I've started to believe that language is often anti-thought. When we are doing what LLMs do, we aren't really thinking, we're just imitating sounds based on a sound stimulus.
Learning a second language let me notice how much of language has no content. When you're listening to meaningless things in your second language, you think you're misunderstanding what they're saying. When you listen to meaningless things in your first language, you've been taught to let the right texture of words slip right in. That you can reproduce an original and passable variation of this emptiness on command makes it seem like it's really cells indicating that they're from the same organism, not "thought." Not being able to do it triggers an immune response.
The fact that we can use it to encode thoughts for later review confuses us about what it is. The reason why it can be used to encode thoughts is because it was used to train us from birth, paired with actual simultaneous physical stimulus. But the physical stimulus is the important part, language is just a spurious association. A spurious association that ultimately is used to carry messages from the dead and the absent, so is essential to how human evolution has proceeded, but it's still an abused, repurposed protocol.
I'm an epiphenomenalist, though.
suddenlybananas
>Learning a second language let me notice how much of language has no content.
Learning a second language let me notice how much of language has no content. When you're listening to meaningless things in your second language, you think you're misunderstanding what they're saying. When you listen to meaningless things in your first language, you've been taught to let the right texture of words slip right in. That you can reproduce an original and passable variation of this emptiness on command makes it seem like it's really cells indicating that they're from the same organism, not "thought." Not being able to do it triggers an immune response.
The fact that we can use it to encode thoughts for later review confuses us about what it is. The reason why it can be used to encode thoughts is because it was used to train us from birth, paired with actual simultaneous physical stimulus. But the physical stimulus is the important part, language is just a spurious association. A spurious association that ultimately is used to carry messages from the dead and the absent, so is essential to how human evolution has proceeded, but it's still an abused, repurposed protocol.
I'm an epiphenomenalist, though.