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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

#411
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> analog models cannot exceed the computational power of Turing machines

There is no reason to assume consciousness is Turing computable [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis

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

#413
post #90

As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100). I have struggled my whole life to express my ideas with language. I conside…

Although I fit the profile of a verbal thinker (English degree, education in the humanities) I don't exactly find language the primary aspect of my thought.

It seems more like a complement to it: the idea arises, and then I have this compulsion to verbalise it, which gets quite frustrating as it takes several iterations. Clearly words do matter to me as a way to structure and record my ideas but there is something that pre-empts verbalisation and to some extent resists it.

I cannot provide insight on how I arrive at ideas. Even when I did literary criticism, the best I can say is that I absorbed lots of text and then suddenly a pattern would spring out. But the same things would happen for me studying maths or the hard sciences.

Software engineering is actually a bit different for me because I am not naturally a good algorithmic problem solver. Really I am somebody very passionate about computing who has a near-compulsion to see and collect more and more technology. So for me it is as simple as saying "this resembles a reader monad" or "this puns on the active record pattern". Less impressive than my humanities intelligence but worth maybe 10x the amount in the labour market :-)

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

#414
post #90

As some who has a dis-harmonic intelligence profile, this has been obvious for a very long time. In the family of my mother there are several individuals struggling with language while excelling in the field of exact sciences. I very strongly suspect that my non-verbal (performal) IQ is much higher (around 130) than my verbal IQ (around 100). I have struggled my whole life to express my ideas with language. I conside…

> 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…

Programming is moreso based on recursive problem solving. (Most) language does have some recursive structures, but these become quite difficult to think about after just a few levels, and really aren't what you'd normally consider to be "good language", e.g.

> The dog's owner's house's roof's angle's similarity to an equilateral triangle is remarkable.

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just need to go further in your thought process here: if you recognize that your amazing IQ scores have only very local relevance, that they don't capture everything, why feel the need to have any investment in them at all? Would it be too much of a conspiracy to you if I told you that IQ is rather a lot of BS? If the category you are working with is the kind of thing that you have to construct such nuanc…

I think your comment and mine are two sides of a coin. I'm very aware that intelligence isn't everything and the nuances and circles are not of my creation. Luck is huge. What you are describing is the difference between a Nicolai Tesla and a Thomas Edison - Tesla was far more brilliant than Edison and what he's was doing was superior to what Edison was doing in the same field of study but Edison won and Tesla died p…

Ok so first of all: I am truly sorry that the world is hard for you. I think its really critical for your well-being to understand that even if you are very assured at how smart you are, you are never too smart to talk to a (lesser IQ) professional of any sort; namely one who can help you navigate your thoughts and problems. Even if I can't convince you of anything else, just try to see how a third-party alone can be helpful in matters of the squishy mind. I see lots of people like you who don't get the help they could get because they feel for whatever reason above it, and it seems like your world view is really ripe for some nasty repression. You must understand your high-IQ as a symptom, not a cause.

Now a little bit cheekier advice. Let me help you make an argument for your position against someone like me, because I really didn't see how I was to be convinced that this thing we are talking about is "substantial" enough to reduce any which way. The only way you can really argue with my position here is to take the point of view that "intelligence" is something like a metaphysical category. It doesn't have to be exactly that, but the important thing is that intelligence is more something "justice" than it is like "phenotype" or "language" or "neuron". You simply cannot be a materialist and also hold the fundamental nature of something like "intelligence," I wont insult you by filling in the dots there, but just know you are committed to a bit of woo-woo when you want to go all the way like you are (which is fine, I like woo-woo, just not in this case). You want, at the end of the day, for the brain to be more than an organ, but a truly teleological entity, which by chance has now touched upon something "substantial". Its a rough argument to make these days, you would of done great in the Enlightenment though :).

Also, what I believe you were trying to get at with the Tesla/Edison thing is this idea that Edison manifests my point of view because he was more successful in like the capitalist sense than Tesla. But that is just surface level here, and not at all what I am saying. I would come back and say "no, those are simply too people we are now calling intelligent, for different reasons." Intelligence isnt about results, its about certain things that we value (at a given time). And I am not quite sure even how you want to make your point here, we all generally consider Tesla as a very intelligent man these days, people even did back then!

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a brilliant genius according to IQ tests. Think me arrogant or conceited or whatever - that is literally the truth, fact - proven many times in the educational system (I was homeschooled and didn't follow any sort of curriculum and was allowed to do whatever I wanted bc I kept testing higher than almost everyone) and just for kicks also - the last time I took an IQ test I was in my late 20s and a friend and I had…

Meta: I have noticed many comments written in this style lately. Long-winded with out-of-place internet shorthand. It is as if someone is deliberately trying to sound youthful while not really knowing how. It is the "how do you do, fellow kids" of writing styles. I am not sure what sort of LLM-powered bot is behind them, or whether it's one person with some sort of schizophrenia, but once you notice it you will see a…

I just assumed this was a reddit copy-pasta

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

#418
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you look at how humans play chess they employ several different cognitive strategies. Memorization, calculation, strategic thinking, heuristics, and learned experience. When the first chess engines came out they only employed one of these: calculation. It wasn't until relatively recently that we had computer programs that could perform all of them. But it turns out that if you scale that up with enough compute y…

This seems quite reasonable, but I recently heard a podcast ( https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/06/24/280-... ) that LLMs are more likely to be very good at navigating what they have been trained on, but very poor at abstract reasoning and discovering new areas outside of their training. As a single human, you don't notice, as the training material is greater than everything we could ever learn. After…

Isn't your first point purely because LLMs are canned models that aren't actively being trained aka inference only? It isn't really a fair comparison considering humans can actively learn/continuous training.

I suppose one could build an LLM around a lora that's being continuously trained to attempt to get it to adapt to new scenarios.

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

#419
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems quite reasonable, but I recently heard a podcast ( https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/06/24/280-... ) that LLMs are more likely to be very good at navigating what they have been trained on, but very poor at abstract reasoning and discovering new areas outside of their training. As a single human, you don't notice, as the training material is greater than everything we could ever learn. After…

What part of AI today leads you to believe that an AGI would be capable of self directed creativity? Today that is impossible - no AI is truly generating "new" stuff, no poetry is constructed creatively, no images are born from a feeling, inspiration is only part of AI generation is you consider it utilizing it's training data, which isn't actually creativity. I'm not sure why everyone assumes an AGI would just autom…

Kind of reductive but humans are barely creative at all as you say. Most of what we create is just a rehash of something we've already seen before. Genuinely new and unseen things and experiences are incredibly rare in our reality.

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

#420

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've tried it out and found that some models can answer the question if it's phrased right. And pretty much all models get it right if you also spell it out letter by letter to solve the problem you pointed out.
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