51–60 of 424 posts
Language is a very poor substitute for freely flowing electrical information - it is evolved to compensate for the bottlenecks to external communication - bottlenecks that are lacking an internal analogue.
It's also a highly advanced feature - something as heavily optiimised as evolved life would not allow something as vital as cognition to be hampered by a lack of means for high fidelity external expression.
Is this not obvious? Language is a very poor substitute for freely flowing electrical information - it is evolved to compensate for the bottlenecks to external communication - bottlenecks that are lacking an internal analogue. It's also a highly advanced feature - something as heavily optiimised as evolved life would not allow something as vital as cognition to be hampered by a lack of means for high fidelity externa…
>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…
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…
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 monkeys.
>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…
I guess I've always just assumed it refers to some feature that's uniquely human—notably, recursive grammars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, I feel like I can "feel" small numbers (up to 4 or 5) easier than than thinking about them as objects in a language.
By feel, I can without language or counting, play mostly X . . X . . X . . . X . X . . . and every so often switch out for variations, eg: X . . X . . X . X . . . X . . . or X . . . X . . . . . X . X . . . but I'm no good for playing polyrhythms, which many other people can do, and I believe they must also do so more by feel than by counting.
X . X X X . X . X X X .
A . . A . . A . . A . .
B . B . B . B . B . B .
X . . X . X X X . X X . X . X X . . X . X X . . X X . X X . X . . X . X X . . X X . X . . X . . X X X X . . X X X X . . X . . X . X X . . X X . X . . X . X X . X X . . X X . X . . X X . X . X X . X X X . X . .
A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . . A . . . .
B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . . B . . . . . .
C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . . C . .
Most things we know, we are probably not aware of. And for most of us, direct experience of everything that surrounds us in the world certainly exceeds by several order of magnitude the best bandwidth we can ever dream to achieve through any human language.
Ok, there are no actual data to back this, but authors of the article don't have anything solid either to back such a bold statement, from what is presented in the article.
If most of what we know of the world would mostly be things we were told, it would obviously be mostly a large amount of phatic noises, lies and clueless random assertions that we would have no mean to distinguish from the few stable credible elements inferable by comparing with a far more larger corpus of self experiments with realty.
For those who can’t and don’t think in words this is unsurprising.
Other animals with at best very limited language, are still highly intelligent and capable of reasoning - apes, dogs, rats, crows, ...
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…
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…
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/
There are 100 million in my gut, but it doesn't solve any problems that aren't about poop, as far as I know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
If the suspiciously round number is accurate, this puts the human gut somewhere between a golden hamster and ansell's mole-rat, and about level with a short-palated fruit bat.
>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…
> 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 go on to discuss some of the brain structures involved in the production and interpretation of these word sequences:
> Language production and language understanding are sup-ported by an interconnected set of brain areas in the left hemisphere, often referred to as the ‘language network'.
It is these brain areas that form the basis of their testable claims regarding language.
> Anyone can prove anything and its contrary about language if the term is given whatever meaning is needed for premises to match with the conclusion.
This is why "coming to terms" on the definitions of words and what you mean by them should be the first step in any serious discussion if you aim to have any hope in hell of communicating precisely; it is also why you should be skeptical of political actors that insist on redefining the meanings of (especially well-known) terms in order to push an agenda. Confusing a term with its actual referent is exceedingly commonplace in modern day.