[michael1999]

It is not all obvious that consciousness precedes language. Hellen Keller provides a vivid description of her pre-verbal mental state as something less than reflective conscious.

> Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect.

https://scentofdawn.blogspot.com/2011/07/before-soul-dawn-he...

[bunderbunder]

There are real questions about the veracity of some of these Helen Keller quotes, and reason to believe that a lot of it was really coming from Anne Sullivan.

There are really three main observations that give pause. First, after she started working with Sullivan, Keller apparently developed a writing style and nuanced opinions reminiscent of a college-educated person virtually overnight. That’s pretty surprising for any child, let alone one who had only recently acquired language. Second, all of that disappeared overnight when Sullivan died - Keller’s writing style changed drastically, becoming much simpler, and all that eloquent insight also disappeared along with Sullivan. Finally, we’ve never since seen another Helen Keller. On the contrary, later observation of deaf-blind people who don’t acquire language until later in life is part of what inspired a variant of the critical period hypothesis that posits that people who don’t learn their first language (doesn’t matter whether it’s spoken or signed) in early childhood are never able to acquire any language to a particularly high level of proficiency.

That said, even if that Keller quote is now considered dubious, it may not be entirely off base. Supposedly people who don’t acquire language in early childhood also tend to show less capacity for abstract reasoning tasks. Which is still a far cry from the “no-consciousness” that Keller-maybe-Sullivan describes, but does still suggest that language and reasoning are mutually supportive.

[bryant]

TL;DR: I think while Sullivan did add context, much of the context could've been "decompression" in an almost technical sense. This would've made Helen's exact words more palatable for the world to consume, and Sullivan could've been running the same intuitive algorithm in reverse to make the broader communication of the world accessible to Helen. This probably affects other disciplines as well, e.g business.

Of course this entire premise is couched in my LLM-based reproduction of the idea, so uh, take it with a few grains of salt. I tried this on your own comment to "compress" and then "decompress" to see what the outcome is.

---

I took your first paragraph starting with "After [Helen] started working with" through "high level of proficiency." and 'compressed' it as Helen's own tactile signing might've done. Did it via a temporary cgpt session. Prompted "I'm going to give you a fully formed thought. Give it back to me as if it was Helen Keller herself signing the words into Sullivan's hand. I.e if Helen didn't use filler words when signing into Sullivan's hand, don't use those words either in your reframing of this thought."

> Sullivan came. Language came.

> Soon, words rich. Thought subtle. Writing like long study. Strange. Child. New language. Yet mind seemed already full.

> Sullivan died.

> Rich words gone. Thought simpler. Same hands. Different voice.

> No second Helen.

> Others deaf-blind. Language late. Same result. Language never deep.

> Perhaps first language must come early. Speech. Sign. No matter. Miss that season. Full language may never come.

---

I then, in a second, unrelated temporary session, prompted to expand the prose above into a fully formed thought. "The following is a thought conveyed via a "compressed, tactile, idea-first" language. Expand it into the full meaning that the speaker, deaf and blind, might've intended. Keep to one or two paragraphs. Do not go online."

> When Anne Sullivan entered Helen Keller’s life, language arrived with her—not merely labels for objects, but a system rich enough to support subtle thought, reflection, and writing of remarkable sophistication. That achievement was almost uncanny: Helen was still a child, newly acquiring her first true language, yet her prose often sounded as though it came from a mind already long educated. After Sullivan died, however, that richness seemed to fade. Helen still used the same hands and remained the same person, but the voice became plainer and the thought less intricate, raising the unsettling possibility that some of what appeared to be Helen’s singular literary mind had depended on Sullivan’s continual linguistic presence.

> No comparable “second Helen” emerged among other deaf-blind people who first gained language late. Their experiences seemed to point toward a critical period: perhaps the human mind must receive a complete first language early in childhood, whether spoken or signed. Once that window closes, vocabulary can still be taught and communication can still develop, but language may never become fully deep, flexible, and generative.

