Thanks for articulating this so well. I'm a musician and music/CS phd student, and as a jazz improvisor of advanced skill (30+ years), I'm accutely aware that there are significant areas of intelligence for which linguistic thinking is not only not good enough, but something to be avoided as much as one can (which is bloody hard sometimes). I have found it so frustrating, but hard to figure out how to counter, that the current LLM zeitgeist seems to hinge on a belief that linguistic intelligence is both necessary and sufficient for AGI.
Does it really matter? At the end of the day, all the modalities and their architectures boil down to matrices of numbers and statistical probability. There’s no agency, no soul.
