Stop for one second and ask yourself a simple question. Where do your words come from? When you speak, what comes first, the idea or the word? Do you first feel a thought inside you, and only after that go searching for the right word to wrap around it? I think we all do. The word is never the start. The word is just the skin. The idea, the consciousness, is the thing sitting under it.
  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzM
    1·
    10 days ago

    This is actually two topics in one: 1) Language and reasoning, 2) how those models work. And there’s a lot to say about both, so… I’ll focus on the first one, even if the text’s focus is the second one. Disclaimers:

    • This is just my personal take. I’m no expert on the area, my main area of interest is Proto-Indo-European.)
    • I’ll use “Language” with a capital “L” to refer to the human faculty, and “language” with a minuscule “l” for communication systems using Language (like Mandarin, Arabic, English, LIBRAS, BSL, isiZulu etc.)

    Now. Imagine a village like this:

    There’s no street or pathway or anything similar there. All properties are “glued” to each other, separated by fences, but with no gap between them for public usage. Can you still walk through that village?

    You can, but it’s messy: you’ll need to jump over a lot of fences, trample someone’s garden, perhaps even run from someone’s dog. (He’s still a good boy.) But, at least in theory, you can start from one side of the village and reach the other side, by walking through it.

    Now imagine the same village had pathways, like any normal village. Walking through it becomes faster, more reliable, more predictable, less tiring. And you can even share directions with someone else.

    So. If that village was the human mind, and “walking” through it was reasoning, I believe Language would be like the pathways. You can reason without Language; a lot other animals show signs of reasoning, and even us humans do it once in a while (we call it “intuition”). But reasoning with Language is faster, more reliable, and the outcome is more predictable.

    I also think advanced reasoning is a pre-condition necessary for the development of Language in human beings. Because no matter the language, you see a recursive structure of blocks building blocks that requires good cognition: sounds/gestures forming units able to convey meaning, those units being combined into sentences, sentences into utterances etc. And it’s perhaps no surprise the non-human animals with the closest we know of Language — such as chimps and cetaceans — are also known for being damn smart, even for tasks unrelated to communication.