[HN Gopher] Language is primarily a tool for communication rathe...
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Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought
(2024) [pdf]
Author : netfortius
Score : 122 points
Date : 2025-11-28 14:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gwern.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (gwern.net)
| netfortius wrote:
| Excellent, comprehensive, extremely thorough work behind all
| this. Maturana would love it!
| krackers wrote:
| Doesn't hellen keller provide a counterexample? She seemed to
| imply pretty strongly that before acquisition of language she
| operated more on stimulus and bodily perception rather than
| higher-level thought.
| brianush1 wrote:
| One could make the argument that higher-level thought is not
| the same as awareness of higher-level thought; perhaps language
| only affords the latter.
| yyyk wrote:
| It's clear humans have several networks working together. Some
| Mathematicians report they 'see' the solution, these rely on a
| visual network *. Others report they prefer to do math
| symbolically (relying on the language network?).
|
| Perhaps there are also multiple human paths to higher-level
| thought, with Keller (who lost her sight) using the language
| facility while others don't have to.
|
| * Given Box 1 contents, the article authors seem unaware of the
| research on this? e.g.
|
| https://www.youcubed.org/resource/visual-mathematics/
|
| https://www.hilarispublisher.com/open-access/seeing-as-under...
| uoaei wrote:
| She learned "language" later than most. The primary function
| for her was as communication with the outside world, not for
| cognition, which she was already doing from birth.
| lunar-whitey wrote:
| Keller's early experience of the world differed from typical in
| dimensions beyond language recognition.
| BanditDefender wrote:
| Those aren't mutually exclusive, stimulus and bodily perception
| enable higher-level thoughts about the physical world. Once I
| was driving a big cheap pickup with a heavy load on an
| interstate, and a rear tire violently blew out, causing the
| truck to sway violently. I operated entirely by feel + my 3D
| mental model of a moving truck to discern what and where went
| wrong and how to safely pull over. It was too fast and too
| difficult for any stupid words to get in the way.
|
| I am glad humans are meaningfully smarter than chimps, and not
| merely more vocal. Helen Keller herself seemed to think that
| learning language finally helped her understand what this weird
| language thing was: I stood still, my whole
| attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I
| felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten--a thrill
| of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was
| revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful
| cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word
| awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!
|
| It is not like she was constantly dehydrated because she didn't
| understand what water was. She realized even a somewhat open-
| ended concept like "water" could be given a name by virtue of
| being recognizable via stimulus and bodily perception. That in
| and of itself is quite a high-level thought!
| Grimblewald wrote:
| No, if i recall the section in her autobiography, specifically
| it was being taught the concept of "i" / "me" that did it.
|
| Up until that point language was just an extension of what she
| already knew, it was the learning of being other that did the
| trick. Being blind and deaf would certainly make it hard to
| draw a distinction between the self and the world, and while
| languaged helped her get that concept under wraps, i dont think
| it's strictly speaking required. Just one of many avenues
| towards.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| But language is also the only way to communicate this. As far
| as I can tell my cat has a complex consciousnesses but there
| is no way for me to tell if she has this capacity for
| introspection and self-reflexivity.
|
| If there are other avenues other than language, how would we
| know?
|
| I think language is a medium that enables this kind of
| structured thought. Without it, I cannot imagine reaching
| this level of abstraction (understanding being a "self").
| balamatom wrote:
| As far as the cat herself is concerned, there is no
| _reason_ to make that known, either. "Introspection" and
| "self-reflexivity" are notions, language items. Best used
| by a human for explaining to other humans why that human
| should be fed, you know?
|
| What ontological difference does it make whether a being
| contains "introspection" and "self-reflexivity" but not
| "nuclear physics" or "interpretive dance"? It's still
| hungry with or without them. And what good is any of those
| to a cat, when "meow" fills the bowl just fine?
|
| >If there are other avenues other than language, how would
| we know?
|
| Well, if you knew, you'd certainly know, tautology
| extremely intended.
|
| You would just be unable to communicate it, because
| language would forbid it.
|
| Not "not support it", you see, explicitly _forbid_ it: it
| would not only be impossible for you to communicate it,
| _you would be exposing yourself to danger by attempting to
| communicate it._
|
| Because the _arbitrary limitation of expressible complexity
| is what holds language in power_. (Hint: if people keep
| responding to you in confusing ways, you may be doing
| extralinguistic cognition; keep it up!)
