Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

I can think without language about all the things that I have experienced directly through some of my senses, but there is a huge number of things that I have never experienced directly and about which I can think only using language.

I doubt that this is different for other people. I believe that those people who claim that they never think using language are never thinking about the abstract or remote things about which I think using language.

For instance, I can think about a model of CPU without naming it, if it has been included in some of the many computers that I have used during the years, by recalling an image of the computer, or of its motherboard, or of the CPU package, or recalling some experiences when running programs on that computer, how slow or how responsive that felt, and so on.

I cannot think about a CPU that I have never used, e.g. Intel 11900K, without naming it.

Similarly, I can think without language about the planet Jupiter, which I have seen directly many times, or even about the planet Neptune, which I have never seen with my eyes, but I have seen in photographs, but I cannot think otherwise than with words about some celestial bodies that I have never seen.

The same for verbs, some verbs name actions about which I can think by recalling images or sounds or smells or tactile feelings that correspond with typical results of those actions. Other verbs are too abstract, so I can think about the corresponding action only using the word that names it.

For some abstract concepts, one could imagine a sequence of images, sounds etc. that would suggest them, but that would be like a pantomime puzzle and it would be a too slow way of thinking.

I can look at a wood plank thrown over a precipice and I can conclude that it may be safe to walk on it without language, but if I were to design a bridge guaranteed to resist to the weight of some trucks passing on it, I could not do that design without thinking with language.

Therefore I believe that language is absolutely essential for complex abstract thinking, even if there are alternative ways of thinking that may be sufficient even most of the time for some people.

We should look to the animals.

Higher order faculties aside, animals seem like us, just simpler.

The higher functioning ones appear to have this missing thing too. We can see it in action. Perhaps all of them do and it is just harder for us when the animal thinks very differently or maybe does not think as much, feeling more, for example.

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Now, about that thing... and the controversy:

Given an organism, or machine for this discussion, is of sufficiently robust design and complexity that it can precisely differentiate itself from everything else, it is a being.

This thing we are missing is an emergent property, or artifact that can or maybe always does present when a state of being also presents.

We have not created a machine of this degree yet.

Mother nature has.

The reason for emergence is a being can differentiate sensory input as being from within, such as pain, or touch, and from without, such as light or motion.

Another way to express this is closed loop vs open loop.

A being is a closed loop system. It can experience cause and effect. It can be the cause. It can be the effect.

A lot comes from this closed loop.

There can be the concept of the self and it has real meaning due to the being knowing what is of itself or something, everything else.

This may be what forms consciousness. Consciousness may require a closed loop, and organism of sufficient complexity to be able to perceive itself.

That is the gist of it.

These systems we make are fantastic pieces. They can pattern match and identify relationships between the data given in amazing ways.

But they are open loop. They are not beings. They cannot determine what is part of them, what they even are,or anything really.

I am both consistently amazed and dismayed at what we can get LLM systems to do.

They are tantalizingly close!

We found a piece of how all this works and we are exploiting the cral out of it. Ok fine. Humans are really good at that.

But it will all taper off. There are real limits because we will eventually find the end goal will be to map out the whole problem space.

Who has tried computing that? It is basically all possible human thought. Not going to happen.

More is needed.

And that "more" can arrive at thoughts without having first seen a few bazillion to choose from.

> What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs

I am not convinced it follows. Sure LLMs don’t seem complete however there’s a lot of unspoken inference going on in LLMs that don’t map into a language directly already - the inner layers of the deep neural net that operates on abstract neurons.

> but there is a huge number of things that I have never experienced directly and about which I can think only using language.

This makes me think of the Tao Te Ching, which opens with (translation dependent, of course)

   The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
   The name that can be named is not the eternal name

As one of those people most of the time (communicating with other people is the main exception), I still find it astounding that it's hard for some people to understand.

Take riding a bike: I presume even people with an overactive inner monologue aren't constantly planning their actions (brakes, steering, turns) in words. Then just extend that out to most other stuff.