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

gwern.net

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

#211

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…

Often times i can actively feel how laggy my brain is in wrapping the thoughts in language. Before i even have the words ready, my thinking is already way ahead at the next thought. Not sure if that's just ADHD. I like to think secretly it's because i am not too dumb and actually a quick thinker. On the other hand, my analytical thinking is not that good. While i enjoy the process of thinking about things alone for h…

Funny all the criticism LLMs get for hallucinations/conflabulations as if humans aren't often worse offenders at this very behavior unintentionally or intentionally.

I think you're not mad, but rather demonstrate a learned behavior to a very common situation any person finds themself in. IE they don't know or aren't sure if they don't know and any case don't want to appear as if they don't know certainly so they put in the least amount of effort to obscure ascertaition with some fancy distracting magicians hoodwink.

I think getting answers to nuanced/frontier or non-frontier problems can involve different sets of brain processes and behaviors. For already solved problems with knowledge thats pervasive throughout society, the solution is simply observation and copying, OR recollection and re-execute from memory.

For other problems one can figure out through reasoning and extrapolation.

For other problems no amount of armchair reasoning and theorizing will figure out (frontier problems not yet solved by any humans or at least humans accessible ) it, and they will need to do some trial and error exploration within reality on the path to solving a problem. Thinking in language, recalling by search and retrieval isn't going to find a solution to the problem at hand in these situations, but humans will try and jam the square peg into the circular hole especially if thats easier to do (and it is) than expending a lot more trial and error energy to do reality based experiements instead of pure clean easy brain processes of keyword/descriptor search and retrieval.

Search and retrieval with or without words is a very quick and easy brain process, perhaps anything you do that solely involve those brain processes you perform excellently at. Not all problems solely rely on these process such as analyzing new unsolved puzzles put on your doorstep. Perhaps there's a habitual behavior where you're trying to over-rely on the quick processes and doing the magicians trick to obscure the lack of actual solution with the hopes of retaining social standing. Instead of slowing things down attempting the slow bog down of actually finding the problem while communicating as such OR making use of human language for its actual purpose and networking for someone who has already solved the problem and deferring to their authority.

But all and all humans collectively are driven to collect (no, hoard greedily) solutions to problems at or not at the frontier and incorporate/encode those into their brain in a way that the solutions can be searched and retrieved in an efficient reflex like manner that's conducive to your ADHD speed.

I suck at language but am good at analytical stuff and because of that I'm not going to put any more effort into reducing this lengthy TLDR literature rambling into a concise conducive to reading snippet. My apologies to those that don't skip over this and trudge through this Thesis length reading.

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

#212
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seem…

>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 Interesting, it's the same for me. I'm 94th and 98th percentile on the first two, but 2nd and 25th percentile for the other two. Since we're both on a (primarily) science a…

Pretty close to me too. 98th percentile for Internal Verbalization, 88th percentile for Visual Imagery, average for all the others.

I'm constantly talking to myself in my head as if I'm talking to a duplicate of myself. Asking questions, providing answers, having full back and forward conversations (especially with programming). There are certainly days though where, if you have a lot going on, you can start to burn yourself out with conversation (since every single action of the day comes with a conversation). Even if it's just "Oh I should make a coffee. Did I have a coffee yet? No, I think you had one this morning. What about if I made one anyway. Yeah I think that would be fine. Oh do I need to boil water? I suppose I should check if the water is hot. Yep looks like I do have to boil some". and after a while you just get sick of talking to yourself. But you can't switch it off and it drives you a bit batty sometimes.

I asked my wife once if she constantly narrates her own day, she said absolutely no. She said she only really has an internal monologue when reading things from text. And she writes down a lot of stuff on text. But other than that, she answered confused by my question "...nothing? I guess? Quiet?"

Brains are interesting!

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

#213
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?

Thanks for your comment. It just occurred to me that I have an inner voice narrating the text when I am reading in English. This does not happen when I read in my first two languages.

This explains why I read slower when I read in English.

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

#214
Okay, so my first experiment was to try to think without language. Go ahead, you try it. I can't do it. So a simple conclusion is that language gives rise to what we call thought. However, I do some things - which I do not call thought - without language. There was/is an old IBM programming test of patterns and I can choose the correct pattern even when I cannot think why that is. In "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", Christopher Alexander talks about how we can tell "good art" even when we do not know why. As a painter, I often do not paint well and I know it.N Sometimes I do well, but I cannot tell you why or what.

Next issue: communication. Humans are currently dominate because we collaborate. The idea of communication as "I can tell you the day of the month" is useful. But communication as a way of effectively collaborating is another thing all together.

