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Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

425 pointsby hardmaru11 months ago

86 comments

benrutter11 months ago
It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that:<p>- People experience their thoughts very differently<p>- We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.<p>I&#x27;ve never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn&#x27;t very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking).<p>It seems like there&#x27;s a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language.<p>That sounds absolutely nuts to me, but I&#x27;ve heard people say the exact same in reverse. Even more fringe is that there&#x27;s a sizable number of people who when thinking about words (i.e. remembering names) <i>visualize their words as text</i>. What!? I can&#x27;t imagine that anymore than I can imagine how a jellyfish feels?<p>The University of Wisconsin did a cool study that comes with a fun quiz you can do to see just how much of a wierdo you truly are: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com&#x2F;jfe&#x2F;form&#x2F;SV_3NMm9yyFsNioVhz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com&#x2F;jfe&#x2F;form&#x2F;SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...</a>
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nopinsight11 months ago
There are many concepts in our thought stream without a &#x27;word&#x27; or even a simple &#x27;phrase&#x27; to label them.<p>A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common <i>and</i> important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly <i>and</i> the label catches on.<p>We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concept is accorded such importance in every language. Some common words in other languages without direct translation in English:<p>* 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.<p>* น้ำใจ (Nam-jai) (Thai): Literally &quot;water from the heart&quot;. Being very nice and helpful without expecting anything back.<p>* 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business.<p>This is perhaps another line of evidence to support the thesis of the article.<p>Make no mistake though: Language is extremely useful for some types of thoughts, especially more abstract ones. Not everyone, however, uses it as their primary tool for thinking.<p>-----<p>The above also helps explain some limitations of LLMs, such as their inadequate spatial intelligence. Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) start to address these issues by using much more granular data than language alone.
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dangrossman11 months ago
Contrast that with Helen Keller&#x27;s description of her mental state before language: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scentofdawn.blogspot.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;07&#x2F;before-soul-dawn-helen-keller-on-her.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scentofdawn.blogspot.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;07&#x2F;before-soul-dawn-he...</a>
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justacomment10011 months ago
My takes:<p>1. The existence of “rubber duck debugging”, and a whole bunch of studies on verbally explaining a concept indicate that language is essential for thought. In rubber duck debugging, programmers tell their problem to an object and this is beneficial in finding the solution. There are studies that show when we verbally teach material to someone we remember it better. Also the act of taking a test increases learning and memory, but why should this be if learning is secondary?<p>2. Everything we know about memory tells us that externality is essential for memorizing something. If there’s nothing visual, aural, or sensory then it is unlikely to be remembered. Language acts as an externality even as inner speech, meaning that thoughts can be said in language (ascribed onto the words) and remembered for short-term and long-term memory. A thought without externality seems more like a passing whim, unrooted in any more permanent mode of cognition and thus liable to be forgotten. I can imagine thinking in visuals, melodies, words, but if there is a kind of thought that isn’t occurring based off of these then it probably can’t be sophisticated.
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boerseth11 months ago
There are many that would strongly object to this conclusion. I have heard friends describe their inner life as almost entirely verbal, that they &quot;think in words&quot;, and are totally unable to relate to anything else.<p>When we say &quot;communication&quot;, I think there is an implication that the goal is communication with others. But there is also value in communication with oneself. To verbalize is to condense ones thoughts into words, and when we hear words they get unpacked and evoke meaning. The resulting feedback loop can be amazing for refining ideas.<p>It should be no surprise that humans might end up relying on this internal monologue when thinking to the point that they mistake it for thought itself.
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Jun811 months ago
The entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good summary of the Language of Thought Hypothesis. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&#x2F;entries&#x2F;language-thought&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&#x2F;entries&#x2F;language-thought&#x2F;</a><p>Jerry Fodor, who advocated an internal mental language, was seen as an old crank when I studied Linguistics in late 90s; I just looked him up and, god, he died recently in 2017. Here’s a <i>New Yorker</i> article from that time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;postscript&#x2F;jerry-fodors-enduring-critique-of-neo-darwinism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;culture&#x2F;postscript&#x2F;jerry-fodors-en...</a>.
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calini11 months ago
I&#x27;m bilingual, people keep asking me what language I think &#x27;in&#x27;, and I don&#x27;t think I think _in_ a language.<p>For lack of a better way of describing it, I rather think in concepts, sometimes the voice in my head likes to play along by imagining the words representing those concepts, sometimes in English, sometimes in Romanian, but the words are not necessary.<p>In dev words, I guess I think in structs and then optionally serialize those structs in En&#x2F;Ro (JSON).
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giorgosts11 months ago
False dichotomy. Of course language is for communication like in all other animals, but where would man be without the invention of the language of mathematics? Probably not in the space and nuclear age. So the linguistic tools can push the boundaries of human cognition.
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cubefox11 months ago
Here is my explanation why language seems to be, while not necessary, so useful for abstract thought: Thinking thoughts with abstract concepts takes up a lot of working memory. We can&#x27;t hold many of those in mind at once. But if they are expressed in words they take very little memory. So we can have long winding and abstract thoughts because language compresses the parts of the thought complex we are not currently focusing on, so we can hold more of it in short term memory. In effect it increases our thinking cache.