|
| >I think language is a medium that enables this kind of
| structured thought. Without it, I cannot imagine reaching
| this level of abstraction (understanding being a "self").
|
| Language does a bait and switch here: first it sets a
| normative upper bound on the efficiency of knowledge
| transfer, then points at the limitation and names it
| "knowledge".
|
| That's stupid.
|
| Example: "the Self", oh that pesky Self, what is its true
| nature o wise ones? It's just another fucking linguistic
| artifact, that's what it is; "self-referentiality" is like
| the least abstract thing there is. You just got a bunch of
| extra unrelated stuff tacked onto that. And of course, you
| _have an obligation to mistake_ that stuff for some
| mysterious ineffable nature and /or for your _self_ : if
| you did not learn to perform these miscognitions, the apes
| would very quickly begin to deny you sustenance, shelter,
| and/or bodily integrity.
|
| Sincerely, your cat
| Grimblewald wrote:
| Plus, i'd argue without a concept of self there is no
| concept of territory and cats are territorial.
| andai wrote:
| When I was a kid a friend asked me, "Hey, you speak three
| languages. Which one do you think in?"
|
| I was bemused, and thought... "people think in words?"
|
| Apparently people with ADHD or Autism can develop the inner voice
| later in life.
|
| In my 20s, language colonized my brain. Took me years of
| meditation to get some peace and quiet back...
| tarsinge wrote:
| Meditation is interesting because it made me able to not only
| separate thoughts from words, but also consciousness from
| thoughts.
|
| It's also consistent with our intuition that toddlers have
| consciousness and thoughts and other mammals at least
| consciousness (and emotions) without language.
| wobfan wrote:
| I have never not thought in words. How does it work? Like, how
| can I for example think about plans or something if not in
| words?
|
| I do meditate here and now, but sooner or later the constant
| stream of words will 100% set in again, usually during or
| immediately after meditation. And these words for example tell
| me or discuss whether I should go shower, go to gym, do dishes,
| or whatever. And in the end I'll decide based on that
| discussion and do it. It's weird how defined I am by this inner
| voice.
| kranner wrote:
| What about a-ha moments when you're solving a tricky problem?
| For me they come in a flash and I know I've solved the
| problem even before I've narrated the solution to myself.
| CjHuber wrote:
| For me such moments come in the form of knowing that I can
| verbalize it, but I have to verbalize it as quickly as
| possible otherwise I might loose it
| j4coh wrote:
| I tend to think in images without an internal dialog running.
| If I think about an upcoming trip I will imagine a series of
| images related to the trip, possible places to go, or just
| generally the place. After a bit a potential conclusion
| appears fully formed in my mind. If I think about a work
| problem, I might imagine the document, a coworkers face, or
| something like that while ruminating on it. Basically it
| feels like the subconscious is handling the details and the
| conscious self overall directs it.
|
| Occasionally there is some snippet of a sentence I imagine,
| but it's almost always cut off prior to finishing the
| sentence. If I imagine writing something, though, I'll speak
| it to myself in my head.
|
| Funnily enough, I'm a pretty weak mental visualiser too. I
| don't have aphantasia but metal images are very transparent
| and dark.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Interesting. I do the same but would never refer to this as
| thinking. Probably something more like "visualizing" or
| "feeling".
| j4coh wrote:
| It works for coding or system architecture and things
| like that, as well. For you, when you start thinking, a
| narrative voice appears? Is it debating yourself?
| MangoToupe wrote:
| No, I have plenty of non-linguistic mental processes, I
| just tend to define thoughts as linguistic to distinguish
| them from the other mental processes.
| heavymemory wrote:
| I think primarily in structures, spaces, and
| transformations. Language tags along afterward.
| tryfinally wrote:
| I do have an inner monologue, but I do make many decisions
| non-verbally. I often visualize actions and their
| consequences, in the context of my internal state. When I'm
| thirsty I consider the drinks available nearby and imagine
| their taste. In the morning coffee feels most tempting,
| unless I've already had a few cups - in that case drinking
| more would leave me feeling worse, not better. After a
| workout, a glass of water is the most expedient way to quench
| the thirst. It is similar when I write a piece of code or
| design a graphic. I look at the code and consider various
| possible transformations and additions, and prefer ones that
| move me closer to my goal, or at least make _any_ sort of
| improvement. It's basically a weighing of imagined possible
| world-states (and self-states), not a discussion.
