alt Hacker NewsAn interesting talk I heard at a conference once, that I can neither remember the speaker for or speak to their legitimacy, suggested that we might have some lower form of intelligence encoded into our language. They posed the idea that we have enough unique words, and combination of words, that it starts to have reason unto itself similar to how our neurons and their connection breed intelligence. The idea was that we as humans have baked intelligence into our own speech patterns. It seemed a little to abstract for me, but potentially goes a little way to explaining how a statistical averaging algorithm with some randomness, at scale, starts to look like it very occasionally has a genuinely novel thought.
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Does that mean the language(s) we speak determine how intelligent we are? Could learning French, for example—often considered a more expressive language—make a native English speaker more intelligent or even more compassionate?
I thought that was how most people understood LLM’s capabilities? We have spent millenia creating language to map onto our world. Therefore, implicit in that language is a simulacrum of our world.
Isn't it more to do with being able to describe truth with language
Does that help explain why learning a word for something can help understand the concept of it?
Michael Levin, the Biologist.
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Or_3tlEOLj4&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%...
Very intriguing, brings to mind Sapir-Whorf a little bit. You wouldn't happen to remember the name of the speaker or the conference, would you?
Interesting. Would this apply to any rich enough system of expression, like music or art? Or is there something specific about language that makes it different?
In The Ticket That Exploded, William S. Burroughs proposes language is a virus in itself, coming from the Outside, and infecting the host with it's control logic. In Radio Free Abemuth, Philip K. Dick attributes a similar possession to a benevolent force, akin to the divine Logos flourishing intelligent development. Both seem open to an impersonal agency that maps to intelligent systems encoded in their transfer protocols.