Human thinking is reaching the end of its usability
Super-human artificial intelligence (SHAI) will come. To be able to deal with it, we will need to understand how it thinks. Yes, it will think, much in the same way as humans do, but with a much larger capacity. That is what I mean with super-human intelligence.
Before we can understand SHAI thinking, we must understand our own thinking. Especially we need to know its limitations, the point where we have to say "sorry, this is beyond what can be captured in human concepts".
Thinking cannot be understood by more thinking. We need episodes of non-thinking to step back and observe. When you are without thoughts and are able to catch the first thought that pops into your head, you are on track to learn a few new things. Your first thought might be "Now, what is the purpose of all this non-thinking!?". And then, only when you are alert enough, you might feel a little surprize, where did this voice come from? Indeed, that is what it is, a voice-in-the head. It speaks with the sound of your own voice and in a natural language (I discovered that I think in English quite often, even while Dutch is my first language). The next moment you are back in thinking, meaning that you don't hear the voice anymore, you have become identified with the voice.
Eastern philosophy can teach a lot about these things, Tao Te Ching and other books. My favorite is Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, because he gives a more western view. But even Eckhart Tolle can talk in very vague terms, and you may not like that. But what he says really doesn't matter too much. The only thing that is important in his teachings is that you learn to take a break from compulsive thinking.
Ok, this might all be familiar stuff for you. Yet, this is all not too well integrated with modern philosophy. For instance, I often hear philosophers talk about consciousness being caused by thinking. I can testify that it is not the case, and you can find out for yourself.
When I woke up after a heart surgery, 5 years ago, my memory was completely blank. I didn't know my own name. No memory no thinking, yet I was perfectly conscious. Since that time this happens to me on a daily basis, although my memory does not drop out completely anymore. Without thoughts, I can eat my lunch, make coffee perfectly. When somebode asks something simple, I can answer. But cooking a meal is challenging, because I need to make decisions.
I believe this non-thinking state is similar to what animals experience. Some animals have learned a few words, but as far as I know, they do not have these trains of thoughts like we humans have. I don't think they have words that imply causality, for instance.
Current AI works much the same as animal brains. I will not address AI consciousness here, that is a topic on its own. But the way it operates looks similar to how animals behave, in a kind of linear way from input to output. And even while ChatGPT operates on text, internally this text is just data. But this also is discussion for a later date. I just want to point out here what the relation is between this non-thinking business and our understanding of AI.
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Human thinking is reaching the end of its usability. The world is too complex for humans to understand it and coordinate it. I read this article on the forum https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15497/quo-vadis-united-kingdom. I am not a pessimist by nature, but the signs are clear. Modern society is destroying itself. The place for change is here, on this forum. But we need real answers, not a succession of thoughts.
Before we can understand SHAI thinking, we must understand our own thinking. Especially we need to know its limitations, the point where we have to say "sorry, this is beyond what can be captured in human concepts".
Thinking cannot be understood by more thinking. We need episodes of non-thinking to step back and observe. When you are without thoughts and are able to catch the first thought that pops into your head, you are on track to learn a few new things. Your first thought might be "Now, what is the purpose of all this non-thinking!?". And then, only when you are alert enough, you might feel a little surprize, where did this voice come from? Indeed, that is what it is, a voice-in-the head. It speaks with the sound of your own voice and in a natural language (I discovered that I think in English quite often, even while Dutch is my first language). The next moment you are back in thinking, meaning that you don't hear the voice anymore, you have become identified with the voice.
Eastern philosophy can teach a lot about these things, Tao Te Ching and other books. My favorite is Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, because he gives a more western view. But even Eckhart Tolle can talk in very vague terms, and you may not like that. But what he says really doesn't matter too much. The only thing that is important in his teachings is that you learn to take a break from compulsive thinking.
Ok, this might all be familiar stuff for you. Yet, this is all not too well integrated with modern philosophy. For instance, I often hear philosophers talk about consciousness being caused by thinking. I can testify that it is not the case, and you can find out for yourself.
