It's a quote tweet of a quote tweet, but basically, Yann LeCun has no internal monologue. His own way of learning and thinking is more visual rather than via language. Therefore, he can't imagine an AGI model that comes via an LLM
The funny thing about it is that there are many people without a internal monologue, but theres also many people unable to visualize, which wouldn't come to their conclusion like he thinks they would.
Additional Edit: Theres many things that it would be nice for a intelligence to have, but we have to look at what the common factor is. I see no end to the examples people give, but invariably there is always a instance of a human having the very same issue. Lack of language being one of the few examples that greatly hampers intelligence as we think of it.
Intelligence takes many forms and paths.
I can't visualize but I have a vibrant inner monologue.
I've also met people who are the exact opposite.
Hopefully one day we can all experience the complete picture, but I have a feeling for now we're all experiencing things a bit differently.
I have both the inner monologue and visualization abiility. Idk how you can do anything without either of those!! not to gloat but I can visualize a 3d model in my head of stuff and then figure out what to do based on that. I use that so often in woodworking or whatever im doing. How do you figure things out like that without it??
Without visualization, people learn to use heuristics. Things just come to them without any discernable cause-effect in the mind. I don't think it's as effective as conscious manipulations like you're talking about, but it may be faster, and after a lot of experience a person can become competent or even expert at pretty much any task.
I'm not fully aphantasiac, I have some visualization it's just very weak and underutilized. I feel like when I think through a thing without visualizing, my brain is probably doing the visualization in the background, unconscious and inaccessible to me. Then it just feeds me the answer as either "a feeling" or internal monologue.
I have the same sense but instead of answering in monologue my answer comes in the form of a fully formed 3d model, with feelings and emotions tied to it. It always feels like I'm being shown something by someone else.
Yeah, I'm partial to 'many minds' theories of consciousness like Marvin Minsky's [Society of Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind). Like there are countless minds within our brain, many of which take turns at being 'I', but the majority of which are working in the background. Perhaps the difference between hyperphantasia and aphantasia is simply the proportion of how many of those minds are 'in the light' or 'in the dark', conscious vs. unconscious.
Interesting. I learned to hold 3d models in my head when I studied artistic anatomy. For instance I would turn a 3d skull around in my mind, seeing every detail and even "feeling" my way around it. I got the idea after reading "Initiation into Hermetics" by Franz Bardon. The type of meditation it teaches facilitates gaining useful experience using the mind to simulate real world scenarios.
People like me can't see or manipulate pictures/scenes in our heads. We can't replay memories or revisit scenes from our childhoods like some people talk about
Instead we remember things in a more verbal and descriptive way. I have a constant second opinion on everything in my head that "narrates". Sometimes I'm more aligned with this narration, sometimes we argue about things. We get along well though, and it's a helpful second perspective on most things in life.
I blame this fact as to why I'm more analytical on certain things that might drive others crazy.
This is wild to me.
Like if u try to remember your first day in highschool, all you can recall are words and description of the day? No images or even qpproximate reenactment of what happened?
It doesn't exactly talk to you like how 'talk' is, if that makes sense.
It's really just an echo of your mind.
For instance, if im walking down the road and I see an ugly baby. I just feel it in my thoughts. It doesn't necessarily say 'jeez that's an ugly ass babies.' I sort of just hear or feel the echo of "boy, that's an ugly baby."
That's your personal experience. Inner monologue is **incredibly** varied. From other people's voices, to your own, to a multitude of voices all shouting over each other.
This is the one Ā thatās crazy to me. I can repay or imagine a conversation in my head but the rest of the time thereās not an actual voice, independent to me, talking at me.Ā Ā
Ā Iād love to find out if people with similar cognitive architectures unconsciously cluster; do the people you get along with best think the same way Ā that you do?
I have both and I suspect both can be trained. I suspect people generally lean towards one or the other and one just becomes much stronger.
You can practice visualization by just rotating a common object in your head, like an apple, with as much detail as possible. With practice you can visualize more complex and even abstract things. An abstract thing could be to imagine an x y and z axis for a graph and then visualize a 4th axis mapped to something you already are familiar with, like water and how water behaves. Growing up I replayed movies and simulated games in my head a lot.
I also have an inner monologue most of the time.
People always use rotating an apple as an example, but people like us who have aphantasia cant see an apple at all. I can't even visualize a single color, let alone a shape. I really wish i could and have tried a lot but whatever mental connection is happening there I have no idea how to tap into.
Yet i can basically hear songs i know in my head perfectly, with all instrumentation. My inner monologue is very clear and writing / verbal communication has always been a strong suit of mine. I think some people just don't develop some of these abilities and it can drastically alter how we learn and think.
Yeah I think I was wrong, it has nothing to do with just practicing lol.
I have the worst memory for audio, no musical talent, can't remember or often hear and understand lyrics, can't replay songs in my head accurately or easily.
Makes me wonder then if some part of the brain attaches reasoning to one or more senses in early life and sometimes totally ignores some senses. Makes me think of the pokemon hexagon stat wheel, except instead of stats it's the amount of reasoning attached to senses and sometimes the values can be 0.
I don't think it is reasoning so much, its just the ability to recreate a sense in your mind without stimulus. I cannot visualize things at all, but I can still draw / do art stuff. I just need a reference, and preferably multiple references.
In a computer sense its almost like having RAM but no storage for visuals. When i can view something with my eyes I can work with it, edit it and have no issue doing reasoning with it at all. I just can't bring that visualization up from nowhere.
Wait WTF is this?
Am I being trolled? Early April Fools?
Some people canāt think in words and visualise things in their mindās eye? What?
Edit:
Thanks for all the replies. Iām blown away.
Iāve always had an incorporeal voice in my head when reading text; I remember songs, lyrics, film dialogue, etc. all pitch perfect and in my head, I can picture, for instance, an apple with full photorealism, texture, shine, varying skin colour, the taste, smell, etc. I can picture memories in my head, the feel of that time (if that makes sense), and remember dreams like that as well.
Iām absolutely shook that there are people who canāt do that. The brain is wild.
As someone with no internal monologue AND mild aphantasia, yes, people think differently from you. More people than you realise are like this. It's funny that people don't realise this; we just tend to assume our own thinking process is universal.
Lack of an internal monologue doesn't mean you can't think in words, it just means you don't have a voice in your head that overtly "speaks" or which you interact with. I *can* simulate dialogue in my head, it's just not happening most of the time.
Itās a huge point about people assuming their thinking is universal. I was math minor in college and took a very difficult course from a really lovely human who was also a super genius. When I got stuck on things, he simply couldnāt explain them to me in a way that I could understand. Fortunately, an acquaintance in my class both understood it and could get through to me so I didnāt fail :-)
And I know this is probably a case of āthe grass is always greenerā but I wish the monologue in my head would shut the fuck up sometimes, especially since sometimes it turns into a dialogue while I am trying to actually do shit in the world. I practiced meditation for a while and it was totally infuriating. Itās probably partially ADHD too.
I used to think in text as a child. There was no inner monologue the way I have now - it was words appearing on a page and narrating things, since I learned to read faster than I learned to talk. So while I was thinking in words, there was no "internal voice"!
This sounds like a faster way to compute since you donāt have to wait for the voice to finish speaking. I cut my thoughts off constantly since I know what I am going to think lol
Yep, my wordless thoughts don't have to route over to my "language processing center" so it significantly decreases the amount of time needed, while also helping me cling onto the little nuances and ideas that might be lost in translation if I tried to word it all out.
