I find this interesting not from the perspective of LLMs but it seems to imply that human language being a prerequisite for self-awareness. Is that really so?
> Imagine a woman – let’s call her Sue. One day Sue gets a stroke that destroys large areas of brain tissue within her left hemisphere. As a result, she develops a condition known as global aphasia, meaning she can no longer produce or understand phrases and sentences. The question is: to what extent are Sue’s thinking abilities preserved?
> Many writers and philosophers have drawn a strong connection between language and thought. Oscar Wilde called language “the parent, and not the child, of thought.” Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” And Bertrand Russell stated that the role of language is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” Given this view, Sue should have irreparable damage to her cognitive abilities when she loses access to language. Do neuroscientists agree? Not quite.
If 23 year old me were here now and considering future life paths, I'd be sorely tempted to be looking at declaring/finishing a dual CS/philos major and going to grad school.
It's a reasonable hypothesis. Being good at calculating 'What would happen next if {x}' is a decent working definition of baseline intelligence, and the capabilities of language allow for much longer chains of thought than what is possible from a purely reactive approach.
Entering the realm of Just My Opinion, I wouldn't be surprised at all if internal theory of mind is simply an emergent property of increasing next-token prediction capability. At a certain point, you hit a phase change, where intelligence loops back on itself to include its own operation as part of its predictions, and there you go- (some form) of self-awareness.
> Imagine a woman – let’s call her Sue. One day Sue gets a stroke that destroys large areas of brain tissue within her left hemisphere. As a result, she develops a condition known as global aphasia, meaning she can no longer produce or understand phrases and sentences. The question is: to what extent are Sue’s thinking abilities preserved?
> Many writers and philosophers have drawn a strong connection between language and thought. Oscar Wilde called language “the parent, and not the child, of thought.” Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” And Bertrand Russell stated that the role of language is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” Given this view, Sue should have irreparable damage to her cognitive abilities when she loses access to language. Do neuroscientists agree? Not quite.
The Language of Thought Hypothesis - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/ (which has a long history going back to Augustine)
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If 23 year old me were here now and considering future life paths, I'd be sorely tempted to be looking at declaring/finishing a dual CS/philos major and going to grad school.