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It is not all obvious that consciousness precedes language. Hellen Keller provides a vivid description of her pre-verbal mental state as something less than re

• etrautmann 3mo ago
  I think this is different if you have vision though. I struggle to understand how someone can look at intelligent animals that don’t have language and not intuitively assume that they’re conscious. Yes this is a tricky problem without an answer but IMO the elements of consciousness can exist without language if visual abstractions are present.
  • sigbottle 3mo ago
    You could redefine language to include mental abstractions and maybe it wouldn't be so weird. Language is a shared medium. Maybe an intelligence is capable of building abstractions in their head without the need for say, a symbol system to hopefully communicate with species similar to itself. You may argue that the agent needs persistent memory. Well, so what? If the world has stable regularities from the perspective of the agent - if the sun rises every day, and language is associating certain visuals with certain thoughts (it's not when viewed in its original social definition - but conduct the thought experiment with sociality removed), who's to say that you can't form a kind of language around that? Of course, this is all armchair, and I'm not trying to separate out what "real language" is or whatever, just thought experiments. But the original poster has a good point though, that's been proven in papers, that the tokens an LLM spits out, themselves, attract them to certain distributions, and at least a decent amount of the tokens in CoT are there solely to bring itself to the right distribution.
  • devmor 3mo ago
    Animals don’t have language the same way we do, but many of them do have some kind of semi-structured communication. Cats for example, when domesticated, develop an entirely parallel method of communication specifically to interact with humans - one that is neotenous in genesis, but nonetheless absent from their feral counterparts.
    • brookst 3mo ago
      While true, the connection between communication and consciousness is thin. Plenty of plants communicate with each other, but it’s seen as signaling rather than consciousness. I believe that conscious is a gradient not a binary, and I believe that cats have some level of consciousness, but I’m not sure communication is the thing to hang that on.
      • devmor 3mo ago
        I think comparing vocalized, intentional communication with chemical signaling is reductive and does not support your point at all. Humans also emit pheromones, this is not the same as, or related in any way to language.
      • famouswaffles 3mo ago
        >Plenty of plants communicate with each other, but it’s seen as signaling rather than consciousness. Seems like a people problem to me. Who's to say plants aren't conscious?
  • gf000 3mo ago
    I think one should bring into Chomsky's Universal Grammar the discussion, or at least some version of it. If for no other reason, I believe it's quite reasonable to believe that cognition must be Turing-complete (okay, linear bounded automaton), and there must be some kind of support for recursive structures, no matter what the "primitives" of such consciousness is (either visual or linguistic). I believe in the case of animal intelligence, they (we) have a pretty good hard-coded 3d/4d world model that ought to encode some level of recursion intrinsically (in thought, we very very often use spatial and temporal words), e.g. understanding the motion of another animal, e.g. a rodent running through a tree trunk requires imagination and future prediction already over an abstract agent. Humans just probably have more "stacks" available, and can offload them into either limited "brain memory", or very importantly drawings, text, etc, for unbounded memory. But I'm just thinking out loud, I'm absolutely no expert on any of these topics.
  • gowld 3mo ago
    Please define "conscious". Please give an example of an interaction with an animal that suggests that the animal is conscious, but not using language. Challenge round: Please demonstrate that conscious animals are not using internal idiolect (language with 1 user) and lack the physical ability to develop a form of shared communication for that language.
    • mat0 3mo ago
      You can touch an animal and it will react to it. Why are you putting language in front of it? Or let’s put it this way, what though you need to think before you feel something is interacting with you body? What you define as consciousness, having a theory of mind or any kind or inner monologue is a very small subset of what consciousness is. And I’m not talking about some pseudo esoteric hippy thing here. I’m talking about what Tomas Nigel was talking about many many years ago https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf
  • mat0 3mo ago
    Yes. I have high confidence that animals are in fact conscious, in the same way that one can train in meditation and completely (although briefly) shut off the thinking brain, the inner dialog, and still be fully conscious and aware of what’s happening. For me, consciousness is this awareness of all the inputs we are having: visual, tactile, sound, etc. there’s no reason to believe that primates weren’t conscious of what was happening, of their surroundings, sensations, sounds, etc. before language developed.