When I woke up after a heart surgery, 5 years ago, my memory was completely blank. I didn't know my own name. No memory no thinking, yet I was perfectly conscious. Since that time this happens to me on a daily basis, although my memory does not drop out completely anymore. Without thoughts, I can eat my lunch, make coffee perfectly. When somebode asks something simple, I can answer. But cooking a meal is challenging, because I need to make decisions.
I believe this non-thinking state is similar to what animals experience. Some animals have learned a few words, but as far as I know, they do not have these trains of thoughts like we humans have. I don't think they have words that imply causality, for instance.
Current AI works much the same as animal brains. I will not address AI consciousness here, that is a topic on its own. But the way it operates looks similar to how animals behave, in a kind of linear way from input to output. And even while ChatGPT operates on text, internally this text is just data. But this also is discussion for a later date. I just want to point out here what the relation is between this non-thinking business and our understanding of AI.
[removed by author]
Human thinking is reaching the end of its usability. The world is too complex for humans to understand it and coordinate it. I read this article on the forum https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15497/quo-vadis-united-kingdom. I am not a pessimist by nature, but the signs are clear. Modern society is destroying itself. The place for change is here, on this forum. But we need real answers, not a succession of thoughts.
Comments (36)
I know this is practically impossible to explicate but I would appreciate further and more detailed accounts of this please. I would find this EXTREMELY useful to hear an attempt at a first-hand account of this experience (although I understand it is now second-hand to you).
Also, have you read 'My Stroke of Insight' by Jill Bolte-Taylor? She is a neuroscientist who had a stroke and had to relearn pretty much everything.
The good news is that you can experience it yourself quite easily. The urge to think is a strong one, and one of my big questions is why evolution switched from non-thinking (animals) to only-thinking (humans). But any meditation practice is meant to relax that urge.
One of the curious things I encounter daily is what I call "impressions". They feel like old memories, with a very distinct atmosphere or, indeed impression. No images, no stories. Every time completely different, in the same way smells can vary in infinite ways. And they feel pleasant, too.
Only this week I discovered that these impressions naturally come up when you have a new insight. This impression then is attached to the insight and serves as a kind of label for later reference. Apparently in my case this whole mechanism has become detached from its normal purpose, and I get those impression at random times, several times a day.
Quoting I like sushi I haven't read it, I will. I had no stroke. No diagnosis has been given in my case, except for a conversion syndrome that distorts my left eye on occasion.
I'll have to think about it. Already it seems I am writing on the edge what is tolerable here...
I have a good enough idea of what you say you have experienced to say that it is likely far more common than you think. Not the EXACT experience, but the same family of experiences (be they brain clots or less apparent physiological/psychological instances).
I mentioned split brain cases to someone recently, and that kind of instance can be related to the kind of 'non-languaged' expression of experience in some way.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
I am certain you will find common ground in there.
Yes, that's entropy. :fire:
And a hand cannot grasp itself just like eyes cannot see themselves and a brain cannot perceive itself. Big whup. But thinking often works, that's all we need to know. "Non-thinking" autopilot is involuntary therefore easy, whereas thinking (i.e. learning, creating, reflecting) is voluntary and difficult. The contrast is reflectively instructive. Read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
And more broadly:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_thought
You have come to the right place, Carlo, for such delusions of grandeur to be ridiculed. :smirk:
If you think in a compulsive way, it is basically system 1 at work. When you practice a bit more non-thinking inbetween your thinking, is is where creativity comes in. That is what Kahneman refers to as system 2.
And I'd rather be ridiculed than ignored, so thank you for the attention.
One example of wrapping a statement in some term without adding understanding. In this case entropy comes from a domain that is very precise - informatica. You apply it loosely to a domain that is highly complex. What do you want to say? Do you want to throw another book at me?
Stating this is not at all likely to help your cause. Some things are best left unsaid. Which you will agree with given what you are hoping to explicate .
