[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.