Live data from Hacker News

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

gwern.net

101–110 of 404 posts

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

#101
post #60

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…

For reference, language deprivation experiments have a long tradition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experim...

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

#102
post #69

It 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?

I don't have an internal monologue at all (I am able to speak to myself in my head if I want to, but I seldom have a reason to). When I read, the information just gets uploaded to my brain. I don't vocalize words in any way, silently or otherwise. I don't read one word at a time either. When I read something quickly I can "feel" that my understanding of the material is lagging "the cursor", sometimes by even a paragraph at a time.

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

#103
post #68

Earlier 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?

Cap Gets The Reference. (talking about Steve Rogers, but trying to stay in the 4 word format, like "Big Hat No Cattle")

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]

#104
post #69

Earlier 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…

> The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me

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]

#106
post #57

Earlier 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.

I believe that intuition is often not enough to have a concrete thought. It’s more of a feeling, you can’t reach conclusions based on intuition, you also need reason.

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

#108
I hate to quote an abstract, but I'm really struggling to understand the purpose here -- it seems like they're angry that Chomsky defined language as symbolic operations and relegated the external facets to "history of language" or "anthropology of language" or other such fields.

  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]

#109

It 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…

Interesting test. I apparently am about as high as you can likely get a percentile score to go for the number of questions here on inner voice and representational manipulation, and as low as possible on mind's eye and orthographic representation

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]

#110
I think cetaceans use sound to broadcast visual and emotional holographs to each other, and as humans we could do good by being stewards of the differing specie and steer their linguistics together somehow.

Conservation through cognitive neuroscience and linguistics.

Can dolphins communicate with sperm whales? What if they could?

Post reply on HN