zlacker

> I do believe language adds to the power of thinking; while (other) animals can of course solve simple problems without language, language permits us to define layers of abstractions (by defining and sharing new concepts) that goes beyond simple, non-linguistic thoughts.

Based on my experience with toddlers, a rather smart dog, and my own thought processes, I disagree that language is a fundamental component of abstraction. Of sharing abstractions, sure, but not developing them.

When I'm designing a software system I will have a mental conception of the system as layered abstractions before I have a name for any component. I invent names for these components in order to define them in the code or communicate them to other engineers, but the intuition for the abstraction comes first. This is why "naming things" is one of the hard problems in computer science—because the name comes second as a usually-inadequate attempt to capture the abstraction in language.

>>lolind+(OP)
The conception here is that one's layered abstractions is basically an informal mathematics... which is formally structured... which is a formal grammar. It's your internal language, using internal symbols instead of English names.

Remember in CS theory, a language is just a set of strings. If you think in pictures that is STILL a language if your pictures are structured.

So I'm really handwaving the above just to suggest that it all depends on the assumptions that each expert is making in elucidating this debate which has a long history.

>>calf+vr
> conception here is that one's layered abstractions is basically an informal mathematics... which is formally structured... which is a formal grammar. It's your internal language, using internal symbols instead of English names

Unless we're getting metaphysical to the point of describing quantum systems as possessig a language, there are various continuous analog systems that can compute without a formal grammar. The language system could be the one that thinks in discrete 'tokens'; the conscious system something more complex.

>>JumpCr+iz
That's based on a well known fallacy, because analog models cannot exceed the computational power of Turing machines. The alternative position is Penrose who thinks quantum tubules are responsible for consciousness and thus somehow more powerful than TMs.

>>calf+We1
> analog models cannot exceed the computational power of Turing machines

There is no reason to assume consciousness is Turing computable [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis

>>JumpCr+dN2
Good thing Computability Beyond Church-Turing via Choice Sequences[1] exists.

[1] Mark Bickford, Liron Cohen, Robert L. Constable, and Vincent Rahli. 2018. Computability Beyond Church-Turing via Choice Sequences. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 245–254. https://doi.org/10.1145/3209108.3209200