|
| I struggle to imagine how people can find the time to
| consider all of these trivial choices verbally - in my case
| it all happens almost instantaneously and the whole process
| is easy to miss. I also don't see what the monologue adds to
| the process - just skip this part and make the decision!
|
| That said, I do use an inner voice when writing, preparing
| what to say to someone, etc. and I feel like I struggle with
| this way of thinking much more.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I had this for the longest time. Very imbalanced academic
| performance because I could get the answer and understood a
| lot of things, but had huge trouble with written work. That
| is, converting the thought process into a linear stream of
| words and sentences. I suppose it's like serialization of
| objects in memory.
|
| Edit: maybe this is like the difference between a diffusion
| model and a "next token" model. I always feel a need to
| jump around and iteratively refine the whole picture at
| once. Hard to maintain focus.
| nosianu wrote:
| > _I have never not thought in words._
|
| You don't notice it, but that inner voice is only on the
| surface. It is generated from what's going on deeper. You may
| not notice it is very good at occupying your _attention_.
| Your "real" thoughts are deeper, then we have processes
| generating speech based on our deeper structures.
|
| Language communication is not a true representation of what
| you know. It is a messy iterative process when we try to
| externalize in words what we know. We also end up with people
| having the same words who don't understand one another.
|
| An instance of that is the often used (at least on reddit)
| bell curve meme - https://i.imgur.com/cUOiP2d.jpeg
|
| It is not that the person on the right has the same
| understanding as the one on the left. It is far deeper, but
| you end up using the same words. The knowledge behind the
| words is hard to express, when you try you will not end up
| truly conveying your internal state. The words are
| iteratively and messily derived from exploring your inner
| state, with varying success.
|
| For better or worse, language has the attention of the
| people. We end up with magical tales about "true names",
| where knowing an entities "true name" gives you full control.
| Or with magic that is invoked by speaking certain phrases,
| and the universe obliges. Or with heated discussions about
| arbitrary definitions when it rarely matters, and when you
| really shouldn't, because if you get to the inevitably fuzzy
| edges of the actual concepts behind words you should just
| switch to other words and metaphors that have the subject you
| are interested in discussing in the middle instead of at the
| edge. In reality, our internal models and thinking are hidden
| in our not that well understood (except in the minute
| details, those we know a great deal of) neural networks.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| Ah yes, language is the guise the rationally irrational
| wears. /s
|
| I mostly agree with you but I always find it a bit funny
| how we are the only things/beings that seem to be aware of
| their own (meta)cognition yet I can't actually pop up my
| hood like a car so to speak to understand what actually
| goes on. It gets funnier when we generally can't agree what
| goes on in our heads by just talking about it with each
| other. I don't suppose the fox thinks about why did it
| enter the hen house after the meal, what led it to such an
| act.
|
| More related when I wrote this comment I still can't tell
| if I engaged my inner monologue and wrote by dictation as
| it were or if I let my fingers do the thinking and I read
| back what they wrote.
|
| Discussions about the mind's eye and inner monologue and so
| on are always fun but most of the time I never get that
| much out of them other than satisfying curiosity.
|
| As an aside I remember reading somewhere that some speed
| reading techniques involve not speaking in your mind the
| words you're reading (forego your inner monologue) and just
| internalizing their form and their associated meaning that
| you already know or something like that.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I have never not thought in words. How does it work? Like,
| how can I for example think about plans or something if not
| in words?
|
| This is just a mistake on your part. Your thoughts are
| already not in words.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| This feels like last year when I found out I have ADHD and
| aphantasia...
|
| What do you mean "think in words"? Is it like a narrator, or a
| discussion like Herman's Head? Are you hearing these words _all
| the time_ or only when making decisions?
| teunispeters wrote:
| I can summon up a voice if needed, but yeah normally not
| thinking in words. Aphantasia means I don't think in pictures
| either ;) What I think mostly is in patterns and connections,
| and flows.
| JoelMcCracken wrote:
| Ditto. I have a hard time thinking in pictures. When I do
| there can only be one detailed part at a time, a very small
| area.
|
| I don't really think in language either. To me thought is
| much more a kind of abstract process
| roncesvalles wrote:
| I still don't "buy" that some people don't have an inner voice.