--

My interpretation is that it's pretty similar. Even your "critical period" reference made it through compression/decompression despite the words not being present. There's some variation, and I think that supports what you're looking to convey, but it also could add weight to the idea that much of what Sullivan expressed could really have been mostly Helen's own thoughts and meanings. Of course none of this is rigorous and my entire exercise should be treated as "back of the napkin" ideation rather than actual science, but there's a thread to pull here, and it could have value in other disciplines e.g in business where intended meanings, statuses, outcomes may be preserved or lost based on how language mutates as it passes through different people.

[bunderbunder]

Regardless of what happens when you play with an LLM, I hope you can see how there’s room for an interpreter to choose words in a way that’s technically consistent with what Keller really said, but somehow still manages to radically embellish upon it.

Which I think then warrants being cautious about reading too literally into a quote that is certainly evocative, but some of what it evokes are rather Victorian ideas about people with neurological disabilities that might be considered ableist from a modern perspective.

[etrautmann]

I think this is different if you have vision though. I struggle to understand how someone can look at intelligent animals that don’t have language and not intuitively assume that they’re conscious. Yes this is a tricky problem without an answer but IMO the elements of consciousness can exist without language if visual abstractions are present.

[devmor]

Animals don’t have language the same way we do, but many of them do have some kind of semi-structured communication. Cats for example, when domesticated, develop an entirely parallel method of communication specifically to interact with humans - one that is neotenous in genesis, but nonetheless absent from their feral counterparts.

[brookst]

While true, the connection between communication and consciousness is thin. Plenty of plants communicate with each other, but it’s seen as signaling rather than consciousness.

I believe that conscious is a gradient not a binary, and I believe that cats have some level of consciousness, but I’m not sure communication is the thing to hang that on.

[devmor]

I think comparing vocalized, intentional communication with chemical signaling is reductive and does not support your point at all.

Humans also emit pheromones, this is not the same as, or related in any way to language.

[famouswaffles]

>Plenty of plants communicate with each other, but it’s seen as signaling rather than consciousness.

Seems like a people problem to me. Who's to say plants aren't conscious?

[gf000]

I think one should bring into Chomsky's Universal Grammar the discussion, or at least some version of it.

If for no other reason, I believe it's quite reasonable to believe that cognition must be Turing-complete (okay, linear bounded automaton), and there must be some kind of support for recursive structures, no matter what the "primitives" of such consciousness is (either visual or linguistic).

I believe in the case of animal intelligence, they (we) have a pretty good hard-coded 3d/4d world model that ought to encode some level of recursion intrinsically (in thought, we very very often use spatial and temporal words), e.g. understanding the motion of another animal, e.g. a rodent running through a tree trunk requires imagination and future prediction already over an abstract agent. Humans just probably have more "stacks" available, and can offload them into either limited "brain memory", or very importantly drawings, text, etc, for unbounded memory.

But I'm just thinking out loud, I'm absolutely no expert on any of these topics.

[mat0]

Yes. I have high confidence that animals are in fact conscious, in the same way that one can train in meditation and completely (although briefly) shut off the thinking brain, the inner dialog, and still be fully conscious and aware of what’s happening. For me, consciousness is this awareness of all the inputs we are having: visual, tactile, sound, etc. there’s no reason to believe that primates weren’t conscious of what was happening, of their surroundings, sensations, sounds, etc. before language developed.

[rented_mule]

There is clearly a level of thinking that doesn't involve language. Participating in competitive sports has been a core part of my family, with some competing at elite levels. When you get to a certain level, if language is involved during the most intense moments, you fail because you act too slowly. Some say you are "reacting" or "using muscle memory" or "using intuition", but some very complex behavior comes from this.

To me, it feels a lot like meditation, or being in the flow when writing code, or being immersed in a video game. I don't have the skills to know, but I wouldn't be surprised if elite chess players are doing the same thing. It's also riding a bike or driving a car, and I think it's why we sometimes can't remember if we stopped at that stop sign behind us, but we almost always did. Language is almost always deeply involved in developing these skills, but gets in the way of top performance once the skills are there.