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calf11 months ago
The crux of their argument is that the language faculty and other faculties (math&#x2F;logic&#x2F;abstract, theory of mind&#x2F;social reasoning, spatial&#x2F;temporal imagination, and other cognitive abilities) all evolved in parallel, so the most plausible explanation is that language is mostly independent of all those other faculties which are activated in distinct neural network areas of the human brain, based on brain scan studies in the last 20 years.<p>I imagine a counterargument (or complication) to that is that such parallel evolution would require the neural networks to independently evolve certain breakthroughs multiple times before reaching the Homo sapiens stage. For example, language is recursive and yet human mathematical reasoning is recursive, but these use two different brain areas (according to the paper). So in their figure of two different brain regions for language processing versus math&#x2F;code thinking, both regions had to somehow evolve the &quot;wetware&quot; for recursive computation. How did natural evolution manage that in general?
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mikewarot11 months ago
My view of the centrality of language in the process of sustained complex thought is strongly influenced by the memoir of Helen Keller we discussed last month [1].<p>While it is possible to think about quantities of things without mathematics, you can&#x27;t engineer systems to get men on the moon without it, nor language.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scentofdawn.blogspot.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;07&#x2F;before-soul-dawn-helen-keller-on-her.html?m=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scentofdawn.blogspot.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;07&#x2F;before-soul-dawn-he...</a>
ajb11 months ago
An important concept , and one that also has implications for mental health treatment. Eg, many talk therapies operate under the assumption that &#x27;saying the wrong words in your head&#x27; is a factor maintaining the problem, and replacing these with better ones will result in improvement.<p>But since words are not thoughts, and further they are not mental actions (such as relaxing), saying different words in your head is only useful if they help put you in a frame of mind where you can access, or discover, the right thoughts or &#x27;mental actions&#x27;.<p>I conjecture that within the diversity of human minds, there are some for whom language closely bound to thoughts and mental actions, and others less so, and that talk therapy is more useful for the former than the latter. If this is true, then it is also likely to be the case that most talk therapists are of the former persuasion, since they are not likely to espouse a practice which has no effect on themselves.
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moth-fuzz11 months ago
I do not have an internal monologue, unless I intend to. I also frequently don’t even have thoughts unless I intend to, but that I’ll admit comes from several years of meditation. When I tell people I’m not thinking about anything, or that I even have the <i>ability</i> to not think about anything, they act shocked and confused. When I say “hold on, I have to translate my thought into English first,” they’re usually accommodating but I can tell from the looks I get that that’s not something everybody does.<p>It does however put into perspective a number of arguments I have day to day and online, and the simple fact that most of them are over semantics, definitions, miscommunications, and misunderstandings. I frequently wonder what it would be like to have an argument with someone where you both perfectly understand each other, and are just debating the merits of your ideas and not just how they’re presented.<p>I feel like a lot of people in the world equivocate language with meaning itself, with no abstraction behind the words and letters. That’s why sometimes if you tell someone they’re using a word wrong they’ll take it personally, as if you told them their very <i>being</i> was wrong. Well, if the externalized word is the only avenue you have for internal understanding, how can it be any other way?
photochemsyn11 months ago
Sounds reasonable. Animals (including humans) construct mental maps of their environment without language, which is an important ability for everything from seasonal migration to location of reliable food sources. For social animals, simple vocal phrases like &#x27;follow me to food&#x27; (e.g. in parrots, crows, etc.) would be secondary to the construction of that mental map, but do confer a large survival advantage on their social group (group selection in evolutionary terms).<p>If so, this has some interesting implications for LLMs and AGI. First, LLMs don&#x27;t seem to be thinking or reasoning if they&#x27;re only doing next-word-prediction based on a large training set - so a step towards real AGI might be a system that had an internal map of reality that it was constantly updating with new sensory information, with the LLM as a layer above it that allowed it to communicate the relevant details of that internal map to others?<p>Personally, every time I &#x27;think in words&#x27; it always begins with &#x27;how can this be explained&#x27; and the actual thinking that precedes that is done with images, diagrams, graphs, etc.
Valakas_11 months ago
There is a condition called aleythimia. People who have been emotionally neglected have not been mirrored and told what they&#x27;re feeling &quot;You look exhausted&quot; &quot;It&#x27;s normal to feel guilty in that situation.&quot; &quot;I understand that you feel so conflicted.&quot;<p>I talk with people in this circle, and in fact, giving a name to emotion, making it a concrete thing, instead of just this bodily feeling and cloud in the mind, gives it relief and allows it to be fully expressed and understood. It makes each emotion a separate entity in a sea of previously undefined emotions.<p>When we talk with people with alexythimia they often say they feel &quot;pain&quot; to describe some discomfort. And in fact they do. But when they realize they are actually feeling guilt, or confusion, or anxiety, which are all uncomfortable, not only you can see them feeling relief, as now it makes sense what they&#x27;re feeling, but the emotion becomes a specific thing. Confusion becomes identifiable from stress, instead of just being called &quot;Pain&quot; and with this, it can be identified as two separate feelings and not just one. They see now that this feeling of not knowing what to do is a clear different thing than the other one where they feel there is an important event coming and they don&#x27;t feel prepared for it, instead of both just being uncomfortable.<p>So imo, the word, &quot;primarily&quot; is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
miika11 months ago
How do you define “thinking”?<p>To me thinking is primary tool of communication between I and “me” and it’s entirely based on sound and language.<p>Can you think without using language?<p>When you have song playing in your head, how is that different from your thoughts?<p>Isn’t talking out loud just act of thinking, the output being connected to mouth?<p>Have you ever tried to repeat mantra in your thought, slow down until coming to full stop? What remains when thinking stops?<p>Have you noticed that thinking is like breathing, in a way that it’s happening automatically and you can also take over?<p>Have you noticed that thinking consciously is linked with breath and being aware of space?<p>Fascinating topic!
