Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf] • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by LoganDark » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 2:43 PM UTC

dinkleberg wrote: post #207

haswell wrote: post #199

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…

You're deriving the cow. You don't see the cow, but you know things logically about the cow, and you can describe it just as well as would someone who does see it. But you are not, and don't need to be, actually seeing the cow.

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

#232

Post by LoganDark » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #215

LoganDark wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Makes sense to me. But my date and place of birth don't define me, they only correlate me with others. Astrology's just a particularly bogus way of not doing that, but anything that would try to derive anything about me from just my date and place of birth, without any actual data to correlate with my answers, isn't really worth my time.

i.e. you'd need to know "people born around this date in this place tend to have whatever human design" in order to provide me actual predictions based on only date and place of birth, but no such data has ever been collected.

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

#233

Post by numpad0 » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 2:52 PM UTC

bbor wrote: post #114

derriz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing the object language (human natural language) and the meta-language (formal grammars - ala Chomsky). Formal grammar theory relies on recursive formulae to define what is a a language (formally set of sentences), natural language itself does not use/require recursion as understood in the same way. Some natural languages support grammatical features like sub-clauses but that's only "recursive" in the se…

I'd definitely say all language use must rely on recursion, you're just highlighting our tendency to halt the pronunciation of it early at arbitrary points due to linguistic norms. Like, AFAIU this was Chomsky's whole impetus, and I really don't think anyone has answered better than he: how can a finite system compute linguistic meaning in finite time, otherwise? I'd guess the "natural language" answer would be along…

"How can $static_config_generator programming itself be Turing complete if its output weren't!?" yeah x86 assembly can generate HTML. yawn.

"How else? Anyone? Gotcha!" followed by silence is not a propositional logic, it's a comedy cliche.

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

#234

Post by renegade-otter » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 2:52 PM UTC

You can't think if you don't speak. Babies don't "think" like adults do, rather they just follow instincts.

Go ahead, try it. Think something but don't say it in your head.

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

#235

Post by Jensson » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 2:57 PM UTC

renegade-otter wrote: post #234

You can't think if you don't speak. Babies don't "think" like adults do, rather they just follow instincts. Go ahead, try it. Think something but don't say it in your head.

> Go ahead, try it. Think something but don't say it in your head.

I can think about how much food left I have in my fridge, then if I need more now, then formulating a plan to go to the store etc, all without any words ever being in my head.

There is no "I have a gallon of milk" etc, instead I remember how much milk was left as images or events, and then going to the store etc is also similar events and images. There are no words, and I can't put those things into words I can only do bad translations of them, since my thought of going to the store also includes how I'll be tying my shoelaces and the path I'll take etc, imagining how much I have left includes the exact shape I last saw it in etc, translating that to words would take insane amount of words and still be very lossy.

Unless I write or read or speak I don't hear any words in my mind. Only when directly interfacing with language in some way are the words there. Not when doing math problems or physics problems either etc, not when programming, those arne't languages, only when I write down rationalizations or comments etc do the words pop out.

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

#236

Post by ecjhdnc2025 » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 2:59 PM UTC

LoganDark wrote: post #231

dinkleberg wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're deriving the cow. You don't see the cow, but you know things logically about the cow, and you can describe it just as well as would someone who does see it. But you are not, and don't need to be, actually seeing the cow.

The weird thing obviously is that next to nobody with a mind's eye is actually seeing the cow.

A tiny tiny fraction of people talk about their mind's eye being part of their visual field, to the point that they can sort of functionally see -- hallucinate -- an imaginary object on a table like AR.

Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described.

Most children can sort of whimsically play the imaginary-drinking tea game, imagining the shape of the teacups, imagining spilling tea or milk, but the mental images might not have attributes like colour or weight until they are specifically assigned to the visualisation. Like: what colour are the teacups? They don't have colour until you pick one, and then they do. Is it a heavy cup? It's not, but I do have a saucer. The more you add to the visualisation, the less translucent/ghostly/formless/conceptual it is.

