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Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

(www.scientificamerican.com)
549 points orcul | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 12:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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fnordpiglet ◴[19 Oct 24 03:16 UTC] No.41885384[source]▶
For those who can’t and don’t think in words this is unsurprising.
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Razengan ◴[19 Oct 24 18:49 UTC] No.41889753[source]▶
Can you count without using a "language"?

Try it now: Tap your hand on the desk randomly. Can you recall how many times you did it without "saying" a sequence in your head like "1, 2, 3" or "A, B, C" etc?

If yes, how far can you count? With a language it's effectively infinite. You could theoretically go up to "1 million 5 hundred 43 thousand, 2 hundred and 10" and effortlessly know what comes next.

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1. KoolKat23 ◴[19 Oct 24 20:24 UTC] No.41890509[source]▶
An important note. If you're hearing your voice in your head doing this, that's subvocalisation and it's basically just saying it out loud, the instruction is still sent to your vocal chords

It's the equivalent of <thinking> tags for LLM output.