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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

#391

Post by winwang »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #131
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…

Don’t assume whales are less intelligent than humans. They’re tuned for their environment. They won’t assemble machines with their flippers but let’s toss you naked in the pacific and see if you can communicate and collaborate with peers 200km away on complex hunting strategies.

Conclusion noted: nuke the whales before they nuke us.

(/s)

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

#392

Post by Izkata »

chongli wrote: post #303
crooked-v wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As one of those people most of the time (communicating with other people is the main exception), I still find it astounding that it's hard for some people to understand. Take riding a bike: I presume even people with an overactive inner monologue aren't constantly planning their actions (brakes, steering, turns) in words. Then just extend that out to most other stuff.

What about when reading and writing? My inner monologue internally voices the words as I’m reading and writing. Do you not do that?

That's how I start reading, but once I'm really into it, no - I'm seeing a (low-quality) version of the scene in my head and not even registering that I'm still reading words and turning pages.

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

#393

Post by habitue »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #152
habitue wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many times the very act of trying to communicate a thought colors/corrupts the main point and gives only one perspective or a snapshot of the overall thought. There's a reason why they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Yeah! Sometimes the thought isnt compressible and language doesnt help. But a lot of times it is, and it does

Does language actually 'help', or is it just the best we have? e.g. would running a thought through language have any benefit in a world where telepathy existed

Yeah, I think it would. I think if we coudl seamlessly transmit thought from one person to another in full fidelity, we would be less smart. Abstraction results from boiling out unnecessary parts and retaining the essence of something. If you have a very high bandwidth connection (unlike language) you dont need to abstract as much and I would guess humans wouldnt be as advanced as they are.

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

#394

Post by ninetyninenine »

fhdsgbbcaA wrote: post #386
ninetyninenine wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Read the parent post. The claim is LLMs can't reason.

The evidence is using one instance of the LLM parroting training data while completely ignoring contradicting evidence where the LLM created novel answers to novel prompts out of thin air.

>Observations trump claims.

No. The same irrational hallucinations that plague LLMs are plaguing human reasoning and trumping rational thinking.

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

#395

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

famouswaffles wrote: post #388
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Sal…

> You can have a mutation that is over-kill and if it doesn't actively impede you in some way, it just stays.

Right, but big brains do actively impede you - they require a lot of energy, so there needs to be some offsetting benefit.

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

#396

Post by fhdsgbbcaA »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #394
fhdsgbbcaA wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Read the parent post. The claim is LLMs can't reason. The evidence is using one instance of the LLM parroting training data while completely ignoring contradicting evidence where the LLM created novel answers to novel prompts out of thin air. >Observations trump claims. No. The same irrational hallucinations that plague LLMs are plaguing human reasoning and trumping rational thinking.

Must be my lying’ eyes, fooling me once again.

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

#397

Post by ddingus »

chongli wrote: post #293
ddingus wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can they reason, or is the volume of training data sufficient for them to match relationships up to appropriate expressions? Basically, if humans have had meaningful discussions about it, the product of their reasoning is there for the LLM, right? Seems to me, the "how many R's are there in the word "strawberry" problem is very suggestive of the idea LLM systems cannot reason. If they could, the question is not diffi…

The “how many R’s are in the word strawberry?” problem can’t be solved by LLMs specifically because they do not have access to the text directly. Before the model sees the user input it’s been tokenized by a preprocessing step. So instead of the string “strawberry”, the model just sees an integer token the word has been mapped to.

I think my point stands, despite a poor example.[0]

Other examples exist.

[0]That example is due to tokenization. DoH! I knew better too.

Ah well.

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

#398

Post by weard_beard »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #378
weard_beard wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a creature on earth without one. Imagine trying to limit, control, or explain a being without familiar cognitive structures. Is there a reason to care about such unfamiliar modalities of cognition?

> Name a creature on earth without one. Anything that doesn't have a spine, I'm pretty sure. Also if we look at just auditory, tons of creatures are deaf and don't need that. > Imagine trying to limit, control, or explain a being without familiar cognitive structures. I don't see why any of that that affects whether it's intelligent.

Agreed: Perhaps we aught to be studying cognition of creatures without spines before we claim to replicate or understand cognition of creatures with them.

Presumably they have some sort biological input processing or sensory inputs. They don't eat data.

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

#399

Post by calf »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #365
calf wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

That's based on a well known fallacy, because analog models cannot exceed the computational power of Turing machines. The alternative position is Penrose who thinks quantum tubules are responsible for consciousness and thus somehow more powerful than TMs.

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

#400

Post by GavinMcG »

dleeftink wrote: post #211
GavinMcG wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as a data point, my guess is that a very small minority of English-language speakers would define the term as broadly as you do, at least in a context relating the concept to analytical thought processes. At the very least, I think most people expect that language is used actively, such that pheromones wouldn’t fall within the definition. (And actually, that’s reflected when you say language is a means “you can…

I'm not sure it's that fringe. Popular addages such as 'language is a vehicle for thought' and 'the pen is mightier than the sword' reveal that language is sometimes implied to be tool-like, with many of our unspoken acts carrying linguistic meaning (e.g. ghosting, not answering a call, sign language, gesturing, nodding, etc.). Even tools present us a certain 'language', talking to us via beeps, blinks and buzzes, an…

I think what you’re saying supports the view that language is structured and actively used—which excludes pheromones. But I don’t see how you get to the next step, of characterizing unspoken acts as carrying linguistic meaning. That is, sign language and not answering a call aren’t obviously in the same category, precisely because not answering a call fails to communicate any particular concept, and because people don’t use various modes of non-answering to communicate various things.
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