by godelski | 2025-10-20 04:26:20+00:00
> What if language is the intelligence?

Almost certainly not. There does not seem to be a strong correlation between the two. We have a lot of different measures for intelligence when it comes to animals. We can place them across a (multidimensional) spectrum and humans seem unique with language. It also appears that teaching animals language does not cause them to rapidly change on these metrics despite generations of language capabilities.

> What if "guessing the next word" really was all that was there, to peak human intelligence, knowledge, and understanding of our world?

I believe this is falsifiable. As I best understand it is a belief of this relationship: predict next word <--> understanding. Yet we know that neither direction holds true. I'll state some trivial cases for brevity[0] but I have no doubt you can determine more complicated ones and even find examples.

-> I can make accurate predictions about coin flips without any understanding of physics or how the coin is being flipped. All I need to do is be lucky. Or we can take many mechanical objects like a clock that can predict time.

Or a horse can appear to do math if I tell it how many times to stomp its foot. It made accurate predictions yet certainly has no understanding.

Ehh I'll give you a more real example. Here's a model that gives accurate predictions for turn by turn taxi directions where the authors extract the world model and find it is not only inaccurate but find that it significantly diverges. Vafa has a few papers on the topic, I suggest reading his work.

<- You can understand all the physics to a double pendulum and not predict the movement for any arbitrary amount of time moving forward if you do not also know the initial conditions. This is going to be true for any chaotic system.

I said we've seen this in the history of science. {Geo,Helio}centrism is a great example. Scientists who had no affiliation with the church still opposed Galileo because his model wasn't making accurate predictions for certain things. Yet the heliocentric model is clearly a better understanding and more accurate as a whole. If you want to dive deeper into this topic I'd highly recommend both the podcast "An Opinionated History of Math" and the book "Representing and Intervening" by Ian Hacking. They're both very approachable. FWIW, metaphysics talks about this quite a lot.

> My first problem is that there are many people that claim that they have NO internal monologue

So again, I cannot stress that we should not represent this as a binary setting. The binary cases are the extreme (in both directions). Meaning very few people experience them.

The problem here is one of language and semantics, not effect. I completely believe that someone will say "I have no internal monologue" if >90% of their thinking is without an internal monologue. Just like how a guy who's 5'11.75" will call themselves 6'. Are they a liar? I wouldn't say so, they're >99% accurate. Would you for someone 5'11"? That's probably more contextually dependent.

So you distrust the data. That's fine. Let's assume poisoned. We should anyways since noise is an important part of any modeling[2]. It is standard practice...

So instead, do you distrust that there's a distribution into how much of an internal monologue individuals use? Or do you presume they all use them the same.

I'd find it hard to believe you distrust the spectrum. But if you trust the spectrum then where is the threshold for your claim? 0%? That's really not a useful conversation even if heavy tailed.

You are hyper-fixated on the edge case but its result isn't actually consequential to your model. The distribution is! You'll have to consider your claims much more carefully when you consider a distribution. You need to then claim a threshold, in both directions. Or if you make the claim that we're all the same (I'd find that quite surprising tbh, especially given the nature of linguistics), you need to explain that too and your expected distribution that would claim that (narrow).

All I can tell you is that my friend and I have had this conversation multiple times over many years and it seems very constant to me. I have no reason to believe they are lying and if they are they are doing so with an extreme level of consistency, which would be quite out of the norm.

[0] Arguing the relationship still requires addressing trivial relationships.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.03689

[2] Even if there are no liars (or "lizardmen"[3]) we still have to account for miscommunication and misunderstandings.

[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Lizardman%27s_Constant