Language isn't thought. It's a representation of thought.

Something to think about (hah!) is there are people without an internal monologue i.e. no voice inside their head they use when working out a problem. So they're thinking and learning and doing what humans do just fine with no little voice no language inside their head.

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WJW a day ago | parent [-]

It's so weird that people literally seem to have a voice in their head they cannot control. For me personally my "train of thought" is a series of concepts, sometimes going as far as images. I can talk to myself in my head with language if I make a conscious effort to do so, just as I can breathe manually if I want. But if I don't, it's not really there like some people seem to have.

Probably there are at least two groups of people and neither really comprehends how the other thinks haha.

	▲	graemefawcett a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think there are significantly more than 2, when you start to count variations through the spectrum of neurodiversity. Spatial thinkers, for example, or the hyperlexic. Meaning for hyperlexics is more akin to finding meaning in the edges of the graph, rather than the vertices. The form of language contributing a completely separate graph of knowledge, alongside its content, creating a rich, multimodal form of understanding. Spatial thinkers have difficulty with procedural thinking, which is how most people are taught. Rather than the series of steps to solve the problem, they see the shape of the transform. LLMs as an assistive device can be very useful for spatial thinkers in providing the translation layer between the modes of thought.
	▲	hyperliner a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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rhetocj23 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Its very interesting to see how many people struggle to understand this.

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subjectivationx 15 hours ago | parent [-]

We are paying the price now for not teaching language philosophy as a core educational requirement.

Most people have had no exposure to even the most basic ideas of language philosophy.

The idea all these people go to school for years and don't even have to take a 1 semester class on the main philosophical ideas of the 20th century is insane.

	▲	CamperBob2 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Language philosophy is not relevant, and evidently never was. It predicted none of what we're seeing and facilitated even less. One must imagine Sisyphus happy and Chomsky incoherent with rage.

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CamperBob2 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If it were that simple, LLMs wouldn't work at all.

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qlm 21 hours ago | parent [-]

I think it explains quite well why LLMs are useful in some ways but stupid in many other ways.

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CamperBob2 14 hours ago | parent [-]

LLMs clearly think. They don't have a sense of object permanence, at least not yet, but they absolutely, indisputably use pretrained information to learn and reason about the transient context they're working with at the moment.

Otherwise they couldn't solve math problems that aren't simple rephrasings of problems they were trained on, and they obviously can do that. If you give a multi-step undergraduate level math problem to the human operator of a Chinese room, he won't get very far, while an LLM can.

So that leads to the question: given that they were trained on nothing but language, and given that they can reason to some extent, where did that ability come from if it didn't emerge from latent structure in the training material itself? Language plus processing is sufficient to produce genuine intelligence, or at least something indistinguishable from it. I don't know about you, but I didn't see that coming.

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bigstrat2003 11 hours ago | parent [-]

They very clearly do not think. If they did, they wouldn't be able to be fooled by so many simple tests that even a very small (and thus, uneducated) human would pass.

	▲	CamperBob2 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Are you really claiming that something doesn't think if it's possible to fool it with simple tricks? Seriously?

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naasking a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Are the particles that make up thoughts in our brain not also a representation of a thought? Isn't "thought" really some kind of Platonic ideal that only has approximate material representations? If so, why couldn't some language sentences be thoughts?

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qlm 21 hours ago | parent [-]

The sentence is the result of a thought. The sentence in itself does not capture every process that went into producing the sentence.

	▲	naasking 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The sentence in itself does not capture every process that went into producing the sentence. A thought does not capture every process that went into producing the thought either.