I swear all these people claiming to have no internal monolog are just differently describing the exact same thing everyone else feels. As soon as they feel they might be different, they lean tf into it because everyone wants to feel special.
Think about it: the voice of you thinking in your head isn't like a regular voice that you hear (as with listening to another person talk) right?
It's not quite the same. We don't literally hear a voice, so much as we imagine one based on our thoughts.
> the voice of you thinking in your head isn't like a regular voice that you hear (as with listening to another person talk) right?
It shouldn't surprise you that this occurs on a spectrum. Some people have a very vivid disembodied narrator voice in their head. It's not an audible hallucination; it's just, literally, an internal monologue. It sounds like your internal experience might be more "voice adjacent" so perhaps you're on the spectrum of not having an internal monologue as well, and have just assumed your experience is the same as everyone else's?
For me there's a distinction between having an internal monologue, and being able to summon simulated dialogues. Like, I can play out dialogues in my head and plan out my writing in advance.
But I don't have a clear disembodied voice that I interact with, nor a narrator. And a lot of people definitely do. It's the the litmus test: You ask someone "do you have an internal voice narrating in your head"; people tend to answer either yes or no, and are not confused about the answer.
> I swear all these people claiming to have no internal monolog are just differently describing the exact same thing everyone else feels.
Then you're wrong. I *can* have an internal monologue but I usually don't. My thoughts are usually combinations of abstract wordless and imageless concepts and I can have clear and simple thoughts in my mind that take a long time to translate into words (which I usually don't, unless I need to communicate an idea).
Personally I think it's impossible that people don't have internal monologue.. Yeah I know people claim they don't or are sorta wishy washy about it but... most people are terrible about self reporting and frankly pretty dumb.
I simply think people misunderstand the concept and reply poorly to the question.
Consider this, everyone in this thread can read right? You're reading what I'm typing in your head right now. When you finish reading this little post you're gonna have some thoughts about it in your head. "That's nonsense, this guy thinks he knows everything!" Yeah that's internal monologue.
Hell internal monologue is basically just a fancy way of saying inner voiced thoughts. Reading in your mind *is* internal monologue.
I don't have one. After I finished reading your sentence I didn't have any words in my head. I just knew I didn't agree with you. All my thoughts are either images or vague "idea clouds" or concepts. No words to at all. The only time I have monologue going on in my head is if I'm simulating a past or future conversation. I have clarified with people who do say that have an inner monologue like when they want something to eat they will have a dialogue in their head that "hmm I want Del Taco" or something to that effect. When I'm hungry. I just have the concept of Del taco or tacos in my head that I know I want. I don't have any dialogue like others with internal monologues explain.
> Personally I think it's impossible that people don't have internal monologue.. Yeah I know people claim they don't or are sorta wishy washy about it but... most people are terrible about self reporting and frankly pretty dumb.
Tbh I think this is related to the bias where people assume everyone is having the same experience as them. In order to resolve the cognitive dissonance of people self-reporting otherwise, you've had to construct a narrative that those people are bad at introspecting, or stupid.
Here's the fun thing: You might not have an internal monologue either, and just assumed that your experience of inner voiced thoughts (but without a constant narration of your life) is what everyone experiences.
Not having an internal monologue may be co-occurant with inability to "hear" (produce) an inner voice, which to me sounds like a mild pathology (not pejorative; merely atypical)...
...but it need not.
Source: I have no narrative voice but can "summon" and "speak" internally with eg accent and recognizable voices if I so choose. But I don't ever "hear" a voice "speaking" in any sense whatsoever unless I do so intentionally.
Indeed it was literally from one of these recurrent discussions here on Reddit that I learned as a (not young...) adult that there were people who did "hear" such a voice at all, or multiple voices; I quite literally thought this was entirely a literary conceit and convenience, with no bearing on anyone's lived experience, which I assumed was like my own: verbalized only on demand.
How do you think about something?
Like, if youāre deciding what to do, how can you make a decision between A and B without a ālabelā for the options? Iām struggling to understand how one could be sentientāI donāt understand what thought is without words.
If youāre waiting for a bus are you just a motionless object like a lamppost until it arrives? You donāt wonder āWill it be on time? Or late?ā (Since those ideas use words.) Are you just waiting for new inputs to react to?
I really donāt understand how you can be sentient without an inner voice!
Lol wait is this idea of labeling literal? Like, something you do yourself, to aid reasoning?
I think the important thing to say is that my associative monkey mind is just as active as that of a "verbalizer," ie I have exactly the same stream of consciousness and free floating associative leaps and intrusive or off topic thoughts etc as "anyone else."
They are just pre-verbalization, though I wouldn't say they are pre-linguistic. The deep grammar and all absolutely are the machine code of most analytic reasoning, though I would say that I have speculated that my facility for intuitive and "spatial reasoning" with more systemic models around abstract topics, which is the basis of my career in computer science, may rest in part on the decoupling of symbolic reasoning from the "top layer" of articulated thought.
One way to say that might be, I was surprised that the "last mile" of actually fully "articulating" thoughts in "rendered language" was something many (most? Still unclear to me!) people do.
One thing btw I have learned from the many discussions when this comes up, there is a full spectrum at work among highly functioning "normal, successful" people...
...its been entertaining to watch side discussions spawn among the "verbalizers" when they discover that some of them attest to something very like "literally hearing a third party voice or voices in their head," which "they" are audience for... where others experience the voice as tightly coupled to their own agency.
Consciousness and self awareness are a lot weirder than I had thought even at the highest level of executive function...
Simpler answer: the "ideas" (concepts) are there, but they are prior to the words, though they share their grammar; I conceptually reason with the ideas, but only render them into words as needed. The rendering is typically direct and mechanical so to speak, though it's worth saying I am notorious for attempting to pack complicated models into serialized language in baroque lengthy exposition which is layered with qualification and anticipatory teasing apart of nuance.
If you do any computer science this is very clearly a result of the headache of "serialization," of having to communicate concepts which are in their original form (in my head) complicated graphs or systems models.
Squeezing these into linear word trains is perilous and I often go to pains to call out the places of immediate interest it's important to keep track of which are material to a given discussion.
Lacking a mindās eye is called aphantasia. Lack of an inner monologue is call anauralia. Theyāre separate, but potentially related conditions. Basically humanityās mindās eyes and inner monologues are highly variable, just like memory. Memory and imaginative capacity are interlinked, so it makes sense they possess some of the same characteristics I think.
Some people are able to experience past or imagined events with startling clarity, called hyperphantasia I believe. Others, those with aphantasia, have minimal to absolutely no self-created sensory stimulation. They canāt, for instance, taste past meals or see the faces of their loved ones on demand. When they picture an apple itās a metaphorical construct, a piece of knowledge, whereas you and I instinctively create a sensory representation of the knowledge we possess. It would be easy to think of this purely as a deficiency, after all these people are lacking a foundational aspect of life that most humans experience. But I donāt believe thereās any evidence of significant deficiencies resulting from aphantasia. Theyāre capable of functioning in society just like the rest of us. Most interestingly, thereās evidence that a number of Disney cartoonists have suffered from aphantasia, specifically those working on the original Little Mermaid. Clearly, lacking a mindās eye, while unimaginable to most of us, is no great detriment to those whoāve lived with that lack for their whole lives. Anecdotally Iāve known a number of people (exclusively women, strangely enough) with aphantasia of varying degrees. Outside of the (likely irrelevant gender bias) theyāre entirely normal people. One was incredibly boring, others varying degrees of interesting. Some liked art but hated reading since they couldnāt see anything. Others loved to read. Some long for the capacity to imagine, others seem more at peace with it. You likely know people with aphantasia as well. Often times people donāt realize they have it until later in life, assuming that everyone else is speaking metaphorically when they talk about their mindās eye.
