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Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

#121

Post by orwin »

I will add an anecdata, then ask a question.

I could enter what we all here call the "Zone" quite often when i was young (once while doing math :D). I still can, but rarely on purpose, and rarely while coding. I have a lot of experience in this state, and i can clearly say that a marker of entering the zone is that your thoughts are not "limited" by language anymore and the impression of clarity and really fast thinking. This is why i never thought that language was required for thinking.

Now the question: would it be possible to scan the brain of people while they enter the zone? I know it isn't a state you can reach on command, but isn't it worth to try? understand the mechanism of this state? And maybe understand where our thought start?

Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

#122

Post by neom »

vivekd wrote: post #15
neom wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would someone think in words? You mean the words in the pictures or...?

I think in words. For me during thought there is a literal voice in my putting my thoughts into words.

I'm an idiot. I thought this meant, for some reason unknown to me... written words, something I couldn't imagine being able to think in. Spoken words, sure.

Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

#123

Post by toomuchtodo »

orwin wrote: post #121

I will add an anecdata, then ask a question. I could enter what we all here call the "Zone" quite often when i was young (once while doing math :D). I still can, but rarely on purpose, and rarely while coding. I have a lot of experience in this state, and i can clearly say that a marker of entering the zone is that your thoughts are not "limited" by language anymore and the impression of clarity and really fast think…

Also known as “Flow”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

#124

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #78
Animats wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what we need. Nor does anybody else, yet. But we know what it has to do . Basically what a small mammal or a corvid does. There's been progress. Look at this 2020 work on neural net controlled drone acrobatics.[1] That's going in the right direction. [1] https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/RSS20_Kaufmann.pdf

You could say language is just the "communication module" but there has got to be another whole underlying interface where non-verbal thoughts are modulated/demodulated to conform to the language expected to be used when communication may or may not be on the agenda.

In these discussions, I always knee-jerk into thinking "why don't they just look inward on their own minds". But the truth is, most people don't have much to gaze upon internally... they're the meat equivalent of an LLM that can sort of sound like it makes sense. These are the people always bragging about how they have an "internal monologue" and that those that don't are aliens or psychotics or something.

The only reason humans have that "communication model" is because that's how you model other humans you speak to. It's a faculty for rehearsing what you're going to say to other people, and how they'll respond to it. If you have any profound thoughts at all, you find that your spoken language is deficient to even transcribe your thoughts, some "mental tokens" have no short phrases that even describe them.

The only real thoughts you have are non-verbal. You can see this sometimes in stupid schoolchildren who have learned all the correct words to regurgitate, but those never really clicked for them. The mildly clever teachers always assume that if they thoroughly practice the terminology, it will eventually be linked with the concepts themselves and they'll have fully learned it. What's really happening is that there's not enough mental machinery underneath for those words to ever be anything to link up with.

Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

#125

Post by NeuroCoder »

Animats wrote: post #48

This is an important result. The actual paper [1] says that functional MRI (which is measuring which parts of the brain are active by sensing blood flow) indicates that different brain hardware is used for non-language and language functions. This has been suspected for years, but now there's an experimental result. What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs. It's not clear what that someth…

I'm not convinced the result is as important here as the methods. Separating language from complex cognition when evaluating individuals is difficult. But many of the people I've met in neuroscience that study language and cognitive processes do not hold the opinion that one is absolutely reliant on the other in all cases. It may have been a strong argument a while ago, but everytime I've seen a presentation on this relationship it's been to emphasize the influence culture and language inevitably have on how we think about things. I'm sure some people believe that one cannot have complex thoughts without language, but most people in speech neuro I've met in language processing research find the idea ridiculous enough they wouldn't bother spending a few years on that kind of project just to disapprove a theory.

On the other hand, further understanding how to engage complex cognitive processes in nonverbal individuals is extremely useful and difficult to accomplish.

Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

#126

Post by KoolKat23 »

Animats wrote: post #75
KoolKat23 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs. Basically we need Multimodal LLM's (terrible naming as it's not an LLM then but still).