| In my opinion it's either a misunderstanding of what it means
| to have an inner voice (it's not the schizophrenic "other
| person" voice), or people simply lying to appear quirky and
| special.
|
| If people don't have an inner voice, it also must be the case
| the some people (these people?) don't have consciousness. It
| isn't obvious that consciousness is essential to fitness,
| especially of an inner voice isn't. Some people may be
| operating as automatons.
| helpfulclippy wrote:
| > If people don't have an inner voice, it also must be the
| case the some people (these people?) don't have
| consciousness.
|
| Don't see how you got to that.
| bolangi wrote:
| Not sure how well this dovetails with the research presented in
| the article, but Grinder and Bandler's work -- which they named
| Neuro Linguistic Programing (derived I understand from analyzing
| the brief therapy and hypnotherapy techniques of Milton Erickson)
| -- postulated that people have dominant modes of thought: visual,
| auditory, and kinesthetic. They correlated these modes with eye
| movements they observed in subjects when asked to recall certain
| events.
|
| In my personal experience, my mind became much less busy as a
| result of several steps. One being abandoning the theory of mind
| -- in contrast to spiritual practices such as Zen and forms of
| Hinduism, where controlling the mind, preventing its misbehavior,
| or getting rid of it somehow is frequently described as a goal,
| the mind's activity being to blame for a loss of a person's
| ability to be present in the here and now.
|
| As a teenager, I can remember trying to plan in advance what I
| will say to a person when faced with a situation of conflict, or
| maybe desire toward the opposite sex, doubting that language will
| reliably sprout from my feelings when facing a person, whose
| facial reactions (and my dependence on their good will) pulls me
| out of my mental emotional kinesthetic grounding.
|
| As humans we use language, however, it seems possible to live in
| our experience. Some people who are alienated from their
| experience, or overwhelmed by others, seek refuge in language.
|
| There is obviously a gap between research such as this, and how
| someone can make sense of their agency in life, finding their way
| forward when confronted with conflict, uncertainty, etc.
| wobfan wrote:
| I have no clue, have not read the PDF, and am naive and dumb on
| this topic. But my naive thought recently was how important
| language must be for our thought, or even be our thoughts, based
| on how well LLMs work. Needless to say I'm no expert on either
| topic. But my naive impression was, given that LLMs work on
| nothing more than words and predictors, the evidence that they
| almost feel like a real human makes me think that our thoughts
| are heavily influenced or even purely based on language and
| massively defined by it.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It mimics the outputs of our thought. Good and useful mimicry
| doesn't mean the mechanism must be the same
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Seeing as there are people with no internal monologue (no inner
| voice), language is clearly _not_ required for thought.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| How loud and clear are these internal monologues?
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Can you replicate an algorithm just by looking at its inputs
| and outputs? Yes, sometimes.
|
| Will it be a full copy of the original algorithm - the same
| exact implementation? Often not.
|
| Will it be close enough to be useful? Maybe.
|
| LLMs use human language data as inputs and outputs, and they
| learn (mostly) from human language. But they have non-language
| internals. It's those internal algorithms, trained by relations
| seen in language data, that give LLMs their power.
| phforms wrote:
| Maybe the structure and operation in LLMs is a somewhat
| accurate model of the structure and operation of our brains and
| maybe the actual representation of "thought" is different
| between the human brain and LLMs. Then it might be the case
| that what makes the LLM "feel human" depends not so much on the
| actual thinking stuff but how that stuff is related and how
| this process of thought unfolds.
|
| I personally believe that our thinking is fundamentally
| grounded/embodied in abstract/generalized representations of
| our actions and experiences. These representations are
| diagrammatic in nature, because only diagrams allow us to act
| on general objects in (almost) the same way to how we act on
| real-world objects. With "diagrams" I mean not necessarily
| visual or static artefacts, they can be much more elusive,
| kinaesthetic and dynamic. Sometimes I am conscious of them when
| I think, sometimes they are more "hidden" underneath a
| symbolic/language layer.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| I don't know how Federenko squares this view with her own work
| which directly contradicts it [1]. In this work, they find that
| the language network activated for "meaningful" non-linguistic
| stimuli such as the sounds of someone getting ready in the
| morning (e.g. yawning, brushing teeth, etc.). It seems entirely
| contrary to her arguments in this article and she doesn't even
| acknowledge it.
