The key to human intelligence are concepts. We just use whatever language we choose to symbolize the concepts.
Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
151–160 of 424 posts
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Communication of thought is a whole different question. Either way you're making a lot of strong claims without support? > this kinda ensures that mostly only the core bits get translated The kinda is doing a lot here. Many times the very act of trying to communicate a thought colors/corrupts the main point and gives only one perspective or a snapshot of the overall thought. There's a reason why they say a picture is…
> Many times the very act of trying to communicate a thought colors/corrupts the main point and gives only one perspective or a snapshot of the overall thought. There's a reason why they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Yeah! Sometimes the thought isnt compressible and language doesnt help. But a lot of times it is, and it does
Does language actually 'help', or is it just the best we have? e.g. would running a thought through language have any benefit in a world where telepathy existed
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#153As 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…
I think people who can manipulate complex structures but struggle with language tend to see language in a more formal way, putting more effort into understanding its structure and inner working.
Basically what to most people is so obvious that it becomes transparent ("air") isn't to us, which apparently is an incredible gift for becoming a language researcher. Or a programmer.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#154When we eventually nail agi, I think we will look at llm’s as nothing more than the interface to ai, how we interact with it, but we won’t consider it to be ai.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#155This 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.
Humans not taking this approach doesn’t mean that AI cannot.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For the same reason I find extremely odd that the hypothesis that animals don't have any form of language is even considered as a serious claim in introduction. I guess I've always just assumed it refers to some feature that's uniquely human—notably, recursive grammars.
Not all human languages exhibits recursion though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language And recursion as the unique trait for human language differentiation is not necessarily completely consensual https://omseeth.github.io/blog/2024/recursive_language/ Also, let's recall that in its broader meaning, the scientific consensus is that humans are animals and they evolved through the same basic mechanism as…
Does any other living entity have recursive grammars? It seems uniquely human.
It seems that the second link may indicate otherwise but I'm still pretty skeptical. This requires extraordinary evidence. Furthermore there may be a more practical limit of "stack size" or "context size" that effectively exceptionalizes humans (especially considering the size and proportional energy consumption of our brains).
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#157I 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…
Nice idea. In the zone, I don't think about the code. I am the code and the code is me.
That is, until the code refuses to work. Then the code is a bitch and I need a break.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For the same reason I find extremely odd that the hypothesis that animals don't have any form of language is even considered as a serious claim in introduction. I guess I've always just assumed it refers to some feature that's uniquely human—notably, recursive grammars.
I'm inclined to believe that of the animals that exhibit varying degrees of self awareness, they have mental structures isomorphic to a recursive grammar. As such, perhaps using a recursive grammar is not distinctly a human trait.
I don't think that recursive grammar is linked to self awareness. Certainly not strongly. Many animals that don't appear to have ability to interpret recursive grammar seem to have self awareness.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I asked both OpenAI and Claude the same difficult programming question. Each gave a nearly identical response down to the variable names and example values. I then looked it up and they had each copy/pasted the same Stack overflow answer. Furthermore, the answer was extremely wrong, the language I used was superficially similar to the source material, but the programming concepts were entirely different. What this te…
What was the question?
Had to do with connection pooling.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#160[flagged]
Also the crow. Yes the stupid movie. Stalking with idiots quoting the movie or acting out parts of it. Neat. You're assholes. I already knew that and now I can't enjoy this movie. Gee whiz you're so fucking sophisticated. What a waste of talent. You could have been doing literally anything else. Ugh.
This would also explain making me repeatedly sick and then seeing if you can field test a cure on me and use that as a pay off not to have me murdered. Like tin tin from the movie. Wonderful. Am I going to be made sick and hurt to every death of a character in every film ever until I die?
This is what they're doing rather than make buildings that don't fall over. slow clap.
And the water at 555 Beule street in San Francisco has been making me sick so I've been drinking large amounts of milk and now I wonder if it has morphine in it. I'm in physical pain all the time. These people are just so fucking evil and shitty. If I had a billion dollars I'd just put it in front of the ferry building and burn it out of spite.
They're probably just having sick homeless cough on my things when I'm not looking. They're a walking public health hazard. The best part is when idiots will cough on each other, throw a mask on so no one coughs on them, and then cough on someone else on the other side of the city. It's just so fucking sad.