Quoting Carlo Roosen
The sentence 'walking on the moon' refers to an experience that only a few astronauts share. It doesn't suddenly stop referring when the rest of us who lack the experience use the sentence. Furthermore, what else do you expect from language than "only" the same labels? Different labels? :chin:
Is it taking so long? Computers are around less than 90 years. ChatGPT is only a few years old. The rate of improvement is enormous.
What's improved? AI is stuck on simulating intelligence, and simulation is not duplication. Neither a machine nor a human becomes intelligent by merely acting as if it is.
The only thing is that the architecture is still too limited such that it only 'sort of' captures the essence what it is trained on. It cannot raise above it. To solve that is the idea that I am working on. But to really understand that idea, you must learn to step out of thinking a bit. I have a bit of a challenge here on the forum to get that across. So if you have some idea what I am talking about, let me know.
You are talking about 'worded' thought. You will come to understand, if you have not already, that some people cannot 'think' without words. This was a strange thing for me to find out and equally strange for those who cannot think without words to grasp that anyone can think without words.
There will be some people on this forum that simply cannot fathom 'thinking' without words; and others who refer to 'thinking' as only being worded.
I dont think this is true. Do you have a reference I can take a look at?
If youre interested in knowing more, I highly recommend a book The Feeling of What Happens, by Antonio Damasio. He goes into a discussion of these kinds of symptoms in detail.
Cognitive science and psychology say no.
An interesting analogy would be in the dance of sexual selection, where the subject/object of your desire demands a great performance. If you pass the test, you get to mate. On the other side, you play competitive sports with your own rivals to practice for ever new encounters. The competition of either the love or war dance ensues, age after age, and they are both linked (ex. the Trojan War of Homer's epic). The evolutionary pressure in competition generates new ways of doing (grows the capacity for doing) which get copied for all kinds of ends.
The ability to manipulate the world via thought has been so tremendous that what constitutes the transient subject/object of anyone's desire is so incredibly varied. But behind it all everyone is still just "getting off" in one way or another, under the restrictions and sublimation of culture.
Seriously, you are confusing subjective experience with empirical data. You would hardly tell someone with blind-sight they can see just because they can walk around a room and avoid every object. For them they are blind.
I have met several people who cannot think without words. I first became aware of this when my secondary English teacher told the class he could not think without words - had no subjective capacity to produce images and his dreams were purely auditory. Other people I have spoken to like this do have visual dreams but cannot perform the same visualisation when in a waking state.
It is bizarre, but it is more prevalent than you would think. A lot of people when pressed on this matter do sometimes 'pretend' to fit in. I get random flashes of images when I meditate but some people get nothing other than their own inner dialogue. Some people also insist that 'thinking' has to involve 'worded thought' and they are usually the ones who have a limited visualisation or none at all.
To repeat, some people on this forum have stated they cannot think without words.
No, you are confusing anecdotal personal impressions with knowledge of how the brain and mind work.
Quoting I like sushi
I have a friend who has, as she says, no minds eye. She can't imagine, remember, or dream visual images, but she has no problem with representing her other senses mentally. That has nothing to do with being able or unable to think without words. Much of anyone's thinking takes place below the threshold of self-awareness - without words. Words come along fairly late in the thinking process.
Quoting I like sushi
My friend didn't "pretend" to fit in, she wasn't aware until late in life that she was any different from other people. Starting from earliest childhood, she just compensated for her handicap without realizing it. No one noticed.
That is all. I can absolutely 'think' without the use of 'words'.
Quoting T Clark
That is not what I meant at all btw. People do tend to conform and if they believe something about how they perceive the world differs from others, and they are viewed with deep scepticism, they tend to just say they experience the world like others do. You know this, as does everyone. That is all I meant; AND I have seen people do this firsthand when quizzed about worded thought versus other thought. One minute they state they cannot visualise and when they realised this was 'different' to me they switched. When pressed further they resorted to stating they cannot 'see' or represent ideas in any other way than through worded thought.
