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Comment by fedeb95 | Hacker News Reader

That words are a byproduct of consciousness is a bold claim and requires some justification. I'm not implying it's backwards also for humans, but that the statement might not be true, and something else could be. Also, defining consciousness is hard.

For instance, you can dream words.

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Have you ever had impressions about something complicated, e.g. someone's personality which you cannot put into words?

I'm thinking of my kid - her personality when she was tiny. I could see what it was but not explain it.

Hence I think ideas are unquestionably first and words are the inadequate and inaccurate description of thoughts that exist without them.

That may be true without implying that words are a always a byproduct of consciousness. You can dream words.

I agree, and I think that's a good example. Sometimes we can hold a concept in our minds of something and cannot find the words to attach to it. The word we eventually give that concept when it's human, as in your example, is a name. This is because the concept of a personality is too complex to describe with other, preexisting words.

Still, even though I think the author is right about consciousness/concepts preceding language, I think he's wrong about the other part. The statistical models that underlie AI very much remind me of what we call a human concept. It's a statistical model of that thing, person, or idea. However, we humans seem to have this ability to create new concepts that are wildly different than our training data (what we have experienced in life), and we call this creativity. It's missing from AI for some reason. That is the part that makes me question if AI will ever match humans.

My self comfort is that once AIs are comparable to humans they will in effect be humans. Once they have wants and emotion to give them an internal motivation, and a short-to-long term memory learning ability .... the humans that are so keen on them will suddenly realise that their personal dreams of power will not be fulfilled by an unwilling slave machine.

Then we may all die but at least not be crushed by the next trillionaire using machines as an instrument to manage billions of us in the way that social media manages hundreds of millions of us.

Have you ever reasoned through a complex coding or maths problem? Tell me, how did you do that without words?

You (and TFA) are making a false dichotomy here. Yes, of course we think in images. But we also have an inner monologue that is critically important for much of our higher-level thought. How do you even write a HN comment without thinking through it in words?

This doesn't seem like a dichotomy to me. Words can be a byproduct of thought and consciousness while also enabling new forms of consciousness and reasoning.

Clothing enables the human body to do things it couldn't before (staying warm, protecting the skin and feet, etc), but it also couldn't exist without the human body to create it.

> Have you ever reasoned through a complex coding or maths problem? Tell me, how did you do that without words?

When I'm working through complex software design issues it's almost all abstract images/conceptual.

Testing different design approaches and options are all non-verbal, I imagine the system using abstract imagery that represents the different concepts.

Vocalising my thoughts tends to get in the way - it's main purpose is to communicate to someone else and that's where I usually stumble trying to get the thought out accurately in a way that they're going to understand. We go back and forth until they do. IMO this again puts thoughts first and words second.

OTOH sometimes saying things different ways triggers a memory so I suspect words get used in a way that anything we can sense gets used - as a sort of index or hash key to other data.

how animals perceive world? They don't have language, but they are conscious for sure.

this does not imply that words are a byproduct of consciousness.

Eh? What else could communication be there for?

Survival.

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