This feels like a higher level of consciousness to me than language-based thinking. And I think there's a good chance it's the same kind of thinking that we see in animals and primates. Our advantage is that we've figured out how to use language to inform that level of thinking / consciousness more deeply and in more domains.

[gowld]

Please define "conscious".

Please give an example of an interaction with an animal that suggests that the animal is conscious, but not using language.

Challenge round: Please demonstrate that conscious animals are not using internal idiolect (language with 1 user) and lack the physical ability to develop a form of shared communication for that language.

[mat0]

You can touch an animal and it will react to it. Why are you putting language in front of it? Or let’s put it this way, what though you need to think before you feel something is interacting with you body? What you define as consciousness, having a theory of mind or any kind or inner monologue is a very small subset of what consciousness is. And I’m not talking about some pseudo esoteric hippy thing here. I’m talking about what Tomas Nigel was talking about many many years ago https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

[sigbottle]

You could redefine language to include mental abstractions and maybe it wouldn't be so weird.

Language is a shared medium. Maybe an intelligence is capable of building abstractions in their head without the need for say, a symbol system to hopefully communicate with species similar to itself.

You may argue that the agent needs persistent memory. Well, so what? If the world has stable regularities from the perspective of the agent - if the sun rises every day, and language is associating certain visuals with certain thoughts (it's not when viewed in its original social definition - but conduct the thought experiment with sociality removed), who's to say that you can't form a kind of language around that?

Of course, this is all armchair, and I'm not trying to separate out what "real language" is or whatever, just thought experiments.

But the original poster has a good point though, that's been proven in papers, that the tokens an LLM spits out, themselves, attract them to certain distributions, and at least a decent amount of the tokens in CoT are there solely to bring itself to the right distribution.

[vitamark]

Well, language is not really required for thinking and conscious experiences, a huge chunk of people don't even have an internal monologue, and some (that'd be me) don't have any "byproducts" of thought process.

Though there are recent experiments showing that unconscious brain retains language processing abilities [1], so the two might be as well independent systems

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10448-0

[estearum]

IMO it's far more likely that people don't agree on what it means to "have an internal monologue" than that people actually bifurcate that dramatically on cognition. Surely there are some people with an actual difference from baseline, but I don't think it's the near-equal split that seems to appear when you just ask people about internal monologue

This is in contrast with aphantasia (complete lack of mental imagery) which can be correlated with outwardly detectable responses. E.g. people who can imagine mental images will dilate pupils when imagining a bright light with eyes closed, while people with aphantasia will not. Not sure there's an analog for internal monologue but if anyone.

[amalcon]

I don't think a bifurcation of cognition is necessary to explain this. You get both people who claim to always think with words (to the point where they don't understand how it's possible to think without one), and people who claim never to outside of linguistic tasks like writing (to the point where they need "internal monologue" explained to them). In my experience, if you get down to it -- most people will have experienced cases of the thought preceding the word (you can skip the word, or not, but either way it demonstrates a thought without a word) and of the word preceding the thought (people who claim not to have an internal monologue will usually still do this sometimes when writing).

It's just that subvocalization is one powerful technique for organizing thoughts, but not the only one. If you had a swimmer who only ever learned the crawl stroke (freestyle), they might wonder how someone can swim without it. The difference, of course, is that the breaststroke is a demonstrable physical act whereas cognitive techniques are not. The monologuers are just more practiced at subvocalization-based reasoning, and the non-monologuers are more practiced at other types.

It's not that hard to exert limited control over which technique you're using -- and I think there are multiple nonverbal techniques. I'd encourage people to explore the space a bit. Subvocalization-first approaches are very good for linear progressions, whereas subvocalization-last (or never) approaches are usually better for big-picture reasoning.

[estearum]

I still think it's far more likely that people aren't describing the same thing. People are very, very bad at interpreting and experiencing their mind's inner workings. Then getting them to describe and compare those inner workings is, IMO, largely a fool's errand. I'll wait until someone develops an external validation of this to believe it.

