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chrisweeklytoday at 3:14 AM1 replyview on HN

"There is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a depth of formless feeling untouched by thought." - Rilke

Your assertion that we don't think in language is questionable. It runs counter to the lived experience of developing thoughts through writing ("writing isn't capturing thinking -- it is thinking"). I believe there is more to thought than language alone, but I also feel quite sure that language forms an essential part of thinking beyond a base layer of instinctive animalistic associations. Sophisticated thoughts are impossible to construct or maintain in the absence of language to represent concepts.

Edt to add: I cited Rilke because I find the notion [some deep thoughts are beyond language] interesting. But I disagree with the idea that language is only ever epiphenomenal (co-occurring with thought), or akin to a hard-of-hearing scribe attempting to convey thoughts which always have independent existence.


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JohnBootytoday at 3:57 AM

This is true and it's barely even debatable. Whatever exact role language plays in our thought processes, it is most definitely nonzero.

It's why I think "LLMs are only fancy autocorrect" style takes are really underselling how wild it is that we've, in a roundabout way, sort of crystallized a bit of the human thought process in a way that is genuinely useful for a lot of tasks.

Linguistic Relativity — John Lucy https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.anthro.26....

Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104

Unconscious Effects of Language-Specific Terminology on Pre-Attentive Color Perception https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0811155106

Newly Trained Lexical Categories Produce Lateralized Categorical Perception of Color https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1005669107