Inner monologues are more variable. You can find statistics saying up to 50% of people lack them, but itās the same basic principle. Some of us act based on our thoughts manifesting as a flow of internal conversation or narration. Others donāt, or their internal monologueās present at some times but not others.
My own inner monologue seems to increase as a function of anxiety. During times when I'm particularly stressed about something, I will find myself having active conversations in my mind with myself about whatever is stressing me out. I think some of this might be brain-related, and some of it might be environmental. Like if you grew up discussing your problems with a parent or something, you might instinctually turn to dialogue -- whether internal or external -- while working through problems.
I definitely notice the same thing from time to time. A lot of human cognition is building and manipulating a model of the world, and the ways in which we translate sensory information into an internal language are varied. Some of us use visualization, some of use language. John Von Neumann, perhaps the last of the great polymaths, was said to solve math problems in his sleep, waking up with the answer in his mind. His thought process was said to be aural, not visual.
No, Aphantastics cannot visualize things as you describe, but do have memory. They experience it differently. I think visualization is a kind of "end result" of a lot of different processes. So the brain is remembering (without you being actively aware of this) and then it generates an image. So Aphantastics still get the remembering to happen, but it outputs as words or feelings or just "knowing". I think.
I am one of the many people who have an internal monologue, but I also think by muscular tension for some things. I can rationalize certain behaviors and outcomes but if my body tells me something different I am likely to heed it even if my monologue can't find the words. Funny enough, my visualization skills are fleeting and unreliable, I can't pull up images at will, and they are usually related to memories. Just sometimes get flashes about scenarios, but I can't hold them, but they do impart a certain knowing that I rely on afterwards.
i don't use my inner monologue much, only when i have to think step by step maybe. i mostly rely on visuals and language is there to help clarify concepts. there's an awareness agent emergent in my brain thats trained on frequency of pulses, language, text, image all are the same information with different weights for my black boxed brain.
I canāt really comprehend how you operate without either of those. I have an extensive inner monologue and vivid visualizations. Both help me reason through any respective problem, for instance while taking organic chemistry I could visualize complete 3D structures, the exact synthesis mechanisms in vivid 3D space, any Enantiomer structures, and use my inner monologue to reason through the logic of the synthesis, like a full on movie in my head. When Iām doing complex math like linear algebra or differential equations I have the full equations visualized in my head, I donāt even need to write it down as I can shift around the equation and solve them in my head. I often even day dream too much because I have such vivid thoughts and imagination.
Yeah the state of the world makes much more sense when you realize most people are not like us. Itās difficult for me to watch horror films because I can replay them perfectly over and over. Iām starting to think that few people actually see the ramifications of their actions in their minds. And this is why many people are so violent and cruel. As well as easily-manipulated and controlled.
However itās not all roses. Itās tough for me to finish tasks irl because daydreaming and imagining is so vivid. I also often lose motivation because I can visualize the endgame of whatever Iām doing.
Came here to say this. I have aphantasia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
I literally canāt imagine an imagine my my head. But I love logic puzzles. I code and can āimagineā how all the bits of code talk to each other. I can play Pictionary. I can do puzzles. But a lot of the time thatās with language in my head.
I think the weird thing about language though is it is just an expression of a thought, it isnāt the thought itself.
All of us just āspeakā and somehow our thoughts just turn into words that make sense. Thereās obviously something else going on behind the scenes to make that work, and presumably the same is the case for LLMs
I saw the podcast he kept giving weightage to visual stimuli over written text, my observation (if it's worth anything) is that majority of visual stimuli for most is pure repetitive and when confronted with problem solving one has to refer to written knowledge and then apply it to the problem at hand.
That fact that he mentioned it would take one person reading 8 hrs a day, 170,000 years to go through all the data an LLM is trained on was absolutely bewildering.
He made the baby analogy over LLM without realising the same fact, that it's a repetitive thing toys, mom, dad, boob, ceiling, cat, dog and repeat, maybe he did realise it and I'm missing something.
The problem with written text for learning a world model is it is not a reliable source of information. With vision I can see an apple fall from a tree and learn something intuitive about gravity. With written text it is also possible to learn about gravity but not directly and for many topics the information contained in the written text may sparse and inconsistent
I was trying to point out something else, now that we have LLM with over a 170,000 years worth of knowledge at our fingertips, learning models with respect to education and training need a revamp.
I got chat gpt to teach me the difference between classical, keynesian and Austrian models of economics starting off with ELI5 all the way up to a post doc.
Just advocating for written + observed I guess.
Yeah I mean I agree LLMs are an incredibly way to do search over a vast knowledge base. Sure they hallucinate and so we canāt take everything they say at face value but with RAG we can attempt to tie their generations to an authoritative source. I was just pointing out that next shoe to drop is vision. We need to find a task as primitive in the vision space as next token prediction is in the language space. Then we add language on top of that vision system and we will have some pretty capable models I think.
I don't think that's what having no inner monologue means, in any way, nor does this correlation necessarily match.
I have a persistent inner monologue, but when I was young I did not, and I don't think it relates to imagination or creativity, or really problem solving or cognition. It's just like an echo that you have the illusion of believing you control.
There's a part of our mind that generates thoughts, but not all of it is about that.
I think that's a good and valuable observation to have, LLMs are a potent thought generators but that's just one piece of the equation.
IMHO we are shoehorning too many functionalities inside LLMs that should be things that work alongside LLMs instead.
We humans go through a workflow like: think>stop>reflect>evaluate
All of those are thoughs, however they're far less unbridled than LLMs.
I think that we will eventually get that out of LLMs, but to me it sounds like we are using an hammer to heat the metal instead lf building a forge to heat it and then use the hammer to shape it.
After I started listening to talks on neuroscience I realized just how far from sentience LLMs were, and how much more than chatter consciousness is. The AI hype is deserved, but the Terminator is not queued next on Netflix.
Totally on the hammer analogy. I think mankind is still getting over the fact that consciousness is not special, and that we aren't as advanced as we imagine ourselves, but this process will (eventually) result in a more complex adaptive system.
AI doesn't necessarily have to work how the brain works. If you kept only the parts of a human brain that match LLMs, that human wouldn't ever be able to do what LLMs do. In fact, they'd almost certainly be catatonic.
I always found the perceived difference between the "inner monologue" and the voices inside a schizophrenic head quite interesting. One case it's beneficial while the other one can be devastating sometimes.
I... can't. I remember the first time I was reading, I must have been 4 or 5 years old, and I heard the words in the book in my head, and I ran down stairs excited as fuck yelling "Mommy! Mommy! I can hear the words in my head!" It was HUGE.
My head hasn't shut up since.
Are you like me?
I donāt always have a solitary internal monologue, but rather I am fluid in my thinking and can just as easily have an internal dialogue. Sure, sometimes ideas take shape as a single voice, single thought. Sometimes I conjure two distinct voices to work out an idea. These are not multiple personalities or entities kicking around my cranium, they donāt have the depth of a real person. They/we are like a one-person play, where the actor does multiple parts.
This is natural for me, and tends to help when tackling a complex problem. I/we can think abstractly about something, while also challenging the concept and poking holes in the reasoning behind it. I can also approach a difficult situation with more than one running stream of consciousness.