I say this as someone who pays a lot of attention to my mind's inner workings (meditation etc, near-complete aphantasic) and the more I pay attention to the inner workings, the less I know the answer to whether or not I have an inner monologue.

[RaftPeople]

> I still think it's far more likely that people aren't describing the same thing. People are very, very bad at interpreting and experiencing their mind's inner workings.

Are you thinking that the term "internal monologue" is being interpreted too literally and that any system of organized thought, even one without the apparent usage of words, could still be considered an internal monologue?

[estearum]

I think that is one of many dimensions of ambiguity and therefore of confusion on this topic, yes.

[vitamark]

Well, I can't say for the general population, but for me there's just nothing unless I actively try to think of words, sentences and other things. One moment you don't have an idea and the next you do, like a state switch.

I really feel like humans argue too much about how computer programs think and at the same time too little about how humans think. The topic is criminally underresearched and the existing research is all over the place.

[saltcured]

You make it sound like there are no ideas until words arrive? For me, my normal ground state is full of thinking that is not linguistic. My mode switch is more like having to turn on the whole language subsystem and pay attention to it, often to the detriment of my native concentration.

When I do think with words, it is usually something I am manipulating with a purpose. It is not the thoughts themselves. I have a thought, and I attempt to render it into words.

Outside of recollection of past speech, it is extremely rare for me to feel like words arrive with a thought I wasn't already holding. Most often, it happens when making jokes and puns in real-time. I am in a mood to be playful, and may have a vague feeling that there is something funny to interject, but cannot separate it from the word combination that comes to mind.

But I can't really think and deliberate verbally. It feels like an act of puppetry.

[vitamark]

No, I actually say that there are no words unless I think of them. Ideas appear out of nowhere and are made of nothing, like they just are integral part of my mind state

[infinite_spin]

I'm very reluctant to believe people when they say they don't have an internal monologue. Studies on the matter all appear to rely on self-reported data, not objective measurements. It's been shown that electromyography can be used to measure myoelectric signals produced when a person subvocalizes their speech (i.e. an inner monologue). It works well enough to reconstruct and synthesize that speech.

So we could test this objectively, and I'm not sure why we haven't.

[idiotsecant]

I'm not sure what you think all these people have to gain from tricking you. I have no internal monologue. None whatsoever. If I have something like an internal monologue I don't have any conscious access to it at all. When I want to think through a spatial type problem, I can visualize shapes, images, rotations, relationships, etc but it has no verbal component. If I want to think through a text or verbal heavy task, like perhaps planning some code, I type it out. I do have intrusive thoughts but they are in the form of memories of a thing that happened or simulations of something that could happen, I guess. I most surely do not have an internal narrator or anything that approaches any kind of inner verbal life.

[infinite_spin]

> I'm not sure what you think all these people have to gain from tricking you.

Asking for objective evidence of a phenomenon being self-reported by enough people to make the news isn't really about me. I don't know why you're being defensive in a thread that wasn't directed at you, but this is not a good sign.

[idiotsecant]

Weird that you go right to assuming everyone who doesn't agree with you is defensive. I think you need to recalibrate your outrage sensors.

You said a thing doesn't exist. I pointed out that the thing does, in fact, exist. That's all that happened here.

[RaftPeople]

> I'm very reluctant to believe people when they say they don't have an internal monologue.

Why would you choose internal monologue as the default position and no internal monologue needs to be proved?

It seems the natural position for an unknown would be to assume it is not the case unless there is evidence for it.

[infinite_spin]

Because most people I know can read without mouthing the words. At any rate, we can just test both cases if people who claim one or the other are willing.

I'm not sure why this seems like a problem, or why you have to criticize my default position, but my own personal views on the matter aren't important here.

[vitamark]

I don't see how reading has anything to do with internal monologue. Do you hear the words you read when reading? If so, it surely has to be slow as hell.

