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]

#291

Post by lumb63 » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 8:29 PM UTC

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…

This test really threw me for a loop because it didn’t cover my main mode of thought. For me, I can consciously use my internal voice or visualize things, but if I am not actively trying to, they never happen. Typically, the results of my thoughts simply enter my conscious mind, and what brought them about is opaque to me.

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

#292

Post by ecjhdnc2025 » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 8:32 PM UTC

emiliobool wrote: post #237

ecjhdnc2025 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the most challenging things I find in life is explaining to a non-programmer how I visualise code. Because I don't really know how I do it; it is simultaneously grammatical and architectural, and a lot of the processes that guide me are really emotional or almost visceral. Code sometimes does not feel right.

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

#293

Post by geor9e » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 8:51 PM UTC

leto_ii wrote: post #69

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…

> 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?

The reading version of internal monologue is called "subvocalization" and this paragraph describes it well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization#Comparison_to_...

Reading your comment, I don't subvocalize at all. In order to get through my college degree, I taught myself speed reading. Now, I just naturally do it. My eye flicks to the middle of every 5-10 word chunk and flies though the text. If you did speech synthesis at that speed, it'd be a incomprehensible chipmunk. So I don't subvocalize at all. It'd be way too slow. To suppress subvocalization I used to hum (in my mind) instead, but I don't need to anymore. If something is hard to understand I will slow way down, then the subvocalization might kick in. When typing, I do subvocalize everything, since I can't write that fast.

I think this post/paper was more about your personal thought process rather than reading though. I very rarely have any internal monologue. In fact, the rare times I do have one are usually very awkward social situations where I wanted to say something but don't. Otherwise never. My whole life has been that way. An internal monologue sounds like a nightmare to be honest. Constant talking that nobody else can hear? No thank you.

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

#294

Post by mewpmewp2 » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 8:52 PM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #245

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just sounds so different to how I solve math problems. I was naturally good at maths, but it was always from monologue kind of bruteforcing different solutions until one of them seemed to work. I guess it might be a reason also why I find LLMs really exciting since I feel like if I can do it, LLM should be able to do it. I don't feel like I am doing anything special. I always had problem with trusting my intuiti…

> I first remind myself of the strategy to do it, which is first I will do 60 x 60. Then it is 3600, then I add 2 x 60, 3720, and then there is 2 x 62 left, but I have to keep reminding myself occasionally what the last numbers were, that initial multiplication was 62 x 62, then I got 3720, and now I have to add 124... okay lets go 3820, 24 left, now 3844. Of course it is easier to remember as I am typing this, but i…

If you can or ever were able to do this in 2 seconds that is unimaginable to me. Not in a doubting way, I just have no idea how I could do it in 2 seconds. It would take me 20 to 30s and at least. But most people wouldn't even try to multiply this top of their head.

Also this multiplying of two digit numbers I was never taught, I just came to a strategy that I explained with my thoughts. And I used to do these for fun as a kid. But I would only get faster than that if it was something I had memorized, but not numbers from scratch. And I had to constantly try to repeat numbers in my head that I had stored for addition down the road.

What is usually tougher top of my head and especially if I am tired at all, is something like 68 x 68. Then here first I have to decide whether I go from 60 x 60 or 70 x 70. Since it's that close to 70, I think 70 is more likely be easier. So I think okay 4900 - that's from memory right. Then I start to think what I have to take off from 4900 and what is 68 x 68 lacking compared to 70 x 70. So I will think that if I add 2 x 68, it will make it 68 x 70 and then I have 2 x 70 missing. So I need to deduct 140 and 136. So now at this point, this is much easier done in writing but here I frequently have to repeat numbers or redo some steps because I am not certain or I forget. But otherwise 4900 - 140, this comes easily instantly 4760 - maybe that's how it is for you with 62 x 62. And then now I take 100 off, it's 4660, and further 36 it would be 4624. Right now testing this in my head it took more than a minute because I wasn't sure whether I could just use the logic that I was thinking out of the box and I'm quite tired.

What if you were to have to do something more difficult e.g. 3 digits multiplication or 4?

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

#295

Post by tetrisgm » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 9:08 PM UTC

082349872349872 wrote: post #120

tetrisgm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great insight. How do you think animals store or communicate those thoughts? From your own experience.

Storage I have no idea. (for that matter, I have little idea how we store non-linguistic thoughts) Communication is primarily via posture, secondarily via sound. No "grammar" is involved, intensification is via intensification of signal, not addition of symbols. (that said, much human-animal communication is by means of arbitrary symbols, just that each symbol is serving as a sign because combinations of symbols and…

Thanks for the very thoughtful and well explained answer. If you have pointers on further reading on the subject in all ears.