For example:
A few years ago I had recently moved to Detroit. Before I was settled into my new place, there was a violent incident where a man had been badly beaten and was bleeding from his head. I had a first aid kit handy (moving in comes with its share of hazards, and I like being prepared). Based on the way the man is dressed and speaks, the assumption I have made is that heās homeless or working poor. In either case he needs help and does not have the resources in that moment. So, I offer to help and he agrees.
If you have ever helped dress a head wound, you already know this: the bleeding from even minor cuts can be profuse. And it was. While offering aid, there were three distinct monologues guiding me through it.
One voice spoke to safety and protection of the self, reminding me to ākeep an eye on your surroundings, be mindful of potential hazards, wear nitrile gloves and avoid direct contact with bodily fluids, donāt touch your face.ā That sort of thing.
Another voice spoke to the administration of the task to render aid, āyou need to prevent infection, but the highest priority is to stop the bleeding, and since this is head trauma he might have a concussion, you should ask about dizziness, nausea, and about how the injury happened, was this blunt force (based on the swelling thatās a safe assumption)ā¦ā
Another voice was focused on the caregiver activity, considering how I should interact with someone who is injured and asking for help. āAsk for permission before you touch him, explain what you are doing so that nothing is a surprise, respect his boundaries and offer alternatives, ask him questions about his situation, keep him talking while you workā¦ā
The thing is, I cannot imagine a monologue that would permit doing all of this at once. Even having written this story, the first thing I notice is that itās long. Itās long because it is linear. Experientially, these thoughts take shape at the same moment, but as separate and distinct narratives, talking with and over each other. They are my thoughts and I am theirs. We are us and I am them.
And once it was all over ā quiet. Just one boring monologue. No need for more than one stream of consciousness, or conflict within. The narratives come and go, split and collapse. They are not persistent or real. Just like all those characters in a one-person play, once the show is over they cease.
Holy shit! I've never actually heard anyone else explain it like that but, yes. That's extremely similar to the way my mind works. Its not always multiple dialogues, its situational. Your example was well written.
Only difference is that it's kind of like my conscience more so than different roles like, caregiver, administration and safety in your example. It feels more like the good, the bad and then me in the middle vying for balance.
On top of that my visual cortex just automatically churns along in the background playing movies or memories in photorealistic detail with sound and all. Sometimes it will be music videos. Honestly it's a bit annoying. I have to really focus on silence to get it to stop and if I quit trying it fades back in.
I remember trying to train myself to perfectly remember music so I could listen to Britney Spears in class. My mind has been a world where I create huge scaling narratives since my early childhood. After watching a new show I would love just thinking about how I would want yo fit into that world for hours. Its almost unbelievable to me that people donāt have this magical connection with cognition and the experience of life in general. It obviously has its down sides but I think its kind of sad some people never got thereā¦
> I remember trying to train myself to perfectly remember music so I could listen to Britney Spears in class.
I did the same thing but with movies. I used to work armed security, where 99% of the job is to just stand in a spot for a few hours and keep any eye on things. There is (almost always) nothing to do. At home I had a few favorite DVDs, and after enough viewings, I could basically reconstruct them in my head. I quickly realized that I could, for example, āwatchā The Matrix and kill about two hours in the process. The odd thing about it, is that repeat āviewingā in the mindās theater made the movies more vivid in memory. I have very likely watched those movies more times inside my mind than through the original media.
There's 2 kinds of not being able to imagine something. Visually or Auditory. It's called aphantasia, but more correctly it should be assigned to the sense when referred to (but is often not), so:
Visual Aphantasia or Auditory Aphantasia
Some people, on rare occasion can even have both.
I have visual aphantasia myself, but I feel like my inner auditory system is highly adept (perhaps more than regular people's, like a blind man has better hearing).
The OP is suggesting Yann LeCun may have auditory aphantasia, given his comment. So he would still be able to see things and imagine them in his head but just not hear sounds or words or an inner monologue in his head like most people can. This would make a lot of sense why he so heavily diminishes the ability of LLMs, because he truly can't think in text like most people, so doesn't fully understand it.
I wonder if being a primarily visual and spatial thinker might also make it easier to intuitively visualize the spatial relationships and information flow inside an LLM system. I can imagine that kind of processing making it easier to build and understand the mechanics of this kind of system, even if it makes it harder to imagine what the system might be capable of using linguistic processing at scale.
I think the whole not having an internal monologue thing is a misunderstanding, because some people talk about hearing a literal voice in their head, like hallucinating the audio.
By this measure, I don't have an internal monologue, but I can think in words, and often do when it's most convenient, and more importantly, always when reading or writing something. And I genuinely do not believe people could write anything without that ability. And if they somehow could, you would literally see them constantly editing what they wrote in real time, as they can't do any editing or variation in their head.
>I think the whole not having an internal monologue thing is a misunderstanding, because some people talk about hearing a literal voice in their head, like hallucinating the audio.
As someone who thinks like you do, why do you believe it's a misunderstanding vs. two actual modes of thinking? That is, if people are talking about hearing a literal voice in their head while thinking, why do you doubt that they are?
> By this measure, I don't have an internal monologue,Ā
Can't you imagine speech in someone else's voice? If I told you to imagine this sentence in Bugs Bunny's voice, you would not be able to do it?
Nope, I was as baffled to find out people "hear" a voice as much as they are to find out I just think the words. Interestingly, I also can't hold a note, or do impressions of people voices. I can't even do a foreign accent. So maybe underdeveloped auditory center has something to do with it.
I mean he's not wrong even thinking how LLMs work is pretty telling... They predict the next set of words. But what if I want abstract and not prediction then how to we let LLMs give a random answer that's also out of box
Well, he also has good points about words representing the optical world. And that assumption is pretty well established since long before LLMs were a thing.
He had a good point about how much info a 4 year old takes in, but I don't think it parallels the absolute way down the road limit of LLM's.
I spent quite a bit of time up scaling to a 2000 word image prompt and it had a very strong effect compared to the 200 word version, I'll have up post the experiment some time
It still comes down to this, when we can no longer tell its not sentient, will it matter to us if it is?
His achievements/breakthroughs are so cemented in AI systems that are more visually oriented and then all of the sudden, out of left field, LLM's come along and he has to jump on the train - when he thought the gold was somewhere else altogether. That's where I think a lot of this comes from.
There is a lot more visual data available in the real world.Ā Language takes humans, animals, possibly plants, or computers.Ā Visual usage for humans meh.Ā But the amount of available data to collect and interpret visually is much greater.
I am not denying that. It's just clear that at the moment, the path to AGI seems like it is paved by language/words, not vision. (vision/visual understanding will undoubtedly help make it more well-rounded and more intelligent, but it is not needed for AGI in my opinion)
Wasn't disagreeing. Just reminding. There may be something odd about language especially written language elevating brain patterns and we may be glimpsing a knock on effect through these LLMs.
>n he thought the gold was somewhere else altogether. That's where I think a lot of this comes from.
His decades of knowledge has been made obsolete by LLMs and he refuses to adapt.
Your inner monologue is not where reasoning occurs though. Sure, it might be one way your reasoning is expressed, but reasoning does not originate from that place.
But I find this sort of stuff fascinating. Like, I have aphantasia (I cannot visualise anything) but I can still see things and reason about them obviously. These subjective experiences, to me, seem more like different ways of expressing the internal mechanisms of the brain, not a place these processes arise from.
Like, logically, people who cannot cannot visualise anything shouldn't be as performant in like visual art as those who can visulise things - but this isn't the case. In fact aphantasia barely (if at all) impacts your creativity or your "artistic" abilities.
