An 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.
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.
The english language pattern is definitely shaping our thoughts and limiting our ideas. Just the whole idea of going from some abstract thought to actually making it out in tangible language, I mean no matter the thought it's a lossy transfer into a medium that lacks all the dimensionality of subconscious thought, neurotransmitter action, sensory information, and physiological response.
There's also something to consider with lower level vs higher level abstractions in language. E.g. jargon. One short word could have a 200 page thesis behind it defining all the ramifications. Talk about compression of information.
Now imagine if our language lacked say the mechanism of jargon, of using some meta word to define thousands of stringed together words at once. Every idea like "car" would have to be described from first principles. The species would probably never develop technology with this sort of language pattern present. If we could somehow level up beyond our current abstraction level, maybe that would make us even smarter, able to handle bigger ideas quicker in real time.
Even more simply than all this: I can only speak about what I have english words for.
If you are fluent in a second language, you understand that the only way to become truly fluent is not just to learn the tangible aspects - the vocabulary, grammar, references, expressions, etc - you have to learn to think like the language/culture.
It’s a combination of cultural assumptions, facial expressions and affectations, thinking patterns, and a whole cultural upbringing that can lead you to very different mental processes and natural conclusions starting from the same words and phrases.
Language absolutely encodes a certain form of intelligence. A lot of those things are reflected not just in the totality of the culture but the language itself. Being fluent leads you to different thinking patterns and different conclusions when processing in that language.
Absolutely? I don't think it does so much. People speaking different languages seem to have very similar thoughts. It's true that fluency is a wholistic performance, but I don't think there are any particular thoughts that can't be translated.
It is tougher with european languages from the influence of latin and the sort of mutt that is english. They are all pretty related. That being said when I learned spanish I felt the way they put adjectives after the noun in spanish leads to a sort of different thinking pattern. Car red instead of red car. A bunch of more distant languages though there's no European language equivalent for certain words or concepts. I'm not sure about the sentance structures, but if its a lot different than european languages, I wouldn't be surprised if this changes thinking. I've heard in some languages they don't have a concept of "self" or "I".
That idea is also present in Snowcrash (and the Bible?) in a slightly different form - that our current fragmented languages are a way to protect us from the 'mind control' that results from having a single shared language - with some more layers of fantasy on top.
At one point there was a universal language, and later either recreated or scrambled, allowing for humans to have many languages for increased confusion.
Now that we are once again attempting to unify our language we find ourselves in a pursuit to build something to escape the Earth.
I am speaking of biblical sources as reasoning or evidence. If you read different books and hold a different faith that would explain the missing part.
Correct. The people of earth, after the great flood, built a structure to avoid future floods but were interrupted by a multidimensional being through confusion of languages.
Language are the tokens in the inference output. How they are ordered comes from the weights, and the weights come from the microtubules holding and collapsing quantum state. Orch OR.
Anecdotally, but I have lived in different cultures with entirely different languages and/or dialects, and the thoughts and even entire categories of thoughts people from these cultures express, or can easily express, are very much shaped by their language. Relatedly, I've also often witnessed multilingual people switch out of their native language to a second one just to express a particular idea or nuance, because they can do it with two words in that other language but would need at least a couple of sentences to say the same thing in their native one.
We use formal language to express symbolic relationships, e.g. "A implies B". But even "A implies B" has multiple meanings: material conditional, strict implication, logical entailment, etc. So, symbolic systems are not "pure and hard", they are also contaminated and softened by the vagaries of language outside them, which is our primary access to those systems: "valid" natural language and its strings of words. A statistical system that can string words into valid(=allowed by the distribution) language asymptotically approaches reason. So, the mind is not in the words, but in the laws that permit many words to come together, i.e. the probability distribution.
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.
I feel like I can feel this happening in my mind in real time. Something like: the part of my brain that thinks thoughts is fairly rudimentary, basically just impressions or hunches--but then there's another part which translates them into words and grammar, and when it takes an impression it can translate it into something fairly sophisticated and intelligent, because it's somehow necessary in order to create a sentence which actually captures the impression.
