[chrisweekly]

"There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought." - Rilke

Your assertion that we don't think in language is questionable. It runs counter to the lived experience of developing thoughts through writing ("writing isn't capturing thinking -- it is thinking"). I believe there is more to thought than language alone, but I also feel quite sure that language forms an essential part of thinking beyond a base layer of instinctive animalistic associations. Sophisticated thoughts are impossible to construct or maintain in the absence of language to represent concepts.

Edt to add: I cited Rilke because I find the notion [some deep thoughts are beyond language] interesting. But I disagree with the idea that language is only ever epiphenomenal (co-occurring with thought), or akin to a hard-of-hearing scribe attempting to convey thoughts which always have independent existence.

[noduerme]

I strongly disagree. For one thing, many animals that lack language can still navigate a very complicated natural world using concepts of phenomena like gravity, distance, speed, the threat level of another animal, etc. without needing a linguistic expression of those things. Images and music can convey ideas without language. Math can convey ideas without language. Physically taking apart an object and putting it back together can convey extremely complex ideas without language.

This goes back to the whole Tarzan obsession of the early 20th, I guess, or earlier. But we know that apes can make simple tools without the language to describe them, or the thought process that went into them.

Thought is multimodal. Language is just one lossy mode.

[TeMPOraL]

> For one thing, many animals that lack language can still navigate a very complicated natural world

So can a cruise missile. Also I think there's like separate part of the brain for that

> using concepts of phenomena like gravity, distance, speed, the threat level of another animal, etc. without needing a linguistic expression of those things.*

FWIW, AFAIK we haven't shown the ability to think in concept exists anywhere except in humans (because philosophy, reported experience) and LLMs (because we can literally see them forming and activating in patterns, and we've learned to identify them specifically, and experimentally verified through amplifying or suppressing them and observing behavior, etc.).

But more importantly:

> Images and music can convey ideas without language. Math can convey ideas without language. Physically taking apart an object and putting it back together can convey extremely complex ideas without language.

Images and music and math are langauge. If it can convey ideas, it is language.

Words and sentences and speech are subset of the idea of language and communication, that for some reason gets routinely confused for the whole thing. At this point I'd say even the "language models" are badly named, simply because people see "language models" think of "token" as number representing a sub-word element in existing human language like English. With multimodal models, at this point tokens are closer to units of sensory experience.

[lanstin]

Have you ever had a professor or mentor walk you through some experiences as a way to help you understand some complex concepts? I guess language is used in that but the ideas are conveyed by the process not the language.

And I rather disagree that mathematics is language, when I did maths there was a distinct difference from understanding a thing and then writing it down.

And modalities that don’t include “where is this body in space” or “I am lonely” don’t seem to capture some essential elements of sensory experience. It is a mistake to separate the interior from the exterior in the analysis of how our thinking works.

I think the folks saying these systems have a kind of intelligence, but a non-human kind are correct - whether that can lead to an independent intelligence that can stay stable sane and focused for weeks or months as many people can, without some sort of embodied cognition providing over all wellness checks to keep the system of thinking sane, remains to be seen. In the meantime, in my hands, they can do very nice dataviz programming to make complex systems much more transparent, even as just throwing all the ops data at them and asking what’s up is, several years in, still not worth doing.

[ben_w]

> And I rather disagree that mathematics is language, when I did maths there was a distinct difference from understanding a thing and then writing it down.

It is generally the case that there's a difference between "understanding a thing" and "writing it down", as demonstrated by every student who studies for the exam, the Chinese Room thought experiment, and Business Bullshit Bingo.

For example, I can copy the next sentence of yours, but I have no idea what:

> And modalities that don’t include “where is this body in space” or “I am lonely” don’t seem to capture some essential elements of sensory experience. It is a mistake to separate the interior from the exterior in the analysis of how our thinking works.

means, can you rephrase that by as much as possible? Preferably without a double negative?

Agree regarding sanity issues of AI. Extremely unlikely we make something "stable" so early in our attempts.

[lanstin]

Our sensory experience as wired into our brains include notions of our own body, both physically “where is the leg now and where is it going” and as a sort of monitor of our brain/body state “hunger” “restlessness” “lonely” “need to talk this torrent of ideas out with someone”.

I was arguing that in:

> With multimodal models, at this point tokens are closer to units of sensory experience.