    • rented_mule 3mo ago
      There is clearly a level of thinking that doesn't involve language. Participating in competitive sports has been a core part of my family, with some competing at elite levels. When you get to a certain level, if language is involved during the most intense moments, you fail because you act too slowly. Some say you are "reacting" or "using muscle memory" or "using intuition", but some very complex behavior comes from this. To me, it feels a lot like meditation, or being in the flow when writing code, or being immersed in a video game. I don't have the skills to know, but I wouldn't be surprised if elite chess players are doing the same thing. It's also riding a bike or driving a car, and I think it's why we sometimes can't remember if we stopped at that stop sign behind us, but we almost always did. Language is almost always deeply involved in developing these skills, but gets in the way of top performance once the skills are there. This feels like a higher level of consciousness to me than language-based thinking. And I think there's a good chance it's the same kind of thinking that we see in animals and primates. Our advantage is that we've figured out how to use language to inform that level of thinking / consciousness more deeply and in more domains.
• kibwen 3mo ago
  Helen Keller was blind and deaf from infancy. What her teacher gave her was a way of systematizing what little sensory stimulation she was capable of receiving. "Language", in the topical sense of "the textual encoding of language that LLMs ingest and emit", is certainly not required for consciousness. Rather, what you need is a way to identify and predict patterns borne out of repeated observations, which is complicated by the lack of ability to observe.
• huflungdung 3mo ago
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• abound 3mo ago
  Similarly, I'm reading "Supernormal Stimuli" now, and there's a whole section on infants raised by various animals (chimps, wolves, chickens, leopards, etc, etc). When they are found and brought back to human societies, basically none of them develop full language and integrate fully. There's also the grim history of language deprivation experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experimen... It really does seem like language is a key part of how we develop our human intelligence.
  • kibwen 3mo ago
    That humans who have grown out of their optimal brain plasticity and hence never acquire the capacity for ordinary human language are not somehow "conscious" is not supported. Rather, it means that, by its very definition, we do not have the means to communicate with them in order to even ask the sorts of questions necessary to determine such a thing. The premise is unfalsifiable.
    • gf000 3mo ago
      Well, we can surely communicate without language. I certainly communicate via body language with other humans, my dog, etc.
  • palmotea 3mo ago
    > Similarly, I'm reading "Supernormal Stimuli" now, and there's a whole section on infants raised by various animals (chimps, wolves, chickens, leopards, etc, etc). When they are found and brought back to human societies, basically none of them develop full language and integrate fully. Infants raised by chickens? Chickens!? That doesn't sound real.
    • abound 3mo ago
      Reading it again, the book is referencing this case: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/11/fiji.jennyforsyth https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/11/fiji.jennyfors...
• vitamark 3mo ago
  Well, language is not really required for thinking and conscious experiences, a huge chunk of people don't even have an internal monologue, and some (that'd be me) don't have any "byproducts" of thought process. Though there are recent experiments showing that unconscious brain retains language processing abilities [1], so the two might be as well independent systems [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10448-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10448-0
  • estearum 3mo ago
    IMO it's far more likely that people don't agree on what it means to "have an internal monologue" than that people actually bifurcate that dramatically on cognition. Surely there are some people with an actual difference from baseline, but I don't think it's the near-equal split that seems to appear when you just ask people about internal monologue This is in contrast with aphantasia (complete lack of mental imagery) which can be correlated with outwardly detectable responses. E.g. people who can imagine mental images will dilate pupils when imagining a bright light with eyes closed, while people with aphantasia will not. Not sure there's an analog for internal monologue but if anyone.
    • devmor 3mo ago
      This is in the same vein to what I wanted to say here as well - I find it very likely that people with no internal monologue are executing similar mental processes, just without them being so “front and center” in the mind.