I did get relatively good scores in reading speed back in primary/middle school when we took such tests, so maybe there's an explanation. At the same time, writing/speaking is a very resource-intensive task for me so I tend to be silent a lot (and then drop a pile of sentences on the unsuspecting people I'm with)

[devmor]

This is in the same vein to what I wanted to say here as well - I find it very likely that people with no internal monologue are executing similar mental processes, just without them being so “front and center” in the mind.

[rolph]

Metacognition

https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/zjuzickv

not everyone is aware of the "methodology", they just think it through, some however have an executive layer to cognition vs reflex.

imnot sure enough to form an opinion quite yet but thinking about thinking, modifying the methods of cognition, may be a learned skill, perhaps with a developmental window.

a comparison between extroverts and introverts [1] for perceived modality of cognition might be interesting.

it may very well be that a difference in neural development is the cause of this disparity.

1] this is about focus on internal conceptualization vs external perceptualization.

myself, i think in terms of a mono/dialogue if i am preparing to disseminate.

if i am thinking for my own benefit i percieve it as idetic imagery and run thought experiments to qualify for IRL candidacy.

[devmor]

> myself, i think in terms of a mono/dialogue if i am preparing to disseminate.

> if i am thinking for my own benefit i percieve it as idetic imagery and run thought experiments to qualify for IRL candidacy.

I’m very similar personally, though I often have background dialogues going over “sub threads” of whatever I’m thinking about.

I have also wondered if people who say they don’t have this kind of thought process actually do - but the real difference is that for some reason it persists in memory for us, whereas it is immediately discarded for them, leaving only the result.

[Fraterkes]

Do you have a source for the pupil dilation thing? Sounds fascinating!

[lightedman]

I scored a 68 on the VVIQ and I can watch my pupils dilate in response to me 'seeing' something in my mind. It doesn't have to be a bright light in my mind's eye, I can imagine something that would trigger a fight or flight response and make the same thing happen.

[estearum]

Yeah this is another test they use: imagine something frightening and "normal people" will get clammy hands and elevated heart rates while aphantasics will not

[justbees]

My mom has aphantasia and we were both shocked to discover it even exists.

She saw something about it online and then started asking everyone in the family if they could picture an apple in their mind. We all said - yes of course, what are you talking about?

And she said, "When you say the word apple, I think of the concept of an apple. It's juicy. It's crisp. It's red, etc, but I don't SEE an apple. I just know what it is."

She had no concept that other people literally saw the apple and I had no concept that people couldn't see the apple.

I asked her what she thought the phrase "in your minds eye" meant for her entire life and she said she thought it just meant exactly what she was describing and not literally seeing anything...

[estearum]

Yeah this was my experience too as a near-complete aphantasic. Doing the apple test around the dinner table was enlightening, and it also made a whole lot of other things make sense through my life as well: I have virtually no concrete memories from a first-person point of view (I remember the fact that events happened, I do not remember subjectively being there)

It's unfortunately very insulting when someone says, "hey remember when we did that very important thing together?" and my answer has always been "uhh... I remember that we did it?"

[justbees]

That's so interesting to me! I actually have a terrible memory for events and names so my answer is almost always - sort of. So I can visualize an apple, but if you say - remember that time we went apple picking with Greg? I might only vaguely remember that, and not know who Greg is. But, if you showed me a picture of Greg I would probably say - oh that's that guy we went apple picking with. Why did we do that?

[bayarearefugee]

There is also a rather thorny chicken and egg problem.

If language is required for thinking and conscious experience how did we manage to develop language in the first place.

[triceratops]

Human level thinking and conscious experience aren't required for language. Dogs understand spoken words and gestures. They're also pretty good at making themselves understood through noises and body language. Humans have better hardware than dogs for making noises.

I could see language development bootstrapping abstract thinking over generations in humans.

[abound]

Similarly, I'm reading "Supernormal Stimuli" now, and there's a whole section on infants raised by various animals (chimps, wolves, chickens, leopards, etc, etc). When they are found and brought back to human societies, basically none of them develop full language and integrate fully.

There's also the grim history of language deprivation experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experimen...

It really does seem like language is a key part of how we develop our human intelligence.