|
| [1] https://direct.mit.edu/nol/article/5/2/385/119141
| Peteragain wrote:
| A beautifully written paper but I do feel it missed a major
| point. Vygotsky pointed out that "in ontogenesis one can discern
| a pre intellectual stage in the development of speech, and a pre
| linguistic stage in the development of thought"[Kozulin 1990
| p153]. The pre intellectual nature of language can be interpreted
| as "performative" language (eg "ouch!" or "I pronounce you man
| and wife") but what does pre linguistic thinking look like? The
| contemporary answer I'd propose is that it looks like situated
| action/ radical enactivism / behaviour-based robotics.(see for
| example Gallagher's 2020 "Action and Interaction") In terms of
| LLMs, the idea is that rather than "distributed representations",
| LLMs are indeed using "glorified auto complete" to predict the
| future and hence look like they are thinking symbolically to us
| humans because that is how we (think we) think. Paper plug: see
| Https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08403
| grumbel wrote:
| Might be correct for reasonably narrow definitions of language
| and thought, but it falls a bit short in considering the extended
| mind thesis. A whole lot of our thinking happens with pen&paper,
| their digital successor or other items out there in the world. We
| don't solve complex problems in our head alone, we solve them by
| interacting iteratively with the real world, and that in turn
| often involves some kind of language, even if it's just us
| reading our own scribbles.
|
| Another issue is that a lot of tasks in the modern world are
| rooted in language, law or philosophy is in large part just word
| games, you won't be able to get far thinking about them without
| language, as those concept don't have any direct correlate that
| you could experience by other means.
|
| Overall I do agree that there are plenty of problems we can solve
| without language, but the type of problems that can and can't be
| solve without language would need some further delineation.
| James_K wrote:
| I think it depends what you mean by language. There is a kind of
| symbolic logic that happens in the brain, and as a programmer I
| might liken it to a programming language, but the biological term
| is defined differently. Language, as far as it is unique to
| humans, is the serialisation of those internal logical structures
| in the same way text file is the serialisation of the logical
| objects within a programming language. What throws most people
| here is that the internal structures can develop in response to
| language and mirror it in some ways. As a concrete example, there
| is certainly a part of my brain that has developed to process
| algebraic equations. I can clearly see this as distinct from the
| part that would serialise them and allow me to write out the
| equation stored internally. In that way, the language of
| mathematics has precipitated the creation of an internal pattern
| of thought which one could easily confuse for its serialisation.
| It seems reasonable to assume that natural language could have
| similar interactions with the logical parts of the mind.
| Constructs such as "if/then" and "before/after" may be acquired
| through language, but exist separate from it.
|
| Language is, therefore, instrumental to human thought as distinct
| from animal thought because it allows us to more easily acquire
| and develop new patterns of thinking.
| NonHyloMorph wrote:
| I think the terminology here isn't sharp. One of the first
| headlines is: "Language is not necessary nor sufficient for
| thought" I disagree. Language is not necessary for cognitive
| processes in individuals/organisms. It is absolutely necessary
| for what we commonly refer to as thought (bit of a pretentious
| we: it involves you in the group of people who have some idea
| about philosophy (e.g. baseline-heidegger)/the
| humanities/psychoanalysis etc.) that which we refer to as
| thought. Thought can be a decentralised process that is happening
| "between" individuals ("Die Sprache spricht" - Language is
| speaking by heidegger points into that direction). Thought is
| also, imho, a symbolic process (which involves sign systems,
| mathematics, languages, images). Not everything going on as a
| cognitive process is therefor constituting thought. That's why
| one can act thoughtless- but not "cognitionless".
| Lionga wrote:
| Based on your definition a child that can not speak/understand
| language yet can not think? Hint: It clearly can.
|
| There are a lot of things I can think about that I do not have
| words for. I can only communicate these things in a unclear
| way, as language is clearly a subset of thought, not a
| superset.
|
| Only if your definition of thought is that is is language
| based, which is just typical philosophy circular logic.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I've started to believe that language is often anti-thought.
| When we are doing what LLMs do, we aren't really thinking,
| we're just imitating sounds based on a sound stimulus.
|
| Learning a second language let me notice how much of language
| has no content. When you're listening to meaningless things
| in your second language, you think you're misunderstanding
| what they're saying. When you listen to meaningless things in
| your first language, you've been taught to let the right
| texture of words slip right in. That you can reproduce an
| original and passable variation of this emptiness on command
| makes it seem like it's really cells indicating that they're
| from the same organism, not "thought." Not being able to do
| it triggers an immune response.
