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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

#61

Post by nemo »

Razengan wrote: post #21
fnordpiglet wrote: post #2

For those who can’t and don’t think in words this is unsurprising.

Can you count without using a "language"? Try it now: Tap your hand on the desk randomly. Can you recall how many times you did it without "saying" a sequence in your head like "1, 2, 3" or "A, B, C" etc? If yes, how far can you count? With a language it's effectively infinite. You could theoretically go up to "1 million 5 hundred 43 thousand, 2 hundred and 10" and effortlessly know what comes next.

Many animals can do some form of counting of small numbers where there's no connection to language possible.

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

#62

Post by ryandv »

nickelpro wrote: post #28

As always, barely anyone reads the actual claims in the article and we're left with people opining on the title. The claims here are exceptionally limited. You don't need spoken language to do well on cognitive tests, but that has never been a subject of debate. Obviously the deaf get on fine without spoken language. People suffering from aphasia, but still capable of communication via other mechanisms, still do well…

> As always, barely anyone reads the actual claims in the article and we're left with people opining on the title

One must ask why this is such a common occurrence on this (and almost all other) social media, and conclude that it is because the structure of social media itself is rotten and imposes selective pressures that only allow certain kinds of content to thrive.

The actual paper itself is not readily accessible, and properly understanding its claims and conclusions would take substantial time and effort - by which point the article has already slid off the front page, and all the low-effort single-sentence karma grabbers who profit off of simplistic takes that appeal to majority groupthink have already occupied all the comment space "above the fold."

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

#63

Post by ujikoluk »

habitue wrote: post #30

Language may not be essential for thought, (most of us have the experience of an idea occurring to us that we struggle to put into words), but language acts as a regularization mechanism on thoughts. Serializing much higher dimensional freeform thoughts into language is a very lossy process, and this kinda ensures that mostly only the core bits get translated. Think of times when someone gets an idea you're trying to…

Yes, dimension reduction.

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

#64

Post by card_zero »

datameta wrote: post #36
Razengan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you count without using a "language"? Try it now: Tap your hand on the desk randomly. Can you recall how many times you did it without "saying" a sequence in your head like "1, 2, 3" or "A, B, C" etc? If yes, how far can you count? With a language it's effectively infinite. You could theoretically go up to "1 million 5 hundred 43 thousand, 2 hundred and 10" and effortlessly know what comes next.

I can remember the sequence of sounds and like a delay line repeat that sequence in my head. This becomes easier the more distinguishable the taps are or the more of a cadence variability there is. But if it is a longer sequence I compress it by remembering an analogue like so: doo doo da doo da doo da da doo (reminiscent of morse code, or a kind of auditory binary). Would we consider this language? I think in the co…

Do you also have some noise for mathematical operations, such as raising a number to a power, and for equals? So doo doo da ugh doo doo feh doo doo da doo da doo da da doo?

...maybe I do this sometimes myself. Remembering the proper names of things is effort.

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

#65

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

nickelpro wrote: post #28

As always, barely anyone reads the actual claims in the article and we're left with people opining on the title. The claims here are exceptionally limited. You don't need spoken language to do well on cognitive tests, but that has never been a subject of debate. Obviously the deaf get on fine without spoken language. People suffering from aphasia, but still capable of communication via other mechanisms, still do well…

> Language's purpose is thought

Language's purpose - why it arose - is more likely communication, primarily external communication. The benefit of using language to communicate with yourself via "inner voice" - think in terms of words - seems a secondary benefit, especially considering that less than 50% of people report doing this.

But certainly language, especially when using a large vocabulary of abstract and specialist concepts, does boost cognitive abilities - maybe essentially through "chunking", using words as "thought macros", and boosting what we're able to do with our limited 7+/- item working memory.

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

#66

Post by psychoslave »

GavinMcG wrote: post #53
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…

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…

It's also doubtful that thinking about the concept of analytical thought processes is something most humans do either, at least not in these terms and this perspective.

Should we expect experts in cognitive science exposing their view in a scientific publication to stick to the narrowest median view of language though? All the more when in the same article you quote people like Russell who certainly didn't have a naïve definition of language when expressing a point of view on the matter.

And slapping in general can definitely communicate far more than a single thing depending on many parameters. See https://www.33rdsquare.com/is-a-slap-disrespectful-a-nuanced... for a text exploring some of nuances of the meaning it can encompasse. But even a kid can get that slap could perfectly have all the potential to create a fully doubly articulated language, as The Croods 2 creators funnily have put in scene. :D

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

#67

Post by yarg »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #52
yarg wrote: post #51

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…

It is not at all obvious that "freely flowing electrical information" isn't just language in a different medium, much the same as video on a cassette tape.

Yes it is.

Language is designed to be expressible with low fidelity vibrating strings - it is very clear that the available bandwidth is in the order of bytes per second.

Verses a fucking neural network with ~100 billion neurons.

Come on man, seriously - the two communication modalities are completely incomparable.

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

#68

Post by pazimzadeh »

habitue wrote: post #30

Language may not be essential for thought, (most of us have the experience of an idea occurring to us that we struggle to put into words), but language acts as a regularization mechanism on thoughts. Serializing much higher dimensional freeform thoughts into language is a very lossy process, and this kinda ensures that mostly only the core bits get translated. Think of times when someone gets an idea you're trying to…

Communication of thought is a whole different question. Either way you're making a lot of strong claims without support?

> this kinda ensures that mostly only the core bits get translated

The kinda is doing a lot here. 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. Except the mind can conjure much more than a static picture. The mind can also hold the idea and the exceptions to the idea in one coherent model. For me this can be especially apparent when taking psychedelics and finding that trying to communicate some thoughts with words requires constant babbling to keep refining the last few sentences, ad libidum. There are exceptions of course, like for simple ideas.

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

#69

Post by KoolKat23 »

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.

Basically we need Multimodal LLM's (terrible naming as it's not an LLM then but still).

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

#70

Post by KoolKat23 »

Razengan wrote: post #21
fnordpiglet wrote: post #2

For those who can’t and don’t think in words this is unsurprising.

Can you count without using a "language"? Try it now: Tap your hand on the desk randomly. Can you recall how many times you did it without "saying" a sequence in your head like "1, 2, 3" or "A, B, C" etc? If yes, how far can you count? With a language it's effectively infinite. You could theoretically go up to "1 million 5 hundred 43 thousand, 2 hundred and 10" and effortlessly know what comes next.

An important note. If you're hearing your voice in your head doing this, that's subvocalisation and it's basically just saying it out loud, the instruction is still sent to your vocal chords

It's the equivalent of tags for LLM output.

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