The conclusion implied by the title seems self evident for anyone who has seen any (at least) nonhuman mammalian predator.
Or anyone who has done any thinking in their own brain.
Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
91–100 of 424 posts
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#92As 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…
Growing up, I never used words or even sentences for thinking.
The abstract visualizations I could build in my mind where comparable to semi-transparent buildings that I could freely spin, navigate and bend to connect relations.
In my mid-twenties, someone introduced me to the concept of people using words for mental processes, which was completely foreign to me up to this point.
For some reason, this made my brain move more and more towards this language-based model and at the same time, I felt like I was losing the capacity for complex abstract thoughts.
Still to this day I (unsuccessfully) try to revive this and unlearn the language in my head, which feels like it imposes a huge barrier and limits my mental capacity to the capabilities of what the language my brain uses at the given time (mostly EN, partially DE) allows to express.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#93This 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
Not to over-hype LLMs, but I don't see why this results says this. AI doesn't need to do things the same way as evolved intelligence has.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#94For 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 can imagine the numbers as figures (I mean that the shape of the characters 1, 2 etc), or the patterns on a dice in sequence.
This is a parallel stream, because if I count with imagined pictures, then I can speak and listen to someone talking without it disturbing the process. If I do it with subvocalization, then doing other speech/language related things would disturb the counting.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#95Earlier 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 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 visu…
Can you draft a sentence (with all the words precisely determined) in your mind before you say it or you write it down? Can you "rehearse" saying it without moving your tongue or mouth? If yes, that's pretty much an "inner voice".
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#96>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.
I'm inclined to believe that of the animals that exhibit varying degrees of self awareness, they have mental structures isomorphic to a recursive grammar. As such, perhaps using a recursive grammar is not distinctly a human trait.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well said! This is a great restatement of the core setup of the Chomskian “Generative Grammar” school, and I think it’s an undeniably productive one. I haven’t read this researchers full paper, but I would be sad (tho not shocked…) if it didn’t cite Chomsky up front. Beyond your specific point re:interfaces—which I recommend the OG Syntactic Structures for more commentary on—he’s been saying what she’s saying here for about half a century. He’s too humble/empirical to ever say it without qualifiers, but IMO the truth is clear when viewed holistically: language is a byproduct of hierarchical thought, not the progenitor.
This (awesome!) researcher would likely disagree with what I’ve just said based on this early reference:
In the early 2000s I really was drawn to the hypothesis that maybe humans have some special machinery that is especially well suited for computing hierarchical structures.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#98This 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…
LLM as a term is becoming quite broad; a multi-modal transformer-based model with function calling / ReAct finetuning still gets called an LLM, but this scaffolding might be all that’s needed.
I’d be extremely surprised if AI recapitulates the same developmental path as humans did; evolution vs. next-token prediction on an existing corpus are completely different objective functions and loss landscapes.
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#99A concept in every human culture - i.e., created in every culture, not passed from one to some others - is mentalese [0]: "A universal non-verbal system of concepts, etc., conceived of as an innate representational system resembling language, which is the medium of thought and underlies the ability to learn and use a language." [1]
If you look up 'mentalese' you can find a bunch written about it. There's an in-depth article by Daniel Gregory and Peter Langland-Hassan, in the incredible Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on Inner Speech (admittedly, I'm taking a leap to think they mean precisely the same thing). [2]
[0] Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002)
[1] Oxford English Dictionary
Re: Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought
#100This 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 Not to over-hype LLMs, but I don't see why this results says this. AI doesn't need to do things the same way as evolved intelligence has.
To a point. If you drill down this far into the fundamentals of cognition you begin to define it. Otherwise you may as well call a cantaloupe sentient