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robthebrew11 months ago
I totally agree. Kekulé&#x27;s discovery of the structure of benzene was in a dream and purely visible. When I still did chemistry (post-doc), much of my thinking was not verbal but &quot;Intuition&quot; (whatever that is). Explaining in words my discoveries was secondary.
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sturza11 months ago
A counterargument to the claim that language is not sufficient for thought could be that while individuals with intact language abilities may exhibit impairments in reasoning and problem-solving due to brain damage or disorders like schizophrenia, these impairments might not be a direct result of language function itself. Instead, they could be caused by damage to other cognitive systems that interact with language, or by the disorder&#x27;s broader impact on cognitive function.<p>For instance, schizophrenia is a complex disorder affecting various cognitive domains, including attention, memory, and executive functions, which are crucial for reasoning and problem-solving. Therefore, the observed impairments might stem from these broader cognitive deficits rather than a lack of language proficiency.<p>Brain damage can affect multiple brain regions and their connections, leading to a wide range of cognitive impairments. It is possible that the observed deficits in reasoning and problem-solving are due to damage to specific brain regions responsible for these functions, rather than a disruption of language processing itself.<p>While the presence of intact language abilities does not guarantee intact thinking abilities, it is necessary to consider the potential confounding factors, such as broader cognitive deficits or damage to other brain regions, before concluding that language is not sufficient for thought. Further research is needed to disentangle the complex relationship between language and thought and to determine the specific contributions of language to various cognitive processes.
ModernMech11 months ago
Makes sense -- I don&#x27;t think in language but shapes and graphs and blobs and other things I can&#x27;t even describe with words. The words are vehicles for my thoughts but they are not my thoughts. So communication is sort of like a serialization process where thoughts in my head, however I represent them, are packaged into language; sent over a medium; received as language through eyes or ears or touch; and then unpacked into thoughts in the receivers head, however they represent them.
verghese11 months ago
Reminds me of the the quote from Albert Einstein: &quot;I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.&quot;<p>Language is a higher level abstraction for the brain. Sort of like a higher level programming language vs assembly or binary.
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jumploops11 months ago
I think this is largely correct, but may miss some higher-order concepts related to language and the structure of one’s complex thoughts.<p>To me they appear to go hand-in-hand, similar to the way a backend’s logic may inadvertently be structured to support an API. Another metaphor may be Conway’s Law, where the way one is forced to communicate, may in turn shape the way they structure their (brain) processes.<p>Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that speakers of different languages seem to “think” more similarly than not. For instance, native speakers of non-English Germanic languages appear to think more similarly compared to those native speakers of Romance languages, and vice-versa.<p>Obviously I’m using English as a middle-man, and am likely projecting on what their internal thoughts actually are, but the pathways they take to express an idea or a solution is oftentimes more similar than not within the same base language background.<p>Now is language necessary for complex thought? Absolutely not. We’ve seen evidence from many different life forms that show complex problem-solving, pattern matching, and novel tool use that all seem to happen without having a seemingly complex language background (i.e. Zipf’s Law).
peter_vukovic11 months ago
Language helps us shape our thoughts, in a way a ruler helps us draw straight lines, but thoughts do not begin with language.<p>Our thoughts and ideas come from an unknown source. We might call it intuition, but scientifically speaking, it remains a black box.<p>Lethologica - a temporary inability to remember a particular word or name - is one evidence of this. You can have a fully formed thought in your mind, but be unable to express it with words.
talkingtab11 months ago
Okay, so my first experiment was to try to think without language. Go ahead, you try it. I can&#x27;t do it. So a simple conclusion is that language gives rise to what we call thought. However, I do some things - which I do not call thought - without language. There was&#x2F;is an old IBM programming test of patterns and I can choose the correct pattern even when I cannot <i>think</i> why that is. In &quot;Notes on the Synthesis of Form&quot;, Christopher Alexander talks about how we can tell &quot;good art&quot; even when we do not know why. As a painter, I often do not paint well and I know it.N Sometimes I do well, but I cannot tell you why or what.<p>Next issue: communication. Humans are currently dominate because we collaborate. The idea of communication as &quot;I can tell you the day of the month&quot; is useful. But communication as a way of effectively collaborating is another thing all together.<p>If we accept collaboration as the thing that gives people survival fitness - which I do - then you can invert the whole thing and focus on how we achieve that. Ants are another species that collaborate well and are successful. But, arguably, ants neither think nor speak. Unless you want to call leaving a pheromone trail &quot;speaking&quot;? And why not? So now we can consider the issue of from another perspective - what constitutes a language? Sapir Whorf says our language affects if not determines what we think. Perhaps we need to look at language not as what we think it is but instead that language is any system that provides collaboration. And then we start going down an interesting rat hole. &quot;Twitter and Teargas&quot; argues that that extwitter does &quot;affords&quot; people ways to do some things but not others.<p>It is a complex and interesting issue. My take is that language is primarily a tool for collaboration.