[kibwen]

That humans who have grown out of their optimal brain plasticity and hence never acquire the capacity for ordinary human language are not somehow "conscious" is not supported. Rather, it means that, by its very definition, we do not have the means to communicate with them in order to even ask the sorts of questions necessary to determine such a thing. The premise is unfalsifiable.

[gf000]

Well, we can surely communicate without language. I certainly communicate via body language with other humans, my dog, etc.

[palmotea]

> Similarly, I'm reading "Supernormal Stimuli" now, and there's a whole section on infants raised by various animals (chimps, wolves, chickens, leopards, etc, etc). When they are found and brought back to human societies, basically none of them develop full language and integrate fully.

Infants raised by chickens? Chickens!? That doesn't sound real.

[abound]

Reading it again, the book is referencing this case: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/11/fiji.jennyfors...

[palmotea]

So not "raised by chickens," but rather abused and isolated in the presence of chickens. That's more plausible.

[kibwen]

Helen Keller was blind and deaf from infancy. What her teacher gave her was a way of systematizing what little sensory stimulation she was capable of receiving. "Language", in the topical sense of "the textual encoding of language that LLMs ingest and emit", is certainly not required for consciousness. Rather, what you need is a way to identify and predict patterns borne out of repeated observations, which is complicated by the lack of ability to observe.

[neptvn]

Sure, but that's a non-sequitur. Sight and hearing are the most important human senses that practically inform consciousness in the sense of where we live, and what we can do. The other 3 (touch, smell and taste) are at best secondary and cannot provide the groundedness in our world experience - you are the easiest prey in the animal kingdom. Language is primarily a tool for communication, not thought [0], and "thought" is a slippery concept when you're lacking a guidance that informs you of the world if you can't see or hear it.

Super interesting quote and link though!

[0] Fedorenko et al, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w

[pigeonwarz]

It is likely that language forms a sort of quanta of reasoning. It is far easier to posit a verbal hypothesis pertaining to verbal subjects and test it than to try and do it nonverbally.

Maths is probably a great example of this. Try and describe Pythagoras' Theorem without using maths notation or words. Difficult, right? Reasoning is a House of Cards, and without understanding what the card is that exercise becomes significantly more difficult.

[catlifeonmars]

a^2 + b^2 = c^2 is perhaps a poor example, since there are several visual proofs that don’t rely on language. I don’t think this negates your overall point fwiw.

[vharuck]

Math is a terrible example. Euclid's "Elements" was a core book in Western math education for millennia, and it uses drawn geometric proofs. The proofs are then described in Greek, but the rigorous definitions are the pictures. A lot of mathematical fields can be reasoned about and explored by imagining shapes and objects. The end results today are written in notation because this is a standard language that helps clarify ideas.

[gowld]

Geometry pictures are absolutely not "rigorous definitions". For 1 thing, pictures of lines aren't finite in extent, and pictures of points are finite in extent.

Some of Euclid's proofs are wrong, because they relied on those non-rigorous picture definitions.

* Book I, Proposition 1 (constructing an equilateral triangle)

* Book I, Proposition 4 (Side-Angle-Side triangle congruence).

* Multiple theorems throughout the Elements rely on the visual "betweenness" of points.

[pigeonwarz]

To steelman your point with gowld's point notwithstanding, how do you articulate ideas like infinity without notation? The point is that language is an abstraction for ideas that are difficult to rationalise 'close to the metal'.

[mjd]

In “The Origin of Consciousness” Julian James argues that human consciousness substantially predates language and even writing.

For example he contrasts the language in the Iliad (which he claims was written before the development of consciousness) and the Odyssey (which came after).

[tgv]

Animals communicate, and it may be primitive, but a lot of it doesn't seem to require consciousness. Should someone insist, it then depends on what you call "a word".

[gowld]

Words are like atoms. We also have sentences (molecules) and paragraphs (structures) and more. Complexity matters.

[tgv]

The OP means "concept". The author doesn't want to use fancy words or has no idea of (psycho)linguistics.

[high_byte]

this was absolutely fascinating to read