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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

#241

Post by ninetyninenine »

batch12 wrote: post #184
kridsdale1 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t assume whales are less intelligent than humans. They’re tuned for their environment. They won’t assemble machines with their flippers but let’s toss you naked in the pacific and see if you can communicate and collaborate with peers 200km away on complex hunting strategies.

Let's toss a whale on land and see if it can communicate and collaborate with peers 10 ft away on anything. I don't think being tuned to communicate underwater makes them more intelligent than humans.

> I don't think being tuned to communicate underwater makes them more intelligent than humans.

Your responding to a claim that was never made. The claim was don't assume humans are smarter than whales. Nobody said whales are more intelligent than humans. He just said don't assume.

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

#242

Post by agumonkey »

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…

At times I had impaired brain function (lots of soft neurological issues, finger control, memory loss, balance issues) but surprisingly the core area responsible for mathematical reasoning was spared .. that was a strange sensation, almost schizophrenic.

And yeah it seems that core primitives of intelligence exist very low in our brains. And with people like Michael Levin, there may even be a root beside nervous systems.

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

#243

Post by senand »

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…

This seems quite reasonable, but I recently heard a podcast (https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/06/24/280-...) that LLMs are more likely to be very good at navigating what they have been trained on, but very poor at abstract reasoning and discovering new areas outside of their training. As a single human, you don't notice, as the training material is greater than everything we could ever learn.

After all, that's what Artificial General Intelligence would at least in part be about: finding and proving new math theorems, creating new poetry, making new scientific discoveries, etc.

There is even a new challenge that's been proposed: https://arcprize.org/blog/launch

> It makes sense that the process of thinking and the process of translating those thoughts into and out of language would be distinct

Yes, indeed. And LLMs seem to be very good at _simulating_ the translation of thought into language. They don't actually do it, at least not like humans do.

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

#244

Post by numpad0 »

xiande04 wrote: post #26
bassrattle wrote: post #16

Is this the death of the Sapir-Whorf theory?

No. Just because words are not needed for cognitive processes, does not mean that people still can and do think in language. The properties of that language could then influence thought. This is known as the Weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (note "hypothesis", not "theory").

This also doesn't say that the non-literal cognitive process is DNA-wired logic. Could very well be culturally constructed as well.

IMO this rather reinforce Sapir-Whorf positions than refute, it means more than literal language/grammar influence thoughts. That's directly against UG theory that predetermined rigid grammar is all you need.

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

#245

Post by ninetyninenine »

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…

>What this tells me is there is clearly no “reasoning” happening whatsoever with either model, despite marketing claiming as such.

Not true. You yourself have failed at reasoning here.

The problem with your logic is that you failed to identify the instances where LLMs have succeeded with reasoning. So if LLMs both fail and succeed it just means that LLMs are capable of reasoning and capable of being utterly wrong.

It's almost cliche at this point. Tons of people see the LLM fail and ignore the successes then they openly claim from a couple anecdotal examples that LLMs can't reason period.

Like how is that even logical? You have contradictory evidence therefore the LLM must be capable of BOTH failing and succeeding in reason. That's the most logical answer.

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

#246

Post by keepamovin »

When I was in junior high, I remember a friend saying to me “you can’t think in images, you think in words.” She insisted, and couldn’t believe that I actually thought in images a lot of the time. she was pretty smart and creative.

But I thought in images and I still do in part. so I don’t think you need words to think.

I thought the people who did were overly computerized, maybe thinking in an over defined way.

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

#247

Post by Peteragain »

I know a little about this area and there is certainly a movement (glacial) away from thinking that thinking uses symbols, distributed or not. The argument cannot be made in a popular science article and so such articles inevitably fall back on popular ideas of what thinking is. The alternatives: the embodied nature of reasoning is one direction and many talk of an "enacivist" approach. There are certainly some kinds of thinking that require symbols, but a surprisingly large and diverse range of intelligent behaviour can be done by just wiring stuff up. Interestingly, a significant amount seems amenable to a mechanism based on "glorified auto-complete" (cf Hinton) and I have written something on the sociological variant - something readable I hope - arxiv.org/abs/2402.08403

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

#248

Post by agumonkey »

avazhi wrote: post #188
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…

It’s impossible to overstate how crude and useless blood flow MRI studies are, at least relative to the hype they receive. Spoiler alert: brains require a lot of blood, constantly, just to not die. Looking at blood flow on an MRI to determine neural circuitry has to deal with the double whammy of both an extremely crude tool and a correlation/causation fallacy. This article and the study are arguably useless.

The connectome and brain mapping efforts might be a better research path for the coming years I guess

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

#249

Post by numpad0 »

mcswell wrote: post #179
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Language's purpose is thought Language's purpose - why it arose - is more likely communication, primarily external communication. The benefit of using language to communicate with yourself via "inner voice" - think in terms of words - seems a secondary benefit, especially considering that less than 50% of people report doing this. But certainly language, especially when using a large vocabulary of abstract and spec…

Whether language's purpose was communication or thought is not easily answered. For one, how would you know? It left no fossils, nor do we have any other kind of record from that time. For another, the very question implies a teleological view of evolution, which is arguably wrong. As for what 50% of people report (where did that number come from?), we have virtually zero intuitive insight into the inner workings of…

hot take: language's original purpose must have been to lie.

It doesn't take words to understand implication of a club in your hand and a body of dead ape. From there it takes either violence or words to defend yourself(rightfully or not). Here, using language to explain the situation is more efficient.

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

#250

Post by jamiek88 »

at_a_remove wrote: post #227
Animats wrote: post #190

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? 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 c…

I like your premise! And will check out Harlie!
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