by whatnow37373 | 2025-04-18 10:05:25+00:00
This is quite a swampy bit of territory you're joining me in here so please excuse the mess.

I'm going to attempt a good faith interpretation here so we're clear. I want to understand your position, because I think it's, if nothing else, very interesting to contemplate these matters.

First of all, I have to clear the obvious debris out of the way.

I can read and I can cogitate lingual constructs. That includes creating monologues. Sometimes I "role-play" some professor or something and talk through my problem out loud - when alone. I tend to do this with philosophical problems, but it's unnatural and quite entertaining. The last time I did this must have been a few months ago when pondering Hume's problem of "necessary connection" or Kant's .. everything. I think this is the closest I get to "inner monologue" and it does have its uses, because language in and of itself has a computational character of sorts. By speaking the words out loud I sometimes trigger snippets of verbal knowledge that wouldn't be triggered otherwise.

If this qualifies me as "having inner monologue" already then we're done. By that definition I am in your club and I'm fine with that.

What would still remain however is that those role-playing sessions are deliberate and unnecessary. I can quite easily go without them. It's a trick I've picked up, but it's by no means the only way to make progress. Their nature is comparable to rubber duck debugging: by explaining your problem you work through it differently somehow than if you'd remain "stuck in your head". I can go without rubber ducking, but it's still a useful trick.

Another way of approaching this problem is through programming - assuming you code. You don't literally think "Ah, I see a linked list here and it gets initialized here.. [etc]"? Or maybe you do? I can tell you quite firmly that I don't. If you also don't then just assume I go through my life in the same abstract wordless mode.

> I don't buy that there is "another inner language of thoughts", of the same or greater complexity than our known language, which has not been discovered or described at all.

I find this quite interesting, because I don't understand it. Our language is made of rules and in and of itself has no content. It's literally made out of just rules. Any intelligence has to be brought into it. This was quite clear with GPT-2 era transformers spewing sentences like: "The bear and the snake are wearing stairs". You have to know quite a lot before you can explain why this is nonsense despite it being a valid sentence and it's not clear to me at all that this knowledge itself is purely lingual.

This "inner language" you speak of is just raw cogitation and surely you employ it just as much as me but we assign different words to things. This "inner language" is not to be put "besides" our natural languages, it's the core of it. Without it, there would be no "natural language". I view natural language as a communication convenience, built on top of and not besides raw wordless thought.

I'm not 100% sure how to handle your analogy because, as you've indicated, it's quite tricky, but I'll try something. Sorry for the mess again:

I agree that higher level abstractions enable cognitive moves that just won't be obvious from raw assembly.

Where we disagree, I think, is that these "higher level concepts" are somehow spontaneously lingual by nature. In my view of things these higher level concepts are still raw thought, but .. higher. More complex. Encoding these new more complex cogitations necessitates more complicated lingual structures.

Let's put it this way: do you first cogitate the "class concept" or does the "class syntax" enable the "class"-cogitation? Perhaps for a programmer it's the second, but for the one inventing the abstraction surely the cogitation must come first and, lacking existing lingual constructs, must be cogitated in a purer form.

My problem would thus be: how could you possibly cogitate something that doesn't yet exist in language if all you have is language? "class" does not "fall out of" assembly naturally - inside of it. You need to bring cogitation from outside and then realize it and be able to think of an encoding for that new concept to communicate the idea.