A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in

Ah its so refreshing to read a comment on the state of affairs of LLMs that is clearly from someone that gets it.

Indeed true intelligence is wordless! Think about it - words are merely a vehicle for what one is trying to express within oneself. But what one is trying to express is actually worldless - words are just the most efficient way that humans have figured out as being the mode of communication.

Whenever I think of a concept, I'm not thinking of words. Im visualising something - this is where meaning and understanding comes from. From seeing and then being able to express it.

Terence McKenna makes the argument that spoken language is a form of bandwidth-limited telepathy in which thoughts are processed by a dictionary, encoded into variations of strength of an acoustical pressure wave which transmitted by mechanical means, detected at a distance, and re-encoded to be compared against the dictionary of a second user.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnPBGiHGmYI

While McKenna is interesting, it's still metaphysical and probably nonsense. If you stick to hard science, aphasia studies reveal language and thought have nothing to do with one another, which means language is arbitrary gibberish that predominantly encodes status, dominance, control, mate-selection, land acquisition etc.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27096882/

“How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?” Plato, The Allegory of the Cave