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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

#381

Post by lanstin »

jebarker wrote: post #93
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…

> What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs Not to over-hype LLMs, but I don't see why this results says this. AI doesn't need to do things the same way as evolved intelligence has.

Language models would seem to be exquisitely tied to the way that evolved intelligence has formulated its society and training.

An Ab Initio AGI would maybe be free of our legacy, but LLMs certainly are not.

I would expect a ship-like intelligence a la the Culture novels to have non-English based cognition. As far as we can tell, our own language generation is post-hoc explanation for thought more so than the embodiment of thought.

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

#382

Post by NemoNobody »

mannykannot wrote: post #335
bbor wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel you are putting too much emphasis on the importance and primacy of having a definition of words like 'reasoning'. As humanity has struggled to understand the world, it has frequently given names to concepts that seem to matter, well before it is capable of explaining with any sort of precision what these things are, and what makes them matter - take the word 'energy', for example. It seems clear to me that one…

This is one of my favorite comments I've ever read on HN.

The first three paragraphs you wrote very succinctly and obviously summarize the fundamental flaw of our modern science - that it can't make leaps, at all.

There is no leap of faith in science but there is science that requires such leaps.

We are stuck bc those most capable of comprehending concepts they don't understand and are unexplainable - they won't allow themselves to even develop a vague understanding of such concepts. The scientific method is their trusty hammer and their faith in it renders all that isn't a nail unscientific.

Admitting that they don't kno enough would be akin to societal suicide of their current position - the deciders of what is or isn't true, so I don't expect them to withhold their conclusions til they are more able to.

They are the "priest class" now ;)

I agree with your humble opinion - there is much more we could learn if that was our intent and considering the potential of this, I think we absolutely ought to make certain that we do everything in our power to attain the best possible outcomes of these current and future developments.

Transparent and honest collaboration for the betterment of humanity is the only right path to an AGI god - to oversimplify a lil bit.

Very astute, well formulated position, presented in accessible language and with humility even!

Well done.

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

#383

Post by NemoNobody »

visarga wrote: post #344
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.

This is actually exactly what is needed. We think the dataset is the primary limitation to an LLMs capability but in reality we are only developing one part of their "intelligence" - a functional and massive model isn't the end of their training - its kinda just the beginning.

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

#384

Post by at_a_remove »

sokoloff wrote: post #252
at_a_remove wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Where are we going to find the equivalent data set that will train this other kind of thinking?" Just a personal opinion, but in my shitty When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One (and others) unpublished fiction pastiche (ripoff, really), I had the nascent AI stumble upon Cyc as its base for the world and "thinking about how to think." I never thought that Cyc was enough, but I do think that something Cyc-like is necessary as a c…

> A pond is here. Other animals will also come to drink. I could attack them and eat them. Is that the dominant chain, or is the simpler “I’ve seen animals here before that I have eaten” or “I’ve seen animals I have eaten in a place that smelled/looked/sounded/felt like this” sufficient to explain the behavior?

Could be! But then there are ambushes, driving prey into the claws of hidden allies, and so forth. Modeling the behavior of other animals will have to occur without place for many instances.

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

#385

Post by fnordpiglet »

bonoboTP wrote: post #95
fnordpiglet wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t make a sound or word in my mind but I definitely keep track of the number. My thinking is definitely structured and there are things in my thoughts but there is no words or voice. I also can’t see images in my mind either. I’ve no idea what an inner monologue or the minds eye is like. I have however over the years found ways to produce these experiences in a way of my own. I found for instance some rough visu…

Can you draft a sentence (with all the words precisely determined) in your mind before you say it or you write it down? Can you "rehearse" saying it without moving your tongue or mouth? If yes, that's pretty much an "inner voice".

Not really, I can speak it out loud though which is often what I do. I have over the years been able to do it in my mind but it’s not really a voice or words but some conceptual framing of the words. It’s difficult to explain.

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

#386

Post by fhdsgbbcaA »

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…

Claim is LLM exhibit reasoning, particularly in coding and logic. Observation is mere parroting of training data. Observations trump claims.

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

#387

Post by fhdsgbbcaA »

alphan0n wrote: post #300
fhdsgbbcaA wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had to do with connection pooling.

Small wonder why you received a sub-optimal response.

I’ll say the unholy combination of managing the python GIL, concurrency, and connection reuse is not my favorite topic.

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

#388

Post by famouswaffles »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #367
famouswaffles wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 gener…

Evolution is a blind, dumb optimizer. You can have a mutation that is over-kill and if it doesn't actively impede you in some way, it just stays. It's not like it goes, "Ok we need to reduce this to the point where it's just beneficial enough etc".

That said, i definitely would not say the Ocean is particularly less diverse or demanding.

Even with our limited understanding, there must be adaptations for Pressure, Salinity, light, Energy, Buoyancy, Underwater Current etc that all vary significantly by depth and location.

And the bottlenose dolphin for instance lives in every ocean of the world except the Arctic and the Antarctic oceans.

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

#389

Post by Izkata »

usgroup wrote: post #339
orobus wrote: post #336

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…

I think it’s a nicely summarised challenge to boot. It’s doubtless to me that thinking happens without intermediary symbols; but it’s also obvious that I can’t think deeply without the waypoints and context symbols provide. I think it is a common sense opinion.

"Language" is a subset of "symbols". I agree with what you said, but it's not representative of the quote in GP.

Just a few days ago was "What do you visualize while programming?", and there's a few of us in the comments that, when programming, think symbolically without language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41869237

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

#390

Post by winwang »

exe34 wrote: post #328
dboreham wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I mean, the QKV part of transformers is like an "ASIC" ... well, for an (approximate) lookup table.

(also important to note that NNs/LLMs operate on... abstract vectors, not "language" -- not relevant as a response to your post though).

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