Language is not essential for the cognitive processes that underlie thought

You could say language is just the "communication module" but there has got to be another whole underlying interface where non-verbal thoughts are modulated/demodulated to conform to the language expected to be used when communication may or may not be on the agenda.

Well said! This is a great restatement of the core setup of the Chomskian “Generative Grammar” school, and I think it’s an undeniably productive one. I haven’t read this researchers full paper, but I would be sad (tho not shocked…) if it didn’t cite Chomsky up front. Beyond your specific point re:interfaces—which I recommend the OG Syntactic Structures for more commentary on—he’s been saying what she’s saying here for about half a century. He’s too humble/empirical to ever say it without qualifiers, but IMO the truth is clear when viewed holistically: language is a byproduct of hierarchical thought, not the progenitor.

This (awesome!) researcher would likely disagree with what I’ve just said based on this early reference:

  In the early 2000s I really was drawn to the hypothesis that maybe humans have some special machinery that is especially well suited for computing hierarchical structures.

…with the implication that they’re not, actually. But I think that’s an absurd overcorrection for anthropological bias — humans are uniquely capable of a whole host of tasks, and the gradation is clearly a qualitative one. No ape has ever asked a question, just like no plant has ever conceptualized a goal, and no rock has ever computed indirect reactions to stimuli.

Chomsky is shockingly unhumble. I admire him but he's a jerk who treats people who disagree with him with contempt. It's fun to read him doing this but it's uncollegiate (to say the least).

Also, calling "generative grammar" productive seems wrong to me. It's been around for half a century -- what tools has it produced? At some point theory needs to come into contact with empirical reality. As far as I know, generative grammar has just never gotten to this point.

Who has he mistreated?

In these discussions, I always knee-jerk into thinking "why don't they just look inward on their own minds". But the truth is, most people don't have much to gaze upon internally... they're the meat equivalent of an LLM that can sort of sound like it makes sense. These are the people always bragging about how they have an "internal monologue" and that those that don't are aliens or psychotics or something.

The only reason humans have that "communication model" is because that's how you model other humans you speak to. It's a faculty for rehearsing what you're going to say to other people, and how they'll respond to it. If you have any profound thoughts at all, you find that your spoken language is deficient to even transcribe your thoughts, some "mental tokens" have no short phrases that even describe them.

The only real thoughts you have are non-verbal. You can see this sometimes in stupid schoolchildren who have learned all the correct words to regurgitate, but those never really clicked for them. The mildly clever teachers always assume that if they thoroughly practice the terminology, it will eventually be linked with the concepts themselves and they'll have fully learned it. What's really happening is that there's not enough mental machinery underneath for those words to ever be anything to link up with.

This view represents one possible subjective experience of the world. But there are many different possible ways a human brain can learn to experience the world.

I am a sensoral thinker, I often think and internally express myself in purely images or sounds. There are, however, some kinds of thoughts I've learned I can only fully engage with if I speak to myself out loud or at least inside of my head.

The most appropriate mode of thought depends upon the task at hand. People don't typically brag about having internal monologues. They're just sharing their own subjective internal experience, which is no less valid than a chiefly nonverbal one.

I think one big problem is that people understand LLMs as text-generation models, when really they're just sequence prediction models, which is a highly versatile, but data-hungry, architecture for encoding relationships and knowledge. LLMs are tuned for text input and output, but they just work on numbers and the general transformer architecture is highly generalizable.

As far as I understand it, it's just output and speaking is just enclosed in tags, that the body can act on, much like inline code output from an LLM.

e.g. the neural electrochemical output has a specific sequence that triggers the production of a certain hormone in your pituitary gland for e.g. and the hormone travels to the relevant body function activating/stopping it.

Nobody, people are just crying because Chomsky calls them out, rationally, on their intellectual and/or political bullshit, and this behavior is known as projection.

What? I used the term "sensoral" after thinking about what I wanted to communicate. I have no idea if that is a pop psychology term, I didn't google it. I was attempting to communicate that I often think in visual, aural, tactile or olfactory modes, not just visually or via inner monologue, especially when recalling memories.

You're just projecting at this point and stalking previous comments to start arguments. That is exceedingly immature and absolutely against Hacker News guidelines. You need to reevaluate your behavior. Please refrain from continuing to start arguments on previous posts.

Well, it’s the basis of programming languages. That seems pretty helpful :) Otherwise it’s hard to measure what exactly “real world utility” looks like. What have the other branches of linguistics brought us? What has any human science brought us, really? Even the most empirical one, behavioral psychology, seems hard to correlate with concrete benefits. I guess the best case would be “helps us analyze psychiatric drug efficacy”?

Generally, I absolutely agree that he is not humble in the sense of expressing doubt about his strongly held beliefs. He’s been saying pretty much the same things for decades, and does not give much room for disagreement (and ofc this is all ratcheted up in intensity in his political stances). I’m using humble in a slightly different way, tho: he insists on qualifying basically all of his statements about archaeological anthropology with “we don’t have proof yet” and “this seems likely”, because of his fundamental belief that we’re in a “pre-Galilean” (read: shitty) era of cognitive science.

In other words: he’s absolutely arrogant about his core structural findings and the utility of his program, but he’s humble about the final application of those findings to humanity.

It's a fair point that Chomsky's ideas about grammars are used in parsing programming languages. But linguistics is supposed to deal with natural languages -- what has Chomskyan linguistics accomplished there?

Contrast to the statistical approach. It's easy to point to something like Google translate. If Chomsky's approach gave us a tool like that, I'd have no complaint. But my sense is that it just hasn't panned out.