The tokens are inherently missing some extremely vital pieces of sensory experience, namely the ones that establish the narrative of a self.

[ben_w]

Thanks :)

> The tokens are inherently missing some extremely vital pieces of sensory experience, namely the ones that establish the narrative of a self.

Hmm.

While I agree LLMs are missing many pieces of sensory experience, it is unclear to me which pieces are necessary and sufficient for a narrative of self.

Clinical dissociation (and, at least to the approximation of public stereotypes, Buddhism) come to mind as an example where the presence of usual sensory input is insufficient for a sense of self: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dissociative-...

More broadly: while I agree that LLMs are not like us*, I am unclear why this matters in this context?

The behaviour of tokens in a transformer seem to me to behave like sensory input, just not human-like sensory input. The closest human analogy would be if the entire context window was a retina, each rod and cone one of the tokens in that context, and the output was filling in the blind spot (but of course, even this is a very loose analogy).

* even if the engineering teams were trying to do that, which they are not, it would be unlikely to converge on us so soon

[TeMPOraL]

> as demonstrated by every (...) the Chinese Room thought experiment

Wait, did I miss the Chinese Room suddenly becoming sensible, or relevant? Last I checked it was a failure to accept that the system of "human + room" can in fact understand Chinese, even if the components individually don't.

[ben_w]

My point here is that regardless of how you view the entire system of [human + room + books], the human themselves in that system are still just a cog. The human themselves doesn't know Chinese, they are literally writing down Chinese without understanding it, by design of the thought experiment.

"Is the Chinese Room intelligent/conscious?" is a scissor question*, i.e. people strongly disagree about what it shows.

Myself, I'm with you: the system collectively is intelligent, despite the human in the loop being reduced to a cog in that system. The biological analogy to "the human does not understand Chinese therefore the system is not conscious" would be "no individual cell in a human body knows what the human is doing therefore humans are not conscious".

* https://www.lesswrong.com/w/scissors-statements

[TeMPOraL]

> Have you ever had a professor or mentor walk you through some experiences as a way to help you understand some complex concepts? I guess language is used in that but the ideas are conveyed by the process not the language.

Yes, but I believe this is happening with LLMs too. Language (as in text, symbols, actions) is a vehicle, but much like us, language models have internal models and represent concepts (this has been directly, empirically demonstrated few years ago), and they don't "think" in tokens either[0].

> And modalities that don’t include “where is this body in space” or “I am lonely” don’t seem to capture some essential elements of sensory experience. It is a mistake to separate the interior from the exterior in the analysis of how our thinking works.

That's fair. LLMs don't capture every dimension we experience. There's also history - our individual lived experiences since birth are, in my view, something else entirely. It's not a modality, but it's also not something currently possible to capture in or post training.

> I think the folks saying these systems have a kind of intelligence, but a non-human kind are correct - whether that can lead to an independent intelligence that can stay stable sane and focused for weeks or months as many people can, without some sort of embodied cognition providing over all wellness checks to keep the system of thinking sane, remains to be seen.

Possibly. I definitely agree it's not human intelligence. I think it's human-like, in the sense of human-approximating, by virtue of how it's trained[1], but it's arriving there via a different path so end result can still be alien (though I speculate approximation will hold[2]).

> even as just throwing all the ops data at them and asking what’s up is, several years in, still not worth doing.

I guess depends on the complexity of the case (and my understanding of your example); e.g. in my case, I had stellar results from giving Sonnet and Opus (from 4.6 all the way to now) access to my Home Assistant instance. They aren't perfect at making dashboards, but they're excellent at surfacing insights I didn't even realize were possible to get.

--

[0] - That's distinct from the "tokens are units of thinking" heuristic, which still holds for mechanistic reasons - best analogy IMO is "clock signal" in ICs.

[1] - The overall goal function is literally just "generate output that looks sensible to a human", in fully general, unqualified sense. Or, put another way, we're just brute-forcing DWIM, and rating the output by whether it's "what I meant".

[2] - Thinking about constraints on biological evolution, whatever the design of a human mind is, the fundamentals behind it must be so simple, that a greedy incremental optimizer random-walked into it. Given how far we've got with LLMs using simple architecture and crude training methods, and especially how eerily similar their failure modes are to human cognitive failure modes, I suspect LLMs are actually attracted towards the same fundamental design as evolution discovered.

