Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 424 posts

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

#341

Post by famouswaffles »

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…

You are getting derailed because of the name we've chosen to call these models but only the first few and last few layers of LLMs deal with tokens. The rest deal with abstract representations and models learnt during training. Language goes in and Language comes out but Language is not the in-between for either LLMs or Humans.

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

#342

Post by erichocean »

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…

> So if someone figures out to do this, it will probably take less hardware than an LLM.

We have, it's called DreamCoder. There's a paper and everything.

Everything needed for AGI exists today, people simply have (incorrect) legacy beliefs about cognition that are holding them back (e.g. "humans are rational").

https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08381

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

#343

Post by jumping_frog »

smallerfish wrote: post #301

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.

This "feeling" of full comprehension can be an illusion. Similar to how we think we are taking in 140 degree of full visual information through our eyes. In truth, we can only take in accurate information about the size of our thumb at arms length. The so called saccades phenomenon.

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

#344

Post by visarga »

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…

> No idea how to do this

We need to add the 5 senses, of which we have now image, audio and video understanding in LLMs. And for agentic behavior they need environments and social exposure.

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

#345

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

mcswell wrote: post #179
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Language's purpose is thought Language's purpose - why it arose - is more likely communication, primarily external communication. The benefit of using language to communicate with yourself via "inner voice" - think in terms of words - seems a secondary benefit, especially considering that less than 50% of people report doing this. But certainly language, especially when using a large vocabulary of abstract and spec…

Whether language's purpose was communication or thought is not easily answered. For one, how would you know? It left no fossils, nor do we have any other kind of record from that time. For another, the very question implies a teleological view of evolution, which is arguably wrong. As for what 50% of people report (where did that number come from?), we have virtually zero intuitive insight into the inner workings of…

Surely it's obvious that language production and perception evolved out of more primitive animal vocalizations, used for communicative purposes. How could it not have ?!

Note that human speech ability required more than brain support - it also required changes to the vocal apparatus for pronunciation (which other apes don't have), indicating that communication (vocalization) was either driving the development of language, or remained a very important part of it.

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

#346

Post by jumping_frog »

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…

I would like to propose that reasoning needs an intermediate representation for it to be effective. Consider the scene graph representation in computer graphics. This scene graph is the intermediate representation. The algorithm is not reasoning about individual pixels of two objects interacting in the scene graph. It uses IR. Now for some that IR takes the form of language/words. For some it takes the form of visuals. For some, these are just abstract feelings.

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

#347

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

famouswaffles wrote: post #338
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brain size isn't necessarily a very good correlate of intelligence. For example dolphins and elephants have bigger brains than humans, and sperm whales have much bigger brains (5x by volume). Neanderthals also had bigger brains than modern humans, but are not thought to have been more intelligent. A crow has a small brain, but also has very small neurons, so ends up having 1.5B neurons, similar to a dog or some monke…

Dolphins, Orcas, whales and other intelligent cetaceans do not have Hands and live in an environment without access to a technological accelerator like fire. The absence of both of these things is an incredible crippler for technological development. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are, you're never going to achieve much technologically without these. I don't think brain size correlations is as straightforward…

Intelligence isn't measured by ability to create technology or use tools.

Intelligence is the ability to use experience to predict your environment and the outcomes of your own actions. It's a tool for survival.

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

#348

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

mcswell wrote: post #171
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I think it's less than 50% of people that have an "inner voice" - using language to think. Other animals with at best very limited language, are still highly intelligent and capable of reasoning - apes, dogs, rats, crows, ...

"Highly intelligent" is not a word to be used with apes, dogs, rats or crows.

If that's your opinion, then define intelligence in a meaningful/reductive fashion (not just "i know it when i see it"), then defend this opinion based on that!

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

#349

Post by visarga »

jll29 wrote: post #265
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…

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.…

> the "end to end black box" approach is perhaps misguided, because the result will be a non transparent system by definition

A black box that works in human language and can be investigated with perturbations, embedding visualizations and probes. It explains itself as much ore more than we can.

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

#350

Post by alok-g »

swayvil wrote: post #322

Does 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.

How specifically do you define 'meaning' and (the domain of) 'any thing'? Pls. consider if your definition of language would lead to an inference that most animals have language abilities.
Post reply on HN