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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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You are under the false assumption that thought can only be described by language. Why are you constructing this false hierarchy? Furthermore, symbolic constructs are not by definition language. The opposite, really. Language cannot be formed without symbols. Symbols, however, do not need language.

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You are under the false assumption that thought can only be described by language. Why are you constructing this false hierarchy? Furthermore, symbolic constructs are not by definition language. The opposite, really. Language cannot be formed without symbols. Symbols, however, do not need language.

How else can thought be described if not through language? I don't know what you mean by "symbolic constructs." Symbols are the foundation of language—they're not the opposite. There is no sense in which symbols exist outside of at the very least a protolinguistic system. Once you begin to associate sensory data with meaning, you are doing the work of creating language. To analyze or describe cognition, we must use language, which organizes symbols into meaningful constructs. That thought occurs without language is not even wrong per se. It's unfalsifiable, which frankly is worse than being wrong in a scientific context. As Wittgenstein puts it, 'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.' Without language, discussing thought is impossible, making the claim that thought occurs without language scientifically untenable. It is an attempt to position thought as the transcendental signified.

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

#223

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 To some extent this is true. To calculate A + B you could for example generate A, B for trillions of combinations and encode that within the network. And it would calculate this faster than any human could. But that's not intelligence. And Apple's research showed that LLMs are simply inferring relationships based on the tokens i…

> To calculate A + B you could for example generate A, B for trillions of combinations and encode that within the network. And it would calculate this faster than any human could.

I don't feel like this is a very meaningful argument because if you can do that generation then you must already have a superhuman machine for that task.

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

#224
post #201
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you think this research is wrong? (it claims llms can not reason) https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/llms-cant-perform-genuine... or do you maybe think no logical reasoning is needed to do everything a human can do? Tho humans seem to be able to do logical reasoning

I’ll pop in with a friendly “that research is definitely wrong”. If they want to prove that LLMs can’t reason, shouldn’t they stringently define that word somewhere in their paper? As it stands, they’re proving something small (some of today’s LLMs have XYZ weaknesses) and claiming something big (humans have an ineffable calculator-soul). LLMs absolutely 100% can reason, if we take the dictionary definition; it’s tri…

Chasing our own tail with concepts like "reasoning". Let's move the concept a bit - "search". Can LLMs search for novel ideas and discoveries? They do under the right circumstances. You got to provide idea testing environments, the missing ingredient. Search and learn, it's what humans do and AI can do as well.

The whole issue with "reasoning" is that is an incompletely defined concept. Over what domain, what problem space, and what kind of experimental access do we define "reasoning"? Search is better as a concept because it comes packed with all these things, and without conceptual murkiness. Search is scientifically studied to a greater extent.

I don't think we doubt LLMs can learn given training data, we already accuse them of being mere interpolators or parrots. And we can agree to some extent the LLMs can recombine concepts correctly. So they got down the learning part.

And for the searching part, we can probably agree its a matter of access to the search space not AI. It's an environment problem, and even a social one. Search is usually more extended than the lifetime of any agent, so it has to be a cultural process, where language plays a central role.

When you break reasoning/progress/intelligence into "search and learn" it becomes much more tractable and useful. We can also make more grounded predictions on AI, considering the needs for search that are implied, not just the needs for learning.

How much search did AlphaZero need to beat us at go? How much search did humans pack in our 200K years history over 10,000 generations? What was the cost of that journey of search? That kind of questions. In my napkin estimations we solved 1:10000 of the problem by learning, search is 10000x to a million times harder.

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone defines AI as "doing the thing that biological brains do" though, we define it in terms of capabilities of the system.

I think if you gave it the same biological inputs as a biological brain you would quickly see the lack of capabilities in any man made system.

Okay, but does that help us reach any meaningful conclusions? For example, okay some AI system doesn't have the capabilities of an auditory cortex or somatosensory cortex. Is there a reason for me to think it needs that?

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are under the false assumption that thought can only be described by language. Why are you constructing this false hierarchy? Furthermore, symbolic constructs are not by definition language. The opposite, really. Language cannot be formed without symbols. Symbols, however, do not need language.

How else can thought be described if not through language? I don't know what you mean by "symbolic constructs." Symbols are the foundation of language—they're not the opposite. There is no sense in which symbols exist outside of at the very least a protolinguistic system. Once you begin to associate sensory data with meaning, you are doing the work of creating language. To analyze or describe cognition, we must use l…

Yes, you need language to describe (discuss) something. But not everything that exists must have a description. Furthermore, meaningful does not require organization.

If you stand outside under the sun, do you have to be able to write the word "sun" in order to feel warm?

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

#227
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? Probably by putting simulated animals into simulated environments where they have to surv…

"Where are we going to find the equivalent data set that will train this other kind of thinking?"

Just a personal opinion, but in my shitty When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One (and others) unpublished fiction pastiche (ripoff, really), I had the nascent AI stumble upon Cyc as its base for the world and "thinking about how to think."

I never thought that Cyc was enough, but I do think that something Cyc-like is necessary as a component, a seed for growth, until the AI begins to make the transition from the formally defined, vastly interrelated frames and facts in Cyc to being able to growth further and understand the much less formal knowledgebase you might find in, say Wikipedia.