[lanstin]

Not much in biology is simple. The time scales for this random walk and the ruthless energy budget of organisms makes for pretty crazy re-use of structures and chemicals even at relatively simple things.

The time scales and mechanisms of investor driven development don’t seem to share much with evolutionary processes. And digitally there’s not really a native equivalent to the global and dynamic state that the chemical melee inside and between cells provides.

[TeMPOraL]

Not much in biology is simple, but one of the ruthless rules is that an incremental change must be net non-negative in terms of fitness to stick around. In particular, this prevents evolution from keeping around adaptations "for future need", preventing chaining up many individually useless adaptations that become beneficial only when all of them come together. Key term here is "metabolic cost". This reduces the many ways evolution could've cobbled together our minds to a much, much smaller subset of sequences of steps that provided intermediate value along the way.

[porridgeraisin]

Ok, but it is clear the parent meant language as in words like english or tamil. If you expand language to include anything that can convey idea then the argument is meaningless and its a null agreement.

[TeMPOraL]

It's not a null argument, because LLMs have long moved past "language as in words like english or tamil". Tokens are not units of such language, at least not since visual and audio tokens became first-class objects and there's no actual distinction between them inside the model. That sameness of representation is what it means for a model to be "multimodal".

[JohnBooty]

This is true and it's barely even debatable. Whatever exact role language plays in our thought processes, it is most definitely nonzero.

It's why I think "LLMs are only fancy autocorrect" style takes are really underselling how wild it is that we've, in a roundabout way, sort of crystallized a bit of the human thought process in a way that is genuinely useful for a lot of tasks.

Linguistic Relativity — John Lucy https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.anthro.26....

Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104

Unconscious Effects of Language-Specific Terminology on Pre-Attentive Color Perception https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0811155106

Newly Trained Lexical Categories Produce Lateralized Categorical Perception of Color https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1005669107

[otabdeveloper4]

> sort of crystallized a bit of the human thought process

a) LLMs don't think. They predict a most probable sequence of language tokens. Huge difference there.

b) Whatever LLMs do doesn't model human behavior whatsoever. LLMs are basically very fancy logistic regressors. I.e., it's a mathematical abstraction first and foremost.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

When I see these sorts of debates about LLMs thinking, its rarely a disagreement about what LLMs do. Its almost always over how 'thinking' is defined and the two sides use different definitions but don't actually communicate to each other what those definitions are because they assume the other side is using the same one.

The loosest definition of thinking is along the lines of anything that can process information in a useful way. Basic calculators can therefore think about adding two numbers. The strictest definitions tend to on the side that it is linked to the nebulous concept of consciousness and therefore cannot ever be machine generated. In that we don't even really understand how humans think, so how could we possibly know if machines can do it.

[jeremyjh]

It has nothing to do with thinking or consciousness.

There is a common misconception that LLM are simply a "statistical process" that doesn't feature any abstract conception of the tokens it is predicting. There are studies that show that such features do exist - that there is discernible structure built into the weights - and that the process of inference is a very rich one.

The statistical process exists but it is the substrate in which the model is implemented - or more accurately - grown.

If you can predict Magnus Carlsen's next move then you are just as good at chess as Magnus - and being that good absolutely does require reasoning.

If you can predict the solution to an open Erdos problem that stumped hundreds of people for decades...

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

I don't dispute what you're saying about how LLMs work, but this is exactly what I mean. LLMs can be shown to demonstrate reasoning, so if define thinking as being able to reason, then LLMs can indeed think. If instead you define thinking as being more than just reasoning, then LLMs cannot think. Neither of these two options change what LLMs do, its just an argument about the best word to describe it.

[jeremyjh]

Yes we agree with each other but the objection you were replying to is laboring under the misconception I described - it’s not a semantic distinction.

[otabdeveloper4]

> that there is discernible structure built into the weights

Yes, this "structure" is but the weights of the glorified logistic regression that's describing an extremely simple statistical process.

[JohnBooty]

   When I see these sorts of debates about LLMs thinking, 
   its rarely a disagreement about what LLMs do. Its almost 
   always over how 'thinking' is defined and the two sides 
   use different definitions

Well, hmmm. Yes, I think that happens a lot.

I think there's a pattern that happens even more often, and it's what happened here.

