Yes, over long time spans language accumulates and transmits experience, so rats would be disadvantaged while humans got a huge boost.
What I wanted to say originally is that we are riding on the shoulders of giants - the whole corpus of knowledge and concepts, ways to use them that have been discovered by previous generations, at great expense. AI and new born humans inherit this language heritage.
That is why I would attribute to language most of our intelligence. Not all, because we adapt and contextualise, sometimes we stumble on a new thing, a new concept or piece of knowledge. But that is a rare phenomenon, we are 99% of the time contextually reusing the crystallised intelligence in language.
We're like LLMs, where each token generated "visits" the synthesis of the whole human culture - the model weights - before being fully formed. Our thoughts travel the same path - they visit the model of human culture before being formed.
If we lost our language and knowledge we'd have to redo the path again, over a long time, and pay the same price. In a sense, language is smarter than us - smarter than one human generation can accomplish.
What I wanted to say originally is that we are riding on the shoulders of giants - the whole corpus of knowledge and concepts, ways to use them that have been discovered by previous generations, at great expense. AI and new born humans inherit this language heritage.
That is why I would attribute to language most of our intelligence. Not all, because we adapt and contextualise, sometimes we stumble on a new thing, a new concept or piece of knowledge. But that is a rare phenomenon, we are 99% of the time contextually reusing the crystallised intelligence in language.
We're like LLMs, where each token generated "visits" the synthesis of the whole human culture - the model weights - before being fully formed. Our thoughts travel the same path - they visit the model of human culture before being formed.
If we lost our language and knowledge we'd have to redo the path again, over a long time, and pay the same price. In a sense, language is smarter than us - smarter than one human generation can accomplish.