Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

> I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100).

I very strongly suspect that you're overestimating yourself.

I'm a brilliant genius according to IQ tests. Think me arrogant or conceited or whatever - that is literally the truth, fact - proven many times in the educational system (I was homeschooled and didn't follow any sort of curriculum and was allowed to do whatever I wanted bc I kept testing higher than almost everyone) and just for kicks also - the last time I took an IQ test I was in my late 20s and a friend and I had a bet about who could score higher completely stoned off of our ass. We rolled enough blunts apiece that we could be continuously smoking marijuana as we took the IQ test, which followed several bongs finished between the two of us. I was so high that I couldn't keep the numbers straight on one of the number pattern questions - it was ridiculous. I scored 124, my lowest "serious" attempt ever - all of this is 100% true. I need anyone to believe me - take this how you will but I have an opinion that is a bit different.

I'm brilliant - I've read volumes of encyclopedias, my hobbies include comparative theology, etymology, quantum mechanics and predicting the future with high accuracy (I only mention stuff I'm certain of tho ;) but so much so it disturbs my friends and family.

The highest I scored was in the 160s as a teenager but I truly believe they were over compensating for my age - only as an adult have I learned most children are stupid and they maybe in fact didn't over compensate. I am different than anyone else I've ever personally met - I fundamentally see the world different.

All of that is true but that's a rather flawed way of assessing intelligence - fr. I'm being serious. The things we know can free us as much as they can trap us - knowledge alone doesn't make a man successful, wealthy, happy or even healthy - I'm living evidence of this. That doesn't cut it as a metric for prediction of much. There are other qualities that are far more valuable in the societal sense.

Every Boss I've ever worked for has been dumber than me - each one I've learned invaluable stuff from. I was a boss once - in my day I owned and self taught/created an entire social network much like FB was a few years ago, mine obviously didn't take off and now I'm a very capable bum. Maybe someday something I'm tinkering with will make me millions but prolly not, for many reasons, I could write books if I wanted ;)

At the end of the day, the facts are what they are - there is an optimal level of intelligence that is obviously higher than the bottom but is nowhere near the top tier, very likely near that 100 IQ baseline. What separates us all is our capabilities - mostly stuff we can directly control, like learning a trade.

A Master Plumber is a genius plumber by another name and that can and obviously is most often, learned genius. What you sus about yourself is truth - don't doubt that. No IQ test ever told me I lacked the tenacity of the C average student that would employ me someday - they can't actually measure the extent of our dedicated capacity.

I kno more than most people ever have before or rn presently - I don't know as much about plumbing as an apprentice with 2 years of a trade school dedicated to plumbing and a year or two of experience in the field, that's the reality of it. I could learn the trade - I could learn most every trade, but I won't. That's life. I can tell you how you the ancients plumbed bc that piqued my curiosity and I kno far more about Roman plumbing than I do how a modern city sewer system works. That's also life.

It isn't what we kno or how fast we can learn it - it's what we do that defines us.

Become more capable if you feel looked down on - this is the way bc even if what you hone your capabilities of can be replicated by others most won't even try.

That's my rant about this whole intelligence perception we currently have as a society. Having 100 IQ is nowhere near the barrier that having 150 IQ is.

Rant aside, to the article - how isn't this obvious? I mean feelings literally exist - not just the warm fuzzy ones, like the literal feeling of existence. Does a monkey's mind require words to interpret pain or pleasure for example. Do I need to know what "fire" or "hot" is in a verbal context to sufficiently understand "burn" - words exists to convey to to others what doesn't need to be conveyed to us. That's their function. Communication. To facilitate communication with our social brethren we adopt them fundamentally as our Lego blocks for understanding the world - we pretend that words comprising language are the ideas themselves. A banana is a - the word is the fruit, they are the same in our minds but if I erase the word banana and all it's meaning of the fruit and I randomly encounter a banana - I still can taste it. No words necessary.

Also, you can think without words, deliberately and consciously - even absentmindedly.

And LLMs can't reason ;)

Truthfully, the reality is that a 100 IQ normal human is far more capable than any AI I've been given access to - in almost every metric I attempted to asses I ultimately didn't even bother as it was so obvious that humans are functionally superior.

When AI can reason - you, and everyone else, will kno it. It will be self evident.

Anyways, tldr: ppl are smarter than given credit for, smarter and much more capable - IQ is real and matters but far less than we are led to believe. People are awesome - the epitome of biological life on Earth and we do a lot of amazing things and anyone can be amazing.

I hate it when the Hacker News collective belittles itself - don't do that. I rant here bc it's one of the most interesting places I've found and I care about what all of you think far more than I care about your IQ scores.

Sure, when humans use multiple skill to address a specific problem, you can sometimes outperform them by scaling a spefic one of those skills.

When it comes to general intelligence, I think we are trying to run before we can walk. We can't even make a computer with a basic, animal level understanding of the world. Yet we are trying to take a tool that was developed on top of system that already had an understanding of the world and use it to work backwards to give computers an understanding of the world.

I'm pretty skeptical that we're going to succeed at this. I think you have to be able to teach a computer to climb a tree or hunt (subhuman AGI) before you can create superhuman AGI.

You seem to be conflating "different hardware" with proof that "language hardware" uses "software" equivalent to LLMs.

LLMs basically become practical when you simply scale compute up, and maybe both regions are "general compute", but language ends up on the "GPU" out of pure necessity.

So to me, these are entirely distinct questions: is the language region able to do general cognitive operations? What happens when you need to spell out "ubiquitous" or declense a foreign word in a language with declension (which you don't have memory patterns for)?

I agree it seems obvious that for better efficiency (size of training data, parameter count, compute ability), human brains use different approach than LLMs today (in a sibling comment, I bring up an example of my kids at 2yo having a better grasp of language rules than ChatGPT with 100x more training data).

But let's dive deeper in understanding what each of these regions can do before we decide to compare to or apply stuff from AI/CS.

You're sidestepping the problem. Feeling warmth is a sensory issue. Connecting the fact that you're feeling warm with the fact that you're in the sun is cognition. In order to do that, you are doing the work of creating language. Sun equals warm.