Re:Do large language models understand us?
by celrod on Saturday December 18, 2021 @02:43PM
(#29607858)
I've had aphantasia all my life, although my dreams are still visual, as though they're real.
The article claims it is more common among academics and computer scientists, so perhaps it's fairly common here.
Perhaps it's helpful for dealing with abstraction, as abstractions don't always map well to visual representations.
> Animals with very limited language capabilities have the ability to run their own lives, and to some extent manipulate their environment. Systems built from large language databases don't have that.
I'm tempted to agree with this in some capacity, language is probably just one expression of thought, much like how some people have an internal narration going on during their lives, while others think in abstract concepts that aren't necessarily expressed in language.
Here's the first article DuckDuckGo turned up on the subject, i bet someone can share a better one: https://www.iflscience.com/brain/people-with-no-internal-mon...
Furthermore, there are people who don't have the capacity to visualize things in their "mind's eye" either (aphantasia), which is another curious thing: https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/aphantasia-life-...
Of course, when you get into it, there are also some niche theories about how language could not only help us express ourselves, but shape our thought (not that dissimilar from the "newspeak" concept in Orwell's 1984): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity