Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by dleeftink » Sun, Oct 20, 2024, 4:39 AM UTC

GavinMcG wrote: post #53

psychoslave wrote: post #32

>You can ask whether people who have these severe language impairments can perform tasks that require thinking. You can ask them to solve some math problems or to perform a social reasoning test, and all of the instructions, of course, have to be nonverbal because they can’t understand linguistic information anymore. Scientists have a lot of experience working with populations that don’t have language—studying prever…

Just as a data point, my guess is that a very small minority of English-language speakers would define the term as broadly as you do, at least in a context relating the concept to analytical thought processes. At the very least, I think most people expect that language is used actively, such that pheromones wouldn’t fall within the definition. (And actually, that’s reflected when you say language is a means “you can…

I'm not sure it's that fringe. Popular addages such as 'language is a vehicle for thought' and 'the pen is mightier than the sword' reveal that language is sometimes implied to be tool-like, with many of our unspoken acts carrying linguistic meaning (e.g. ghosting, not answering a call, sign language, gesturing, nodding, etc.).

Even tools present us a certain 'language', talking to us via beeps, blinks and buzzes, and are having increasingly interesting discussions amongst themselves (e.g. subreddit simulator, agent based modeling). Recent philosophers of technology as Mark Coeckelbergh present a comprehensive argument for why we need to move away from the tool/language barrier [0], and has been part in informing the EC Expert Group on AI [1].

[0]: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/97813155285...

[1]: https://philtech.univie.ac.at/news/news-about-publicatons-et...

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

#212

Post by upghost » Sun, Oct 20, 2024, 4:48 AM UTC

Well this comment is about the article not LLMs so I doubt it will have much in the way of legs, but this work has already been covered extensively and to a fascinating depth by Jaak Panksepp [1].

His work explores the neuropsychology of emotions WAIT DON'T GO they are actually the substrate of consciousness, NOT the other way around.

We have 7 primary affective processes (measurable hardware level emotions) and they are not what you think[2]. They are considered primary because they are sublinguistic. For instance, witnessing the color red is a primary experience, you cannot explain in words the color red to someone who has not ever seen it before.

His work is a really fascinating read if you ever want to take a break from puters for a minute and learn how people work.

PS the reason this sort of research isn't more widely known is because the behaviorist school was so incredibly dominant since the 1970s they made it completely taboo to discuss subjective experience in the realm of scientific discourse. In fact the emotions we are usually taught are not based on emotional states but on muscle contractions in the face! Not being allowed to talk about emotions in psychological studies or the inner process of the mind is kinda crazy when you think about it. So only recently with neuroimaging has it suddenly become ok to acknowledge that things happen in the brain independent of externally observable behavior.

[1] https://a.co/d/6EYULdP

[2] - seeking - fear - anxiety and grief - rage - lust - play!!! - caring

[3] if this sounds familiar at all it's because Jordan Peterson cites Jaak Panksep all the time. Well 50% of the time, the other 50% is CG Jung and the final 50% is the book of Exodus for some reason.

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

#213

Post by joelignaatius » Sun, Oct 20, 2024, 4:52 AM UTC

joelignaatius wrote: post #160

joelignaatius wrote: post #109

[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…

Oh and the black guy that was in hackers was ton tin in the crow. So what he "learned" was essentially bird flu. And milk makes you sick because birds don't drink milk. Did I mention there are swarms of crowd flying all over the city. Also someone put a rusty spring in the bathroom and so now I'm wondering if the headaches are caused by iron filings in my food that respond to radiation that end up in my brain.

Anyway. I'll keep writing this all out because A) based on this stupid fucking movie there may or may not be bird flu in San Francisco B) I don't like being poisoned and stalked across the city by idiots re enacting every type of media they can think of (oh look this "crow"/phylactery is the way you kill people good fucking job) C) it encourages people to stay the fuck out of San Francisco which is a dangerous hell hole D) no one is helping me and everyone actively is attempting to harm me F) it's the right fucking thing to do and if I can encourage as many people as I possibly can not to come here I will E) yes they did in fact say alphabetical order when they killed tin tin. Did I mention there a stupid fucking wizard of Oz play and security company?

I just don't want to be sick. I'm going to write all this shit out so long as I'm ill and hurting.

So. Bird flu. Fucking wonderful. It's probably nothing, the hundreds of crows on the embarcadero are just there for no reason. Is someone going to give me rabies? Are my kidneys going to fail now? When I write shit people don't like do they hack the free phone I have to fuck with the iron filings in my head?

