Okay, so my first experiment was to try to think without language. Go ahead, you try it. I can't do it. So a simple conclusion is that language gives rise to what we call thought. However, I do some things - which I do not call thought - without language. There was/is an old IBM programming test of patterns and I can choose the correct pattern even when I cannot think why that is. In "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", Christopher Alexander talks about how we can tell "good art" even when we do not know why. As a painter, I often do not paint well and I know it.N Sometimes I do well, but I cannot tell you why or what.
Next issue: communication. Humans are currently dominate because we collaborate. The idea of communication as "I can tell you the day of the month" is useful. But communication as a way of effectively collaborating is another thing all together.
If we accept collaboration as the thing that gives people survival fitness - which I do - then you can invert the whole thing and focus on how we achieve that. Ants are another species that collaborate well and are successful. But, arguably, ants neither think nor speak. Unless you want to call leaving a pheromone trail "speaking"? And why not? So now we can consider the issue of from another perspective - what constitutes a language? Sapir Whorf says our language affects if not determines what we think. Perhaps we need to look at language not as what we think it is but instead that language is any system that provides collaboration. And then we start going down an interesting rat hole. "Twitter and Teargas" argues that that extwitter does "affords" people ways to do some things but not others.
It is a complex and interesting issue. My take is that language is primarily a tool for collaboration.
Fascinating. Does it mean that when we have an internal monologue, we're in effect collaborating with our immediate-future self?
This has parallels to the Chain-of-Thought prompting in LLMs, where simply by letting the model speak its reasoning, it generates better responses.
The way I look at things: language-less thinking is tapping into our evolved or ingrained patterns (aka intuition). This is like one forward pass of LLMs. But if you have to reason in a novel situation that you haven't seen before, you have to break it down into simpler steps and that necessarily requires some form of "thinking aloud".
I need to follow the references in the original paper, but most of their evidence of language-less thought was about intuition-type thinking, not multi-step reasoning.
I just ran that experiment and successfully thought without language. I took my coffee cup into the sink in the kitchen without thinking of such actions explicitly with words, but I sure “thought” to do it. I didn’t wake up in the kitchen wondering how the cup got in the sink or anything.
Another example of thinking without language: walking around or driving a car while holding a conversation.
I can think without language, and so can you. That's why we have the phrase, "what just happened?" "what was that" you have seen an event, you can see think about it, but you don't understand it. thoughts come before language, language helps to cement understand. I also speak multiple languages, I don't think in any language.
> So a simple conclusion is that language gives rise to what we call thought.
Simple and wrong. Remember that thought is highly influenced by habit. If you habitually think in language, it might just possibly take more than thirty seconds of trying before you can conclude it's impossible.
Unless you're defining "thought" to be "internal mental processes that take the form of language", in which case have fun at tautology club.
Next issue: communication. Humans are currently dominate because we collaborate. The idea of communication as "I can tell you the day of the month" is useful. But communication as a way of effectively collaborating is another thing all together.
If we accept collaboration as the thing that gives people survival fitness - which I do - then you can invert the whole thing and focus on how we achieve that. Ants are another species that collaborate well and are successful. But, arguably, ants neither think nor speak. Unless you want to call leaving a pheromone trail "speaking"? And why not? So now we can consider the issue of from another perspective - what constitutes a language? Sapir Whorf says our language affects if not determines what we think. Perhaps we need to look at language not as what we think it is but instead that language is any system that provides collaboration. And then we start going down an interesting rat hole. "Twitter and Teargas" argues that that extwitter does "affords" people ways to do some things but not others.
It is a complex and interesting issue. My take is that language is primarily a tool for collaboration.