Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

Since it controls my limbs, I consider it to be the real me. My inner monologue is a bit frustrated that it can't control my limbs, and it can't really communicate with whoever controls my limbs.

Then there is my inner monologue, which does my thinking almost always, in an auditory way: imagine the sound of spoken words in an ~5 sec long duration, and let the answer appear. I consider it as an auditory deducing thingy, and also an intelligence on its own.

I am mostly fine with this, tho I am curious about my non-verbal me, and I wish I'd know more about it.

Why I mention this is that I see both language and reasoning as rooted in this more fundamental cognitive ability of "coherent sequencing". This sits behind all kinds of planning and puzzling tasks where you have to project forward a sequence of theoretical actions and abstractly evaluate the outcome.

Which is all to say, I don't think language and reasoning are the same, but I do think it is likely they stem from the same underlying fundamental mechanisms in our brain. And as a consequence, it's actually quite plausible that LLMs can reconstruct mechanisms of reasoning from language, in a regressive model kind of fashion. ie: just because their are other ways to reason doesn't exclude language as a path to it.

In my personal learning journey I have been exploring the space of intuitive learning which is dominant in physical skills. Singing requires extremely precise control of actions we can't fully articulate or even rationalise. Teaching those skills requires metaphors and visualising and a whole lot of feedback + trial & error.

I believe that this kind of learning is fundamentally non verbal and we can achieve abstraction of these skills without language. Walking is the most universal of these skills and we learn it before we can speak but if you study it (or better try to program a robot to walk with as many degrees of freedom as the human musculoskeletal system) you will discover that almost all of us don't understand what all the things that go into the "simple" task of walking!

My understanding is that people who are gifted at sports or other physical skills like musical instruments have developed the ability to discover and embed these non verbal abstractions quickly. When I practise the piano and am working on something fast, playing semiquavers at anything above 120bpm is not really conscious anymore in the sense of "press this key then that key"

The concept of arpeggio is verbal but the action is non verbal. In human thought where does verbal and non-verbal start and end? Its probably a continuum

I think that using a LLM as the referred telepathy device to a wolfram-alpha/mathematica like general reasoning module is the way to AGI. The reasoning modules we have today are still much to narrow because of the very broad and deep search trees exploding in complexity. There is the need for a kind of pathfinder which could come from common knowledge already encoded in LLMs, like in o1. An system playing with real factual reasoning but exploring in directions coming from world knowledge.

What is still missing is the dialectic between possible and right, a physics engine, the motivation of analysed agents, the effects of emergent behavior and a lot of other -isms. But they may be encoded in the reasoning-explorer. And of course loops, more loops, refinement, working hypotheses and escaping cul-de-sacs.

There are people with great language skills and next to no reasoning skills. Some of them have general knowledge. If you ever talked to them, for a at least an hour freely meandering topics you will know. They seem intelligent for a couple of minutes but after a while you realise that they can refer fact, even interpret metaphors, but they will not find an elegant one, to navigate abstraction levels, even to differentiate root cause from effect or motivation and culture from cold logic. Some of them even ace IQ or can program but none did math so far. They hate, fear or despise rational results violation their learned rules. Sorry, chances are if you hate reading this, maybe you are one (or my English is annoyingly bad).

I love talking to people outside my bubble. They have an incredible broad diversity in abilities and experiences.