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klik9911 months ago
I’ve noticed during meditation that the words come after the realization - I think we put thoughts into words after out of a habit of trying to explain our thoughts - we’re imagining how we would explain it to others.
bbor11 months ago
I hate to quote an abstract, but I&#x27;m really struggling to understand the purpose here -- it seems like they&#x27;re angry that Chomsky defined language as symbolic operations and relegated the external facets to &quot;history of language&quot; or &quot;anthropology of language&quot; or other such fields.<p><pre><code> We conclude that although the emergence of language has unquestionably transformed human culture, language does not appear to be a prerequisite for complex thought, including symbolic thought. Instead, language is a powerful tool for the transmission of cultural knowledge; it plausibly</code></pre> co-evolved with our thinking and reasoning capacities, and only reflects, rather than gives rise to, the signature sophistication of human cognition.<p>What is the difference between &quot;language is a cognitive adaptation used for communication&quot; and &quot;language is the communication enabled by a cognitive adaption&quot;, really? Other than a, as Chomsky would call it, &quot;terminological dispute&quot;
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ankit21911 months ago
In my limited (to one person) experience, it may not be as clear cut.<p>I am one of those who uses language to think. I would have an internal monologue and I would also say things out loud just to see how they sound. It&#x27;s not always a fully fledged idea, or even a coherent thought for that matter. I have no idea why i do this. But that is me. In a sense, my thoughts are forming when I speak. Hence, i am somewhat better at written communication than being asked for things on the spot.<p>I have encountered people who when they speak, are communicating their thoughts, not formulating them unlike the way I do. I have to be careful with them because they assume I am also communicating my thought vs formulating it and that makes it sound more rigid than it is in my mind. I have seen many nerds like me who understand what thinking out loud is and are more forgiving about missteps or &quot;wrong sounding thoughts&quot;. They are also more understanding because in our experience, that is how people tend to think.
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nabla911 months ago
Some people use language in thought more than others. Some don&#x27;t use language at all. It&#x27;s certainly time to exit the notion that language is necessary for complex thought.<p>Thinking the Way Animals Do: Unique insights from a person with a singular understanding. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.grandin.com&#x2F;references&#x2F;thinking.animals.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.grandin.com&#x2F;references&#x2F;thinking.animals.html</a><p>&gt; A horse trainer once said to me, &quot;Animals don&#x27;t think, they just make associations.&quot; I responded to that by saying, &quot;If making associations is not thinking, then I would have to conclude that I do not think.&quot;<p>&gt;I have no language-based thoughts at all. My thoughts are in pictures, like videotapes in my mind. When I recall something from my memory, I see only pictures. I used to think that everybody thought this way until I started talking to people on how they thought. I learned that there is a whole continuum of thinking styles, from totally visual thinkers like me, to the totally verbal thinkers. Artists, engineers, and good animal trainers are often highly visual thinkers, and accountants, bankers, and people who trade in the futures market tend to be highly verbal thinkers with few pictures in their minds.
xjay11 months ago
Perspectives<p>[2015-09] Anne C. Reboul: &quot;Why language really is not a communication system: a cognitive view of language evolution&quot; - , Laboratory on Language, Brain and Cognition (L2C2), Institute for Cognitive Sciences-Marc Jeannerod, Bron, France [1]<p>&gt; [2013-09] Noam Chomsky: One of the most striking cases of incompatibility, that I know, is the sharp conflict between computational efficiency, and communicative efficiency. Language is just badly designed for communication, but well-designed to be efficient, it seems. [2]<p>&gt; [2013-09] Noam Chomsky adds: There&#x27;s a kind of phrase that is sometimes used for this that drives people crazy; &quot;Language is beautiful, but unusable.&quot; It&#x27;s kind of true, you know. Even if people don&#x27;t like it. [2]<p>[2022] Nick Enfield: &quot;Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists&quot; [3]<p>&gt; Language cannot create or change physical reality, but it can do the next best thing: reframe and invert our view of the world. In Language vs. Reality, Enfield explains why language is bad for scientists (who are bound by reality) but good for lawyers (who want to win their cases), ... [3]<p>&gt; [2023-01] Ev Fedorenko: &quot;Although language and thought often go together, they are robustly dissociable.&quot; [4]<p>&gt; [2023-01] Ev Fedorenko: Fallacy 1: &quot;Good at language = Good at thought&quot;. Fallacy 2: &quot;Bad at thought = Bad at language&quot;. Fallacy 3: &quot;Bad at language = Bad at thought&quot; (emphasis in being judged on how smart you are based on how you say something). [4]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.frontiersin.org&#x2F;journals&#x2F;psychology&#x2F;articles&#x2F;10.3389&#x2F;fpsyg.2015.01434&#x2F;full" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.frontiersin.org&#x2F;journals&#x2F;psychology&#x2F;articles&#x2F;10....</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-72JNZZBoVw&amp;t=4493s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-72JNZZBoVw&amp;t=4493s</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;direct.mit.edu&#x2F;books&#x2F;monograph&#x2F;5472&#x2F;Language-vs-RealityWhy-Language-Is-Good-for" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;direct.mit.edu&#x2F;books&#x2F;monograph&#x2F;5472&#x2F;Language-vs-Real...</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uE9AiYuCwdE&amp;t=250s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uE9AiYuCwdE&amp;t=250s</a>
visarga11 months ago
Let&#x27;s do a mental experiment: Put 2 year old Einstein on a remote island, all alone, and come back 30 years later. Assume he survives. Will he impress you with his insights?<p>They say we don&#x27;t use language for thought, but language informs our strategies and choices, and collective experience is essential for progress. We only add small increments of insight from our own experiences to the pool, but the experience captured in language is greater than any one of us.<p>And more interestingly, LLMs trained on this data show amazing capabilities that go beyond mere reproduction. LLMs gain everything Einstein lost in this experiment, what is the language part and what is the pure insight part? Looks to me humans are like LLMs on feet, and with a full social complement surrounding them.
