If you'd like a more detailed and in-depth summary of language and its relationship to cognition, I highly recommend Pinker's The Language Instinct, both for the subject and as perhaps the best piece of popular science writing ever.
I straight-up don't believe this. Can you link to the claim so I can understand?
Surely if "high-order thought" has any meaning it is defined by some form. Otherwise it's just perception and not "thought" at all.
FWIW, I don't "hear" my thoughts at all, but it's no less linguistic. I can put a lot more effort into thinking and imagine what it would be like to hear it, but using an sensory analogy fundamentally seems like a bad way to describe thinking if we want to figure out what it thinking is.
I of course have non-linguistic ways of evaluating stuff, but I wouldn't call that the same as thinking, nor a sufficient replacement for more advanced tools like engaging in logical reasoning. I don't think logical reasoning is even a meaningful concept without language—perhaps there's some other way you can identify contradictions, but that's at best a parallel tool to logical reasoning, which is itself a formal language.
In the case of Yann, he said so himself[1]. In the case of people generically, this has been well-known in cognitive science and linguistics for a long time. You can find one popsci account here[2].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39709732
[2]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/not-everyone-has-...
For instance: what does it mean to "hear" a thought in the first place? It's a nonsensical concept.
What does this mean though? "Listening" is not a word that makes much sense to apply to something we can't both agree is audible.
Surely one of these would involve using your input from your ears and one would not? Can you not distinguish these two phenomena?
Are you saying you cannot tell whether you are thinking or talking except via your perception of your mouth and vocal chords? Because I definitely perceive even my imagination about my own voice as different.
I can listen to songs in their entirety in my head and it's nearly as satisfying as actually hearing. I can turn it down halfway thru and still be in sync 30 sec later.
That's not to flex only to illustrate how similarly I experience the real and imagined phenomena. I can't stop the song once it's started sometimes. It feels that real.
My voice sounds exactly how I want it to when I speak 99% of the time unless I unexpectedly need to clear my throat. Professional singers can obviously choose the note they want to produce, and do it accurately. I find it odd your own voice is unpredictable to you. Perhaps - and I mean no insult - you don't 'hear' your thought in the same way.
Edit I feel it's only fair to add I'm hypermnesiac and can watch my first day of kindergarten like a video. That's why I can listen to whole songs in my head.
It is no surprise to me that you have to adopt existing terms to talk about what it is like, as vocabularies depend on common experiences, and those of us who do not have the experience can at best only get some sort of imperfect feeling for what it is like through analogy.
If someone says “I cannot picture anything in my head”, then just because I would describe my experience as “I can picture things in my head” isn’t enough information to know whether we have different experiences. We could be having the same exact experience.
You could ask people what they mean when they say they "hear" thoughts, but since you've already dismissed their statements as "nonsensical" I guess you don't see the point in talking to people to understand how they think!
That doesn't leave you with many options for learning anything.
Presumably the question would be "If you claim to 'hear' your thoughts, why do you choose the word 'hear'?" It doesn't make much sense to ask people if they experience something I consider nonsensical.
In other topic, I would consider this as minor evidence of possibility of nonverbal thought “could you pass me that… thing… the thing that goes under the bolt?”. I.e. Exact name eludes me sometimes, but I do know exactly what I need and what I plan to do with it.
Perceive
> Exact name eludes me sometimes, but I do know exactly what I need and what I plan to do with it.
This is just analytic language. Even if the symbol fails to materialize you can still identify what the symbol refers to via context-clues (analysis)
Or maybe I'm wrong and people have just been using this term to describe mental shit all along!
That's kind of my point, though, we literally don't have the language to figure out how other people perceive things.
Perceive at least disambiguates itself from the senses that aren't related to thought!
you are right, talking about mental processes is difficult. Nobody knows how exactly other person perceive things, there is no objective way to measure things out. (Offtopic: describing smell is also difficult)
In this thread, we see that rudimentary language for it exists.
For example: lot of people use sentence like “to hear my own thoughts” and a lot of people understand that fine.
That is what my partner in the conversation is doing. I am not doing that.
When I think of a plan what’s needed to be done (e.g. something broke in the house, or I need to go to multiple places), usually I know/feel/perceive the gist of my plan instantly. And only after that, I verbalise/visualise it in my head, which takes some time and possibly add more nuance. (Verbalisation/visualisation in my head, is a bit similar to writing things down)
At least for me, there seem to be three (or more) thought processes that complement each other. (Verbal, visual, other)
When the sounds waves hit your ear drum it causes signals that are then sent to the brain via the auditory nerve, where they trigger neurons to fire, allowing you to perceive sound.
When I have an internal monologuing I seem to be simulating the neurons that would fire if my thoughts were transmitted via sound waves through the ear.
Is that not how it works for you?
How the hell would you convince someone of this?
There's a writer and blogger named Mark Evanier who wrote as a joke
"Absolutely no one likes candy corn. Don't write to me and tell me you do because I'll just have to write back and call you a liar. No one likes candy corn. No one, do you hear me?"
You're doing the same thing but replace "candy corn" with "internal monologue".
The fact people report it makes it obviously true to the extent that the idea of a belligerent person refusing to accept it is funny.
It's dense, but even skimming the SEP article is pretty fascinating: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/
Well that's easy—some do, some don't.
The reason I (and others) say that language is almost certainly preceded by (and derived from) high-order thought is because high-order thought exists in all of our close relatives, while language exists only in us.
Perhaps the confusion is in the definition of high-order thought? There is an academic definition but I boil it down to "able to think about thinking as, e.g. all social great apes do when they consider social reactions to their actions."
Yes, I think this is it.
But now I am confused why "high-order thought" is termed this way when it doesn't include what we would consider "thinking" but rather "cognition". You don't need to have a "thought" to react to your own mental processes. Surely from the perspective of a human "thoughts" would constitute high-order thinking! Perhaps this is just humans' unique ability of evaluating recursive grammars at work.
The reason why is: the core of the paper suggests that they trained a model and then fed it adversarial input, and it mostly (and selectively) kept to its training objectives. This is exactly what we'd expect and want. I think most people will hear that pretty much mostly not be alarmed at all, even lay people. It's only alarming if we say it is "faking" "alignment." So that's why I thought it would be helpful to scope the word in that way.
We do not refer to all mental processes as "thoughts". What makes you believe this?
I believe that I was thinking before I learned words, and I imagine that most other people were too. I believe the "raised by wolves" child would be capable of thought and reasoning as well.
I'm not even implying "english", but logic is inherently a product of formal language—how else would you even construct claims to evaluate?