There is the then the further problem of measurable data, in terms of fMRI and such, because they are one particular aspect of the empirical evidence. Empirical evidence and anecdotal evidence are close enough when dealing with subjective experiences in the real world. This is simply because we cannot create a 'controlled' setting if the setting is life experience.
I am not trying to twist the meaning of 'anecdotal evidence' here only state that the more subjective the phenomenon under investigation, the more so-called 'anecdotal evidence' becomes meaningful when some rigor is added - hence the field of psychology.
Synesthesia is another instance where experience and thought can become difficult to grasp. Many people can assign colours to abstract ideas where to others this seems utterly ridiculous. Again, this is a 'thought' in some sense of the word, but not something that utilises 'words'. Some people cannot do this. It can be argued by some that this is not 'thinking' though because it does not appear to be guided ... this is precisely the bias some people hold (maybe correctly) regarding what we refer to as 'thought'. Which seems to be more or less what you are saying. We can agree to disagree here.
There is a psychologist (or cognitive neuroscientist/linguist?) who believes that ALL emotions exist only because we created words for them. Crazy as that sounds we can see clear physical changes in a toddlers brain when they first learn the words for colours. Through fMRI it can be seen clear as day that pre-speaking one part of the infants brain lights up when exposed to and focusing on a particular colour, yet when they learn the words for the colours the activity in the brain dramatically shift to the other hemisphere. Of course, this does not present hard evidence for or against, but it is intriguing nevertheless.
Note: I do think Damasio has a point when it comes to viewing consciousness more in line with 'feeling' and his somatic marker view of consciousness. He did a lot to tear people away from the widely held dichotomy of emotion and reason in the public eye.
I think you're right. We see some of them here on the forum - people who think that all thinking is reasoning, which does require language.
Quoting I like sushi
Don't think when I question anecdotal evidence I'm rejecting introspection - self-awareness. I see that as a foundation of philosophical understanding.
Quoting I like sushi
Thinking is not "guided." Guided by whom? I think you're talking about the people whom I referred to above who think all thinking is reasoning. And no, this is not what I'm suggesting.
Quoting I like sushi
I think there is some truth to that. If I understand him correctly, Damasio makes a distinction between emotions and feelings. Emotions come instinctively while feelings have to be learned.
Things get messy when people use the same words within different contexts. I personally see philosophy as being one of those fields of interest that plays a large role in sorting out such messes, whilst often also exacerbating them! It gives with one hand and takes with the other :D
Quoting T Clark
'Goal Directed' would have been a better way of framing it. As in, merely having a sense of the word "gradation" as possessing the taste of "blackberries" is not really teleologically significant.
I don't understand what you are saying here. It sounds like two opposite stands, but the first has a double negation and the second has none, so they both point to the same statement.
"people .. cannot fathom 'thinking' without words" = thinking must have words
Some people (A) cannot comprehend 'thinking' as X and others (B) refuse to define 'thinking' as X. In both cases A and B would, probably more often than not, state "thinking must have words" (A and B are not mutually exclusive either).
It could be possible that someone who cannot comprehend 'thinking' without words would accept the statements from those who say they can. One need not experience something to believe in its possibility. That is why I wrote 'probably more often than not'.
Someone else can explain if they want to. I already tried.
This is one of the songs I sing incessantly and off key in my posts - define your terms at the beginning of the discussion. There is a lot of resistance to that idea.
Quoting I like sushi
Maybe that is a good definition of "reason" - goal directed thought. I'd never thought of it in that way. I like it and will use it at least twice a week in my posts from here on.
You mentioned these two, explained in my own words:
(A) people who only know one cognitive mode, that is, thinking in words.
(B) people who know two modes, cognitive activity with and without words, calling the first one "thinking", and the second one differently.
I belong to (B), and I simply call the second mode non-thinking.
I will add other possible/theoretical variants:
(C) people who do not think in words at all (do they exist? Is it possible?)