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zarzavat11 months ago
Language is a major component of thought. Every programmer knows the unreasonable effectiveness of rubber duck debugging whereby one can solve logical problems more effectively by talking aloud.<p>If language were merely a tool for communicating thoughts rather than an integral part of thinking, then talking aloud wouldn’t help. But since raising the volume of one’s internal monologue does improve reasoning, this shows that the internal monologue is part of the thinking process - not a passive reflection of thought that is happening “elsewhere”.<p>Yes, of course you can engage in complex thought without language. There is verbal and non-verbal reasoning. A chess player thinks spatially in terms of how the knight moves, not just verbally, though verbal reasoning does help in chess somewhat.
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scoofy11 months ago
I see aphasia as the insight into animal thoughts. Imagine when you’re trying to remember a name, and it’s just not coming. You can still understand the thing, see the thing, think about using the thing. You can do all that without language, you just can’t communicate the thing.
spark_chicken11 months ago
This article raises an interesting point, but I think it may oversimplify the relationship between language and thinking. While the authors provide some convincing arguments, we should not ignore the role of language in internal thought processes.<p>Many people, including myself, often organize and sort out their thoughts through internal dialogue. This &quot;self-communication&quot; may not be external communication in the traditional sense, but it does help us structure and refine ideas. Language provides a way to structure our thoughts, allowing us to examine our ideas more clearly.<p>In addition, certain complex abstract concepts may be difficult to form without language. While basic cognitive processes may not rely on language, high-level thinking - especially in fields such as philosophy and science - is often closely linked to language.<p>I agree that language is a powerful communication tool, but I think it is also a thinking tool. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that language serves both communication and thinking, and the two are not mutually exclusive.
vishnugupta11 months ago
Most of the time we are communicating (internal monologue) with ourselves which I’m sure shapes our thoughts. I’d guess a large percentage of that is through a language.<p>In fact languages codify a community’s culture, values, a way of life all of which go way beyond communication.
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leshokunin11 months ago
We don&#x27;t have better tooling to transfer information between humans though. We have language, and we have art. It seems that art transcends humans in some ways: happy &#x2F; sad music seems to affect animals, and we&#x27;ve seen animals contemplating things. Without language, we can&#x27;t really create a mapping to what that means though. We simply don&#x27;t have a better way to compress multiple concepts into few bits of information we can pass around.<p>Interestingly, removing language as a tool for communication is a cool thought experiment. I imagine one could use maths, or music, as a way of expressing thoughts and ideas. Would that process of condensing information not be language-making though?
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hliyan11 months ago
Was just remembering some advice I received from a counsellor years ago: &quot;thoughts lead to actions, actions lead to emotions&quot;. That never fully resonated with me, because if thoughts as we understand them are the origin of everything, we should have a lot more control of ourselves than we actually do.<p>Now I tend to think that both thoughts and emotions have the same origin: some sort of internal representation of the world around us that we do not directly control. Thoughts, whether visual or auditory or symbolic, arise from this &quot;model&quot;. I&#x27;d like to think of this model as not consisting anything that we would recognise directly as thoughts or emotions or even memories. It may be a &quot;machine language&quot; layer that has no conscious representation. I wouldn&#x27;t call it subconscious thought because that would imply a thought being thought, only without conscious awareness.
Merrill11 months ago
In college I was struck by a housemate&#x27;s law books. They only contained text with no pictures, drawings, diagrams, tables, graphs, formulae, or any of the other tools for organizing information common to engineering. They looked to be extremely tedious and boring.<p>Later, another former housemate, a math major who was developing software, went to law school for a JD. It was his opinion that many of the tools from computer science were useful for deciphering the more complex laws and regulations.<p>How you think may be a significant factor in whether you are a good match to certain occupations.
