An interesting talk I heard at a conference once, that I can neither remember the speaker for or speak to their legitimacy, suggested that we might have some lower form of intelligence encoded into our language. They posed the idea that we have enough unique words, and combination of words, that it starts to have reason unto itself similar to how our neurons and their connection breed intelligence. The idea was that we as humans have baked intelligence into our own speech patterns. It seemed a little to abstract for me, but potentially goes a little way to explaining how a statistical averaging algorithm with some randomness, at scale, starts to look like it very occasionally has a genuinely novel thought.
In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs proposes language is a virus in itself, coming from the Outside, and infecting the host with it's control logic. In Radio Free Abemuth, Philip K. Dick attributes a similar possession to a benevolent force, akin to the divine Logos flourishing intelligent development. Both seem open to an impersonal agency that maps to intelligent systems encoded in their transfer protocols.
The english language pattern is definitely shaping our thoughts and limiting our ideas. Just the whole idea of going from some abstract thought to actually making it out in tangible language, I mean no matter the thought it's a lossy transfer into a medium that lacks all the dimensionality of subconscious thought, neurotransmitter action, sensory information, and physiological response.
There's also something to consider with lower level vs higher level abstractions in language. E.g. jargon. One short word could have a 200 page thesis behind it defining all the ramifications. Talk about compression of information.
Now imagine if our language lacked say the mechanism of jargon, of using some meta word to define thousands of stringed together words at once. Every idea like "car" would have to be described from first principles. The species would probably never develop technology with this sort of language pattern present. If we could somehow level up beyond our current abstraction level, maybe that would make us even smarter, able to handle bigger ideas quicker in real time.
Even more simply than all this: I can only speak about what I have english words for.
If you are fluent in a second language, you understand that the only way to become truly fluent is not just to learn the tangible aspects - the vocabulary, grammar, references, expressions, etc - you have to learn to think like the language/culture.
It’s a combination of cultural assumptions, facial expressions and affectations, thinking patterns, and a whole cultural upbringing that can lead you to very different mental processes and natural conclusions starting from the same words and phrases.
Language absolutely encodes a certain form of intelligence. A lot of those things are reflected not just in the totality of the culture but the language itself. Being fluent leads you to different thinking patterns and different conclusions when processing in that language.
At one point there was a universal language, and later either recreated or scrambled, allowing for humans to have many languages for increased confusion.
Now that we are once again attempting to unify our language we find ourselves in a pursuit to build something to escape the Earth.
There is no evidence there was ever a universal language. Or am I missing a joke here?
Sage thoughts, trash88
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Or_3tlEOLj4&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%...
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I thought that was how most people understood LLM’s capabilities? We have spent millenia creating language to map onto our world. Therefore, implicit in that language is a simulacrum of our world.
An interesting theory that would cast some of the more interestingly phrased verses of the Bible in a new light, e.g.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” - John 1:1
I feel like I can feel this happening in my mind in real time. Something like: the part of my brain that thinks thoughts is fairly rudimentary, basically just impressions or hunches--but then there's another part which translates them into words and grammar, and when it takes an impression it can translate it into something fairly sophisticated and intelligent, because it's somehow necessary in order to create a sentence which actually captures the impression.
Does that mean the language(s) we speak determine how intelligent we are? Could learning French, for example—often considered a more expressive language—make a native English speaker more intelligent or even more compassionate?
It's arguable; see the Sapir-Worf hypothesis in the strong and weak forms.
I would argue the languages with the most colors belong to the most intelligent.
Does that help explain why learning a word for something can help understand the concept of it?
Isn't it more to do with being able to describe truth with language
Very intriguing, brings to mind Sapir-Whorf a little bit. You wouldn't happen to remember the name of the speaker or the conference, would you?
Does that explain why different countries that speak different languages have different engineering cultures? Like is german better suited towards engineering than english for example?
Michael Levin, the Biologist.
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Or_3tlEOLj4&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%...
Interesting. Would this apply to any rich enough system of expression, like music or art? Or is there something specific about language that makes it different?