[jshmrsn]

I can only speak from my own internal experience, but don’t your unspoken thoughts take form and exist as language in your mind? If you imagine taking the increasingly common pattern to “think through the problem before giving your answer”, but hiding the pre-answer text from the user, then it seems like that would pretty analogous to how humans think before communicating.

[hexaga]

> don’t your unspoken thoughts take form and exist as language in your mind?

Not really. More often than not my thoughts take form as sense impressions that aren't readily translatable into language. A momentary discomfort making me want to shift posture - i.e., something in the domain of skin-feel / proprioception / fatigue / etc, with a 'response' in the domain of muscle commands and expectation of other impressions like the aforementioned.

The space of thoughts people can think is wider than what language can express, for lack of a better way to phrase it. There are thoughts that are not <any-written-language-of-choice>, and my gut feeling is that the vast majority are of this form.

I suppose you could call all that an internal language, but I feel as though that is stretching the definition quite a bit.

> it seems like that would pretty analogous to how humans think before communicating

Maybe some, but it feels reductive.

My best effort at explaining my thought process behind the above line: trying to make sense of what you wrote, I got a 'flash impression' of a ??? shaped surface 'representing / being' the 'ways I remember thinking before speaking' and a mess of implicit connotation that escapes me when I try to write it out, but was sufficient to immediately produce a summary response.

Why does it seem like a surface? Idk. Why that particular visual metaphor and not something else? Idk. It came into my awareness fully formed. Closer to looking at something and recognizing it than any active process.

That whole cycle of recognition as sense impression -> response seems to me to differ in character to the kind of hidden chain of thought you're describing.

[adroitboss]

Mine do, but not so much in words. I feel as though my brain has high processing power, but a short context length. When I thought to respond to this comment, I got an inclination something could be added to what I see as an incomplete idea. The idea being humans must form a whole answer in their mind before responding. In my brain it is difficult to keep complex chains juggling around in there. I know because whenever I code without some level of planning it ends up taking 3x longer than it should have.

As a shortcut my brain "feels" something is correct or incorrect, and then logically parse out why I think so. I can only keep so many layers in my head so if I feel nothing is wrong in the first 3 or 4 layers of thought, I usually don't feel the need to discredit the idea. If someone tells me a statement that sounds correct on the surface I am more likely to take it as correct. However, upon digging deeper it may be provably incorrect.

[corobo]

This depends for me. In the framework of that book Thinking, Fast and Slow - for me the fast version is closer to LLM in terms of I'll start the sentence without consciously knowing where I'm going with it. Sometimes I'll trip over and/or realise I'm saying something incorrect (Disclaimer: ADHD may be a factor)

The thinking slow version would indeed be thought through before I communicate it

[bagful]

My unspoken thought-objects are wordless concepts, sounds, and images, with words only loosely hanging off those thought-objects. It takes additional effort to serialize thought-objects to sequences of words, and this is a lossy process - which would not be the case if I were thinking essentially in language.

[whimsicalism]

You have no clue how GPT-4 functions so I don't know why you're assuming they're "thinking in language"