The fascinating thing about broad aphantasia is that it appears to be way beyond even that; it's like things only happen conceptually, yet they still happen. Like the sibling comment from andrewflnr perceptively said: as if it's a conceptual blind-sight.

And when you consider our evolutionary pathway, perhaps it actually is the same phenomenon: a part of the brain successfully doing part of the task, without the support of the visualiser.

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

#237

Post by emiliobool » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 3:00 PM UTC

ecjhdnc2025 wrote: post #193

benrutter wrote: post #56

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…

The question about visualising three dimensional objects is fascinating to me. Because my answer has changed radically in the last five or so years, and I'm not a young person! I used to consider myself 3D-impaired -- unable to maintain and rotate a 3D image in my head, which also made 3D software frustrating. (I also have, it turns out, some binocular vision issues and some other mild cognition weirdness). But a few…

This is very interesting, when I was a kid I didn’t think with words but with “abstract” ideas. When I realized every other kid used language for thinking I tried to do it myself and not only I was able to do it, but it never stopped after that. Now I probably think 90% with language, but I’ve been trying to practice other forms of thought recently.

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

#238

Post by foobarqux » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 3:00 PM UTC

derriz wrote: post #163

bbor wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd definitely say all language use must rely on recursion, you're just highlighting our tendency to halt the pronunciation of it early at arbitrary points due to linguistic norms. Like, AFAIU this was Chomsky's whole impetus, and I really don't think anyone has answered better than he: how can a finite system compute linguistic meaning in finite time, otherwise? I'd guess the "natural language" answer would be along…

I think Chomsky is a linguist really more famous and respected among non-linguists than actual experts in the field. I don't think modern linguistics - particularly applied linguistics for example in the area of language acquisition - references Chomsky. His theories are unfalsifiable and un-empirical and thus, for me, unscientific. This discussion is typical. Chomsky's definition of "recursion" - like that of a "lan…

It would genuinely shock me if Chomsky wasn't the most cited author for works published today even if you exclude works that are dismissive of him.

The reason the specifics of Chomsky's proposals are changing is that it isn't a solved problem and he and others are continuing to try to advance the understanding by revising proposals in light of better arguments, simpler explanation and (contrary to what you say, see [1] which lists some examples) experimental evidence. In Chomsky's most recent book he himself quotes Wheeler: "Surely someday, we can believe, we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say to each other, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind so long!’". I think people have a hard time understanding this because it is one of the few nascent sciences and therefore no one has figured out the fundamental theories.

And if some specific proposal like X-bar theory is falsified or supplanted by something else that doesn't falsify the core ideas of universal grammar or the minimalist program. You say that it isn't possible to provide evidence that these are false but Moro for example conducted experiments comparing hierarchical and linear language processing that potentially would have provided reasonable evidence against language being hierarchical had they shown linear languages were processed similarly (instead they support it).

The reason you should be downvoted is that you made a bunch of evidence free assertions; You could have said "Neil Bohr's work has been completely falsified and is of dubious value" with the same amount of supporting argument.

[1] https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007363

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

#239

Post by lebuffon » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 3:01 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #215

LoganDark wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

An interesting test would be to correlate birth date results with people from the southern hemisphere. "Western civilization" is very north biased IMHO.

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

#240

Post by jyscao » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 3:04 PM UTC

justacomment100 wrote: post #183

My takes: 1. The existence of “rubber duck debugging”, and a whole bunch of studies on verbally explaining a concept indicate that language is essential for thought. In rubber duck debugging, programmers tell their problem to an object and this is beneficial in finding the solution. There are studies that show when we verbally teach material to someone we remember it better. Also the act of taking a test increases le…

>There are studies that show when we verbally teach material to someone we remember it better.

I am convinced that teaching material to other people helps us remember concepts better. Doing it verbally just so happen to be the most common and convenient form of knowledge transmission between individuals.