|
| The fact that we can use it to encode thoughts for later
| review confuses us about what it is. The reason why it can be
| used to encode thoughts is because it was used to train us
| from birth, paired with actual simultaneous physical
| stimulus. But the physical stimulus is the important part,
| language is just a spurious association. A spurious
| association that ultimately is used to carry messages from
| the dead and the absent, so is essential to how human
| evolution has proceeded, but it's still an abused, repurposed
| protocol.
|
| I'm an epiphenomenalist, though.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| >Learning a second language let me notice how much of
| language has no content.
|
| What on earth do you mean?
| Peteragain wrote:
| Okay so rephrasing the question, how should we characterise the
| type of thinking we do without language? And the more
| interesting question IMO what thinking can an agent do without
| symbolic representation?
|
| The original Vygotsky claim was that learning a language
| introduces the human mind to thinking in terms of symbols. Cats
| don't do it; infants don't either.
| balamatom wrote:
| Neither do, necessarily, language users.
| Peteragain wrote:
| One can certainly use language to _do_ things without
| thinking. Polly was a robot that gave a tour of the MIT
| labs, but it used pre recorded descriptions at various
| locations. The HUMANS gave meaning to the sounds.
| naasking wrote:
| I think there are other sorts of reasoning, like spatial
| reasoning. If you're trying to sort a set of physical items
| in front of you in order of size, are you thinking about the
| items linguistically, or is your mind working on some
| different internal representation?
|
| It's more the latter for me. I don't think there's
| necessarily one type of internal thought, I think there's
| likely a multimodal landscape of thought. Maybe spatial
| reasoning modes are more geometric, and linguistic modes are
| more sequential.
|
| I think the human brain builds predictive models for all of
| its abilities for planning and control, and I think all of
| these likely have a type of thought for planning future
| "moves".
| Isamu wrote:
| >what thinking can an agent do without symbolic
| representation?
|
| The language model is exclusively built upon the symbols
| present in the training set, but various layers can capture
| higher level patterns of symbols and patterns of patterns.
| Depending on how you define symbolic representation, the
| manipulation of the more abstract patterns of patterns may be
| what you are getting at.
| Peteragain wrote:
| I think the argument is that yes LLMs find patterns in
| token sequences. Assign tokens to moves in a chess game and
| the tokens are predictive of what happened in the past and
| of what chess players will do in the future. The LLM is not
| doing semantics; the humans who generated the corpus are
| doing the thinking. The LLM has no representation of goals
| or plans, rooks or bishops, it's just glorified auto
| complete from a corpus of tokens that we humans understand
| as refering to things in the world.
| Isamu wrote:
| >The LLM is not doing semantics; the humans who generated
| the corpus are doing the thinking.
|
| Agreed, this bears repeating. This point is not obvious
| to someone interacting with the LLM. Because it is able
| to mash up custom responses doesn't make it a thinking
| machine, the thinking was done ahead of time as is the
| case when you read a book. What passes for intelligence
| here is the mash-up, a smooth blending of digested text,
| which was selected by statistical relevance.
| mpascale00 wrote:
| I think you make a good point that much of what we call
| thinking is really _discourse_ either with another ^[0], with
| media, or with one 's own self. These are largely mediated by
| language, but still there are other forms of communicative
| _art_ which externalize thought.
|
| The other thoughts here largely provide within-indivudal
| examples: others noted Hellen Keller and that some folks do not
| experience internal monologue. These tell us about the sort of
| thinking that does happen within a person, but I think that
| there are many forms of communication which are not linguistic,
| and therefore there is also external thinking which is non-
| linguistic.
|
| The observation that not all thought utilizes linguistic
| representations (see particularly the annotated references in
| the bibliography) tells us something about the representations
| that may be useful for reasoning, thought, etc. That though
| language _can_ represent the world it is both not the only way
| and certainly not the only way used by biological beings.
|
| ^[0]: _It Takes Two to Think_
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-02074-2
| trueismywork wrote:
| I disagree. There can be thought without any way to express it
| any langauge yet. Only with a lot of communication can we get
| to the an approximation of what it means and hence it can mean
| slightly different thing ti everyone. Koans can be a good
| example of this
| habbekrats wrote:
| i think you are right, but its hard to explain as ppl can
| interpret your words in many ways depending on their context.
