn't say is true? My imagination can be prosaic, narrative, auditory, abstract, olfactory, emotional, or kinematic, just not visual. I kind of assume that's similar to what I'm doing here, like whatever "manipulating representations" means here is a useful capability by which to do metacognition but not the thing itself... but it seemed like their questions pertained to a lot of different kinds of manipulation of abstractions or mental models, so I can't really figure out how you'd examine your thoughts per se without that ability. Maybe there's someone more knowledgeable about this field here that could help me understand the distinction?
Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]
#110Conservation through cognitive neuroscience and linguistics.
Can dolphins communicate with sperm whales? What if they could?