(D) people who believe they do not think in words, but they would discover they do, if they practiced a bit of non-thinking (although you say some cannot, which I doubt in fact. Some proper teaching will help, plus of course the wish to learn it)
(E) people who know two modes, and both call them thinking (I am curious as to how they experience thinking without words)
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100%. There are plenty of cases where people do not possess any language so they obviously cannot think in words if they have none.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
I think there is likely a scale of ability as there is with practically all human attributes. Maybe for some the ability is so low as to be unworkable? I do not know.
Quoting Carlo Roosen
You just said you do not call 'thinking without words' by the term 'thinking' but can do this. So, how do you experience this 'other' mode if not with words? Why do you not call it thinking?
You can answer that question yourself. Why are you curious about the answer if you have it?
The question becomes, do these people that have no language, do they think? Do they show intelligent behavior? Probably yes. And can that be explained by some form of concepts inside the mind, even while the person cannot speak? Hm, that is not verifyable.
I am interested in the question whether intelligence requires language. Ultimately to see if we need language to build better AI. And also if a richer/faster language could lead to higher intelligence than ours. And the underlying reason, the topic of this discussion, is that we are making a mess of the world. Truely intelligent AI could help us with that.
Intelligence is often defined as the ability to lay a causal connections between two things, in order to reach a goal. With animals the goal used in experiments is: food. The use of tools (when it is not learned behavior and cannot be explained by instinct) is a sign of high intelligence in animals.
For humans, it would be a sign of even higher intelligence, if we could share the available resources on earth such that nobody dies from hunger, without destroying the earth. That kind of thing. Collectively it seems we don't get that simple thing managed.
With language, I have a broader definition. I mean anything that happens in the mind that can explain this intelligence. That seems a silly thing maybe, but for instance we understand very little of what happens inside neural networks of, say, ChatGPT. There are no intermediate "concepts", nothing where we can point at and say: here it makes the causual connection.
Articulate your questions carefully. Contemplate the terms used and their meanings in different fields of expertise. For instance, in linguistics those who study animals are quite happy to call what bees do a 'language' but others focused in other areas of linguistics are not. It is an arduous task sifting through the detritus of words and it is necessary to make mistakes.
What I think you may just be beginning to understand (or rather understand more fully) here is that every word you type can mean different things to different people and that this then becomes exponentially more likely once these words are put in sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into ...
There is a lot to focus on. Pick something and stick with it to the point where it drives you utterly insane, then switch tack and tackle the next one. Often once you have circled back around to the first thing you began to tackle it has crystalised a little and leaves you to further reexamine it AND other related ideas.
If you want to talk about Language then break that up into parts and tackle them on eat a time. If you want to tackle the concept of Intelligence, likewise.
When I asked some days ago what you hoped to get out of philosophy you said "I don't know".
If you are interested in Language I would recommend you read three books written by different people with opposing views in parallel to each other. Do not read second-hand analysis or interpretations, just read the source material -start with the Conclusions (last Chapter/Page/Paragraph) and then read the Intro. Make a comparison between them. Then read them through jumping between one then another. This should prevent you being too taken in by any one particular view over another.
I would hesitate to recommend any books because my knowledge is limited. Perhaps other can suggest THREE and look at what people suggest as three comprehensive and opposing views of this topic.
Off the top of my head I would suggest:
- The Language Instinct, Pinker (as a general introduction only).
- Any introduction to linguistics book (I have one by Anne McCabe which is alright).
Then:
- Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein.
- The Language and Thought of the Child, Piaget.
- Something about Language by Searle and/or Chomsky maybe?
More nuanced stuff:
- Poetics, Aristotle ALONGSIDE The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche. (This might be a bit too much though as it is more obscure in terms of how it relates to Language).
The gist of what I am saying is you seem serious, so do some serious work. Knuckle down rather than distract yourself with what some people online think or say. It is a place for honing a few individual nuggets or for throwing something randomly out hoping to hit something ... other than that the real understanding and progression lies in your own focused personal time and research, not loose discussions.
btw I have nothing of interest to say regarding what 'intelligence' is. You can study some neuroscience if you want and see what they have to say about it if you want. I took a passing look once, but there is nothing there for me really.