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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

#281

Post by GoblinSlayer »

fjfaase wrote: post #90

As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100). I have struggled my whole life to express my ideas with language. I conside…

IME fast talking people simply give half assed formulations of half assed ideas.

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

#282

Post by soulofmischief »

namaria wrote: post #275
soulofmischief wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This view represents one possible subjective experience of the world. But there are many different possible ways a human brain can learn to experience the world. I am a sensoral thinker, I often think and internally express myself in purely images or sounds. There are, however, some kinds of thoughts I've learned I can only fully engage with if I speak to myself out loud or at least inside of my head. The most approp…

[flagged]

What? I used the term "sensoral" after thinking about what I wanted to communicate. I have no idea if that is a pop psychology term, I didn't google it. I was attempting to communicate that I often think in visual, aural, tactile or olfactory modes, not just visually or via inner monologue, especially when recalling memories.

You're just projecting at this point and stalking previous comments to start arguments. That is exceedingly immature and absolutely against Hacker News guidelines. You need to reevaluate your behavior. Please refrain from continuing to start arguments on previous posts.

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

#283

Post by GoblinSlayer »

NemoNobody wrote: post #233
tines wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100) I used to rationalize to myself along similar lines for a long time, then…

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…

Do you understand quantum mechanics? It's one thing to be smart, it's another to use your ability.

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

#284

Post by Koala_ice »

tsimionescu wrote: post #229
bbor wrote: 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…

> 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 n…

There's a lot of other interesting biology besides propagation of electrical signals. Examples include: 1/ Transport of mRNAs (in specialized vesicle structures!) between neurons. 2/ Activation and integration of retrotransposons during brain development (which I have long hypothesized acts as a sort of randomization function for the neural field). 3/ Transport of proteins between and within neurons. This isn't just adventitious movement, either - neurons have a specialized intracellular transport system that allows them to deliver proteins to faraway locations (think >1 meters).

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

#285

Post by ryandv »

bmacho wrote: post #272

There is a non-verbal me . E.g. who moves my limbs, feels the feelings (hunger, happiness, ..), and sometimes helps my verbal me to think (in math or in chess the answer just appears for the verbal me), or in sudden situations it takes over, and it makes decisions very fast. 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'…

Julian Jaynes has written on this verbal/non-verbal dichotomy in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, in which he literally defines god to mean those phenomena related to right hemispheric structures and activities in the brain that are communicated over the anterior commissures and interpreted by left hemispheric language centers as speech; hence the many mystical reports of "hearing the voice of god" as passed down through the aeons. Such phenomena have gone by many other names: gods, the genius, the higher self, the HGA... though this metaphysical and spiritual terminology is best understood as referring to non-verbal, non-rational, non-linear forms of cognition that are closer to free association and intuitive pattern matching (similar to Kahneman's "System 1" thinking). There even exist certain mystical traditions which purport to facilitate deeper connections with this subsystem of the mind; see for instance Eshelman's accounting of the western esoteric tradition in The Mystical and Magical System of the A.'.A.'. at [0] (currently defunct pending the restoration of the Internet Archive).

[0] https://archive.org/details/a-a-the-mystical-and-magical-sys...

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

#286

Post by adrian_b »

aniijbod wrote: post #104

Thought and language are intertwined in ways we don’t fully grasp. The fact that certain cognitive tasks, like comprehension, can proceed without engaging traditional language-related brain regions doesn't mean thought doesn't use language—it just means we might not yet understand how it does. Thought could employ other forms of linguistic-like processes that Fedorenko's experiments, or even current brain-imaging tec…

Moreover, I believe that one should distinguish between "language" and "words".

The parent article is mostly about thinking without "words", not necessary without a "language".

Some thoughts might be completely different from sentences in a language, probably when they have a non-sequential nature, but other thoughts are exactly equivalent to a sentence in a language, except that they do not use the words.

I can look and see to things that I recognize, e.g. A and B, and I can see that one is bigger than the other and I can think "A is bigger than B" without thinking at the words used in the spoken language, but nonetheless associating some internal concepts of "A", "B" and "is greater than", exactly like when formulating a spoken sentence.

I do not believe that such a thought can be considered as an example of thinking without language, but just as an example that for a subset of the words used in a spoken language there is an internal representation that is independent of the sequence of sounds or letters that compose a spoken or written language.

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

#288

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#289

Post by alserio »

dleeftink wrote: post #182
alserio wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that programming languages and natural languages are processed with the same wetware should be testable with something like the tests described in this submission. I don't expect it to be true, but only expecting something is not science

Some progress has been made in this area, see [0], [1], [2] and [3], observing both similarities and dissimilarities in terms of language processing: Siegmund, J., Kästner, C., Apel, S., Parnin, C., Bethmann, A., Leich, T. & Brechmann, A. (2014). Understanding understanding source code with functional magnetic resonance imaging. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 378-389)…

thank you! fascinating reads

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

#290

Post by klabb3 »

senand wrote: post #243
CSMastermind wrote: post #149

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…

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…

> As a single human, you don't notice, as the training material is greater than everything we could ever learn.

This bias is real. Current gen ai works proportionally well the more known it is. The more training data, the better the performance. When we ask something very specific, we have the impression that it’s niche. But there is tons of training data also on many niche topics, which essentially enhances the magic trick – it looks like sophisticated reasoning. Whenever you truly go “off the beaten path”, you get responses that are (a) nonsensical (illogical) and (b) “pulls” you back towards a “mainstream center point” so to say. Anecdotally of course..

I’ve noticed this with software architecture discussions. I would have some pretty standard thing (like session-based auth) but I have some specific and unusual requirement (like hybrid device- and user identity) and it happily spits out good sounding but nonsensical ideas. Combining and interpolating entirely in the the linguistic domain is clearly powerful, but ultimately not enough.

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