[quote=“JJC, post:19, topic:8668”]
Our mind’s model of the world is intrinsically hierarchical. It could be highly abstract and composite, in a large portion.
Could this model have come into existence without (or independent of) language?
In other words, our model of the real world might be intrinsically coupled/entangled/ with “language”.
For example, names of objects (i.e. Symbols or Labels) might be the most basic elements of a language. [/quote]
Sequence memory. Recognising objects give you the nouns but not the verbs and other parts of speech, and it doesn’t give you a means to utter them. Sequence memory gives you passage of time (for verbs), grammar (word ordering) and utterances (find coordination of sequences of motor outputs).
After some reading & pondering, I now see the significance – sequence memory seems to be the key to many things, so thanks for the comment.
Among many questions I have regarding sequence memory, the most immediate one is: what are the existing theories on how the brain encode sequence memories in STM (short term memory) vs in LTM (long term memory)?
Obviously STM/LTM are related (LTM has to come from repeated refreshing of STM, even in dreams).
Yet they are different – there are STMs we necessarily wipe out as a routine (such as where we parked our car yesterday: we don’t want to permanently keep in mind of a parking-location history through our life time), and there are STMs we struggle to turn into LTM (e.g. when studying something, like HTM or ML in general, we wish we could remember all we have read and understood).
Is sequence memory achieved by simple & straightforward synaptic plasticity? – or does it involve some fancy & heavy numerical calculations of high-dimensional embedding vectors?
I suspect the former, but want to educate myself on the state of the art in this area, so any further comment/insight from you will be truly appreciated.
I have also pondered on this basic question for years and have come to the conclusion that in order to understand our cognitive function (especially in terms of hierarchical layers) we have to always take a look at the evolution of our species and the evolution of our brains. (Perhaps even the evolution of all mammals as well). Because it is quite apparent and clear that our brains have added layers and functions over time. It is therefore my opinion, that when it comes to understanding how our brains build a model of the real world, you have to start before we had language. I am quite convinced that Numenta (and cohorts) have begun in the right place, with HTM. Our models of reality have to begin with a set of what systems engineers would call “primitives”. These are like foundational perceptions of very directly observable and palpable and acoustically hearable objects and environments, or settings. Objects like trees, bushes, rocks, mountains and rivers each have a set of common observable features that allow us to identify them (with high generalization accuracy). So our perceptual disambiguation capabilities for such “primitives” almost certainly developed without the need for language at all. But this fundamental model of reality, has a lot of complexity already. We could distinguish objects, their states, their relative positions, their motions (as in clouds or water) or physical behaviors (in the case of animals). We can also recognize some causalities, like the effects of gravity and getting wet when it rains. So a “primitive” cognitive model of our surrounding reality must be possible, independent of language. And we also even have, what is usually termed as episodic memory (also phrased here by you as sequential memory). Up to this level of perception and cognition, we developed without any language.
But I very emphatically agree with the statement, that “What makes us human requires language”. There is no doubt in our archeological and genetic records that our human species began to evolve under new conditions of complex social interactions around 300.000 years ago. Agriculture is probably only 20.000 years old and urbanization did not begin until around 7.000 years ago, but social interdependence in small groups with specialization is much older. A period of 300.000 years has most certainly added layers to our cognitive function and language also evolved in step with our abilities to abstract and semantically cluster the “primitive” foundational models we had already previously evolved. I am therefore also quite certain, that our current “truely human” models of reality also include a set of added cognitive functions and extended our model of reality, perhaps hierarchically, perhaps with multiple branches. Concepts we use that refer not only to a object and its behavior (like a dog or a horse) are extended to include its intention and its preferences or choices. Such ideas require language. They also come from social interaction and self-reflexion. Empathy, was probably there in some form, like in dogs today, prior to our acquisition of language. But our ability to make very distinguished considerations, probably came with language. However, TBT suggests alternatives to strict hierarchies. As I wrote in my indepth review of “A Thousand Brains”, TBT does point out possible mechanisms that rely more on set-theory and graph-theory for associations, than on a strict hierarchy. But that is the subject of research to come. A very exciting journey awaits us, on this path.
Such elaborate and compelling discourse! I certaintly do not have any objections, yet I cannot help wondering, out of curiosity only – a well-trained dog can understand quite some words (mostly nouns & verbs, rarely adjectives, certainly no pronouns …), so if we consider that as “the use of symbols” in a dog’s mind, though at a very pristine/rudimentary level… Is there any significant difference between the brains of a wild dog who’s never had contact with humans, and a well-trained service dog?
(Link credit to Bitking)
Ildefonso (the deaf person who grew up without language) cried in overwhelming joy when he learned (in his 20s) that everything around him has a name (through sign language) – on the one hand, this obviously support your opinion that “a “primitive” cognitive model of our surrounding reality must be possible, independent of language.”, as Ildefonso must have established one such model before he learned (sign) language in adulthood.
On the other hand, it also inplied that language could be an “add-on” to that primitive model, which while implying that it can come “afterward”, can also imply “it is a separate module/model … kind of”.
