[mindwok]

I'm no expert but have been thinking about this a lot lately. I wouldn't be surprised - language itself seems to be an expression of the ability to create an abstraction, distill the world into compressed representations, and manipulate symbols. It seems fundamental to human intelligence.

[physix]

As a layman, it helps me to understand the importance of language as a vehicle of intelligence by realizing that without language, your thoughts are just emotions.

And therefore I always thought that the more you master a language the better you are able to reason.

And considering how much we let LLMs formulate text for us, how dumb will we get?

[ajuc]

> without language, your thoughts are just emotions

That's not true. You can think "I want to walk around this building" without words, in abstract thoughts or in images.

Words are a layer above the thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. You can confirm this if you ever had the experience of trying to say something but forgetting the right word. Your mind knew what it wants to say but it didn't knew the word.

Chess players operate on sequences of moves dozen turns ahead in their minds using no words, seeing the moves on the virtual chessboards they imagine.

Musicians hear the note they want to play in their minds.

Our brains have full multimedia support.

[mindwok]

It's probably not as simple as just being emotions, but actually there's a really interesting example here: Helen Keller. In her autobiography she describes what it was like before she learned language, and how she remembers it being almost unconscious and just a mix of feelings and impulses. It's fascinating.

[highfrequency]

> without language, your thoughts are just emotions.

Is that true though? Seems like you can easily have some cognitive process that visualizes things like cause and effect, simple algorithms or at least sequences of events.

[Sophira]

In other words, we're rediscovering the lessons from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Language is central to understanding; remove subversive language and you remove the ability to even think about it.