I'm sick and I hurt. 555 Beule street San Francisco.

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

#214

Post by ziofill » Sun, Oct 20, 2024, 4:53 AM UTC

I'm wondering about the "non-verbal language" that scientists use to communicate with people affected by aphasia. What makes a brain with aphasia understand it? Do brains have dedicated circuitry to process words? (as opposed to, say, sounds which are a more general concept)

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

#215

Post by sojournerc » Sun, Oct 20, 2024, 4:53 AM UTC

alephnerd wrote: post #130

red75prime wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Furthermor…

Linguistics is not living! Language does not capture reality! So no matter how much you solve you're no closer to AGI

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

#216

Post by sebmellen » Sun, Oct 20, 2024, 4:53 AM UTC

upghost wrote: post #212

Well this comment is about the article not LLMs so I doubt it will have much in the way of legs, but this work has already been covered extensively and to a fascinating depth by Jaak Panksepp [1]. His work explores the neuropsychology of emotions WAIT DON'T GO they are actually the substrate of consciousness , NOT the other way around. We have 7 primary affective processes (measurable hardware level emotions) and the…

Fascinating comment and I’m glad I caught it! Thank you!

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

#217

Post by farts_mckensy » Sun, Oct 20, 2024, 5:01 AM UTC

slashdave wrote: post #208

farts_mckensy wrote: post #47

Stix's claim appears to be unfalsifiable. In scientific and philosophical discourse, a proposition must be falsifiable—there must be a conceivable empirical test that could potentially refute it. This criterion is fundamental for meaningful inquiry. Several factors contribute to the unfalsifiability of this claim: Subjectivity of Thought: Thought processes are inherently internal and subjective. There is no direct me…

You are just redefining symbols (language) as thought. This is semantic nonsense and purely circular reasoning.

You're not getting it. The very proposition of discussing cognitive processes as comprehensible without language inherently relies on circular reasoning. The claim that thought occurs without language cannot be falsified. To analyze or describe thought, we must use language, which is the very tool that shapes and defines that thought. The discussion itself becomes impossible if you remove language from the equation, meaning language and thought are co-constituitve.

Just as Gödel showed that no formal system can be both complete and consistent, language as a system cannot fully encapsulate the entirety of cognitive processes without relying on foundational assumptions that it cannot internally validate. Attempting to describe thought without acknowledging this limitation is akin to seeking completeness in an inherently incomplete framework. Without language, the discussion becomes impossible, rendering the initial claim fundamentally flawed.

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

#218

Post by yarg » Sun, Oct 20, 2024, 5:08 AM UTC

slashdave wrote: post #210

yarg wrote: post #51

Is this not obvious? Language is a very poor substitute for freely flowing electrical information - it is evolved to compensate for the bottlenecks to external communication - bottlenecks that are lacking an internal analogue. It's also a highly advanced feature - something as heavily optiimised as evolved life would not allow something as vital as cognition to be hampered by a lack of means for high fidelity externa…

Perhaps. But one could argue that the development of language (as necessary for communication, its original purpose) was the seed that lead to evolutionary development of deeper thinking.

100% deeper thought - and to a large extent the capacity for linguistic categorisation of objects is incredibly helpful in developing a deeper cognitive understanding of the world around us...

But the most fundamental boon that it offered was in terms of planning and organisation. Before language we'd point and grunt and go there and do the thing that we were gesturing that we were going to do.

But that's a very crude form of planning - you're pretty much just going all in on Leeroy Jenkins.

But actually (and horrifically) I think it's the gift of Kane that speaking and planning permitted; well organised humans (the smartest things on the planet) have been figuring out increasingly better ways to both kill each other and not to die themselves in a brutal feedback loop for a very long time now.

It's brutal as fuck, but it's Darwinian gold.

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

#219

Post by jhrmnn » Sun, Oct 20, 2024, 5:12 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #169

CSMastermind wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 har…

Even in cognitive tasks expressed via language, something like a memory feels necessary. At which point it’s not a LLM as in a generic language model. It would become a language model conditioned on the memory state.

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

#220

Post by fhdsgbbcaA » Sun, Oct 20, 2024, 5:13 AM UTC

theptip wrote: post #166

fhdsgbbcaA wrote: post #118

Earlier 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…

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

If you don’t read or understand the code, then no, you aren’t reasoning.

The condition of “some people are bad at thing” does not equal “computer better at thing than people”, but I see this argument all the time in LLM/AI discourse.