      • rolph 3mo ago
        Metacognition https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/zjuzickv https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/zjuzickv not everyone is aware of the "methodology", they just think it through, some however have an executive layer to cognition vs reflex. imnot sure enough to form an opinion quite yet but thinking about thinking, modifying the methods of cognition, may be a learned skill, perhaps with a developmental window. a comparison between extroverts and introverts [1] for perceived modality of cognition might be interesting. it may very well be that a difference in neural development is the cause of this disparity. 1] this is about focus on internal conceptualization vs external perceptualization. myself, i think in terms of a mono/dialogue if i am preparing to disseminate. if i am thinking for my own benefit i percieve it as idetic imagery and run thought experiments to qualify for IRL candidacy.
• high_byte 3mo ago
  this was absolutely fascinating to read
• pigeonwarz 3mo ago
  It is likely that language forms a sort of quanta of reasoning. It is far easier to posit a verbal hypothesis pertaining to verbal subjects and test it than to try and do it nonverbally. Maths is probably a great example of this. Try and describe Pythagoras' Theorem without using maths notation or words. Difficult, right? Reasoning is a House of Cards, and without understanding what the card is that exercise becomes significantly more difficult.
  • catlifeonmars 3mo ago
    a^2 + b^2 = c^2 is perhaps a poor example, since there are several visual proofs that don’t rely on language. I don’t think this negates your overall point fwiw.
  • vharuck 3mo ago
    Math is a terrible example. Euclid's "Elements" was a core book in Western math education for millennia, and it uses drawn geometric proofs. The proofs are then described in Greek, but the rigorous definitions are the pictures. A lot of mathematical fields can be reasoned about and explored by imagining shapes and objects. The end results today are written in notation because this is a standard language that helps clarify ideas.
    • gowld 3mo ago
      Geometry pictures are absolutely not "rigorous definitions". For 1 thing, pictures of lines aren't finite in extent, and pictures of points are finite in extent. Some of Euclid's proofs are wrong, because they relied on those non-rigorous picture definitions. * Book I, Proposition 1 (constructing an equilateral triangle) * Book I, Proposition 4 (Side-Angle-Side triangle congruence). * Multiple theorems throughout the Elements rely on the visual "betweenness" of points.
    • pigeonwarz 3mo ago
      To steelman your point with gowld's point notwithstanding, how do you articulate ideas like infinity without notation? The point is that language is an abstraction for ideas that are difficult to rationalise 'close to the metal'.
• bunderbunder 3mo ago
  There are real questions about the veracity of some of these Helen Keller quotes, and reason to believe that a lot of it was really coming from Anne Sullivan. There are really three main observations that give pause. First, after she started working with Sullivan, Keller apparently developed a writing style and nuanced opinions reminiscent of a college-educated person virtually overnight. That’s pretty surprising for any child, let alone one who had only recently acquired language. Second, all of that disappeared overnight when Sullivan died - Keller’s writing style changed drastically, becoming much simpler, and all that eloquent insight also disappeared along with Sullivan. Finally, we’ve never since seen another Helen Keller. On the contrary, later observation of deaf-blind people who don’t acquire language until later in life is part of what inspired a variant of the critical period hypothesis that posits that people who don’t learn their first language (doesn’t matter whether it’s spoken or signed) in early childhood are never able to acquire any language to a particularly high level of proficiency. That said, even if that Keller quote is now considered dubious, it may not be entirely off base. Supposedly people who don’t acquire language in early childhood also tend to show less capacity for abstract reasoning tasks. Which is still a far cry from the “no-consciousness” that Keller-maybe-Sullivan describes, but does still suggest that language and reasoning are mutually supportive.
