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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

#141

Post by orhmeh09 »

voxl wrote: post #111
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it important? To who? Anyone with half a brain is aware that language isn't the only way to think. I can think my way through all kinds of things in 3-d space without a single word uttered in any internal monologue and I'm not remotely unique - this kind of thing is put in all kinds of math and iq'ish like tests one takes as a child.

Before you say things this patiently dumb you should probably wonder what question the researchers are actually interested in and why your average experience isn't sufficient proof.

*patently

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

#142

Post by uoaei »

jebarker wrote: post #93
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 Not to over-hype LLMs, but I don't see why this results says this. AI doesn't need to do things the same way as evolved intelligence has.

in the high entropy world we have, we are forced to assume that the first thing that arises as a stable pattern is inevitably the most likely, and the most likely to work. there is no other pragmatic conclusion to draw.

for more, see "Assembly Theory"

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

#143

Post by kerblang »

fjfaase wrote: post #90

As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100). I have struggled my whole life to express my ideas with language. I conside…

> During my life, I have met several people, especially among software engineers, who seem to be similar to me

This begs a question though: Since programming is mostly done with language - admittedly primitive/pidgin ones - why isn't that a struggle? Not sure if you're a programmer yourself, but if so do you prefer certain programming languages for some sense of "less-verbalness" or does it even matter?

Just wondering, not attacking your claim per se.

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

#144

Post by BurningFrog »

awongh wrote: post #120
jebarker wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs Not to over-hype LLMs, but I don't see why this results says this. AI doesn't need to do things the same way as evolved intelligence has.

One reason might that LLMs are successful because of the architecture, but also, just as importantly because they can be trained over a volume and diversity of human thought that’s encapsulated in language (that is on the internet). Where are we going to find the equivalent data set that will train this other kind of thinking? Open AI O1 seems to be trained on mostly synthetic data, but it makes intuitive sense that…

Videos are a rich set of non verbal data that could be used to train AIs.

Feed it all the video ever recorded, hook it up to web cams, telescopes, etc. This says a lot about how the universe works, without using a single word.

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

#145

Post by numpad0 »

jebarker wrote: post #93
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 Not to over-hype LLMs, but I don't see why this results says this. AI doesn't need to do things the same way as evolved intelligence has.

Title doesn't mean bullet trains can't fly, but do imply what call flights could be more than moving fast, and effects of wings might be worth discussing.

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

#146

Post by tines »

fjfaase wrote: post #90

As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100). I have struggled my whole life to express my ideas with language. I conside…

> As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100)

I used to rationalize to myself along similar lines for a long time, then I realized that I'm just not as smart as I thought I was.

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

#147

Post by alserio »

kerblang wrote: post #143
fjfaase wrote: post #90

As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100). I have struggled my whole life to express my ideas with language. I conside…

> During my life, I have met several people, especially among software engineers, who seem to be similar to me This begs a question though: Since programming is mostly done with language - admittedly primitive/pidgin ones - why isn't that a struggle? Not sure if you're a programmer yourself, but if so do you prefer certain programming languages for some sense of "less-verbalness" or does it even matter? Just wonderin…

The idea that programming languages and natural languages are processed with the same wetware should be testable with something like the tests described in this submission. I don't expect it to be true, but only expecting something is not science

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

#148

Post by superb_dev »

kerblang wrote: post #143
fjfaase wrote: post #90

As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100). I have struggled my whole life to express my ideas with language. I conside…

> During my life, I have met several people, especially among software engineers, who seem to be similar to me This begs a question though: Since programming is mostly done with language - admittedly primitive/pidgin ones - why isn't that a struggle? Not sure if you're a programmer yourself, but if so do you prefer certain programming languages for some sense of "less-verbalness" or does it even matter? Just wonderin…

A programming language has a ton more rules and way less ambiguity than a speaking language.

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

#149

Post by CSMastermind »

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…

When you look at how humans play chess they employ several different cognitive strategies. Memorization, calculation, strategic thinking, heuristics, and learned experience.

When the first chess engines came out they only employed one of these: calculation. It wasn't until relatively recently that we had computer programs that could perform all of them. But it turns out that if you scale that up with enough compute you can achieve superhuman results with calculation alone.

It's not clear to me that LLMs sufficiently scaled won't achieve superhuman performance on general cognitive tasks even if there are things humans do which they can't.

The other thing I'd point out is that all language is essentially synthetic training data. Humans invented language as a way to transfer their internal thought processes to other humans. It makes sense that the process of thinking and the process of translating those thoughts into and out of language would be distinct.

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

#150

Post by makeitdouble »

kerblang wrote: post #143
fjfaase wrote: post #90

As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100). I have struggled my whole life to express my ideas with language. I conside…

> During my life, I have met several people, especially among software engineers, who seem to be similar to me This begs a question though: Since programming is mostly done with language - admittedly primitive/pidgin ones - why isn't that a struggle? Not sure if you're a programmer yourself, but if so do you prefer certain programming languages for some sense of "less-verbalness" or does it even matter? Just wonderin…

I see your general point on needing language proficiency to program, but I think it's just a very low requirement.

Parent isn't saying they can't handle language (and we wouldn't have this discussion in the first place), just that they better handle complexity and structure in non verbal ways.

To get back to programming, I think this do apply to most of us. Most of us probably don't think in ruby or JS, we have a higher vision of what we want to build and "flatten" it into words that can be parsed and executed. It's of course more obvious for people writing in say basic or assembly, some conversion has to happen at some point.

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