Whether I'm right or not, what I said was somewhat nuanced - I stated language is a part of our thought process (even posted research to support this) and, given that fact, I think many underrate how wild this achievement is even if it's only "fancy autocorrect."

And, of course, the other side comes in with BUT IT'S NOT THINKING.

Which... I didn't say, and I would not say, because (like you said) it's impossible to do without the discussion immediately devolving into semantics. Semantics that I'm really, really uninterested in. But, FWIW, I like your definition.

[JohnBooty]

Did you reply to the right post? You quoted me, but you wrote "LLMs don't think" as if it was a rebuttal. It's puzzling, because I didn't say that they think, so it kinda seems like you got confused? Maybe somebody else said that?

I don't really have an opinion on whether or not they "think" because I feel it's impossible to even discuss without getting into a very very uninteresting semantic argument about what "thinking" is.

Are we defining "thinking" as doing it the same way humans do it? Then, of course they're not thinking. It's a statistical model, not axons and neurons, or even a simulation of axons and neurons.

Are we defining "thinking" on a purely functional or behavioral basis, kind of a Turing test approach? Then... well, I think it gets nuanced. For some tasks, within some constraints, they do pass that test. For many others, of course they don't.

Are we defining thinking in more esoteric terms? Something to do with the soul? Maybe the ability to come up with truly novel concepts rather than rehashing and remixing the stuff it was trained on? Do ants think? Do dogs think? Do jellyfish think? Octopi? A newborn baby?

Anyway, it's a deeply uninteresting semantic question.

[Eisenstein]

You should look into emergence. An ant in a colony, an offer in a market, a drop of water in a weather system are all evidence that irreducibly complex things have simple mechanisms at their core.

[lanstin]

The (or a) current neuroscience models of the brain are that its main job is to predict how the body should be responding in the near future. Obviously a lot more complex network nodes than an LLM, but prediction is clearly tied up with thought in some way.

I don’t find LLMs to be very good independent thinkers, but I wouldn’t over sell our own mentation either - it clearly arises from a large number of simpler entities.

The more significant difference is that the LLM is stuck with language which is clearly an emergent and secondary capability of our own thinking. We can formulate words to explain things, but we also can look at two volumes and feel what it means that one is larger than the other. Raise a toddler and you can see the progression from not understanding, repeated experiments, muscle memory and finally to conscious point for reasoning.

[JohnBooty]

    I don’t find LLMs to be very good independent 
    thinkers, but I wouldn’t over sell our own mentation 
    either - it clearly arises from a large number of 
    simpler entities.

Yeah. I don't see them ever hitting the heights of human creativity in terms of coming up with entirely new ideas, schools of thought, etc. That really might be a fundamental limitation of being trained on existing thought. Also, a lot of human experience involves (1) things we don't have words for (2) things we've never put into words.

    clearly an emergent and secondary capability of 
    our own thinking.

Yes. And it's part of our thinking. More than a capability . Thought influences speech, but speech also influences thought.

That's why I think it's remarkable that we've managed to (choosing my words very, very carefully here) create a statistical model that does a remarkably decent job at emulating the behavior of a fragment of that process.

[lanstin]

It is remarkable. A shame that unregulated business models and giant pools of capital seeking very high returns seem to be distorting (hype cycle, excessive spending that seems untethered to realistic plans, and uncritical roll out prior to compelling proof of utility) the rollout of the remarkable new technology.

I would speculate when we do eventually develop independent synthetic sentient beings, LLM technology will be a part of the package. Perhaps also growing up with a sibling that tries to trick one.

Maybe someone needs to write the singularity novel but with Cain and Abel, not just a unified super intelligence but siblings full of some good will and a good bit of clear seeing and some fun (?) trickery.

[jeremyjh]

The statistical model that underpins any deep learning system is the substrate in which a process is implemented. There is still a process - just because that process is grown - not programmed - doesn't tell us anything about the depth or limits of its capability.

[buzzin_]

It's amazing that you can predict a counterexample to an open math problem, all without thinking.

[swingboy]

Yet they do.

[andai]

My favourite quote on this subject... I forgot by who.

"They don't think, they only seem to think. And likewise, they won't replace the majority of human labor, they will only seem to do so."

[lubujackson]

Recalling "They're Made of Weights"

[buzzin_]

"If only we had a word for that process that happens before the words come out."

