An interesting talk I heard at a conference once, that I can neither remember the speaker for or speak to their legitimacy, suggested that we might have some lower form of intelligence encoded into our language. They posed the idea that we have enough unique words, and combination of words, that it starts to have reason unto itself similar to how our neurons and their connection breed intelligence. The idea was that we as humans have baked intelligence into our own speech patterns. It seemed a little to abstract for me, but potentially goes a little way to explaining how a statistical averaging algorithm with some randomness, at scale, starts to look like it very occasionally has a genuinely novel thought.
In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs proposes language is a virus in itself, coming from the Outside, and infecting the host with it's control logic. In Radio Free Abemuth, Philip K. Dick attributes a similar possession to a benevolent force, akin to the divine Logos flourishing intelligent development. Both seem open to an impersonal agency that maps to intelligent systems encoded in their transfer protocols.
The english language pattern is definitely shaping our thoughts and limiting our ideas. Just the whole idea of going from some abstract thought to actually making it out in tangible language, I mean no matter the thought it's a lossy transfer into a medium that lacks all the dimensionality of subconscious thought, neurotransmitter action, sensory information, and physiological response.
There's also something to consider with lower level vs higher level abstractions in language. E.g. jargon. One short word could have a 200 page thesis behind it defining all the ramifications. Talk about compression of information.
Now imagine if our language lacked say the mechanism of jargon, of using some meta word to define thousands of stringed together words at once. Every idea like "car" would have to be described from first principles. The species would probably never develop technology with this sort of language pattern present. If we could somehow level up beyond our current abstraction level, maybe that would make us even smarter, able to handle bigger ideas quicker in real time.
Even more simply than all this: I can only speak about what I have english words for.
If you are fluent in a second language, you understand that the only way to become truly fluent is not just to learn the tangible aspects - the vocabulary, grammar, references, expressions, etc - you have to learn to think like the language/culture.
It’s a combination of cultural assumptions, facial expressions and affectations, thinking patterns, and a whole cultural upbringing that can lead you to very different mental processes and natural conclusions starting from the same words and phrases.
Language absolutely encodes a certain form of intelligence. A lot of those things are reflected not just in the totality of the culture but the language itself. Being fluent leads you to different thinking patterns and different conclusions when processing in that language.
Absolutely? I don't think it does so much. People speaking different languages seem to have very similar thoughts. It's true that fluency is a wholistic performance, but I don't think there are any particular thoughts that can't be translated.
It is tougher with european languages from the influence of latin and the sort of mutt that is english. They are all pretty related. That being said when I learned spanish I felt the way they put adjectives after the noun in spanish leads to a sort of different thinking pattern. Car red instead of red car. A bunch of more distant languages though there's no European language equivalent for certain words or concepts. I'm not sure about the sentance structures, but if its a lot different than european languages, I wouldn't be surprised if this changes thinking. I've heard in some languages they don't have a concept of "self" or "I".
That idea is also present in Snowcrash (and the Bible?) in a slightly different form - that our current fragmented languages are a way to protect us from the 'mind control' that results from having a single shared language - with some more layers of fantasy on top.
At one point there was a universal language, and later either recreated or scrambled, allowing for humans to have many languages for increased confusion.
Now that we are once again attempting to unify our language we find ourselves in a pursuit to build something to escape the Earth.
I am speaking of biblical sources as reasoning or evidence. If you read different books and hold a different faith that would explain the missing part.
Correct. The people of earth, after the great flood, built a structure to avoid future floods but were interrupted by a multidimensional being through confusion of languages.
Language are the tokens in the inference output. How they are ordered comes from the weights, and the weights come from the microtubules holding and collapsing quantum state. Orch OR.
Anecdotally, but I have lived in different cultures with entirely different languages and/or dialects, and the thoughts and even entire categories of thoughts people from these cultures express, or can easily express, are very much shaped by their language. Relatedly, I've also often witnessed multilingual people switch out of their native language to a second one just to express a particular idea or nuance, because they can do it with two words in that other language but would need at least a couple of sentences to say the same thing in their native one.
We use formal language to express symbolic relationships, e.g. "A implies B". But even "A implies B" has multiple meanings: material conditional, strict implication, logical entailment, etc. So, symbolic systems are not "pure and hard", they are also contaminated and softened by the vagaries of language outside them, which is our primary access to those systems: "valid" natural language and its strings of words. A statistical system that can string words into valid(=allowed by the distribution) language asymptotically approaches reason. So, the mind is not in the words, but in the laws that permit many words to come together, i.e. the probability distribution.
I thought that was how most people understood LLM’s capabilities? We have spent millenia creating language to map onto our world. Therefore, implicit in that language is a simulacrum of our world.
I feel like I can feel this happening in my mind in real time. Something like: the part of my brain that thinks thoughts is fairly rudimentary, basically just impressions or hunches--but then there's another part which translates them into words and grammar, and when it takes an impression it can translate it into something fairly sophisticated and intelligent, because it's somehow necessary in order to create a sentence which actually captures the impression.
I think put more simply, you can say that humans wrote things down that were proxies for complex, physical phenomena in the real world. If you just look at what we wrote, you can recover world models that “understand” deeper patterns, bc the training data was only ever a proxy.
Does that mean the language(s) we speak determine how intelligent we are? Could learning French, for example—often considered a more expressive language—make a native English speaker more intelligent or even more compassionate?
Does that explain why different countries that speak different languages have different engineering cultures? Like is german better suited towards engineering than english for example?
Interesting. Would this apply to any rich enough system of expression, like music or art? Or is there something specific about language that makes it different?
I know nothing of this topic but I'd say language had the benefit of much higher precision and flexibility of description than just music without words, though I guess if someone made a ai that used fragments of sound waves as the basis for its language instead of words you could argue it could be similar. But again it probably won't sound like music.
