> Because there people (like Yann LeCun) who do not hear language in their head when they think, at all.
I straight-up don't believe this. Can you link to the claim so I can understand?
Surely if "high-order thought" has any meaning it is defined by some form. Otherwise it's just perception and not "thought" at all.
FWIW, I don't "hear" my thoughts at all, but it's no less linguistic. I can put a lot more effort into thinking and imagine what it would be like to hear it, but using an sensory analogy fundamentally seems like a bad way to describe thinking if we want to figure out what it thinking is.
I of course have non-linguistic ways of evaluating stuff, but I wouldn't call that the same as thinking, nor a sufficient replacement for more advanced tools like engaging in logical reasoning. I don't think logical reasoning is even a meaningful concept without language—perhaps there's some other way you can identify contradictions, but that's at best a parallel tool to logical reasoning, which is itself a formal language.
[EDIT: this reply was written when the parent post was a single line, "I straight-up don't believe this. Can you link to the claim so I can understand?"]
In the case of Yann, he said so himself[1]. In the case of people generically, this has been well-known in cognitive science and linguistics for a long time. You can find one popsci account here[2].
I fundamentally think the terms here are too poorly defined to draw any sort of conclusion other than "people are really bad at describing mental processes, let alone asking questions about them".
For instance: what does it mean to "hear" a thought in the first place? It's a nonsensical concept.
>>>For instance: what does it mean to "hear" a thought in the first place? It's a nonsensical concept.
You could ask people what they mean when they say they "hear" thoughts, but since you've already dismissed their statements as "nonsensical" I guess you don't see the point in talking to people to understand how they think!
That doesn't leave you with many options for learning anything.
> You could ask people what they mean when they say they "hear" thoughts, but since you've already dismissed their statements as "nonsensical" I guess you don't see the point in talking to people to understand how they think!
Presumably the question would be "If you claim to 'hear' your thoughts, why do you choose the word 'hear'?" It doesn't make much sense to ask people if they experience something I consider nonsensical.
When the sounds waves hit your ear drum it causes signals that are then sent to the brain via the auditory nerve, where they trigger neurons to fire, allowing you to perceive sound.
When I have an internal monologuing I seem to be simulating the neurons that would fire if my thoughts were transmitted via sound waves through the ear.
> When I have an internal monologuing I seem to be simulating the neurons that would fire if my thoughts were transmitted via sound waves through the ear.
>>>How the hell would you convince someone of this?
There's a writer and blogger named Mark Evanier who wrote as a joke
"Absolutely no one likes candy corn. Don't write to me and tell me you do because I'll just have to write back and call you a liar. No one likes candy corn. No one, do you hear me?"
You're doing the same thing but replace "candy corn" with "internal monologue".
The fact people report it makes it obviously true to the extent that the idea of a belligerent person refusing to accept it is funny.
What is happening to you when you think? Are there words in your head? What verb would you use for your interaction with those words?
In other topic, I would consider this as minor evidence of possibility of nonverbal thought “could you pass me that… thing… the thing that goes under the bolt?”. I.e. Exact name eludes me sometimes, but I do know exactly what I need and what I plan to do with it.
> Even if the symbol fails to materialise you can still identify what the symbol refers to via context-clues (analysis)
That is what my partner in the conversation is doing. I am not doing that.
When I think of a plan what’s needed to be done (e.g. something broke in the house, or I need to go to multiple places), usually I know/feel/perceive the gist of my plan instantly. And only after that, I verbalise/visualise it in my head, which takes some time and possibly add more nuance. (Verbalisation/visualisation in my head, is a bit similar to writing things down)
At least for me, there seem to be three (or more) thought processes that complement each other. (Verbal, visual, other)
> we literally don't have the language to figure out how other people perceive things.
you are right, talking about mental processes is difficult.
Nobody knows how exactly other person perceive things, there is no objective way to measure things out.
(Offtopic: describing smell is also difficult)
In this thread, we see that rudimentary language for it exists.
For example: lot of people use sentence like “to hear my own thoughts” and a lot of people understand that fine.
I can certainly tell the difference between normal (for me) thoughts, which I don't perceive as being constructed with language, and speaking to myself. For me, the latter feels like something I choose to do (usually to memorize something or tell a joke to myself), but it makes up much less than 1% of my thoughts.
I have the same reaction to most of these discussions.
If someone says “I cannot picture anything in my head”, then just because I would describe my experience as “I can picture things in my head” isn’t enough information to know whether we have different experiences. We could be having the same exact experience.
I take your point that hearing externally cannot be the same as whatever I experience because of literal physics, but I still cannot deny that listening to someone talk, listening to myself think, and listening to a memory basically all feel exactly the same for me. I also have extreme dyslexia, and dyslexia is related to phonics, so I presume something in there is related to that as well?
> but I still cannot deny that listening to someone talk, listening to myself think, and listening to a memory basically all feel exactly the same for me.
Surely one of these would involve using your input from your ears and one would not? Can you not distinguish these two phenomena?