|
| i think this: you dont need language for an idea, to have it,
| or be creative.
|
| to think about it outside of that, like asking critical
| questions, inner dialogue _about_ the ideas and creativity,
| that is i think what is 'thought' and that requires language as
| its sort of inner communication....
| DrierCycle wrote:
| Language may ultimately be maladaptive as it is arbitrary and
| disconnected from thought. Who cares about the gibberish of
| logic/philosophy when survival is at stake in ecological
| balance? The key idea is, there are events. They are real. The
| words we use are false/inaccurate externalizations of those
| events. Words and symbols are bottlenecks that place the events
| out of analog reach but fool us by our own simulation processes
| into thinking they are accurate.
|
| Words are essentially very poor forms of interoception or
| metacognition. They "explain" our thoughts to us by fooling us.
| Yet how much of the senses/perceptions are accessible in
| consciousness. Not very much. The computer serves to further
| the maladaption by both accelerating the symbols and sutomating
| them, which puts the initial real events even further from
| reach. The only game is how much we can fool the species
| through the lowres inputs the PFC demands. This appears to be a
| sizable value center for Silicon Valley, and it seems to
| require coders to ignore the whole of experience and rely
| solely on the bottleneck simulations centers of the PFC which
| themselves are disconnected from direct sensory access.
| Computers, 'social' media, AI, code, VR essentially "play" the
| PFC.
|
| How these basic thought experiments that have been tested in
| cog neuroscience since the 90s in the overthrow of the cog sci
| models of the 40s-80s were not taught as primer classes in AI
| and comp sci is beyond me. It takes now third gen neurobiology
| crossed with linguistics to set the record straight.
|
| These are not controversial ideas now.
| heavymemory wrote:
| If thought needed words, you'd be unable to think of anything you
| can't yet describe
| heavymemory wrote:
| 6th time in the last year that this was posted, apparently
| iainctduncan wrote:
| Any improvising musician or athlete of a complex sport knows with
| absolute certainty that language is not necessary for thought.
| And in fact, we spend years learning to turn off all linguistic
| thought -it degrades performance.
| DrierCycle wrote:
| The key is that there is no content to thought. It's all nested
| oscillations. It can't be extracted as symbols, so there is no
| connection between them. Words play the role of a sportscaster
| reading the minds of the players by observing their behavior. How
| accurate are they or are we about ourselves? Not very.
| ineedasername wrote:
| There are a few things here.
|
| First) This is correct in a trivial and incorrect in profound
| ways.
|
| Trivial Correct: Clearly language is, at best, a lossy channel
| for thought. It isn't thought compressed, it is thought where the
| map would be too complex for language and so we draw a
| kindergarten scribble we all agree on, and that covers a lot of
| ground as a an imperfect pointer. This description is itself
| imperfect, but as a rough sketch not too controversial.
|
| Profound Incorrect: As pointers, it facilitates thought in
| complex ways that would be incredible difficult otherwise.
| Abstractions you can build on like building blocks and, so long
| as your careful about understanding where the word ends and
| doesn't encompass the full thing, you reduce the risk of reifying
| the word overmuch. It's not thought, but is isn't thought in
| some-- not all-- of the ways in which a building's walls is not
| its interior spaces. Of course it isn't. The space would be there
| either way, but keeping it all arranged so nicely and easily to
| reference different elements of it, that is more than just
| convenience and it is inextricable from language, or at least
| some representational system for doing this sort of thing.
|
| Second) It is so strange to see this sort of thing written about,
| in this way, as if it were a new conception, a new view of
| language. But then I look at the researchers involved: near
| always backgrounds outside the formal study of linguistics,
| language itself, and instead focused in other areas adjacent or
| related. Even computational linguistics-- perhaps especially
| computational linguistics. The educational pathway there is much
| more commonly coming from computational paths to applications to
| language, rather than vice versa. This is much less the case with
| Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, where traditional
| biology is much more often within a student's foundation. (This
| is not anecdotal, analysis of student pathways through academic
| studies is a past area of my own professional career)
|
| Through the lens of the history of academia over the past few
| decades, this is not all that surprising. Chomsky's fault (my
| opinion) for trying to wall off the discipline from other areas
| of study or perspective other than his own.
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