I'm curious if you feel like human behaviors are derived from these sets of behaviors. You mapped all the examples of their behaviors to phrases, to give a general vibe. Is your view that we have simply compressed and made these more nuanced and composite? Or did we invent something completely different and operate within that framework which isn't a more sophisticated version?

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

#296

Post by ajb » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 9:23 PM UTC

dabei wrote: post #282

ajb wrote: post #223

An important concept , and one that also has implications for mental health treatment. Eg, many talk therapies operate under the assumption that 'saying the wrong words in your head' is a factor maintaining the problem, and replacing these with better ones will result in improvement. But since words are not thoughts, and further they are not mental actions (such as relaxing), saying different words in your head is on…

Maybe it's similar to tweaking the LLM prompts. A different set of words trigger a different pathway in our thinking.

It could be, but I've not seen an approach to therapy that advocates tweaking like that. Most aim to identify a form of words that "should work" and then advocate persisting "until it works".

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

#297

Post by mewpmewp2 » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 9:27 PM UTC

RaftPeople wrote: post #255

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion?

> That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion? Are you thinking that using words during thinking helps with reaching conclusions and knowing why you reached the conclusion? For me it's just there, the thoughts, the facts, the logic, the sequence, the connections, etc. Expressing all of that in words happens afterward (if it happens).

I don't even know how to think without words. I thought thinking literally means using words in sequence to problem solve. At least I used to think so. If someone says they are going to think about something I have always thought that they were going to focus on their inner monologue of sequence of words.

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

#298

Post by calf » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 9:35 PM UTC

derriz wrote: post #93

calf wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual human natural language is meaningfully recursive, because any grade school student understands the recursive properties of certain toy sentence examples in that they could "go on forever" as a set of arbitrarily larger complex sentences. The commonality of mathematical grammars (as mathematical objects in their own right) and natural language is that both have computational properties such as recursive structu…

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…

Well, I don't share this insistence that natural language is somehow special or privileged. Natural language has a tree structure and nobody need to learn about formal grammars to comprehend that. A schoolchild understands this much, without having to understand recursion in a rigorous way.

Furthermore, as I mentioned before, formal grammars are artificial languages in their own right. The key thing is that the only way a human being can understand these languages (e.g., still at the level of syntax, independent of recursive computations like in functional programming which you did mention) is through some kind of recursive reasoning about their grammar.

And to keep the discussion at the forest instead of the trees, it is weird that human cognition comprehends these tree structures, recursive structures, or fractal structures, relatively naturally and intuitively. If I had said fractal would you have argued that natural languages don't exhibit fractal properties? We are talking bird's-eye level view of things here.

I also believe in the Church-Turing thesis plus the Chomsky hierarchy of computable languages (the idea that languages are models of computation, and that some language classes contain other classes in a hierarchy of what is computable -- see for instance the formal class of Recursive Languages), meaning that natural languages are not based on magical computations exceeding the power of universal computation; furthermore, as another subcommenter (see both users bbor and foobarqux) put it differently to you but if you are committed to a position that natural human language can only be approximated by artificial languages defined by formal grammars then you can never have a humanly intelligible account of the computational features of actual human language. It would be like arguing a laptop is not "meaningfully" like a Turing machine because a laptop has finite number of atoms as is thus really technically a finite state machine -- it's throwing the emergent/abstract baby out with the empirical bathwater.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursively_enumerable_languag...

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

#299

Post by roncesvalles » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 10:16 PM UTC

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…

I think to a large extent this is because people define "internal monologue" differently, so let me just clarify:

a. There is a voice inside your head, and your consciousness is not the one talking: schizophrenia.

b. There is a voice inside your head, it's you doing the talking i.e. you're doing everything but moving your lips and producing sound - the words are literally being narrated in your mind: internal monologue.

c. No language is being "spoken" inside your head. If you're not talking, you're not forming sentences at all: apparently some people have this experience.

My experience is b, but it is possible for me to also think without having to narrate everything (a bit of c). If anyone has a different internal experience, please reply.

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

#300

Post by dejj » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 10:59 PM UTC

leobg wrote: post #279

dejj wrote: 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…

These are fascinating. Anyone know a book our other source for a list of such Chinese shorthand figures of speech and the tales/aphorisms behind them about human nature? Kinda like “sour grapes” in English, or Aesop’s fables.

The book I have at hand is called "成语故事 Geschichten von chinesischen Sprichwörtern". It's parallel German and Chinese. ISBN 978-7-119-06018-7 Published by CBT China Book Trading GmbH www.cbt-chinabook.de