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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

#161

Post by AnimalMuppet »

riiii wrote: post #157
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…

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.

Makes sense. If I am the code and the code is me, and the code doesn't work, then I'm done working too.

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

#163

Post by etcd »

andai wrote: post #101

When I was 13 or so, a friend asked me, "So, you speak three languages. Which one do you think in?" and the question left me speechless, because until that moment I hadn't considered that people think in words. It seemed a very inefficient way to go about things! Much later, I did begin to think mostly in words, and (perhaps for unrelated reasons?) my thinking became much less efficient. Also related, I experienced t…

With the drugs were you able to be more efficient for example code quicker, or was it more like better insights. Or perhaps both?

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

#165

Post by mcswell »

jostmey wrote: post #88

Progress with LLMs would seem to support the title. The language abilities of LLMs does not seem to lead to higher thought, so there must be additional processes that are required for higher thought or process that don’t depend on language

You may be right, but there is another hypothesis that would need to be rejected: at question is whether LLMs "do" language the same way we do. For certain they learn language much differently, with orders of magnitude more input data. It could be that they just string sentence fragments together, whereas (by hypothesis) we construct sentences hierarchically. The internal representation of semantics might also be different, more compositional in humans.

If I had time and free use of an LLM, I'd like to investigate how well it understands constructional synonymy, like "the red car" and "the car that is red" and "John saw a car on the street yesterday. It was red." I guess models that can draw pictures can be used to test this sort of thing--surely someone has looked into this?

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

#166

Post by theptip »

fhdsgbbcaA wrote: post #118
theptip wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM as a term is becoming quite broad; a multi-modal transformer-based model with function calling / ReAct finetuning still gets called an LLM, but this scaffolding might be all that’s needed. I’d be extremely surprised if AI recapitulates the same developmental path as humans did; evolution vs. next-token prediction on an existing corpus are completely different objective functions and loss landscapes.

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…

Humans copy/paste from SO too. Does that prove humans can’t reason?

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

#167

Post by mcswell »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #41

The conclusion implied by the title seems self evident for anyone who has seen any (at least) nonhuman mammalian predator.

Nonhuman predators don't do math, or most of the other cognitive things which (I presume) the author of this article investigated in aphasics.

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

#169

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

CSMastermind wrote: post #149
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 y…

> It's not clear to me that LLMs sufficiently scaled won't achieve superhuman performance on general cognitive tasks

If "general cognitive tasks" means "I give you a prompt in some form, and you give me an incredible response of some form " (forms may differ or be the same) then it is hard to disagree with you.

But if by "general cognitive task" you mean "all the cognitive things that human do", then it is really hard to see why you would have any confidence that LLMs have any hope of achieving superhuman performance at these things.

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

#170

Post by mcswell »

akomtu wrote: post #72
habitue wrote: post #30

Language may not be essential for thought, (most of us have the experience of an idea occurring to us that we struggle to put into words), but language acts as a regularization mechanism on thoughts. Serializing much higher dimensional freeform thoughts into language is a very lossy process, and this kinda ensures that mostly only the core bits get translated. Think of times when someone gets an idea you're trying to…

Imo, that's the essense of reasoning. Limited memory and slow communication channels force us to create compact, but expressive models of reality. LLMs, on the other hand, have all the memory in the world and their model of reality is a piece-wise interpolation of the huge training dataset. Why invent grammar rules if you can keep the entire dictionary in mind?

Why do LLMs (or rather similar models that draw pictures) keep getting the number of fingers on the human hand wrong, or show two people's arms or legs merging? Or in computer-created videos, fail at object preservation? It seems to me they do not have a model of the world, only an imperfect model of pictures they've seen.
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