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guerreroguy11 months ago
From what I read in this paper, it seems like the authors are depending on some very strict definition of what can be considered language. Can anyone provide more context on what definition they&#x27;re using?<p>I ask because certain assumptions that seem to be built into the paper and its references seem to exclude a lot of things that I would personally consider other forms of language. For example, they say the subjects with impairments to the parts of the brain supposedly required for speech could &quot;follow non-verbal instructions&quot; and &quot;understand what another person believes&quot;. What makes those exchanges distinct from use of language, albeit a poorly defined one? I know nothing about this field of study, so I assume there&#x27;s some assumptions and definitions they aren&#x27;t stating explicitly. It seems weird to me that they say &quot;these representations need not be specifically linguistic: they could be symbolic but non-linguistic (for example, ‘9’), and the use of symbolic non-linguistic representations does not engage linguistic resources (for example, mathematical reasoning elicits no response in the language brain areas and is preserved in individuals with severe aphasia&quot;. Why not go back and question the initial assumption that all language depends on those specific parts of the brain? Why are symbols not language?
elijahbenizzy11 months ago
There&#x27;s an interesting debate here -- see this tweet. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;ylecun&#x2F;status&#x2F;1769137037959913690" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;ylecun&#x2F;status&#x2F;1769137037959913690</a>. Cool to see an actual article on it as opposed to speculation from personal experience.<p>Now for some speculation from personal experience. Some people leverage language more for internal thought and some people have other intermediate representations. I&#x27;m personally more of a language thinker except I have a specific avenue for math&#x2F;programming that is highly optimized. I imagine many use language to solve math problems (and no way is right or wrong).
psychoslave11 months ago
Skiming it, it seems that this article doesn&#x27;t give itself a scoped definition for thought and language, despite pointing the highly polysemic state of these terms.<p>It&#x27;s hard to conclude anything on so broad terms.<p>My perspective is that there are thoughts which are inaccessible to bare spoken language and straight forward access without such a language, and there are thoughts that are unreachable without the relevant language to leverage on.<p>Moreover I guess that here communication mainly means interpersonal communication, but my bet is that on the median case people use mainly languages as an internal tool to stear the large body of inconsistent thoughts going through their brain toward something consistent enough to be considered by the small part of the mind called attention, which can then try to decide something about it.<p>At least in my own case, most of my use of language never lead to any utterance. And of course some things I utter obviously lacked thoughtful consideration.
VyseofArcadia11 months ago
I feel like this is one of those &quot;of course&quot; papers that people will dismiss, but it is good in science to confirm via orthogonal methods things that ought to be true[0]. All evidence points to language evolving for the purpose of communication, so of course its primary function is communication. It was only later co-opted for use in thought.<p>[0] I like the analogy of a subway network. Something like a star topology is unreliable because you have one problem and a whole swath of the city is inaccessible. But if you start building secondary and tertiary links between stations, you get robustness. Even if there&#x27;s a problem or two you can still get anywhere.
somenameforme11 months ago
While I think this is a really interesting topic, it should also be self evident because of a simple fact. Humans developed language long after our species evolved. The most recent estimates put the development of language at as recently as 40,000 years ago.<p>It&#x27;d be impossible to &#x27;invent&#x27; language without thought, so therefore it must be the case that thought exists independently of language.
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tombert11 months ago
Hmm, this definitely feels contrary to my intuition; it definitely <i>feels</i> like language is how I think, though I&#x27;ll trust the research here more than my gut feeling, so I&#x27;m definitely wrong.<p>I guess the reason that I think that is because of how much clearer I can think of a problem after I write a somewhat structured paper on it. Maybe it&#x27;s not the &quot;language&quot; so much as just forcing some structure is what&#x27;s responsible.
curation11 months ago
The failure of language to provide for us a way to precisely say what we mean results in consciousness. (Lacan&#x2F;Slovenian Troika&#x2F;McGowan&#x2F;Benjamin etc)
WiSaGaN11 months ago
This is surprising to me because when I learn something, I usually find that trying to speak it out helps a lot of thinking about it clearly. Put it another way, the effort to turn something into language helps forming the thought about it. Thus I don&#x27;t know whether counts as a counter argument.
butterNaN11 months ago
For those without money to spare: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwern.net&#x2F;doc&#x2F;psychology&#x2F;linguistics&#x2F;2024-fedorenko.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gwern.net&#x2F;doc&#x2F;psychology&#x2F;linguistics&#x2F;2024-fedorenko....</a><p>The authors come from MIT, Harward, and University of California
ppipada11 months ago
A conversation with ChatGPT to understand the papers perspective further: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;7f5449d3-3411-4462-acd1-ca9baa535136" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chatgpt.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;7f5449d3-3411-4462-acd1-ca9baa5351...</a><p>The references of interest:<p>Piaget, J. (1926). The language and thought of the child.<p>Monti, M. M., Parsons, L. M., &amp; Osherson, D. N. (2007). Functional Neuroanatomy of Deductive Inference: A Language-Independent Distributed Network
kjkjadksj11 months ago
An easy example of this is from reading books. Chances are you imagine your own scene in your head of how the characters or setting might look like, with much more clarity and depth than what few descriptors the author supplied. In that sense you’ve been communicated something through language but you aren’t thinking within the bounds of that communicated message, your thoughts go beyond merely what is written and add their own sensibilities to the message. None of this was communicated explicitly, but it exists as thought.
beaned11 months ago
Language is for both. Every concept is tied to a label that is a word. We identify pieces of reality by their common attributes while omitting their specific measurements, and attach these identifications to a label which is a word. It is a unique ability that we have as humans, which no other animal shares. It is essential for rational thought. Communication may have been an evolutionary forcing function on our ability to <i>conceive</i> generally (rather than simply perceive), but communication is still downstream from having concepts to communicate.