While I don't have the same experience, I regard what you say as fascinating additional information about the complexity of thought, rather than something needing to be explained away - and I suspect these differences between people will be helpful in figuring out how minds work.
It is no surprise to me that you have to adopt existing terms to talk about what it is like, as vocabularies depend on common experiences, and those of us who do not have the experience can at best only get some sort of imperfect feeling for what it is like through analogy.
I have no clue what this means as I don't understand what to what you refer via "sounds".
Are you saying you cannot tell whether you are thinking or talking except via your perception of your mouth and vocal chords? Because I definitely perceive even my imagination about my own voice as different.
I feel they must know the difference(and anyone would assume that) but will answer you in good faith.
I can listen to songs in their entirety in my head and it's nearly as satisfying as actually hearing. I can turn it down halfway thru and still be in sync 30 sec later.
That's not to flex only to illustrate how similarly I experience the real and imagined phenomena. I can't stop the song once it's started sometimes. It feels that real.
My voice sounds exactly how I want it to when I speak 99% of the time unless I unexpectedly need to clear my throat. Professional singers can obviously choose the note they want to produce, and do it accurately. I find it odd your own voice is unpredictable to you. Perhaps - and I mean no insult - you don't 'hear' your thought in the same way.
Edit I feel it's only fair to add I'm hypermnesiac and can watch my first day of kindergarten like a video. That's why I can listen to whole songs in my head.
There are other lines of evidence. I don't know much about documented cases of feral children, but presumably there must have been at least one known case that developed to some meaningful age at which thought was obviously happening in spite of not having language. There are children with extreme developmental disorders delaying language acquisition that nonetheless still seem to have thoughts and be reasonably intelligent on the grand scale of all animals if not all humans. There is Helen Keller, who as far as I'm aware describes some phase change in her inner experience after acquiring language, but she still had inner experience before acquiring language. There's the unknown question of human evolutionary history, but at some point, a humanoid primate between Lucy and the two of us had no language but still had reasonably high-order thinking and cognitive capabilities that put it intellectually well above other primates. Somebody had to speak the first sentence, after all, and that was probably necessary for civilization to ever happen, but humans were likely quite intelligent with rich inner lives well before they had language.
I think what you are saying is that language is deeply and perhaps inextricably tied to human thought. And, I think it's fair to say this is basically uniformly regarded as a fact.
The reason I (and others) say that language is almost certainly preceded by (and derived from) high-order thought is because high-order thought exists in all of our close relatives, while language exists only in us.
Perhaps the confusion is in the definition of high-order thought? There is an academic definition but I boil it down to "able to think about thinking as, e.g. all social great apes do when they consider social reactions to their actions."
> Perhaps the confusion is in the definition of high-order thought? There is an academic definition but I boil it down to "able to think about thinking as, e.g. all social great apes do when they consider social reactions to their actions."
Yes, I think this is it.
But now I am confused why "high-order thought" is termed this way when it doesn't include what we would consider "thinking" but rather "cognition". You don't need to have a "thought" to react to your own mental processes. Surely from the perspective of a human "thoughts" would constitute high-order thinking! Perhaps this is just humans' unique ability of evaluating recursive grammars at work.
High-order thought can mean a bunch of things more generally, in this case I meant it to refer to thinking about thinking because "faking" alignment is (I assert) not scary without that.
The reason why is: the core of the paper suggests that they trained a model and then fed it adversarial input, and it mostly (and selectively) kept to its training objectives. This is exactly what we'd expect and want. I think most people will hear that pretty much mostly not be alarmed at all, even lay people. It's only alarming if we say it is "faking" "alignment." So that's why I thought it would be helpful to scope the word in that way.
I'm one of those people who claim not to "think in language," except specifically when composing sentences. It seems just as baffling to me that other people claim that they primarily do so. If I had to describe it, I would say I think primarily in concepts, connected/associated by relations of varying strengths. Words are usually tightly attached to those concepts, and not difficult to retrieve when I go to express my thoughts (though it is not uncommon that I do fail to retrieve the right word.)
I believe that I was thinking before I learned words, and I imagine that most other people were too. I believe the "raised by wolves" child would be capable of thought and reasoning as well.
It's actually a very well trod field at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science. The fundamental question is whether or not cognitive processes have the structure of language. There are compelling arguments in both directions.
I straight-up don't believe this. Can you link to the claim so I can understand?
Surely if "high-order thought" has any meaning it is defined by some form. Otherwise it's just perception and not "thought" at all.
FWIW, I don't "hear" my thoughts at all, but it's no less linguistic. I can put a lot more effort into thinking and imagine what it would be like to hear it, but using an sensory analogy fundamentally seems like a bad way to describe thinking if we want to figure out what it thinking is.
I of course have non-linguistic ways of evaluating stuff, but I wouldn't call that the same as thinking, nor a sufficient replacement for more advanced tools like engaging in logical reasoning. I don't think logical reasoning is even a meaningful concept without language—perhaps there's some other way you can identify contradictions, but that's at best a parallel tool to logical reasoning, which is itself a formal language.