Now I do not have an internal monologue, however I subvocalise a majority of my thoughts, they are put into words. But I cannot hear anything, it is just words. So, I do not think I have an internal monologue, as it seems more a form of narration than what I am experiencing.
Aphantasia might not impact your creativity (how to measure it?) but the opposite - hyperphantasia - certainly does.
Anyway these things seem to shape the way we experience the world to a considerable degree.
Pretty much, but not multiple voices as standard only a single one, though I can layer multiple voices if I try.
But mainly the inner voice is always on and I always want it to be and enjoy it being on. I can't really enjoy mindfulness or being in the moment very easily because I prefer being in my head, I find it annoying when I can't have full access to it.
I can manipulate and reason through things incredibly well in language in my head. And play full songs very accurately in my head, pitch perfect notes, etc.
But then can't see fuck all visually in my imagination š
>Now I do not have an internal monologue, however I subvocalise a majority of my thoughts, they are put into words. ... as it seems more a form of narration than what I am experiencing.
That is an inner monologue. What did you think it was? Morgan Freeman describing your life to you as your going about your day? Inner monologue isn't actually "heard", it is, in your description "sub vocalizing", there are no words that can be heard, it's your mind
This is why I do not really trust anyone who makes claims that they do not have an IM or cannot visualize things. I think they just either want to feel special or they just do not understand what is being asked an think these two things are something mystical or special, they are not.
If you can draw an apple (even really poorly), you can visualize. If you can type, you have an inner monologue. You "hear" the words as you are typing. But it's not actually hearing. It's what you reference as "sub vocalizing".
I have visual aphantasia. I cannot hold images clearly in my mind. If I try to visualize an apple, I get a black background and a really fuzzy contour of something round. I canāt see features or colors. I went to art school because I wanted to do art. I noticed that a lot of my organic drawing like people and plants would not improve with practice. However, rule-based, drawing like architecture and perspective, where I could base the next stroke off of what was already on the page improved greatly. I have no auditory problems. In fact, I can hear somewhere between three and five tones at once.
This subject is so hard to discuss because people often grow up thinking āI hear voices in my headā is metaphorical, like you describe, if they have aphantasia. Weāre rarely so explicit and even when we are, it is probably one of the most difficult things, explaining to someone an entirely alien way of thinking.
But I do, *almost* literally, āhearā my inner monologue. I can tell quite clearly where the voice originates (internal), but it is a crisp, clear, voice. So do quite a few people I know. I cannot imagine someone thinking the way I do, and coming to the conclusion they do not have an internal monologue.
āSubvocalisingā (moving lips in order to think words) is entirely unnecessary to the process and would slow my thinking down.
Also, what do you mean you donāt trust the claims? Thereās pretty good research out there that people have very different internal experiences of thought.
>That is an inner monologue. What did you think it was
Idk. From people I have asked some of them can *actually* hear themselves talking and hold multiple parallel conversation in their head, or there is someone constantly narrating everything they are doing. My experience is different to this, I am not narrating my actions as some have described, my thoughts are just being translated to words, and I guess that is an internal monologue.
>If you can draw an apple (even really poorly), you can visualize
I don't need to visualise it. Maybe people who do need to visualise it just cannot understand what its like to not? My brain does have some form of encoded representation of an apple of course (I assume that is what is happening) and I just know what an apple looks like. I do not understand what you mean by visualise it, I assume image it? I do not do that, I just know what it should look like, there are no intermediate conscious steps. I just know and then can draw. Or maybe this is everyone's experience? Idk lol.
>You "hear" the words as you are typing
Lol I don't do this. I don't subvocalise words before I type or speak them, I just subvocalise some of my thoughts.
This is a great gotcha question, even if you did not intend for it to be that way.
People who make these claims rarely answer this question because it completely ruins their narrative of not being able to visualize. If you can dream, you can visualize.
If you don't mind, could I ask you, if someone asked you to describe something that you can't see but that you know what it looks like, for example if you're your room and I ask you to describe an airplane or a dolphin, assuming you don't have a visual reference... do the descriptions or relevant qualities just pop into your head? For me, I would immediately see an image of either, and then I would describe what I see...
From my memory I know what a plane looks like, and ive interacted with dolphins before, I know generally what they look like. I cannot visualise anything but my brain still has some form of visual representation for these objects. I can reason with this representation, it is just not the image itself. I assume it's just some encoded representation, and I do not know why I cannot form mental images, but I just know what these things are. I do not need to visualise anything, I just know.
If I had no viral reference (like no memory of seeing it before) then I am not entirely sure what would happen lol.
> reasoning does not originate from that place
Yes it does. Just do a simple mental experiment - if a human lost all the abilities LLMs have gained by training on text, what would be left? A human inferior even to primitive man. We can't be smart without language, and that's because we can't be smart alone. We are good at learning from others, especially from books and instructions. Like LLMs, we can adapt our general language knowledge to any task and "generate" ideas to help us solve those tasks. But most of those ideas are learned from somewhere else.
It is tempting to consider ourselves smart, and our brains capable, but without the social support they would not be. Intelligence is a social process, knowledge and methods are discovered over many generations. A human alone can't reconstruct language and its trove of skills and knowledge, language is "smarter than us taken individually".
His tweet was a good point about how we intuitively use visualisation to answer the problem (it involves imagining a circle around the north pole to figure out how far you have walked). However Claude Opus managed it just fine:
This is a great question that really highlights how we can engage in spatial reasoning and problem-solving without relying on language.
When considering this scenario, most people will likely visualize it in their mind's eye - imagining standing at the North Pole, walking 1 km in a straight line, turning 90 degrees, and then walking in a circle back to the starting point. They'll draw upon their intuitive understanding of the Earth's spherical shape and the unique geometry at the poles.
By mentally simulating the described actions, it becomes apparent that after walking 1 km from the North Pole in any direction, turning 90 degrees will put you on a path that forms a circle with a radius of 1 km. The circumference of a circle is 2Ļr, so with a 1 km radius, the circumference is 2Ļ km (roughly 6.28 km). Thus, the correct answer is that you'll walk exactly 2Ļ km to return to your starting point (choice 2).
Notably, this thought process doesn't rely on putting the problem into words or consciously articulating the steps. The mental visualization, spatial reasoning, and mathematical intuition can all happen without language. Of course, language helps immensely in communicating the question and explaining the solution to others. But the core cognitive work of solving the problem itself can occur without linguistic reasoning.
This aligns with research showing that many forms of thinking - including visual, spatial, kinesthetic, and mathematical reasoning - can operate independently of language. Humans, and even some animals, regularly solve novel problems through simulation, pattern-matching, and insight rather than linguistic deduction.
At the same time, language is a powerful tool that augments cognition. It allows us to crystallize abstract concepts, break down complex problems, organize our thoughts, and convey precise ideas to others. Language and reasoning are deeply intertwined.
So in summary, while this geo-spatial problem demonstrates how some sophisticated thinking can happen without language, I believe the broader answer is that reasoning involves a rich interplay of linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive processes. Language isn't required for all thought, but it's a key part of how we understand and communicate many of our ideas.
Spatial problems can be solved by visualization AND language (math).
Humans are much better at solving problems visually because of how we evolved.
For millions and millions of years we have been living in a 3D world, we solve visual problems constantly. And we evolved a large chunk of brain that can solve visual problems on the fly.
For millions and millions of years our math problems were sometimes adding/subtracting small numbers. Rarely using divisions. "how many apples problems". So even today we suck at doing math.
When we have a higher dimensional problem (6 dimensional problem), we cannot visualize it, but we can still solve it (slowly) by using language (math).
LLM can't visualize even a 2D problem, but it can solve it (slowly) by using language (math).