"Artist Formerly Known as Thinking"

[otabdeveloper4]

Not really, a shitload of "open math problems" are bounded by constraints of simple text processing or heuristic search.

Much of math is just boring routine work.

[ben_w]

"Fancy logistic regressors" are, in fact, a modelling tool. You can tell LLMs model human behaviour because they're doing things that until a few years ago only humans could do, like cheat in exams.

[andai]

When I was young, a friend asked me, "Hey, you speak three languages, which one do you think in?"

I paused, confused, and replied, "People think in words?"

Fast forward a decade or so, in my twenties, I had lost most of the inner visual sense I had previously used, and developed an overreliance, in my opinion, on language. (I think my dominant sense was some "non visual abstract sense of ideas", but the visual was also very strong.)

In other words, I now do think mostly in words, and it feels a lot harder to get any serious work done. The language-ing is involuntary, and I often wish I had a way to shut it off, because it seems to actively interfere with more subtle mental processes.

More recently, I often have the experience where I will wake up from a dream with some complex idea fully formed in my mind. I write it down before it fades, and then spend the next hour or two trying to understand it.

The best explanation I have right now is that there are at least two minds: one which operates holistically — if it were a 3D printer, it would be like that one with the bath, where the object emerges from the bath, whole.

Whereas the other one (the conscious mind) would be the extrusion printer with the tiny nozzle that has to zip around for a long time to achieve a worse result. (And must be constantly cooled, less it overheat!)

[forshaper]

I find being alone, with no other human around for miles, gets rid of language. Same with combat sports, and more broadly, struggling on the edge of my physical ability.

[the_gipsy]

You just lack (or lacked) introspection, nothing special. Many people claim to have no inner monologue. When pressed, it always comes out. Simply put, it's impossible to function as a human without it. But many people are not aware, and think it means something like "hearing actual voices".

[chmod775]

"Thought is language" is a folk intuition that has been proven wrong over and over. People with severe global or agrammatic aphasia still can score higher on intelligence tasks than you'd expect - even though this data generally comes from people who suffered a stroke, which generally isn't neatly contained to one's language capability. Also, more importantly, even in people with full brain function, the language network appears remarkably unresponsive under neuroimaging when performing arithmetic, logic puzzles, or theory-of-mind tasks. Also famously music tasks: Vissarion Shebalin lost most of his language capabilities to a stroke and still completed his fifth symphony.

There's correlation, and your language network likely augments your intelligence, but as proven by millions of animals, unfortunate humans and also some less-unfortunate human infants, you really don't need language for intelligence.

Where language helps most strongly is metacognition: evidence suggests that it is severely limited without language, and I suppose that is where the common belief that thought is language comes from: the moment you try to think about your thoughts, you use language!

My theory (and this with literally no evidence) is that we use the language network for metacognition precisely because it is not that involved in primary thought. Important to note that "we" here means humans: animals appear to demonstrate metacognition even without language.

[the_gipsy]

Isn't the folk intuition that "words come after thoughts"?

I agree that a stroke cannot isolate language exactly, it's not an ideal approximation of "languagelessness". I think you will find this report interesting: https://nautil.us/what-my-stroke-taught-me-236544

There is no doubt that many marvelous works and concept can be produced entirely without language. Something as complex as driving a car can be done mostly without "thinking about it", without language, without the inner monologue going over all the decision our mind is making.

What we can't do without language, is making a complex plan over time and space, beyond something like "need to fetch hidden item behind the corner to unlock box right in front of me now". The question is how much exactly does language "augment" our intelligence. Is a baby, a human that has not yet learned language, really smarter than an octopus? Or a crow, remarkably smart but interestingly not a mammal, which indicated that intelligence doesn't have to be strongly tied to some evolutionary biological feature. A human stays as "dumb" as an animal if they don't learn language.

Re: your theory, if true, why? The theory implies (though correct me if I'm wrong and strawmanning), that there is another, hidden, way of encoding these extremely complex "information bundles" for lack of another word, in our brains. Why not use that for metacognition too, then?

[ekidd]

When I learned French as an adult, I pushed myself heavily into "forced immersion", avoiding English completely for long periods of time as my French slowly built itself up. This almost entirely silenced my inner monologue in English for those periods of time, and left me with a toddler's ability to think in French. In this comparative silence, it was much easier to observe my non-verbal thought processes moving around "behind" the scarce words.