If we accept collaboration as the thing that gives people survival fitness - which I do - then you can invert the whole thing and focus on how we achieve that. Ants are another species that collaborate well and are successful. But, arguably, ants neither think nor speak. Unless you want to call leaving a pheromone trail "speaking"? And why not? So now we can consider the issue of from another perspective - what constitutes a language? Sapir Whorf says our language affects if not determines what we think. Perhaps we need to look at language not as what we think it is but instead that language is any system that provides collaboration. And then we start going down an interesting rat hole. "Twitter and Teargas" argues that that extwitter does "affords" people ways to do some things but not others.

It is a complex and interesting issue. My take is that language is primarily a tool for collaboration.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do your Human Design profile and see how much it fits. Our society expects everyone to be a Generator (in HD terms) - all people who are not then feel like they're totally weird. In reality, they're just wired differently, and have other strengths and weaknesses. Humanity is like a big puzzle piece. As someone who never was into astrology, Human Design was a shock. I didn't want to even consider that idea at all, but…

> Do your Human Design profile and see how much it fits. How would one do that? Is there a website for it, or something? I tried looking it up and it purportedly uses date and place of birth, but those hardly have anything to do with me, so I don't see how that calculation could be any more useful than, say, a star sign. The concepts seem interesting for sure, just not sure how to find what applies to me.

>it purportedly uses date and place of birth, but those hardly have anything to do with me

While astrology is bogus, you'd be surprised how much "date and place of birth" has to do with you.

There are statistics and studies showing higher than chance similar behavior/tendecies in people born in the same months (for things like depression, health outcomes, etc). Could have to do with exposure to sunlight during early days or whatever.

And for place of birth, of course normally (if you're not in some mix-and-match country like the US, or if your parents don't immigrate immediately) this affects inherited genetic constitution, and of course culture, access to resources, diet, and many other factors.

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

#216

Okay, so my first experiment was to try to think without language. Go ahead, you try it. I can't do it. So a simple conclusion is that language gives rise to what we call thought. However, I do some things - which I do not call thought - without language. There was/is an old IBM programming test of patterns and I can choose the correct pattern even when I cannot think why that is. In "Notes on the Synthesis of Form",…

Many people do not think with language: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5486969

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linguistic thinker: I reach conclusions by feel, pretty much jumping to them, and then sniffing out the "warp trail" from that jump and putting that into words. It doesn't feel like inventing post facto rationalizations, but rather retracing the reasoning that happened in the background. And I do need to do that step - the conclusion doesn't seem "stable" unless I trace it back like this.

>I reach conclusions by feel That sounds like intuition to me

Words are also based on the same intuition, you just verbalize it and restrict yourself to what you have words for instead of all concepts and thoughts.

For example I do math entirely without any words in my process, and I easily got a master in math that way, barely had to study. No problem, you just translate it at the end. Limiting myself to words just makes it harder to think freely.

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

#218
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That test was indeed interesting. But, one thing it didn't mention was audiation. Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording. This is very useful when performing as I can pretty much play along to this internal track. Some people appear not to be able to do this at all.

Curiously, I have this but I lack the musical education/experience/talent(?) to really use it. I can make up and "hear" music with multiple instruments and stuff, but I'm utterly useless at writing it down. Even just reproducing part of a melody on a keyboard is a frustratingly time consuming chore. :-(

I know what you mean. What I found very helpful in getting music out of my head via an instrument was a lot of very tedious scale practice, and similar exercises. This appears to get my fingers habituated such that I may often hear a (simple) line on the radio then immediately pick up an instrument and play it.

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

#219

Okay, so my first experiment was to try to think without language. Go ahead, you try it. I can't do it. So a simple conclusion is that language gives rise to what we call thought. However, I do some things - which I do not call thought - without language. There was/is an old IBM programming test of patterns and I can choose the correct pattern even when I cannot think why that is. In "Notes on the Synthesis of Form",…

Fascinating. Does it mean that when we have an internal monologue, we're in effect collaborating with our immediate-future self?

This has parallels to the Chain-of-Thought prompting in LLMs, where simply by letting the model speak its reasoning, it generates better responses.

The way I look at things: language-less thinking is tapping into our evolved or ingrained patterns (aka intuition). This is like one forward pass of LLMs. But if you have to reason in a novel situation that you haven't seen before, you have to break it down into simpler steps and that necessarily requires some form of "thinking aloud".

I need to follow the references in the original paper, but most of their evidence of language-less thought was about intuition-type thinking, not multi-step reasoning.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with Aphantasia, this is fascinating to me. There have been other aphantasics who report gaining the ability to visualize after mental exercises, and what you’re describing sounds somewhat similar. No luck for me yet, but I’m really interested in the idea that I could actually learn these skills…

This is such an interesting topic. I believe I also have aphantasia and I find that communicating about the topic is rather challenging as the right vocabulary doesn't seem to exist (or I'm ignorant of it). I have no "mind's eye" and can't produce an image in my head. But confusingly, I am quite good at the mental 3D manipulation. I can spin the cow in my head and describe its orientation, but I don't actually see th…

Now that is fascinating. It's like you have blindsight for your mind's eye. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight
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