I think put more simply, you can say that humans wrote things down that were proxies for complex, physical phenomena in the real world. If you just look at what we wrote, you can recover world models that “understand” deeper patterns, bc the training data was only ever a proxy.
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?
Does that explain why different countries that speak different languages have different engineering cultures? Like is german better suited towards engineering than english for example?
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?
I know nothing of this topic but I'd say language had the benefit of much higher precision and flexibility of description than just music without words, though I guess if someone made a ai that used fragments of sound waves as the basis for its language instead of words you could argue it could be similar. But again it probably won't sound like music.
Man, I remember carrying a veal calf in a wheelbarrow away from it's grieving mother (who ended up distressed for days) when I was 16 doing some Summer farm work. It messed me up for weeks, and I still somehow went back to drinking dairy. Thankfully I've sworn off all animal products now, but the knowing cruelty of it I suppressed for a long time.
Look to Birmingham in the UK for evidence of the same deference. Many have been on strike since 2025. The city was a rat infested public waste dump for nearly 3 months until the government hired private firms to do the waste handling while the public worker strike action continued.
In the same vein as this article, the best thing I've ever done might just be leaving my phone by the front door when I get home, and getting rid of our TV. All I do is read books, paint, fix-up the house, tend to the garden, play boardgames, and generally do things that require me to be present when at home with my wife and child, rather than in someone else's version of the world.
We go stir crazy at home now, a sensation I have forgotten since my childhood, and feel almost obliged to go out to do things lest we go crazy from boredom. It's wonderful, and I can't recommend it enough.
>All I do is read books, paint, fix-up the house, tend to the garden, play boardgames, and generally do things that require me to be present when at home with my wife and child, rather than in someone else's version of the world
I'm of two minds about this. Facebook and Instagram keep me connected with friends, new and old. True, they're filled with algorithmic crap now, but when I tried ditching them for a while, it didn't improve my connections with people. If anything, I lost touch with people because that's where they were. I'm much better off knowing what my friends -- many who have scattered -- are up to, and giving casual updates myself.
On the other hand, yes, absolutely put the phone down at the dinner table and engage with those who are present. No questions there.
Finally, my kids are getting to the age where their friends have phones and use them to communicate. My kids don't yet have that and are reliant on me to text parents, which is a lot of friction for everyone involved. Their summer is very boring because they hardly get to see their friends. So, sure, fight boredom by entertaining yourself, but that's a lonely existence.
Note that by leaving them by the front door I don't mean abstain. I relent that it is necessary for communication now we don't use letters or have landlines, but I need to actively walk to the front door if I wish to do that. Notifications are something I check when I leave the house in the morning, or briefly after the gym in the car perhaps, rather than being all I do for the majority of the time I sit in the house. The act of it being at the entrance and allowed no further is enough.
Short term buyer habits don't necessarily track technological progress - they tend to be resistent, then inertia is broken and consumers buy en-mass. Companies need to brunt to cost of innovation until the cost benefit analysis makes sense for consumers. Mobile phones were a passing fad for niche power users until companies threw so much money at them so they weren't, and we became reliant on carrying one. Same can be said for thousands of other products. Nobody used them until suddenly we all were.
We're seeing a moores-law-like improvement in electric cars and their power densities. If the American car manufacturers don't want to be a part of that progress, it's on them, but Asia and Europe will continue to innovate in that area and the US will be playing catch up because they're servicing what consumers want now, not what they will probably want in the future.
The "whistle-to-whistle ban" was always poor legislation. By its own terms it only suppresses TV betting adverts in a defined window and lapses at 9pm, and it never touched the categories that actually make up most of the advertising we see; shirts, hoardings, and structural branding, etc. It was an utterly pointless measure that serves to achieve not a single one of it's initial goals.
I help engineers design traditional scanners (Philips, GE, Siemens, etc). To be frank, this statement stinks like utter pig shit.
Some PE bro preaching miracles about a technology that I am sure they are in some way invested in making profit from does not convince me of it's legitimacy. My base instincts, from the unfortunate experience of working daily with PE bros, tell me the opposite in fact. It gives déjà vu of the Theranos hysteria.