If so, why not develop a primitive model of symbol usage in TBT/HTM theory, as an “Add-on”? “primitive” implies it might be easy to achieve - just the very basic stuff, like naming objects, like being able to see “one coffee cup” vs “two coffee cups”… which requires assigning symbols to recognized objects, being able to represent count numbers (as capable as a 3-year old?), being able to distinguish STM (number of cups observed) vs LTM (cup as a learned object represented by a specific one or group of SDR(s)) … it might open a door to wonders.
I would be careful with the idea of a new capability simply being added-on, with the connotation that it could somehow be cleanly separated from the prior capabilities. Nature rarely turns down an opportunity for optimization. As soon as you get a new capability performing better at one or more essential tasks, then resources get reallocated in a way that support the new capability at the expense of older features that may no longer be necessary or perhaps just not used as often.
While one could probably correctly infer the existence of such prior capabilities, I think it would be very difficult for us to definitively identify that capability by observing only modern day examples.
Supposing you find an individual that is impaired or deprived of the new capability, you might begin to get a sense of what came before by way of compensation for the defect. However, one would expect this compensation to be suboptimal, or perhaps even novel (as in totally new and original behavior), as many supporting capabilities may have also moved on to other duties, or been otherwise subsumed.
Indeed, I also appreciate this very fascinating topic and our enriching exchange of perspectives. I do not think any of us would question the fact that some basic form of thought (such as perception) is possible without language and that certain levels of abstract thought must require language. We cannot be certain until we have modelled and verified this in wet lab studies someday. But the key question is where exactly does this line separating the two levels run. For example, does complex human procedural analysis of our reality require language? Is declarative thought the first (lower) level of language? Did predicate language follow? And then explicative language?
Prior to having that level of hard evidence, we can still make some well educated predictions by observing the evolutionary ladder of mammals with a neocortex. Your example with dog may confuse some people, because dogs, like horses are domesticated animals that have been bread and socialized with human intervention to a degree that they would have never achieved in nature. So their evolution, since we brought them in from the wild, where they were wolfs and foxes, is a human-controlled and influenced evolution. The better question regarding examples of thought without language is to observe wild animals at different levels of the evolutionary ladder. Even when we observe birds and bees and ants, we cannot discard the existence of some form of language. Bees dance to tell other bees which path to follow in order to find the honey or the flowers with nectar. Ants also communicate pathways in similar ways. Birds sing mating songs etc. Whales and dolphins exchange complex sound pattern. So we cannot deny that language itself seems to have multiple levels of evolution across animal species. However, I would argue that none of these animals including modern humans require language for perceptual awareness. Some very brilliant scholars like Marvin Minsky have postulated that human brains may have evolved a natural form of grammar. Based on his theories an original, universal form of grammar emerged, before we developed our natural languages with socially evolved natural languages like English. Neuroscience seems to have largely rejected the idea of a proto-grammar, which is universal to all human thought. But this idea is still contemplated by many in the field of Linguistics.
In my opinion, language is not necessary for perceptual awareness of our physical surroundings. We are also capable of understanding observable causalities and interactions. However as soon as we started to externalize these thoughts for communication with others, we developed (or trained some regions of our brain) to arrange these simple perceptions in sequential order (episodes). Story telling is indeed much older than written language and must have already influenced our brain’s anatomy in regions like Broca’s Area. Certain learned behavior is adopted into our neuro-hardware and seems to also become a part of our genome and therefore inheritable. (This happens by the activation of gene-expression in certain neurons, which is an evolutionary mechanism we posses). I am convinced that language has had a morphological impact on mordern humans. But these structures build upon other simpler ones. And probably all use the foundational universal mechanisms (algorithms) proposed in HTM in the cortical columns.
This point is very interesting and holds true in many specific parts of our phenotype. But our genotype (our genome) follows a so called “conservative” approach. Older stages of our evolution are preserved. Gene expression can be activated by certain triggers in our environment or behavior. When gene expression is activated, our phenotype is modified. For example, we grow large amounts of muscle via intensive exercise. The intensity of our exercise activates certain muscular gene-expressions. Together with good nutrition, this changes our body shape. Likewise, glia cells in our brain also can activate gene-expressions that cause dendritic growth or the creation of new neurons.
We cannot only learn a lot about our evolutionary stages by observing other lifeforms in the evolutionary ladder. We can also learn a lot by observing our embryological stages of development in a human fetus. At every stage, we can observe the sequential activation of previous features from previous stages of our evolution as a species, while some features are not activated and therefore ignored. The way this embryological algorithm unfolds, has changed over time in our evolution. Sometimes, mistakes occur that cause the activation of certain gene-expressions that are no longer required. This leads to malformations of the fetus that may include structures of our past evolutionary history. This underlines the importance that Mothers avoid contact during pregnancy with substances that could interfere in the fetal development.
Basically, if we explored and fully exploited all of our evolutionary historical record in our own genome and also explored the current genomes and phenotypes of other species in earlier phases of evolution and also explore the archeological records, there is little that could not be deciphered, retrospectively. This is a very exciting prospect for neuroscience.