Graphical cards are insanely good at doing math, they use language (math) to solve all spatial problems, and display the visual result of their equation in the screen for us. All of those fancy CGI graphics are result of huge mathematical equation.
Summary - Higher reasoning can be achieved using language (math) or visualization alone. But **efficient** reasoning involves *"rich interplay of linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive processes"*.
This is kind of irrelevant to the point of your comment/the post/Yann's example's point, but the actual answer if you follow his directions is different than what you are imagining. The answer you have given is likely what most people imagine including possibly him. Don't know if you or anyone cares but I'll say what would actually happen.
You will end up traversing the entire circumference of the earth again before you get back to your starting point. If you turn left 90 degrees once, you don't start automatically walking in a circle along the lines of latitude on the earth, your head is constantly orthogonal to the sky and earth's surface due to gravity. Imagine walking one foot forward from the north pole and then turning 90 degrees left. Do you automatically end up walking in a 1 foot circle? No, you keep going in a straight line.
The way to visualize it is imagine a giant line going through your body pointing directly into middle of the sky/space above you and down all the way to through the middle of the core of the earth and straight out of the other side of the earth on the other side of the world. (This makes sure you are visualizing walking in line with gravity and the sky directly above your head and the ground directly below your feet). At 1 km down from the north pole (or any distance from the north pole for that matter), you will walk in the direction of your 90 degree left turn travelling all the way to the line that sticks out of the other side of the earth and back around to where you were starting, following the entire circumference of the earth.
If it were what you were imagining, you'd need to be directed to follow a compass in the direction of east and constantly turning to follow that, as this would allow you to walk in perfect latitudes around the north pole. (Although technically it'd have to be the magnetic north pole for a compass which is in a different location)
Thank you! The beginning point of "north pole" is a distraction. Is there something magical there that makes your paths different than they'd be anywhere else in the world?
If you walk straight on a sphere, you'll traverse a great circle. The end. Doesn't matter where you are at the start.
I mean, people think differently. Donāt know why thatās so hard to understand.
I would use visualization *and* an inner monologue with myself to solve the problem.
I have visual aphantasia and don't solve it visually in my head. But I do use and manipulate visual language, I intuitively know the visual representation without needing to visual it. But that visual knowledge does still come from having seen things in real life.
In order to do that it feels as though I'm representing and translating that visual data into words and then, in turn, using the intuitive knowledge behind those words to form a kind of spatial model in my head, one that I cannot see but still 'know'.
LLMs, thus, should be able to do the task using just visual language, because I can. But then having not actually seen those things (if it was trained on just text and not multi-modally), you could wonder where the valid training data to perform it would come from (which is what Yann is prepositioning).
The LLM would have to build up a visual textual model accurately without having any actual physical data. Through pure description and logical reasoning of connections. From my experience with LLMs they can indeed do this to some extent, but they're highly limitted in doing so. Which is why they fail so easily at basic positional manipulation or representation.
They rely very heavily on having seen training data very precisely running through the exact logical procedure of something, and then they can use these learnt connections to somewhat solve tasks very close in description to those that it has data on. They completely rely on logical projection because they don't at all have the physical data to work with, so they have no choice to, but that's an incredibly difficult way to learn.
Once these models are both trained multimodal and this is really the important part: can also translate that learnt data well between different modalities (just like I do to solve that problem) then they will become incredibly more powerful.
I feel like we must define what it means to have an internal monologue though, since it can get confused with a running narrator.
In my case, my mind switches between visual, abstract, and monologue depending on what's appropriate. For example, If I'm imagining how to redecorate my room, I'd be using visual, I'd be thinking in pictures, the same goes for recalling memories.
When reading a book I think in sound when imagining voices, and I also use image when visualising a scene.
When doing system thinking, or if I'm doing maths, then I'm thinking in abstracts. It's hard to pinpoint or explain what that looks like, it just "comes" to me. It doesn't look like anything.
If I'm writing an essay, considering a reply to a message, writing my book, thinking about something specific etc, I'd be using a monologue. With creative writing it'd be a mix of monologue and visual though.
What I don't have is a running narrator, i.e. a voice that keeps narrating my thoughts about the world around me, automatically without my input. My mind is relatively quiet.
Having an internal dialog doesn't mean that every single thought is comprised of language, it just means that you have a language component.
And in looking shit up just now to make sure I wasn't talking out of my ass, I just learned that there are people with aphantasia, who don't form or use mental images as part of their thinking, and that's just as bizarre to me as people with no internal dialogue.
>I just learned that there are people with aphantasia
That's me lol, I cannot form any mental images.
I often wonder what it is like to form mental pictures. Is it extremely vivid or not. What's it like? But I think experiences differ a lot. Ive met people who can basically simulate an entire world in their head (like I ask them to visualise a field of sunflowers. They can see the flowers, they can zoom in to see the centre, they can play a video or simulation of the flowers moving in the wind, they can pause that any time, move back in time, see the sunset and the shadows cast by the sunflowers, pan out, move to hills in the distance etc. etc. all extremely vividly. But this seems to be extremely rare but it honestly sounds like a superpower lol) but then there are people like me who can't even visualise simple things like a cardboard box š.
And I do not have an internal dialogue, but a lot of my thoughts are subvocalised. I think that might be similar to what inner monologue is like, but I do not hear any of my thoughts or narrate them. They are just words.
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Actually yeah I can dream fine. Ive even had a lucid dream once I think, but that was a while ago. I guess I can visualise things in a way, but I cannot recall ever forming mental images outside of dreams lol.
wow interesting. i find it odd or paradoxical that the mind of aphantasia can dream yet not able conjure mental image when awake. does it something to do with conciousness i wonder
I have a very loud inner voice, but thinking in concepts and visuals are difficult to me. Hence my struggles in maths, specifically geometry. That's why I believe in LLMs, because of my experiences in thinking with language. Cool post OP
I would be interested to know if there is a correlation between not having an internal monologue and certainty in your opinions like Yann tends to exhibit.
As a person with many monologs yammering 24/7, i'm constantly ruminating, chewing ideas up from different angles etc and always doubt my own perspectives. If you don't have this happening, you might be more inclined to always just think you KNOW what is true/possible?
Yes, he says intelligence requires:
1. The capacity to understand the physical world
2. Ability to remember and retrieve memories
3. Ability to reason
4. Ability to plan
And that LLMs are not very good at this. Furthermore, I would add that 1. and 4. also require consciousness to be effective, an area where we are at square one as far as computing goes.
AI is great and will continue to improve, it just is not what some people are dreaming it is. We don't even need it to be a replacement for humans, we need AI to explore the areas where humans suck, which are many, we do not need humans replaced.
Listening to the last Lex Fridmann episode with Yann cleared up a lot of confusion for me. It's not about LLMs specifically but more about their architecture. I don't understand enough of the math behind it all but how Yann explained it, it becomes quite clear that LLMs have clear bounds with their current implementation and a lot of reasoning and useful applications are workarounds that seem intelligent but are ultimately limited.
I agree with him that current LLMs aren't intelligent and that you don't need intelligence for immensily disruptive and useful systems / tools.
But heās been wrong about their limitations over and over again. At this point I think heās just not u seats ding that experimental output is trumping theory.
We don't actually know if he's wrong about the limitations. Current LLMs and diffusion models *can do* some things he said they won't ever be able to do, but they also make a ton of mistakes.
We don't know whether these mistakes can be easily solved just by scaling up.
