Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by fnordpiglet » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 9:27 PM UTC

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.

I don’t make a sound or word in my mind but I definitely keep track of the number. My thinking is definitely structured and there are things in my thoughts but there is no words or voice. I also can’t see images in my mind either. I’ve no idea what an inner monologue or the minds eye is like. I have however over the years found ways to produce these experiences in a way of my own. I found for instance some rough visualization was helpful in doing multi variate calculus but it’s very difficult and took a lot of practice. I’ve also been able to simulate language in my mind to help me practice difficult conversations but it’s really difficult and not distinct.

I would note though I have a really difficult time with arithmetic and mechanical tasks like counting. Mostly I just lose attention. Perhaps an inner voice would help if it became something that kept a continuity of thought.

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

#82

Post by yarg » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 9:31 PM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #77

yarg wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a major difference - the phone network takes in prerequisite constraints on the nature of the information that it's encoding; it is forced by its functionality to be a reflection of spoken language.

The internal communications of the mind have no need for such constraints (and evolved hundreds of millions of years beforehand).

Anyway, I don't know what you were actually trying to argue here: you just built a simulated brain out of people, and the massively multi-agent distributed nature of the language of that machine is (emergently) incomparable with vocalised language.

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

#83

Post by readthenotes1 » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 9:38 PM UTC

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…

I suspect there is more going on with your gut neurons then you would expect. If nothing else, the vagus nerve I had to direct communication link.

I like to think that it is my gut brain that is telling me that it's okay to have that ice cream...

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

#84

Post by nurettin » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 9:38 PM UTC

m463 wrote: post #8

hackboyfly wrote: post #6

Well it’s important to note that this does not mean that our language does not play a role in shaping our thoughts. “You cannot ask a question you that you have no words for” - Judea Pearl

Next they will argue that your eyebrows are words.

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

#85

Post by habitue » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 9:42 PM UTC

pazimzadeh wrote: post #68

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…

> 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

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

#86

Post by dang » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 9:46 PM UTC

All: please don't comment based on your first response to an inevitably shallow title. That leads to generic discussion, which we're trying to avoid on HN. Specific discussion of what's new or different in an article is a much better basis for interesting conversation.

Since we all have language and opinions about it, the risk of genericness is high with a title like this. It's like this with threads about other universal topics too, such as food or health.

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

#87

Post by WiSaGaN » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 9:50 PM UTC

I think we need to distinguish between the language e.g. the native language the person uses like English and the concept of language. Your information exchanging binary messages over PCI bus is also part of a language.

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

#88

Post by jostmey » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 9:54 PM UTC

Progress with LLMs would seem to support the title. The language abilities of LLMs does not seem to lead to higher thought, so there must be additional processes that are required for higher thought or process that don’t depend on language

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

#89

Post by danielmarkbruce » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 9:55 PM UTC

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…

Is it important? To who? Anyone with half a brain is aware that language isn't the only way to think. I can think my way through all kinds of things in 3-d space without a single word uttered in any internal monologue and I'm not remotely unique - this kind of thing is put in all kinds of math and iq'ish like tests one takes as a child.

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

#90

Post by fjfaase » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 9:56 PM UTC

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 consider myself an abstract visual thinker. I do not think in pictures, but in abstract structures. During my life, I have met several people, especially among software engineers, who seem to be similar to me. I also feel that people who are strong verbal thinkers have the greatest resistance against idea that language is not essential for higher cognitive processes.