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Gimpei11 months ago
How accepted is this result? If it’s true, it basically destroys a huge fraction of modern philosophy. A large fraction of the continental tradition would have the rug pulled out from under it.
podgorniy11 months ago
Tailoring pattern-recognition should be easier for a word than for a concept. Then future AI will be able to interpret thoughs of those who think in words because these &quot;words&quot; are common cross many people unline concept-thinking.
interiorchurch11 months ago
This would be sort of a death blow to much of postmodernism, no? &quot;Reality is structured like a language and the free play of symbols reigns over all&quot;-style thinking was very popular at one time, but this would rule against it.
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no_identd11 months ago
&lt;Memetic Components of Languages, probably, if they had drunk too much mean juice&gt; Nice implicit metrics y&#x27;all got there, would be a shame if anything happened to &#x27;em.<p>(yes I duped my comment into the dupe submission, so?)
patryn2011 months ago
Language is a tool for manipulation. Sure it is used for communication with people considered “equals”. But primarily people use it to get what they want from people they can outmaneuver and&#x2F;or manipulate verbally and legally (both are an extension of language).<p>Language’s roots are in trade and survival. Therefore manipulation of others for the speakers benefit has ALWAYS been the primary purpose.
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zindescartes11 months ago
IIUC this is in direct contrast to a previous thread: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40466814">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40466814</a><p>That thread argued that before hellen keller was taught language in some form she was not conscious. Even the top rated comment seems to corroborate it.<p>So which one is true?
no_identd11 months ago
&lt;Memetic Components of Languages, probably, if they had drunk too much mean juice&gt; Nice implicit metrics y&#x27;all got there, would be a shame if anything happened to &#x27;em
davidaorai11 months ago
what is a thought then? what is this little voice which guide you to think of this or that from the beginning of the day till the end even diring dream? for me from the electronic part its a pathway of electronic discharge between all over neural cells of different functional area of tgd brain which respect the phisiological structure of tge brain (motor, visual , temporary front cortex , cingulate for Long short memory, ) but what guide you to think of that then after, maybe thr machine learning conception can explain : for each different person and experience , each of us has going to activate a neural cell wchich to be the most predictable idea , and this prediction id modulated by all the input acquired all thr day ( for example if something more important is seen around us)
jschrf11 months ago
I think cetaceans use sound to broadcast visual and emotional holographs to each other, and as humans we could do good by being stewards of the differing specie and steer their linguistics together somehow.<p>Conservation through cognitive neuroscience and linguistics.<p>Can dolphins communicate with sperm whales? What if they could?
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jpt411 months ago
Which is to say, language is a tool for rigorization.
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aaronturner11 months ago
Leibniz knew this in 1676 - “Let us calculate!”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Characteristica_universalis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Characteristica_universalis</a>
stoniejohnson11 months ago
Language is the medium through which raw perspective refined itself.<p>Language birthed social games and the sense of self.<p>Yes, language evolved for communication.<p>But without communication, thought would still be stuck in the land of instinct, never forged by the tribal dances of love, art, deceit, debate and organization.
badrunaway11 months ago
I believe language allows having more than one layer i.e. enabling complexity of representation. For example, If I want to think about the person thinking inside - these kind of recursive concepts need some sort of symbolic nesting to even materialise the idea.
mrgaro11 months ago
Does anybody else often visualie memories as they would watch them via a movie camera? I do. I can see myself walking in places with a cinematic camera movements and angles. Haven&#x27;t heard much others having the same.
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mleroy11 months ago
I believe the concept of multimodal token embeddings is quite fitting for my own thinking. Certainly, my &#x27;embeddings&#x27; are not always fully formed words, but sometimes they are.
max_11 months ago
Well 99% of the use of language is for thought not communication.<p>Also, People that are considered to be good at language skills (public speaking, writing) are either politicians, writers of fiction or seducers.<p>These fields have one thing in common they are normally about deception&#x2F;changing the way people think about something. Not exactly communication.<p>We know that language is very bad for communication if we try to transmit scientific insights like climate change or health advice.<p>This explains why scientific fields had to invent their own notation like benzine rings, maths equations &amp; free body diagrams to make communication of ideas more effective instead of the verbose, unexact tool of natural language.
soloist1111 months ago
So it sounds like LLMs will not achieve AGI.
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MiguelX41311 months ago
I think it&#x27;d be epic if the link of the post was changed to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doi.org&#x2F;10.1038&#x2F;s41586-024-07522-w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doi.org&#x2F;10.1038&#x2F;s41586-024-07522-w</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oadoi.org&#x2F;10.1038&#x2F;s41586-024-07522-w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oadoi.org&#x2F;10.1038&#x2F;s41586-024-07522-w</a>
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stall8411 months ago
The first thing that strikes me is the definitions of thoughts and language used on the first page.
nazka11 months ago
So if language is primarily a tool for communication, which tools are we using for thought?
veunes11 months ago
Different languages may offer unique perspectives
SillyUsername11 months ago
Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra.<p>^ Reference types in the language seems pretty good at this...
