A little late to the thread, but this is obvious if you've done any reasonably serious mindfulness practice. When you are meditating, you can get to the point where the internal monolog (the yabbering of the "crazy monkey mind") is completely silenced. "You" are still present, and can direct your attention, and can observe all of the perceptions with full comprehension, without the verbal layer interpreting for you.
Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
301–310 of 424 posts
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think if you gave it the same biological inputs as a biological brain you would quickly see the lack of capabilities in any man made system.
Okay, but does that help us reach any meaningful conclusions? For example, okay some AI system doesn't have the capabilities of an auditory cortex or somatosensory cortex. Is there a reason for me to think it needs that?
Name a creature on earth without one.
Imagine trying to limit, control, or explain a being without familiar cognitive structures.
Is there a reason to care about such unfamiliar modalities of cognition?
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#303I’ve been hearing/reading about people who don’t have an inner monologue. Their experience of cognition is not verbally-based. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/inner-monologue-...
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.
What about when reading and writing? My inner monologue internally voices the words as I’m reading and writing. Do you not do that?
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#304This 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…
Most pre-deep learning architectures had separate modules like "language model", "knowledge base" and "inference component". Then LLMs came along, and ML folks got rather too excited that they contain implicit knowledge (which, of course, is required to deal with ambiguity). Then the new aspiration as "all in one" and "bigger is better", not analyzing what components are needed and how to orchestrate their interplay.…
> I do believe language adds to the power of thinking; while (other) animals can of course solve simple problems without language, language permits us to define layers of abstractions (by defining and sharing new concepts) that goes beyond simple, non-linguistic thoughts.
Based on my experience with toddlers, a rather smart dog, and my own thought processes, I disagree that language is a fundamental component of abstraction. Of sharing abstractions, sure, but not developing them.
When I'm designing a software system I will have a mental conception of the system as layered abstractions before I have a name for any component. I invent names for these components in order to define them in the code or communicate them to other engineers, but the intuition for the abstraction comes first. This is why "naming things" is one of the hard problems in computer science—because the name comes second as a usually-inadequate attempt to capture the abstraction in language.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
That philosophers talk about p-zombies seems like evidence to me that at least some of them don't believe that consciousness needs to have observable effects that can't be explained without consciousness. I don't say that I believe that too. I don't believe that there is anything particularly special about brains.
If brain isn't more special than Chinese room, then brain understands Chinese no better than Chinese room?
The brain is faster than the Chinese room, but other than that, yes, that's the so-called systems reply; Searle's response to it (have the person in the room memorize the instruction book) is beside the point, as you can teach people to perform all sorts of algorithms without them needing to understand the result.
As many people have pointed out, Searle's argument begs the question by tacitly assuming that if anything about the room understands Chinese, it can only be the person within it.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#306A little late to the thread, but this is obvious if you've done any reasonably serious mindfulness practice. When you are meditating, you can get to the point where the internal monolog (the yabbering of the "crazy monkey mind") is completely silenced. "You" are still present, and can direct your attention, and can observe all of the perceptions with full comprehension, without the verbal layer interpreting for you.
Came here to say something similar. You also notice that before any verbal thoughts arise, there are "primordial" thoughts, which are "felt" (sometimes as emotions.) These can instigate huge chains of verbal, visual, auditory thought, in turn generating more emotions, causing a (occasionally vicious) feedback loop.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#307>You can ask whether people who have these severe language impairments can perform tasks that require thinking. You can ask them to solve some math problems or to perform a social reasoning test, and all of the instructions, of course, have to be nonverbal because they can’t understand linguistic information anymore. Scientists have a lot of experience working with populations that don’t have language—studying prever…
Language is infinitely productive. Using a finite number of sounds or symbols, humans can produce unlimited utterance chains to communicate novel and complex ideas.
Think about it: almost every nontrivial conversation you’ve had or comment/blog/article/book you’ve read constituted an entirely new (to you) utterance which you understood and which enabled you to acquire new ideas and information you had previously lacked. No non-human animals have demonstrated this ability. At best they are able to perform single-symbol utterances to communicate previously-understood concepts (hungry, sad, scared, tired) but are unable to combine them to produce a novel utterance, the way a child could tell you about her day:
“Today the teacher asked me to multiply 3 times 7 and I got the answer right away! Then Bobby farted and the whole class was laughing. At lunch I bit my apple and my tooth felt funny. I think it’s starting to wiggle! Sally asked me if I could go to her house for a sleepover but I said I had to ask mom and dad first.”
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Why would he not "assume" that when humans have shaped their world so far beyond what it was, creating intricate layers of art, culture and science; even going into space or in the air? Man collectively tamed nature and the rest of the animal kingdom in a way that no beast ever has. Anyway, this is just like solipsism, you won't find a sincere one outside the asylum. Every Reddit intellectual writing such tired drive…
> Why would he not "assume" that when humans have shaped their world so far beyond what it was, creating intricate layers of art, culture and science; even going into space or in the air? Man collectively tamed nature and the rest of the animal kingdom in a way that no beast ever has.
Because whales or dolphins didn’t evolve hands. Hands are a foundational prerequisite for building technology. So if whales or dolphins had hands we don’t know if they would develop technology that can rival us.
Because we don’t know, that’s why he says don’t assume. This isn’t a “deep down we know” thing like your more irrational form of reasoning. It is a logical conclusion: we don’t know. So don’t assume.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#309A very long time ago I took a programming aptitude test, supposedly from IBM. The test was essentially detecting pattern anomalies. Two straight lines, one crooked. Pick the crooked. The patterns became increasingly more complex. I remember a little voice in my head verbalizing "two straight, one crooked". But at some point the voice stopped but I was sure which item broke the pattern.
My take away is that language is secondary to thinking - aka intuitive pattern detection. Language is the Watson to Sherlock.
The corollary is that treating language as primary in decision making is (sometimes) not as effective as treating it as secondary. At this point in my life (I'm old) I seem to have spent much of my life attempting to understand why my pattern matching/intuition made a choice that turned out to be so superior to my verbal language process.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most pre-deep learning architectures had separate modules like "language model", "knowledge base" and "inference component". Then LLMs came along, and ML folks got rather too excited that they contain implicit knowledge (which, of course, is required to deal with ambiguity). Then the new aspiration as "all in one" and "bigger is better", not analyzing what components are needed and how to orchestrate their interplay.…
Is beying another typo? 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…
I think it’s not entirely accurate to say that we “learn” to walk from a zero state. It’s clear that our DNA has embedded knowledge of how to walk and it develops our body appropriately. Our brains might also have preconditioning to make learning to walk much easier.
Music or sports are more interesting to investigate (in my opinion) since those specific actions won’t be preprogrammed and must be learned independently.
The same way we build abstractions for language in order to perform “telepathy” it seems like for music or sports we build body-specific abstractions. They work similar to words within our own brain but are not something easily communicated since they’re not tied to any language, it’s just a feeling.
I think it’s an interesting point that quite often the best athletes or musicians are terrible coaches. They probably have a much more innate internal language for their body that cannot be communicated easily. Partially, I think, that their body is more different than others which helps them be exceptional. Or that weaker athletes or musicians need to focus much more on lessons from others, so their body language gets tied much closer to human language and that makes it much easier for them to then communicate the lessons they learn to others.