Comment by windexh8er
1 month ago
There are quite a few studies to refute this highly ignorant comment. I'd suggest some reading [0].
From the abstract: "Is thought possible without language? Individuals with global aphasia, who have almost no ability to understand or produce language, provide a powerful opportunity to find out. Astonishingly, despite their near-total loss of language, these individuals are nonetheless able to add and subtract, solve logic problems, think about another person’s thoughts, appreciate music, and successfully navigate their environments. Further, neuroimaging studies show that healthy adults strongly engage the brain’s language areas when they understand a sentence, but not when they perform other nonlinguistic tasks like arithmetic, storing information in working memory, inhibiting prepotent responses, or listening to music. Taken together, these two complementary lines of evidence provide a clear answer to the classic question: many aspects of thought engage distinct brain regions from, and do not depend on, language."
Yeah, you can prove pretty much anything with a pubmed link. Do dead salmon "think?" fMRI says maybe!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2799957/
The resources that the brain is using to think -- whatever resources those are -- are language-based. Otherwise there would be no way to communicate with the test subjects. "Language" doesn't just imply written and spoken text, as these researchers seem to assume.
There’s linguistic evidence that, while language influences thought, it does not determine thought - see the failure of the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is one of the most widely studied and robust linguistic results - we actually know for a fact that language does not determine or define thought.
How's the replication rate in that field? Last I heard it was below 50%.
How can you think without tokens of some sort? That's half of the question that has to be answered by the linguists. The other half is that if language isn't necessary for reasoning, what is?
We now know that a conceptually-simple machine absolutely can reason with nothing but language as inputs for pretraining and subsequent reinforcement. We didn't know that before. The linguists (and the fMRI soothsayers) predicted none of this.
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