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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

#361

Post by cognitif »

upghost wrote: post #313
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #139

>> They’re basically the first model organism for researchers studying the neuroscience of language. They are not a biological organism, but until these models came about, we just didn’t have anything other than the human brain that does language. I think this is completely wrong-headed. It's like saying that until cars came about we just didn't have anything other than animals that could move around under its own po…

I've been trying to figure out to respond to this for a while. I appreciate the fact that you are pretty much the lone voice on this thread voicing this opinion, which I also share but tend to keep my mouth shut since it seems to be unpopular. It's hard for me to understand where my peers are coming from on the other side of this argument and respond without being dismissive, so I'll do my best to steelman the argume…

What does consciousness or subjective experience have to do with the relationship between language and cognition? I’m not following your argument.

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

#362

Post by taeric »

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…

I'm curious why "simulation" isn't the extra thing needed? Yes, we need language to communicate ideas. But you can simulate in your mind things happening that you don't necessarily have words for, yet. Right?

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

#363

Post by throwaway4aday »

djtango wrote: post #278
jll29 wrote: post #265

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.…

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 don't think motor skills are a good object to use in an argument about verbal vs non-verbal thinking. We have large regions of our brains primarily dedicated to motor skills and you can't argue that humans are any more talented or capable at controlling our bodies than other animals, we're actually rather poor performers in this area. You're right to say that you aren't conscious of the very highly trained movements you are making because they likely have only a tenuous connection with any part of your brain that we would recognize as possessing consciousness or thought, they are mostly learned reflexes and responses to internal and external stimuli at this point like a professional baseball player who can automatically catch a ball flying at him before he's even aware of it.

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

#364

Post by psychoslave »

chongli wrote: post #307
psychoslave wrote: post #32

>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 lack…

> Language is infinitely productive. Using a finite number of sounds or symbols, humans can produce unlimited utterance chains to communicate novel and complex ideas.

We maybe disagree, in the sense that it seems to be mixing indefinitely bounded expressiveness with actual unlimited expression production that could potentially be in a bijective relationship with the an infinite set of expression.

We human are mortals and even at the whole humankind scale, we will produce a finite set of utterances.

The main thing bringing so much flexibility to languages, is our ability to reuse, fit and evolve them as we go through indefinitely many inedit experiences of the world. So something like context change tolerance. But if we want to be fair with crediting admirable unknowingly extensive creativeness, we should first consider the universe as a whole, with its permanent flow of novel context, which also include all interpretations of itself through mere mortals as ourself.

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

#365

Post by JumpCrisscross »

calf wrote: post #357
lolinder wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The conception here is that one's layered abstractions is basically an informal mathematics... which is formally structured... which is a formal grammar. It's your internal language, using internal symbols instead of English names. 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 su…

> conception here is that one's layered abstractions is basically an informal mathematics... which is formally structured... which is a formal grammar. It's your internal language, using internal symbols instead of English names

Unless we're getting metaphysical to the point of describing quantum systems as possessig a language, there are various continuous analog systems that can compute without a formal grammar. The language system could be the one that thinks in discrete 'tokens'; the conscious system something more complex.

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

#366

Post by psychoslave »

ryandv wrote: post #60
psychoslave wrote: post #32

>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…

They do, in the first section of the journal article itself: > Do any forms of thought—our knowledge of the world and ability to reason over these knowledge representations—require language (that is, representations and computations that sup-port our ability to generate and interpret meaningfully structured word sequences)? Emphasis on "word sequences," to the exclusion of, e.g. body language or sign language. They g…

I don't find these excerpts in the linked article. Are you consulting an other document than the one pointed here?

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

#367

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

famouswaffles wrote: post #358
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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 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 ext…

Another angle to look at intelligence is that not all species need it, or need it to same degree. If you are a cow, or a crocodile, then you are a 1-trick grass-munching or zebra-munching pony, and have no need for intelligence. A generalist species like humans, that lives in a hugely diverse set of environments, with a hugely diverse set of food sources, has evolved intelligence (which in turn supports further generalization) to cope with this variety.

At least to our own perception, and degree of understanding, it would appear that the ocean habitat(s) of dolphins are far less diverse and demanding. Evidentially complex enough to drive their intelligence though, so perhaps we just don't understand the complexity of what they've evolved to do.

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

#368

Post by haswell »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #245
fhdsgbbcaA wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked both OpenAI and Claude the same difficult programming question. Each gave a nearly identical response down to the variable names and example values. I then looked it up and they had each copy/pasted the same Stack overflow answer. Furthermore, the answer was extremely wrong, the language I used was superficially similar to the source material, but the programming concepts were entirely different. What this te…

>What this tells me is there is clearly no “reasoning” happening whatsoever with either model, despite marketing claiming as such. Not true. You yourself have failed at reasoning here. The problem with your logic is that you failed to identify the instances where LLMs have succeeded with reasoning. So if LLMs both fail and succeed it just means that LLMs are capable of reasoning and capable of being utterly wrong. It…

Success doesn’t imply that “reasoning” was involved, and the definition of reasoning is extremely important.

Apple’s recent research summarized here [0] is worth a read. In short, they argue that what LLMs are doing is more akin to advanced pattern recognition than reasoning in the way we typically understand reasoning.

By way of analogy, memorizing mathematical facts and then correctly recalling these facts does not imply that the person actually understands how to arrive at the answer. This is why “show your work” is a critical aspect of proving competence in an education environment.

An LLM providing useful/correct results only proves that it’s good at surfacing relevant information based on a given prompt. That fact that it’s trivial to cause bad results by making minor but irrelevant changes to a prompt points to something other than a truly reasoned response, i.e. a reasoning machine would not get tripped up so easily.

- [0] https://x.com/MFarajtabar/status/1844456880971858028

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

#370

Post by branko_d »

alserio wrote: post #147
kerblang wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> During my life, I have met several people, especially among software engineers, who seem to be similar to me This begs a question though: Since programming is mostly done with language - admittedly primitive/pidgin ones - why isn't that a struggle? Not sure if you're a programmer yourself, but if so do you prefer certain programming languages for some sense of "less-verbalness" or does it even matter? Just wonderin…

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

Other than the word “language”, programming languages and natural languages really have very little in common.

Anecdotally, when I write code, I don’t “talk in my head”. The structures that I have in my brain are in fact difficult to put into words, and I can only vaguely describe them as interconnected 3D shapes evolving over time, or even just “feelings” and “instincts” in some cases.

The code that comes out of that process does not, in fact, describe the process fully, even though it describes exactly what the computer should do. That’s why reading someone else’s code can be so difficult - you are accessing just the end product of their thinking process, without seeing the process itself.

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