The authors report explicitly state that the system's resolution does not match clinical CT or MRI. The elevational resolution is 15–25mm, meaning each slice is effectively a thick 2D section rather than the fine isotropic 3D volume MRI provides. MRI also delivers far richer soft-tissue contrast; this device produces only three contrast types (reflectivity, speed of sound, attenuation), and because it uses a low 1MHz frequency, the reflection images come primarily from tissue boundaries rather than from internal tissue texture.
I could see this being valuable for adipose tissue mapping or fatty-liver monitoring at a large scale, as the machines would be significantly cheaper, but this isn't some revolutionary magic bullet like the Twitter post is insinuating.
As someone in the medical imaging field, are you aware of anyone working on passive sonar for medical imaging? I'm curious, as it's something that I've always thought would be fun to work on.
For context I'm in engineering consultancy, so by no means an expert but I probably have enough experience to be on the other side of the Kruger curve dip.
Passive sonar in the naval sense means listening only, not emitting. Do you mean imaging that relies solely on acoustic energy already present and emitted by the body? If so, then generally no. You have two types of "passive" imaging. First would be hardware-passive, as in MR elastography (most common), where the patient wears a transducer pad, and vibration is actively generated by a driver. You've then got algorithmically-passive, which is more analogue to passive sonar, reconstructing tissue stiffness from ambient broadband vibration without the emitted probing pulse, but that is very much entirely academic. I guess the question would be, why is it worth pursuing when you have something like optical coherence elastography (OCE) for non-invasive profiling. Doing it using noisy ultrasound method becomes redundant. There are other methods, but the outcome is the same.
Generally (this is true for all systems, not just humans) you need to induce energy into it to more effectively measure it's output. Think of it like a bell - if I want to hear the note it produces, it's much easier to hear what this is if I ring it with a hammer. Granted, it will be "passively" resonating to a point where, with a sensitive enough sensor, I could probably pick up the output without the hammer - but that is a pointless problem to solve. I could hit a bell with a soft hammer a million times over without causing damage to it. The lifetime of the person hitting it with a hammer is far shorter than the accumulative damage to the bell before it breaks. The same is true for humans. You could effectively run a very low-energy, 60Hz vibration through a person (which is how the pads work) for multiple lifetimes before it would cause significant damage, so there comes little point in solving that problem. As such, true "passive" imaging is functionally pointless if your outcome is "safely image a patient". You're overengineering your solution to solve a problem that is only relevant if your patient was planning on living for 1000+ years.
I'm thinking passive, as in using only acoustic energy that is already present. Partly it's about minimising irradiation, which you are saying is not a concern.
The more interesting aspect to me is whether the ambient emissions carry useful information. I recall a paper from a few years ago about yeast emitting sounds (mechanical vibrations) in the kHz range. I guess the question I am interested in is "what does life sound like at the cellular level?" Maybe it is silent, but my gut says it's probably making some sound, even if it's very weak. The questions are then along the lines of "What does a healthy cell sound like?", "Do different cells make different sounds?", "Do sick cells make different sounds to healthy cells?". It's absolute pie-in-the-sky stuff, but it would be fascinating to know.
My background is radio communications (with some acoustics) and radio comms has a history of things that used to be considered random noise turning out to be useful signal as processing has developed to the point where signals can be resolved. For example, multipath reflections used to be considered just random interference until the invention of MIMO, at which point they became useful signals and comms systems took a leap forward.
The one thing British people do preen about with regards to technology is cars, but I think that has more to do with the cultural influence of Top Gear than it does the history.
I'd also argue that while Softbank has capital ownership of the company, the leadership structure and how that capital is allocated is still done within the UK with standard board oversight. I know a few of the leadership team personally, and they have a wide remit, almost more so than a public company might do.
The author is a Dutch journalist with no technology background. I wouldn't jump to get my information from this source. As a person who works in the UK semiconductor industry, I noticed 4 or 5 glaring holes in the article in just the first couple of paragraphs.
I got to the second sentence ("Europe is pouring more than €2 billion into sovereign cloud initiatives") before I realize the author either doesn't know and/or didn't care to research properly.
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