  • bryant 3mo ago
    TL;DR: I think while Sullivan did add context, much of the context could've been "decompression" in an almost technical sense. This would've made Helen's exact words more palatable for the world to consume, and Sullivan could've been running the same intuitive algorithm in reverse to make the broader communication of the world accessible to Helen. This probably affects other disciplines as well, e.g business. Of course this entire premise is couched in my LLM-based reproduction of the idea, so uh, take it with a few grains of salt. I tried this on your own comment to "compress" and then "decompress" to see what the outcome is. --- I took your first paragraph starting with "After [Helen] started working with" through "high level of proficiency." and 'compressed' it as Helen's own tactile signing might've done. Did it via a temporary cgpt session. Prompted "I'm going to give you a fully formed thought. Give it back to me as if it was Helen Keller herself signing the words into Sullivan's hand. I.e if Helen didn't use filler words when signing into Sullivan's hand, don't use those words either in your reframing of this thought." > Sullivan came. Language came. > Soon, words rich. Thought subtle. Writing like long study. Strange. Child. New language. Yet mind seemed already full. > Sullivan died. > Rich words gone. Thought simpler. Same hands. Different voice. > No second Helen. > Others deaf-blind. Language late. Same result. Language never deep. > Perhaps first language must come early. Speech. Sign. No matter. Miss that season. Full language may never come. --- I then, in a second, unrelated temporary session, prompted to expand the prose above into a fully formed thought. "The following is a thought conveyed via a "compressed, tactile, idea-first" language. Expand it into the full meaning that the speaker, deaf and blind, might've intended. Keep to one or two paragraphs. Do not go online." > When Anne Sullivan entered Helen Keller’s life, language arrived with her—not merely labels for objects, but a system rich enough to support subtle thought, reflection, and writing of remarkable sophistication. That achievement was almost uncanny: Helen was still a child, newly acquiring her first true language, yet her prose often sounded as though it came from a mind already long educated. After Sullivan died, however, that richness seemed to fade. Helen still used the same hands and remained the same person, but the voice became plainer and the thought less intricate, raising the unsettling possibility that some of what appeared to be Helen’s singular literary mind had depended on Sullivan’s continual linguistic presence. > No comparable “second Helen” emerged among other deaf-blind people who first gained language late. Their experiences seemed to point toward a critical period: perhaps the human mind must receive a complete first language early in childhood, whether spoken or signed. Once that window closes, vocabulary can still be taught and communication can still develop, but language may never become fully deep, flexible, and generative. -- My interpretation is that it's pretty similar. Even your "critical period" reference made it through compression/decompression despite the words not being present. There's some variation, and I think that supports what you're looking to convey, but it also could add weight to the idea that much of what Sullivan expressed could really have been mostly Helen's own thoughts and meanings. Of course none of this is rigorous and my entire exercise should be treated as "back of the napkin" ideation rather than actual science, but there's a thread to pull here, and it could have value in other disciplines e.g in business where intended meanings, statuses, outcomes may be preserved or lost based on how language mutates as it passes through different people.
• neptvn 3mo ago
  Sure, but that's a non-sequitur. Sight and hearing are the most important human senses that practically inform consciousness in the sense of where we live, and what we can do. The other 3 (touch, smell and taste) are at best secondary and cannot provide the groundedness in our world experience - you are the easiest prey in the animal kingdom. Language is primarily a tool for communication, not thought [0], and "thought" is a slippery concept when you're lacking a guidance that informs you of the world if you can't see or hear it. Super interesting quote and link though! [0] Fedorenko et al, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w
• tgv 3mo ago
  Animals communicate, and it may be primitive, but a lot of it doesn't seem to require consciousness. Should someone insist, it then depends on what you call "a word".
  • gowld 3mo ago
    Words are like atoms. We also have sentences (molecules) and paragraphs (structures) and more. Complexity matters.
    • tgv 3mo ago
      The OP means "concept". The author doesn't want to use fancy words or has no idea of (psycho)linguistics.
• mjd 3mo ago
  In “The Origin of Consciousness” Julian James argues that human consciousness substantially predates language and even writing. For example he contrasts the language in the Iliad (which he claims was written before the development of consciousness) and the Odyssey (which came after).