Then my French inner monologue got good enough that I could mostly think in French, especially when I was in a French-speaking environment. One fascinating detail was that after switching from a French-speaking environment to an English-speaking one, I would actually spontaneously translate from French to English for about 15 minutes until my brain switched back.

So it seems obvious to me that it's possible to suppress or at least severely impoverish the language of thought, that other "layers" of thought exist besides the words, and that it's even possible to change the actual language of verbal thought.

Also, something which at least some other people in the HN crowd might recognize: When I'm deepest in the zone programming and refactoring, I tend to work with a lot of half articulated concepts I can't put into words. You know how people talk about "code smells"? That isn't a literal smell for me, but it's generally a non-verbal sense that a pattern is wrong.

[jeremyjh]

You just stated your vibes like it is a fact.

There was a study about this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679762412430...

[the_gipsy]

> adults who reported low levels of inner speech

[andai]

I'm not sure. I think I had a reasonable amount of metacognition as a child. I remember being eight years old, and having a really cool idea but forgetting it.

So I devised a plan to retrieve it. I'm just going to rewind time. I'm going to go back to doing what I was doing when I had that idea, and then it'll come back to me.

And so I remembered that I had been fiddling with my seat belt when I had the idea. And so I resumed fiddling, and my cool idea promptly came back.

Metaphors and abstractions came to me much later though. (I struggled with OOP for about 10 years until one day it all just clicked.) Symbolism took me another ten years.

[the_gipsy]

> So I devised a plan to retrieve it. I'm just going to rewind time. I'm going to go back to doing what I was doing when I had that idea, and then it'll come back to me.

You narrated the ideas back. It's words and language. There is no hidden, unknown, layer of "thought".

[andai]

>You narrated the ideas back

No, I rewound my visual memory, to see what I was doing, and then I did it again, to provide the same stimulus, to retrieve the lost memory.

I've met a few people who have nonverbal cognition, which is also not visual.

It's a bit like this, a "direct manipulation of ideas".

> The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined… The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics

Though as I mentioned, I had this more as a child, and I've become overreliant on language, and this "direct" facility has starkly deteriorated. But as the author explains in the rest of this article, this fluency can be regained by sheer force of will, by simply working on a very narrow problem space obsessively for weeks at a time.

(We don't know if that works for everyone, or if it's something weird like perfect pitch. I suspect everyone could gain a great deal of fluency -- that the chunking would reach such a high order level as to make the mnaipulation feel transparent. But possibly, the types of chunks would be different depending on the person.

More data needed!)

[the_gipsy]

There are no movie clips in your brain that you replay. You are re-narrating the scene, you just may not notice it.

[roncesvalles]

Language is a reductive and lossy serialization of "thought-stuff". Sometimes you need this information-shedding to clear your working memory to make room for more things. Sometimes it's literally just a way to communicate. You're turning something fuzzy into something discrete.

E.g. "I'm feeling something. Is it anger? Yes, I'm angry." But in reality anger isn't just one thing. It's a cluster of infinite and varied feelings that we label as "anger". Something is lost when we do this labeling.

Notice then that the feeling of "anger" didn't start from your language, you merely used language to label, discretize, classify, standardize, compress it. It's one-way.

[dofm]

Also there are emotions for which society has not developed words because it has a social tendency to deny them. OCD, ADHD and Tourettes, for example are driven by deep, complex, strange destructive emotional needs that are wordless and undescribed. They are reduced to “obsession”, “compulsion”, “urge”, “tic”, etc., words that essentially only describe the appearance of the outcomes to others, which are a completely hollow description of the extraordinary internal experiences.

The very fact that we don’t have words for such powerful internal experiences is one of many reasons I find the LLM enthusiasts’ belief that LLMs will one day write indistinguishably from humans to be hollow.

[dumah]

To me, Alexithymia alone proves this.

[radio879]

There are people who do not have any words in their heads at all when they think, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to disbelieve them. It may have been proven or at least observed in fMRI. Some people think in visuals.

I think some of this was discovered somewhat recently

[idiotsecant]

I think you're conflating different things. Many people do not have an internal 'narrator'. I am one. I don't have a voice in my head saying words, ever. I do definitely have something like a playback of other people saying things, though. Words are still in there in the form of recall, they are just not part of the executive layer in a way I have access to.

[cataphract]

What about when you're reading? You don't have a voice in your head saying the words?

