[flagged]
Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
321–330 of 424 posts
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#322Does the act of assigning meaning to any thing count as language?
What if the things are part of a set, chosen for uniqueness and distinguishability. Meanings determined by tradition?
There's a lot of territory between the two.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#323Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#324As 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…
> 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…
That was a difficult thing for me as well -- if you have such great ideas in your head but they fall apart once you try to bring them down on paper, maybe those ideas simply aren't that great.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#325While not essential for thought, language is a very important tool in shaping and sharing thoughts. Another related tool is religion (for emotions instead of thoughts,) which funnily enough faces the same divergence language does. Right now society that calls itself "secular" simply does not understand the role of religion, and its importance in society. To be clear, I don't belong to any religion, I am saying one ne…
Materialism is such a religion. It's sciency and emotion-free, so it appeals to the secular minds.
Holding materialism as an axiom, either directly or non-directly (through other axioms) could be called a "religion" (though at that point I'm not sure what couldn't be), and either way that could be considered bad.
Thinking some type of materialism is even mostly correct, with the sum over all mostly materialist theories being close to 1, isn't a religion at all.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#326This 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…
Not sure about that. The same abstract model could be used for both (symbols generated in sequence). For language the symbols have meaning in the context of language. For non-language thought they don't. Nature seems to work this way in general: re-using/purposing the same underlying mechanism over and over at different levels in the stack. All of this could be a fancy version of very old hardware that had the purpose of controlling swimming direction in fish. Each symbol is a flick of the tail.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 dolphin…
It is very naïve to think that the availability of such tools isn't partly responsible for that intelligence; “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”. And it seems too man-centric of an excuse: you can see all our civilization being built on hands so you state that there can't be a way without. The "they MIGHT be as intelligent, just lacking hands" theory can't have the same weight as "nah" in an hones…
The difference is that my conclusion is logical and yours is an assumption.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#328This 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…
Not sure about that. The same abstract model could be used for both (symbols generated in sequence). For language the symbols have meaning in the context of language. For non-language thought they don't. Nature seems to work this way in general: re-using/purposing the same underlying mechanism over and over at different levels in the stack. All of this could be a fancy version of very old hardware that had the purpos…
I like to think of the non-verbal portions as the biological equivalents of ASICs. even skills like riding a bicycle might start out as conscious effort (a vision model, a verbal intention to ride and a reinforcement learning teacher) but is then replaced by a trained model to do the job without needing the careful intentional planning. some of the skills in the bag of tricks are fine tuned by evolution.
ultimately, there's no reason that a general algorithm couldn't do the job of a specific one, just less efficiently.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#329While not essential for thought, language is a very important tool in shaping and sharing thoughts. Another related tool is religion (for emotions instead of thoughts,) which funnily enough faces the same divergence language does. Right now society that calls itself "secular" simply does not understand the role of religion, and its importance in society. To be clear, I don't belong to any religion, I am saying one ne…
In secular society art is the language for emotions.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#330This 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…
You highlight an expectation that the “truer intelligence” is a singular device, once isolated would mobilize ultimate AGI.
All intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty (the potential distributed problem.) if it does not mitigate uncertainty it is not intelligence, it is something else.
Intelligence is a technology. For all life intelligence and the infrastructure of performing work efficiently (that whole entropy thing again) is a technology. Life is an arms race to maintain continuity (identity, and the very capacity of existential being.)
The modern problem is achieving reliable behavioral intelligence (constrained to a specific problem domain.) AGI is a phantasm. What manifestation of intelligence appears whole and complete and is always right? These are the sorts of lies you tell yourself, the ones that get you into trouble. They distract from tangible real world problems, perhaps causing some of them. True intelligence is a well calibrated “scalar” domain specific problem (uncertainty) reducer. There are few pressing idempotent obstructions in the real world.
Intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty.
Uncertainty is the domain of negative potential (what,where,why,how?)
Mitigation is the determinant resolve of any constructive or destructive interference affecting (terminal resolve within) the problem domain.
Examples of this may be piled together mountains high, and you may call that functional AGI, though you would be self deceiving. At some point “good enough” may be declared for anything so passing as yourselves.