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.
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."