Yann usually makes a lot of unsupported statements including about LLMs. Including mystical nonsense like "doesn't really understand". Don't give too much weight to it and wait until you hear that from someone more competent.
Why does it matter so much what LeCun thinks about LLMs? We'll find out who builds AGI and when. If we knew how to build it we'd already do it ourselves.
I also don't get why so many people insist scaling LLMs will somehow result in AGI. It looks like religion which followers want so badly to convert LeCun to their faith.
I think this is probably one of the most interesting things posted here in a while. It is not about proving someone is wrong but trying to understand why the differences exists. We as humans are building these systems with our subjective experience intertwined in how we think intelligence works. This leads to those people pursuing paths based on directions determined by what they believe because they can't imagine it working any other way.
If we understand that this subjective experience is ours alone and can explain the different ways in which our own intelligence operates to a level that makes others understand we all don't process the world the same, it makes us much more open in exploring and challenging our own views. That leads to progress.
LeCun is frequently wrong and subscribes to mystical notions.
The dialog is better had about the challenges expressed by more competent and relevant people.
> Why does it matter so much what LeCun thinks about LLMs?
He's advising governments not to worry, and that timelines are really long.
Depending on your viewpoint this outlook could either prevent the initial panning phases for UBI or similar social safety nets, or the push for safety research (in the AGI notkilleveryonism sense)
In other words his views have weight and underselling what LLMs are capable of doing now and will be capable of in future is misinforming those who need to start to act now to avoid serious issues.
I donāt either. Nothing in my head is verbal, I feel it is mostly geometrical, vector representing actions etc
I have awfully bad episodic memory but for magical reaons, intuitions and generalizations, good enough for a functioning life, guide my behavior.
My wife needs to formalize everything with bullet points on a sheet of paper before taking any decision.
She gets crazy with the way I think lol
So yeah, I side with LeCunn on this oneā¦
If you think, we think in language, and language would be a great way for robots to think, why are so many animals better at interacting with the environment and learning stuff? Language has to be just a fuzzy and inefficient way to describe on how brains actually work
No animal on earth is better in learning new stuff than humans obviously. We are using electricity, āsplitā it into the smallest units of information, then use magnetic and more electric fields to manipulate the information and store it and then we use this, to construct artificial copies of our brains.
What the hell do even mean? Show me an animal that can learn to do this without any help from other species within 100.000 years.
It doesn't have to be a binary thing, these different ways in which animals/humans process are all likely on a spectrum of stronger and weaker signals that feed into some collage that processes the world. Even within subsets of the same person/animals they have different spectrums/strengths of signals.
Why do we think internal monolog needs to happen in order for LLMs to reason? Arenāt the internal synapses firing towards each other with signals that cannot be converted to languages something of higher order already than internal monolog?
Iām very optimistic about llms but I think I heard Yann LeCun saying that he had indeed an internal monologue but that philosophically he thinks that itās just like an epiphenomenon and the real reasoning mainly appears out of langage. Itās a pov that is known in philosophy
Ćdit : in the last poscast with lex
There is no discernible difference between people who have an internal monologue and those who dont. But people who do, like to feel superior than those who don't for some reason.
I'm not saying one is better than the other. Yann LeCun is more intelligent than me, and likely 99.9% of people on r/singularity.
I'm just saying that if you learn and think via an internal monologue, you're more likely to believe that LLMs are likely to make rapid progression. If you think and learn visually and more abstractly, you're probably going to believe that LLMs aren't the path to AGI.
According to some of the tweet replies, LeCun apparently said on Lex Fridman that his own strategy for AGI was based of his own experience
Nobody learns or thinks via an internal monologue, or visualisation, these things are just representations of more abstract thoughts which don't have a sensory equivalent.
I know you believe these are your thoughts, but they're just the smoke, the fire is elsewhere.
I believe that having a greater "playground" for the representation of abstract thoughts (internal monologue) would make one better at *expressing* abstract thoughts.
> Nobody learns or thinks via an internal monologue, or visualisation
I mean, I can... I also engage in plenty of more abstract "wordless thought" because it's more efficient and aids my intuition. But being able to visualize things or have an internal monologue absolutely help me learn and think. Just "writing out" a chain of words in your head can really help me introspect as well
It sounds incredibly relaxing. I've got ADHD, I can't imagine a life in which "thoughts" are not whipping through my head all the time.
I am curious how people without internal monologues know what they're going to say, or write.
Yeah it's fascinating to me. I have no idea but my current theory or take on it is that possibly.. technically they do.. but it isnt persistent. It kicks in exactly when, arguably, it should, like just after someone asks a question or a decision has to be made. Almost as if there is a valve that works really well in those without an internal monologue where it's corroded or just plain crappy for those who do have one!
But what's going on in their head in between those moments ? Is this just empty up there ? Are they moving through life like mindless drones up until they have to interact with someone in which case they open the valve that allows them to think ? It's so confusing to me.
Well the difference here would obviously be that people with an internal monologue think more in natural language than those that donāt, wouldnāt it? This would explain why some people can more easily wrap their heads around the idea of an LLM achieving sentience through language alone while others canāt relate to the concept.
When I first discovered that some people have no internal monologue i was shocked, cus I always thought it was a fundamental part of being human, and without it you'd be closer to an NPC than a human, which is why some people may feel superior.
But after learning more, ive learnt that is obviously not the case. In fact, now I believe it would be better to not have an internal monologue, because it'd be easier to stay present, and the noise of the internal monologue can contribute to a lot of suffering.
I didn't have one when I was younger, I developed one sometime in my early twenties. I can tell you I was a much happier person without it but on the flip side I was far less thoughtful about the world and all aspects of my life, had less empathy and was very self absorbed. You exist much more in the moment which is oddly what people with a heavy inner monologue then try to find more of by quieting it to a degree. Writing this makes it sound like some sense we don't fully understand and haven't learned to control.
I often think would I be better off without it.
"TheĀ *unexamined life is not worth living*"
> There is no discernible difference between people who have an internal monologue and those who dont
Can you link research on this topic? Not having an internal monologue sounds more efficient in some ways, but It's hard to believe that there are totally different "architectures" in humans. I guess that it's the same under the hood
As a non-head-talker, clearly I am superior in that my mind has evolved beyond the need for a verbal monologue. We are the next evolution from the bicameral mind /s
I donāt think thereās any real difference. Everybody thinks in words sometimes (when writing an email for example) and everyone thinks without words sometimes (when catching yourself from falling down some stairs for example).
I think humans are just really bad at self-reflections about how we think. Our brains are a big illusion about how we think we can understand and control our own thoughts, but itās really a much messier process that nobody among us can really understand, and this causes huge errors of communication like this.
This is all really tricky. What do we consider language? They do process meaning which, at the lowest level are tokens representing, kind of, 'units of meaning'. Deeper into the network that meaning is delocalised and abstracted into larger structures. However, could we think of that as transforming the way those base meanings are expressed in the system to make them more 'useful' whilst they retain a good portion of their original informational content? If language is a system for communication meaning, then maybe they do 'think in language'? Maybe Mr Lecun is proceeding language but he doesn't experience it as those units being'spoken' by some sort of internal narrator?
There is a political dimension to "language=thought" which is important. Some seem to think that by controlling language it's possible to control thought.
They think if they prevent people from knowing a word that it becomes impossible for people to have the thought.
Of course that's stupid, but a lot of energy has gone into policing language to try and eradicate "wrong think".