[lanstin]

Only if it is a very hard text that I have to move slowly thru. For normal reading, no not at all. If I am trying to read something faster than is comfortable, I will periodically emphasize the thing, the idea, behind a key word, so I am more likely to remember it at the useful time. Not verbal and there are many many times when I can describe the thing but not recall the normal word. Like the flat thing with keys in it instead of keyboard. Or even weird quasi-synonyms that serve to muddy the waters as far as sharing my thoughts with others goes.

[idiotsecant]

No. Do you? Like you hear words in your head?

Obviously there is a language layer in there somewhere, but my 'driver' doesn't access it. I don't think in words, I don't have an internal narrative, and when I'm reading I don't even 'see' individual words, in the same way you aren't thinking about your ankle muscles when you're hitting the brakes while driving.

I definitely can consciously make words, but it's 'me' deliberately deciding to make them and hold them in my head. It wouldn't happen naturally.

[cataphract]

Yes, which maybe is a disadvantage because it limits the speed I read to the speed I can articulate the words in my head. But most of the time I'm not consciously aware of it, just like people who go one step further and move their lips are usually not aware (I assume).

[yurishimo]

And some people can’t see any pictures in their minds! My partner is one of these people. We both really enjoy reading fiction books, often with a fantasy or sci-fi bent and it genuinely amazes me that they can experience these books in a way that feels wholly alien to me.

The fun of reading to me is constructing the world in my minds eye and turning the words on the page into a visual experience only found in my mind using imagination. This is a reason why many people get upset when a movie adaptation is made and the actor chosen for their favorite character feels very off or wrong; their mental picture of that character is totally different and it causes dissonance that our brains don’t like. For my partner this is a non issue because they never make a mental image of the person, so the movie is genuinely the first time they are “seeing” a physical representation of the character.

The human mind is genuinely amazing and fascinating and I believe that this range of human experience will be the final 20% for “AI” that might never be reproducible.

[idiotsecant]

Does anyone else just end up with a random celebrity 'playing' characters in your brain image of scenes? I find that I generally picture a person that I have seen on TV, with details that don't nessesarily match book character details.

For example, I recently read a novel where there is 'tough lady cop' character and in my brain, entirely involuntarily, the role has been assigned to Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Rosa Diaz in exactly the clothing and context she exists in that TV show.

When the character in the book has a certain clothing or whatever it all kinda glosses over until it's back to the character I have seen before.

I don't know if this is more a male thing or am ADHD thing or what but details of characters dress and looks are pretty much lost on me once there are assigned a character from 'central casting'

[xpct]

> This is a reason why many people get upset when a movie adaptation is made

I still haven't watched the Dune movies because of this reason. I liked the book a lot, and had a very personal image of what the world looked like, and was afraid to lose it. Unfortunately, by now, I've seen many video clips on social media, and my internal imagery has already been poisoned. Might as well watch the movies at this point.

[elliotec]

This is highly contested, most likely not true, and probably not measurable anyway.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976251335583

[qmmmur]

Just because you can think through writing doesn't mean language is the essence of thought itself.

[lanstin]

The virtue of writing is it makes it harder to fool yourself that you have all the important links addressed in your construction/argument/proposal.

[lelanthran]

> Your assertion that we don't think in language is questionable.

It's true though; we routinely see people get stuck for a word that they know but can't quite recall at that moment in time. It happens daily across billions of people, yourself included.

If we thought in language, it is impossible to be stuck for a specific word. But we all experience this at some point in our lives, hence we aren't thinking in language.

[Jensson]

> It runs counter to the lived experience of developing thoughts through writing

Writing requires thought, but writing isn't thought. Just like doing requires thought, but doing isn't thought, writing is a subset of doing.

You can also doodle to think things through, or play with toys to think things through, or many other similar things.

[dumah]

Hand-waving assumptions drawn from narrow subjective experience without awareness of the profound and contradictory results that have come from scientific study of consciousness and causality.

[ozgung]

I'm not an expert but I saw Yann LeCun shared this recent Neuroscience article on his Facebook page commenting "I don't think in words. Animals don't think in words."

Evidence from formal logical reasoning reveals that the language of thought is not natural language

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520095123

[Sebastian_09]

Are you sure this is Rilke? Couldn’t find anything online - it seems it’s close to a quote by Zora Neale Hurston