Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

Is this not obvious?

Language is a very poor substitute for freely flowing electrical information - it is evolved to compensate for the bottlenecks to external communication - bottlenecks that are lacking an internal analogue.

It's also a highly advanced feature - something as heavily optiimised as evolved life would not allow something as vital as cognition to be hampered by a lack of means for high fidelity external expression.

It is not at all obvious that "freely flowing electrical information" isn't just language in a different medium, much the same as video on a cassette tape.

Yes it is.

Language is designed to be expressible with low fidelity vibrating strings - it is very clear that the available bandwidth is in the order of bytes per second.

Verses a fucking neural network with ~100 billion neurons.

Come on man, seriously - the two communication modalities are completely incomparable.

Versus a fucking phone network with ~10 billion active numbers.

Come on man, seriously - the two communication modalities are completely incomparable.

Clearly the information traveling around on the phone network couldn't possibly be the same as the low bandwidth vibrating strings used in face to face communication. Obviously.

There's a major difference - the phone network takes in prerequisite constraints on the nature of the information that it's encoding; it is forced by its functionality to be a reflection of spoken language.

The internal communications of the mind have no need for such constraints (and evolved hundreds of millions of years beforehand).

Anyway, I don't know what you were actually trying to argue here: you just built a simulated brain out of people, and the massively multi-agent distributed nature of the language of that machine is (emergently) incomparable with vocalised language.

"Is this not obvious?"

No. But I'm going to stop there, because there are pages of comments saying the exact opposite (and of course some agreeing with you) above.

Perhaps. But one could argue that the development of language (as necessary for communication, its original purpose) was the seed that lead to evolutionary development of deeper thinking.

100% deeper thought - and to a large extent the capacity for linguistic categorisation of objects is incredibly helpful in developing a deeper cognitive understanding of the world around us...

But the most fundamental boon that it offered was in terms of planning and organisation. Before language we'd point and grunt and go there and do the thing that we were gesturing that we were going to do.

But that's a very crude form of planning - you're pretty much just going all in on Leeroy Jenkins.

But actually (and horrifically) I think it's the gift of Kane that speaking and planning permitted; well organised humans (the smartest things on the planet) have been figuring out increasingly better ways to both kill each other and not to die themselves in a brutal feedback loop for a very long time now.

It's brutal as fuck, but it's Darwinian gold.

The claim in the title is indeed obvious.

Also the title is editoralized for no reason. It makes searching, recognizing, citing etc waaay harder, and full of errors. I'll flag it.