PLenz11 months ago
I definately talk to think. Even in my head I&#x27;m talking to myself.
abetusk11 months ago
In contrast to Noam Chomsky who was pushing the idea that language was developed primarily for thought [0].<p>I don&#x27;t know how much weight should be given to this paper but, if true, directly contradicts Chomsky. Here is one quote from Chomsky:<p>&quot;&quot;&quot; ... One general assumption about language, almost a dogma in philosophy ... [and] linguistics ... is that language is primarily a means of communication ... probably that&#x27;s totally false. It seems language ... is designed as a mode of creating and interpreting thought. &quot;&quot;&quot;<p>In my opinion, I find Chomsky to get mired in certain quagmires around intelligence and computation, especially in regards to AI, where he&#x27;s somehow managed to rationalize an absurd stance. I remember watching a video with Chomsky claiming that language&#x27;s primary purpose was not communication and thinking it was potentially plausible but highly unlikely. I&#x27;d be curious to see if people think this paper, and maybe any other research, refute this position.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KEmpRtj34xg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KEmpRtj34xg</a>
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meowface11 months ago
Side note, but I enjoy papers with meta-contrarian theses like these.
feverzsj11 months ago
I believe so, as some people don&#x27;t even have inner voice.
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kartoshechka11 months ago
offtopic, but I can&#x27;t fathom why academia and Nature specifically thinks that 2 columns of tiny text is a comfortable format for reading off screen
renegade-otter11 months ago
You can&#x27;t think if you don&#x27;t speak. Babies don&#x27;t &quot;think&quot; like adults do, rather they just follow instincts.<p>Go ahead, try it. Think something but don&#x27;t say it in your head.
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richrichie11 months ago
I wish Oliver Sacks were alive and writing.
dekken_11 months ago
thought is communicating with yourself
bombdailer11 months ago
That makes sense given the analogous LLM, which doesn&#x27;t &#x27;think&#x27; via the individual or even sum of the tokens it produces, but in-between in the hidden layers. The output - or actualization of the token - is simply just the form of communication used to convey the &#x27;thought&#x27;.<p>I guess you could say its inappropriate of an analogy since the LLM must use generated tokens to feed into itself in order to &#x27;think&#x27; over time beyond a single token. But I would argue that&#x27;s simply because we enforce the communication method.<p>One does not need language to have a known concept for &quot;objects fall to the ground when let go&quot;. Babies learn this without language. They do not have words for the particular concepts such as &quot;object&quot;, &quot;fall&quot;, &quot;ground&quot;, but as concepts they are learned all the same.<p>For thought, all there really is, are concepts, or forms in platonic terms. In our case, learned patterns in the world which correspond to particular sense perceptions. Imagination, or the latent space between the forms, is our initial (and only, I&#x27;d argue) mode of thinking. These forms, encoding both logical and sensory - of which they are inseparably bound - can be strung together to form thought. They agree to a type of logic, affording the capacity to extract meaning out of the world.<p>It is an embodied logic, not boolean algebra. The logic is grounded in the ground, the earth underneath your feet. It is grounded in the sun, in its heat and light. It is grounded in the logos, or the intelligible unfolding of the universe. The intelligibility is afforded because of its own nature - that it is built up out of real patterns, patterns all the way down. But it also requires the appearance of the patterns in our sense perceptions in order to be &#x27;seen&#x27; and thus known.<p>As such, logic of this sort is found to be based off of the learned patterns of how the world appears to us so as to make it intelligible, affording our ability to live within it. Then you get sensory being mapped into grounded logic and vise versa, so as to experience the unfolding of the logic with imagination, and I suppose the affective state changes it produces are then fed back into the logic. So emotions seem necessary in order to &#x27;react&#x27; to sense perceptions, so that the logic is grounded in caring about what happens, like a mother does with a child. Otherwise there is just appearance, which has no qualia in and of itself, and so the patterns that can be discovered in the world have no ground.<p>Determining the necessity of the ground of appearances is probably what will determine if we can have AGI or not. We&#x27;d like to think computation alone will get us there, or even embodied cognition, but without the transcendentals, its dimensionality of knowing will always exclude this ground, so it cannot know what patterns are most relevant or salient, so it cannot perform relevance realization and overcome combinatorial explosion. So AI cannot be a temporal embodied agent, since the logos of the world is incomprehensible, except through itself, of which we Beings are made out of. We rely on lower order logic, such as math, for our AI. It is how we make sense of the real patterns we see in the world, but they are an abstraction over the thing itself. So a machine is confined by boolean algebra, while we are confined by the logos itself. Sounds nice anyhow.
passwordle11 months ago
Agreed.
m3kw911 months ago
To all engineers, it’s just an API
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ofslidingfeet11 months ago
Basically a blogpost tbh, and it begs the question by defining language as verbal communication.
darth_avocado11 months ago
Somehow, when I say Pow-el street instead of Pow-ul street, everyone feigns ignorance, even though they completely know what I’m talking about. Doesn’t seem like language as a communication tool works well, when it is I used as a way to establish superiority.
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amgalan11 months ago
...
genocide_joe11 months ago
There was thought before there was language. Anyone who doubts that is not thinking.
genocide_joe11 months ago
FUCK YOU FOR CENSORING MY COMMENTS. YOU CAN STICK IT UP YOUR ARSES.
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