Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 424 posts

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

#71

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

card_zero wrote: post #59
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…

Not sure neuron number correlates to smarts, either. 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 a…

Agreed. It's architecture that matters, although for a given brain architecture (e.g. species) there might be benefits to scale. mega-brain vs pea-brain.

I was just pointing out that a crow's brain is built on a more advanced process node than our own. Smaller transistors.

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

#72

Post by akomtu »

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…

Imo, that's the essense of reasoning. Limited memory and slow communication channels force us to create compact, but expressive models of reality. LLMs, on the other hand, have all the memory in the world and their model of reality is a piece-wise interpolation of the huge training dataset. Why invent grammar rules if you can keep the entire dictionary in mind?

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

#73

Post by Animats »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #71
card_zero wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure neuron number correlates to smarts, either. 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 a…

Agreed. It's architecture that matters, although for a given brain architecture (e.g. species) there might be benefits to scale. mega-brain vs pea-brain. I was just pointing out that a crow's brain is built on a more advanced process node than our own. Smaller transistors.

That makes sense. Birds are very weight-limited, so there's evolutionary pressure to keep the mass of the control system down.

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

#74

Post by psychoslave »

throwaway19972 wrote: post #55
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…

> For the same reason I find extremely odd that the hypothesis that animals don't have any form of language is even considered as a serious claim in introduction. I guess I've always just assumed it refers to some feature that's uniquely human—notably, recursive grammars.

Not all human languages exhibits recursion though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language

And recursion as the unique trait for human language differentiation is not necessarily completely consensual https://omseeth.github.io/blog/2024/recursive_language/

Also, let's recall that in its broader meaning, the scientific consensus is that humans are animals and they evolved through the same basic mechanism as all other life forms that is evolution. So even assuming that evolution made some unique language hability emerge in humans, it's most likely that they share most language traits with other species and that there is more things to learn from them that what would be possible if it's assumed they can't have a language and thoughts.

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

#75

Post by Animats »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #69
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).

I don't know what we need. Nor does anybody else, yet. But we know what it has to do. Basically what a small mammal or a corvid does.

There's been progress. Look at this 2020 work on neural net controlled drone acrobatics.[1] That's going in the right direction.

[1] https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/RSS20_Kaufmann.pdf

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

#76

Post by akomtu »

codersfocus wrote: post #27

While not essential for thought, language is a very important tool in shaping and sharing thoughts. Another related tool is religion (for emotions instead of thoughts,) which funnily enough faces the same divergence language does. Right now society that calls itself "secular" simply does not understand the role of religion, and its importance in society. To be clear, I don't belong to any religion, I am saying one ne…

Materialism is such a religion. It's sciency and emotion-free, so it appeals to the secular minds.

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

#77

Post by IIAOPSW »

yarg wrote: post #67
IIAOPSW wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Versus a fucking phone network with ~10 billion active numbers.

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

Clearly the information traveling around on the phone network couldn't possibly be the same as the low bandwidth vibrating strings used in face to face communication. Obviously.

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

#78

Post by fuzzfactor »

Animats wrote: post #75
KoolKat23 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

I don't know what we need. Nor does anybody else, yet. But we know what it has to do . Basically what a small mammal or a corvid does. There's been progress. Look at this 2020 work on neural net controlled drone acrobatics.[1] That's going in the right direction. [1] https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/RSS20_Kaufmann.pdf

You could say language is just the "communication module" but there has got to be another whole underlying interface where non-verbal thoughts are modulated/demodulated to conform to the language expected to be used when communication may or may not be on the agenda.

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

#79

Post by eth0up »

eth0up wrote: post #14

Considering that, in 2024, if not a majority, then, still, a vast portion of our consciousness is words. Perhaps not for the illiterate, but for many, much of our knowledge is through the written or spoken word. [Edit: Even a hypothetical person, alone and isolated, never having spoken, would still devise internal language structures, at least for the external realm. ] Base consciousness is surely not dependent on la…

Well, I'm not sure cognition entirely without language is even possible for non larval humans. Language is a natural tendency and it arises regardless of documentation, scribblings or utterings. It exists whether audible or not. Language itself is manifestation of the thinking process that permits it.

And I'll hold to the notion that the complete absence of language (and its underlying structure) would resemble death if death can be resembled. Perhaps death is only the excoriation of thought, cognition and language, with something more fundamental persisting.

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

#80

Post by pessimizer »

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…

> Obviously the deaf get on fine without spoken language.

Why the introduction of "spoken?" Sign languages are just as expressive as spoken language, and could easily be written. Writing is a sign.

> But if you want to discuss the themes present in Proust, you're going to be hard pressed to do so without something resembling language. This is self-evident.

And it's also a bad example. Of course you can't discuss the use of language without the use of language. You can't discuss the backstroke without any awareness of water or swimming, either. You can certainly do it without language though, just by waving your arms and jumping around.

> Language's purpose is thought

Is it, though? Did you make that case in the preceding paragraphs? I'm not going to go out on a limb here and alternatively suggest that language's purpose is communication, just like the purpose of laughing, crying, hugging, or smiling. This is why we normally do it loudly, or write it down where other people can see it.

Post reply on HN