Full agreement with your animal model is only sensible. If you think about macaques, they have a limited range of vocalization once they hit adulthood. Noe that the mothers almost never make a noise at their babies. Lacking language, when a mother wants to train an infant, she hurts it. (Shades of Blindsight there) She picks up the infant, grasps it firmly, and nips at it. The baby tries to get away, but the mother holds it and keeps at it. Their communication is pain. Many animals do this. But they also learn threat displays, the promise of pain, which goes beyond mere carrot and stick.

The more sophisticated multicellular animals (let us say birds, reptiles, mammals) have to learn to model the behavior of other animals in their environment: to prey on them, to avoid being prey. A pond is here. Other animals will also come to drink. I could attack them and eat them. And with the macaques, "I must scare the baby and pain it a bit because I no longer want to breastfeed it."

Somewhere along the line, modeling other animals (in-species or out-species) hits some sort of self-reflection and the recursion begins. That, I think, is a crucial loop to create the kind of intelligence we seek. Here I nod to Egan's Diaspora.

Looping back to your original point about the training data, I don't think that loop is sufficient for an AGI to do anything but think about itself, and that's where something like Cyc would serve as a framework for it to enter into the knowledge that it isn't merely cogito ergo summing in a void, but that it is part of a world with rules stable enough that it might reason, rather than "merely" statistically infer. And as part of the world (or your simulated environment), it can engage in new loops, feedback between its actions and results.

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

#228
post #201
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you think this research is wrong? (it claims llms can not reason) https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/llms-cant-perform-genuine... or do you maybe think no logical reasoning is needed to do everything a human can do? Tho humans seem to be able to do logical reasoning

I’ll pop in with a friendly “that research is definitely wrong”. If they want to prove that LLMs can’t reason, shouldn’t they stringently define that word somewhere in their paper? As it stands, they’re proving something small (some of today’s LLMs have XYZ weaknesses) and claiming something big (humans have an ineffable calculator-soul). LLMs absolutely 100% can reason, if we take the dictionary definition; it’s tri…

> LLMs absolutely 100% can reason, if we take the dictionary definition; it’s trivial to show their ability to answer non-memorized questions, and the only way to do that is some sort of reasoning.

Um... What? That is a huge leap to make.

'Reasoning' is a specific type of thought process and humans regularly make complicated decisions without doing it. We uses hunches and intuition and gut feelings. We make all kinds of snap assessments that we don't have time to reason through. As such, answering novel questions doesn't necessarily show a system is capable of reasoning.

I see absolutely nothing resumbling an argument for humans having an "ineffable calculator soul", I think that might be you projecting. There is no 'categorical prohibition', only an analysis of the current flaws of specific models.

Personally, my skepticism about imminent AGI has to do believing we may be underestimating the complexity of the software running on our brain. We've reached the point where we can create digital "brains", or atleast portions of them. We may be missing some other pieces of a digital brain, or we may just not have the right software to run on it yet. I suspect it is both but that we'll have fully functional digital brains well before we figure out the software to run on them.

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

#229
post #201
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you think this research is wrong? (it claims llms can not reason) https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/llms-cant-perform-genuine... or do you maybe think no logical reasoning is needed to do everything a human can do? Tho humans seem to be able to do logical reasoning

I’ll pop in with a friendly “that research is definitely wrong”. If they want to prove that LLMs can’t reason, shouldn’t they stringently define that word somewhere in their paper? As it stands, they’re proving something small (some of today’s LLMs have XYZ weaknesses) and claiming something big (humans have an ineffable calculator-soul). LLMs absolutely 100% can reason, if we take the dictionary definition; it’s tri…

> Even if we accept the most fringe, anthropocentric theories like Penrose & Hammerhoff’s quantum tubules, that’s just a neural network with fancy weights.

First, while it is a fringe idea with little backing it, it's far from the most fringe.

Secondly, it is not at all known that animal brains are accurately modeled as an ANN, any more so than any other Turing-compatible system can be modeled as an ANN. Biological neurons are themselves small computers, like all living cells in general, with not fully understood capabilities. The way biological neurons are connected is far more complex than a weight in an ANN. And I'm not talking about fantasy quantum effects in microtubules, I'm talking about well-established biology, with many kinds of synapses, some of which are "multicast" in a spatially distinct area instead of connected to specific neurons. And about the non-neuronal glands which are known to change neuron behavior and so on.

How critical any of these differences are to cognition is anyone's guess at this time. But dismissing them and reducing the brain to a bigger NN is not wise.

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

#230
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll pop in with a friendly “that research is definitely wrong”. If they want to prove that LLMs can’t reason, shouldn’t they stringently define that word somewhere in their paper? As it stands, they’re proving something small (some of today’s LLMs have XYZ weaknesses) and claiming something big (humans have an ineffable calculator-soul). LLMs absolutely 100% can reason, if we take the dictionary definition; it’s tri…

Chasing our own tail with concepts like "reasoning". Let's move the concept a bit - "search". Can LLMs search for novel ideas and discoveries? They do under the right circumstances. You got to provide idea testing environments, the missing ingredient. Search and learn, it's what humans do and AI can do as well. The whole issue with "reasoning" is that is an incompletely defined concept. Over what domain, what problem…

You can't breakdown cognition into just "search" and "learn" without either ridiculously overloading those concepts or leaving a ton out.
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