I don't know what we need. Nor does anybody else, yet. But we know what it has to do . Basically what a small mammal or a corvid does. There's been progress. Look at this 2020 work on neural net controlled drone acrobatics.[1] That's going in the right direction. [1] https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/RSS20_Kaufmann.pdf

I think you may underestimate what these models do.

Proper multimodal models natively consider whatever input you give them, store the useful information in an abstracted form (i.e not just text), building it's world model, and then output in whatever format you want it to. It's no different to a mammals, just the inputs are perhaps different. Instead of relying on senses, they rely on text, video, images and sound.

In theory you could connect it to a robot and it could gather real world data much like a human, but would potentially be limited to the number of sensors/nerves it has. (on the plus side it has access to all recorded data and much faster read/write than a human).

Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

#127

Post by soulofmischief »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #124
fuzzfactor wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say language is just the "communication module" but there has got to be another whole underlying interface where non-verbal thoughts are modulated/demodulated to conform to the language expected to be used when communication may or may not be on the agenda.

In these discussions, I always knee-jerk into thinking "why don't they just look inward on their own minds". But the truth is, most people don't have much to gaze upon internally... they're the meat equivalent of an LLM that can sort of sound like it makes sense. These are the people always bragging about how they have an "internal monologue" and that those that don't are aliens or psychotics or something. The only r…

This view represents one possible subjective experience of the world. But there are many different possible ways a human brain can learn to experience the world.

I am a sensoral thinker, I often think and internally express myself in purely images or sounds. There are, however, some kinds of thoughts I've learned I can only fully engage with if I speak to myself out loud or at least inside of my head.

The most appropriate mode of thought depends upon the task at hand. People don't typically brag about having internal monologues. They're just sharing their own subjective internal experience, which is no less valid than a chiefly nonverbal one.

Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

#128

Post by soulofmischief »

bbor wrote: post #97
fuzzfactor wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say language is just the "communication module" but there has got to be another whole underlying interface where non-verbal thoughts are modulated/demodulated to conform to the language expected to be used when communication may or may not be on the agenda.

Well said! This is a great restatement of the core setup of the Chomskian “Generative Grammar” school, and I think it’s an undeniably productive one. I haven’t read this researchers full paper, but I would be sad (tho not shocked…) if it didn’t cite Chomsky up front. Beyond your specific point re:interfaces—which I recommend the OG Syntactic Structures for more commentary on—he’s been saying what she’s saying here fo…

I think one big problem is that people understand LLMs as text-generation models, when really they're just sequence prediction models, which is a highly versatile, but data-hungry, architecture for encoding relationships and knowledge. LLMs are tuned for text input and output, but they just work on numbers and the general transformer architecture is highly generalizable.

Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

#129

Post by red75prime »

Animats wrote: post #48

This is an important result. The actual paper [1] says that functional MRI (which is measuring which parts of the brain are active by sensing blood flow) indicates that different brain hardware is used for non-language and language functions. This has been suspected for years, but now there's an experimental result. What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs. It's not clear what that someth…

> What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs

You mean besides a few layers of LLMs near input and output that deal with tokens? We have the rest of the layers.

Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

#130

Post by alephnerd »

red75prime wrote: post #129
Animats wrote: post #48

This is an important result. The actual paper [1] says that functional MRI (which is measuring which parts of the brain are active by sensing blood flow) indicates that different brain hardware is used for non-language and language functions. This has been suspected for years, but now there's an experimental result. What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs. It's not clear what that someth…

> What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs You mean besides a few layers of LLMs near input and output that deal with tokens? We have the rest of the layers.

Those "few layers" sum up all of linguistics.

1. Syntax

2. Semantics

3. Pragmatics

4. Semiotics

These are the layers you need to solve.

Saussure already pointed out these issues over a century ago, and Linguists turned ML Researchers like Stuart Russell and Paul Smolensky tried in vain to resolve this.

It basically took 60 years just to crack syntax at scale, and the other layers are still fairly far away.

Furthermore, Syntax is not a solved problem yet in most languages.

Try communicating with GPT-4o in colloquial Bhojpuri, Koshur, or Dogri, let alone much less represented languages and dialects.

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