I have to disagree with this perspective and reiterate my original position: language is sentience.

And to be fair, reasonable people stake out positions on both sides of this debate: I'm not claiming that the alternative proposition is somehow unreasonable. It's a legitimate subject of scholarly disagreement.

Nevertheless, I'm still firm on language. Why? Because all complexity is ultimately about symbolic manipulation of terms representing the process of manipulation itself. ("Godel, Escher, Bach" is a fantastic exploration of this concept.) How can you manipulate concepts without assigning terms to their parts? That's what language is.

The question I like to ask is this: are there any ideas that you cannot express using language? No? Then how is thought distinct from language?

Yes, people (myself included) experience a "tip of the tongue" experience where you feel like you have an idea you can't just yet express. But maybe this experience is what reason feels like. Why should idea formation take only one "clock cycle" in the brain? Why should we be unaware of the process?

I think this feeling of having an idea yet being unable to formulate it is just the neural equivalent of a CPU pipeline stall. It's not evidence that we can have ideas without language: it's evidence that ideas sometime take a little while to gel.

I think you only need language to communicate, it’s not necessary in order to think. Do you agree that a human that grows up in isolation probably won’t develop a language? Would you say such a human isn’t sentient?

I think as highly social beings we often annotate all of our thoughts with the language we could use to communicate them, which could lead us to believe that the thoughts are indistinguishable from the language, but that conclusion seems like an error to me. I’ve also heard some people talk about how they are “visual” or “geometric” thinkers and sometimes think in terms of images and structures without words.

Assuming Genie the feral child was not born mentally retarded, it may suggest that language is critical for human level intelligence. There's also the theory in anthropolgy which I believe has some evidence that human intelligence exploded with development of more complex language.

I think you're mixing up sentience/consciousness/intelligence. Many animals are sentient for example but as far as we know, they don't really have language. But I think I get what you're getting at, which I believe is "human level intelligence requires langauge". I think that's a reasonable take. But you said "sentience", and you said "is", which makes your position difficult to agree with.

Hold up, you can't just throw out a claim like "many animals are sentient" as if it's a statement of fact. You might be right, but there's a reason that "the hard problem of consciousness" is hard. We don't really have any way to distinguish sentience/non-sentience based on behavior. The whole concept is extremely mushy.

You're right but as I've stated before, sentience and consciousness are different terms, and sentience has a definition in which the idea that animals are sentient isn't all that controversial. Not a mathematical axiom sure, but it all depends on what you mean by sentience, and I'm going by the classic definition.

Yes. You're right. I was sloppy with language. To be specific, I think that "human level intelligence" is basically synonymous with "able to think about thinking", and I think to do that, you need symbolic manipulation, and language is the only way we can do symbolic manipulation.