351–360 of 424 posts
I don't know why Russell is catching strays. Saying language exists to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it does not in any way imply that you can't think without language.
> 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.
Surely these "non-verbal instructions" are some kind of language. Maybe all human action can be considered language.
A contrarian example to this research might be feral children, i.e people who have been raised away from humans.[0] In most cases they are mentally impaired; as in not having human-like intelligence. I don't think there is a good explanation why this happens to humans. And why it doesn't happen to other animals, which develop normally in species-typical way whether they are in the wild or in human captivity. It seems that most human behavior (even high-level intelligence) is learned / copied from other humans, and maybe this copied behavior can be considered language.
If humans are "copy machines", there's also a risk of completely losing the "what's it like to be a human" behavior if children of the future are raised by AI and algorithmic feeds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I’m not a neuroscience expert, but I do have a degree in philosophy. The Russell quote immediately struck me as misleading (especially without a citation). The author could show more integrity by including Russell’s full quote: > Language serves not only to express thoughts, but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it. It is sometimes maintained that there can be no thought without language, but to…
Practically, I think the origins of fire-making abilities in humans tend to undermine that viewpoint. No other species is capable of reliably starting a fire with a few simple tools, yet the earliest archaeological evidence for fire (1 mya) could mean the ability predated complex linguistic capabilities. Observation and imitation could be enough for transmitting the skill from the first proto-human who successfully accomplished the task to others.
P.S. This is also why Homo sapiens should be renamed Homo ignis IMO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Okay and how have we determined we have more intelligence than those species with this measure ?
However, I do think that a meaningful intelligence comparison between humans and dolphins, etc, would conclude that we are more intelligent, especially based on our reasoning/planning (= multi-step prediction) abilities, which allows us not only to predict our environment but also to modify it to our desires in very complex ways.
We only consciously "know" something when we represent it with symbols. There are also unconscious processes that some would consider "thought", like driving a car safely without thinking about what you're doing, but I wouldn't consider those thoughts.
I find an interesting parallel to Chain of Thought techniques with LLMs. I personally don't (consciously) know what I think until I articulate it.
To me this is similar to giving an LLM space to print out intermediary thoughts, like a JSON array of strings. Language is our programming language, in a sense. Without representing something in a word/concept, it doesn't exist.
"Ich vermute, dass wir nur sehen, was wir kennen." - Nietzsche, where "know" refers to labeling something by projecting a concept/word onto it.
Earlier 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.…
> 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 abst…
Remember in CS theory, a language is just a set of strings. If you think in pictures that is STILL a language if your pictures are structured.
So I'm really handwaving the above just to suggest that it all depends on the assumptions that each expert is making in elucidating this debate which has a long history.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay and how have we determined we have more intelligence than those species with this measure ?
Clearly we haven't, given that there is very little agreement as to what intelligence is. This is just my definition, although there's a lot behind why I define it this way. However, I do think that a meaningful intelligence comparison between humans and dolphins, etc, would conclude that we are more intelligent, especially based on our reasoning/planning (= multi-step prediction) abilities, which allows us not only…
I'm not sure how you would make meaningful comparisons here. We can't communicate to them as they communicate and we live in almost completely different environments. Any such comparison would be extremely biased to us.
>which allows us not only to predict our environment but also to modify it to our desires in very complex ways.
We modify our environment mostly through technology. Intelligence is a big part of technology sure but it's not the only part of it and without the other parts (hands with opposable thumbs, fire etc), technology as we know it wouldn't exist and our ability to modify the environment would seem crippled to any outside observer regardless of how intelligent we may be.
It's not enough to think that the earth revolves around the sun, we need to build the telescopes (with hands and materials melted down and forged with fire) to confirm it.
It's not enough to dream and devise of flight, we need the fire to create the materials that we dug with our hands and the hands to build them.
It's not enough to think that Oral communication is insufficient for transmitting information through generations. What else will you do without opposable thumbs or an equivalent ?
Fire is so important for so many reasons but one of the biggest is that it was an easy source of large amounts of energy that allowed us to bootstrap technology. Where's that easy source of energy underwater ?
Without all the other aspects necessary for technology, we are relegated to hunter/gatherer levels of influencing the environment at best. Even then, we still crafted tools that creatures without opposable thumbs would never be able to craft.
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…
Despite being an LLM skeptic of sorts, I don’t think that necessarily follows. The LLM matrix multiplication machinery may well be implementing an equivalent of the human non-language cognitive processing as a side effect of the training. Meaning, what is separated in the human brain may be mixed together in an LLM.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LLMs absolutely 100% can reason, if we take the dictionary definition; it’s trivial to show their ability to answer non-memorized questions, and the only way to do that is some sort of reasoning. Um... What? That is a huge leap to make. 'Reasoning' is a specific type of thought process and humans regularly make complicated decisions without doing it. We uses hunches and intuition and gut feelings. We make all kinds…
All well said, and I agree on many of your final points! But you beautifully highlighted my issue at the top: 'Reasoning' is a specific type of thought process If so, what exactly is it? I don’t need a universally justified definition, I’m just looking for an objective, scientific one. A definition that would help us say for sure that a particular cognition is or isn’t a product of reason. I personally have lots of t…
Unfortunately, you won't get one. We simply don't know enough about cognition to create rigourous definitions of the type you are looking for.
Instead, this paper, and the community in general are trying to perform practical capability assessments. The claim that the GSM8k measures "mathematical reasoning" or "logical reasoning" didn't come from the skeptics.
Alan Turring didn't try to define intelligence, he created a practical test that he thought would be a good benchmark. These days we believe we have better ones.
> I just don’t find this kind of critique specific enough to have any sort of scientific validity. IMHO
"Good cognition" seems like dismisal of a definition, but this is exactly the definition that the people working on this care about. They are not philosphers, they are engineers who are trying to make a system "better" so "good cognition" is exactly what they want.
The paper digs into finding out more about what types of changes impacts peformance on established metrics. The "noop" result is pretty interesting since "relevancy detection" isn't something we commonly think of as key to "good cognition", but a consequence of it.