[NonHyloMorph]

I think the terminology here isn't sharp. One of the first headlines is: "Language is not necessary nor sufficient for thought" I disagree. Language is not necessary for cognitive processes in individuals/organisms. It is absolutely necessary for what we commonly refer to as thought (bit of a pretentious we: it involves you in the group of people who have some idea about philosophy (e.g. baseline-heidegger)/the humanities/psychoanalysis etc.) that which we refer to as thought. Thought can be a decentralised process that is happening "between" individuals ("Die Sprache spricht" - Language is speaking by heidegger points into that direction). Thought is also, imho, a symbolic process (which involves sign systems, mathematics, languages, images). Not everything going on as a cognitive process is therefor constituting thought. That's why one can act thoughtless- but not "cognitionless".

[trueismywork]

I disagree. There can be thought without any way to express it any langauge yet. Only with a lot of communication can we get to the an approximation of what it means and hence it can mean slightly different thing ti everyone. Koans can be a good example of this

[mpascale00]

I think you make a good point that much of what we call thinking is really discourse either with another ^[0], with media, or with one's own self. These are largely mediated by language, but still there are other forms of communicative _art_ which externalize thought.

The other thoughts here largely provide within-indivudal examples: others noted Hellen Keller and that some folks do not experience internal monologue. These tell us about the sort of thinking that does happen within a person, but I think that there are many forms of communication which are not linguistic, and therefore there is also external thinking which is non-linguistic.

The observation that not all thought utilizes linguistic representations (see particularly the annotated references in the bibliography) tells us something about the representations that may be useful for reasoning, thought, etc. That though language _can_ represent the world it is both not the only way and certainly not the only way used by biological beings.

^[0]: It Takes Two to Think https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-023-02074-2

[Lionga]

Based on your definition a child that can not speak/understand language yet can not think? Hint: It clearly can.

There are a lot of things I can think about that I do not have words for. I can only communicate these things in a unclear way, as language is clearly a subset of thought, not a superset.

Only if your definition of thought is that is is language based, which is just typical philosophy circular logic.

[pessimizer]

I've started to believe that language is often anti-thought. When we are doing what LLMs do, we aren't really thinking, we're just imitating sounds based on a sound stimulus.

Learning a second language let me notice how much of language has no content. When you're listening to meaningless things in your second language, you think you're misunderstanding what they're saying. When you listen to meaningless things in your first language, you've been taught to let the right texture of words slip right in. That you can reproduce an original and passable variation of this emptiness on command makes it seem like it's really cells indicating that they're from the same organism, not "thought." Not being able to do it triggers an immune response.

The fact that we can use it to encode thoughts for later review confuses us about what it is. The reason why it can be used to encode thoughts is because it was used to train us from birth, paired with actual simultaneous physical stimulus. But the physical stimulus is the important part, language is just a spurious association. A spurious association that ultimately is used to carry messages from the dead and the absent, so is essential to how human evolution has proceeded, but it's still an abused, repurposed protocol.

I'm an epiphenomenalist, though.

[Peteragain]

Okay so rephrasing the question, how should we characterise the type of thinking we do without language? And the more interesting question IMO what thinking can an agent do without symbolic representation?

The original Vygotsky claim was that learning a language introduces the human mind to thinking in terms of symbols. Cats don't do it; infants don't either.

[naasking]

I think there are other sorts of reasoning, like spatial reasoning. If you're trying to sort a set of physical items in front of you in order of size, are you thinking about the items linguistically, or is your mind working on some different internal representation?

It's more the latter for me. I don't think there's necessarily one type of internal thought, I think there's likely a multimodal landscape of thought. Maybe spatial reasoning modes are more geometric, and linguistic modes are more sequential.

I think the human brain builds predictive models for all of its abilities for planning and control, and I think all of these likely have a type of thought for planning future "moves".

[Isamu]

>what thinking can an agent do without symbolic representation?

The language model is exclusively built upon the symbols present in the training set, but various layers can capture higher level patterns of symbols and patterns of patterns. Depending on how you define symbolic representation, the manipulation of the more abstract patterns of patterns may be what you are getting at.

[balamatom]

Neither do, necessarily, language users.

[habbekrats]

i think you are right, but its hard to explain as ppl can interpret your words in many ways depending on their context.

i think this: you dont need language for an idea, to have it, or be creative.

to think about it outside of that, like asking critical questions, inner dialogue _about_ the ideas and creativity, that is i think what is 'thought' and that requires language as its sort of inner communication....

[fsckboy]

>(e.g. baseline-heidegger)/the humanities/psychoanalysis etc.)

and pre-heidegger, pre-psychoanalysis, what then, how did somebody, e.g. heidegger, think of those thoughts without the vocabulary to do so? ahhh, apparently, they didn't need to. Turns out, language is not required for thought, thought can invent language.

[DrierCycle]

Language may ultimately be maladaptive as it is arbitrary and disconnected from thought. Who cares about the gibberish of logic/philosophy when survival is at stake in ecological balance? The key idea is, there are events. They are real. The words we use are false/inaccurate externalizations of those events. Words and symbols are bottlenecks that place the events out of analog reach but fool us by our own simulation processes into thinking they are accurate.

Words are essentially very poor forms of interoception or metacognition. They "explain" our thoughts to us by fooling us. Yet how much of the senses/perceptions are accessible in consciousness. Not very much. The computer serves to further the maladaption by both accelerating the symbols and sutomating them, which puts the initial real events even further from reach. The only game is how much we can fool the species through the lowres inputs the PFC demands. This appears to be a sizable value center for Silicon Valley, and it seems to require coders to ignore the whole of experience and rely solely on the bottleneck simulations centers of the PFC which themselves are disconnected from direct sensory access. Computers, 'social' media, AI, code, VR essentially "play" the PFC.

How these basic thought experiments that have been tested in cog neuroscience since the 90s in the overthrow of the cog sci models of the 40s-80s were not taught as primer classes in AI and comp sci is beyond me. It takes now third gen neurobiology crossed with linguistics to set the record straight.

These are not controversial ideas now.

[drdeca]

What does "PFC" stand for?