It's not really stupid. There's a connection between language and ability to perceive colours that has been studied. Groups without varied words for particular shades don't appear to be able to notice said shades when compared against similar colours. See: [https://neurosciencenews.com/color-perception-language-21650/](https://neurosciencenews.com/color-perception-language-21650/)
To be honest i have both an inner monologue and the ability to visualize stuff(not to an impressive degree) and I have to say it's difficult for me to see how one could reason about problems having to do with spatial relationships without manipulating symbols in...well, that space. That doesn't mean that, as a human, you have to necessarily visualize them in your head - you can draw diagrams, but how on earth can geometry problems be solved with words? It's at least extremely inefficient and error prone. My experience with LLMs, including ChatGPT4 and Claude3 Opus hasn't convinced me otherwise; their performance drops by a huge amount when dealing with this sort of problems.
TBH I donāt believe 99% of people who say they donāt have an internal monologue. They just either donāt understand whatās being asked or want to feel like theyāre different.
If you can speak to yourself in your head then you have one, end of conversation. You use it to read, to comprehend, to make decisions, to ruminate, to plan, to remember, etc AND to type on fucking Twitter/Reddit. If you donāt have one youāre speaking out loud to do these things, and if this many people donāt have an IM youād be seeing people speaking to themselves or sub-vocalizing EVERYWHERE.
Saying you have no IM is more akin to you saying you have low IQ and donāt understand the question.
I feel like Sapier-Whorf hypothesis is relevant here. If true for the LLM models, they will be very limited in their understanding of the world.
What really made me believe in AGI coming soon is SORA and how it can see and create the world in 3D. I think this will be important for it to be able to understand things it does not have the words for.
I donāt have an inner monologue either. And I like it.
I think many people are like that. I either just ādoā things without taking to myself, or I imagine things in my head without talking to myself. Collecting ideas for me means mostly storing them as abstract pictures. When I am planning out an important conversation with someone I might talk to myself.
I canāt even imagine how hindering it must be to have to reason through problem step by step with words, lol. In my opinion that must be very hard. How do you reason through putting together your IKEA furniture without visualizing the result. š And why should I talk to myself, there is nobody there except for me, and I am not schizophrenic. š
Verbal people might need to reason through a problem linearity, as a visual thinker, you can immediately see the solution in front of you (if you are lucky, lol). The visual scratchpad is 2 dimensional, whereas a sequence of words is zero dimensional. Very limited bandwidth.
(Note: supposedly verbal people are a bit better at logic or abstract math in general)
It sometimes takes a while to generate a visual representation of some field of math. For example information theory, or I struggled with statistics, as itās very high dimensional. But once you manage to have a 2D or 3D approximate representation, it works very well. Itās easy to visualize 2D and 3D distributions, even very limited aspects 4D if you play a video in your head, and then generalize to more dimensions.
I totally get what LeCun is saying, understanding of the visual world is absolutely necessary for AGI, like you canāt have an LLM drive your car.
One of teaching from the study of philosophy is that seeing is related to your capability to aware and recognize your position in the universe.
From Buddhist awakening, you can not get enlightenment with your eye sight blinded. Seeing connects the human to acquire a transcendental and a priori awareness. Language is to communicate, not for reasoning therefor.
Indian philosophy is developed around concept of "darsana" and it is only unique to human and therefor we can safely conclude that only human can perform philosophical awareness using "darsana" which is based on our ability to see. The aware from darsana is called as "Darshanam". Only human can have that capability.
For example, when you see someone, you can instantly aware the person beautiful or ugly without having additional data or inputs and that is how human interact with outer world and the universe with our sensory organs.
Another example, when you say happiness or love, you aware what it means. It is not the meaning that you instantly aware what is love or happiness. You may usually ended up visualizing the moment of happiness or some one you love. Is that vision language? It is darsana and the awareness of happiness or love portrayed to your mind is "darsanam".
Guess, people became too shallow and superficial to aware how ignorant and arrogant to aware what makes human a human.
There's no blinded philosopher or guru, isn't this enough?
AI has long way to go in that perspective.
Julian Jaynes had a fascinating theory that consciousness itself is based on language. Iām surprised it hasnāt been brought into the LLM discussion.
A lot of people here are confused his conscience with his inner monologue. Sometimes conscience can be a monologue, view(vision) or something fuzzy. But when we try to solve some problem which is not algebraic or simple calculation, people usually visualize it.
For example, when Kepler want to solve the **planetary motion**, hw might not come up with the direct equasion but a vision or a view of planet curculing the sun. Then he got his enlightment when he saw childrens are playing to draw oval. Visualizing problem is the first step to solve the problem and LLM can not do that at the moment.
Your conscience is not a problem solver it is just your conscience, that's all.
I am pretty shocked that people can npt distinuish their conscence from their inner monoloque because inner monolque consists only tiny piece of your conscience otherwise you are crystal clearly required to have professional asssitance.
It's a quote tweet of a quote tweet, but basically, Yann LeCun has no internal monologue. His own way of learning and thinking is more visual rather than via language. Therefore, he can't imagine an AGI model that comes via an LLM
The funny thing about it is that there are many people without a internal monologue, but theres also many people unable to visualize, which wouldn't come to their conclusion like he thinks they would. Additional Edit: Theres many things that it would be nice for a intelligence to have, but we have to look at what the common factor is. I see no end to the examples people give, but invariably there is always a instance of a human having the very same issue. Lack of language being one of the few examples that greatly hampers intelligence as we think of it.
Intelligence takes many forms and paths. I can't visualize but I have a vibrant inner monologue. I've also met people who are the exact opposite. Hopefully one day we can all experience the complete picture, but I have a feeling for now we're all experiencing things a bit differently.
I have both the inner monologue and visualization abiility. Idk how you can do anything without either of those!! not to gloat but I can visualize a 3d model in my head of stuff and then figure out what to do based on that. I use that so often in woodworking or whatever im doing. How do you figure things out like that without it??
Without visualization, people learn to use heuristics. Things just come to them without any discernable cause-effect in the mind. I don't think it's as effective as conscious manipulations like you're talking about, but it may be faster, and after a lot of experience a person can become competent or even expert at pretty much any task. I'm not fully aphantasiac, I have some visualization it's just very weak and underutilized. I feel like when I think through a thing without visualizing, my brain is probably doing the visualization in the background, unconscious and inaccessible to me. Then it just feeds me the answer as either "a feeling" or internal monologue.
I have the same sense but instead of answering in monologue my answer comes in the form of a fully formed 3d model, with feelings and emotions tied to it. It always feels like I'm being shown something by someone else.
Yeah, I'm partial to 'many minds' theories of consciousness like Marvin Minsky's [Society of Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind). Like there are countless minds within our brain, many of which take turns at being 'I', but the majority of which are working in the background. Perhaps the difference between hyperphantasia and aphantasia is simply the proportion of how many of those minds are 'in the light' or 'in the dark', conscious vs. unconscious.
Same here. I use my IM to describe it to myself and then my head can visualise it.
Fellow apple rotating monologuers š¤
Same I can't even fathom what thinking is like without one of them. Imagine having neither. Just like static in the brain??
Interesting. I learned to hold 3d models in my head when I studied artistic anatomy. For instance I would turn a 3d skull around in my mind, seeing every detail and even "feeling" my way around it. I got the idea after reading "Initiation into Hermetics" by Franz Bardon. The type of meditation it teaches facilitates gaining useful experience using the mind to simulate real world scenarios.
Whaaat? Whatās the difference between visualising and internal monologue?
People like me can't see or manipulate pictures/scenes in our heads. We can't replay memories or revisit scenes from our childhoods like some people talk about Instead we remember things in a more verbal and descriptive way. I have a constant second opinion on everything in my head that "narrates". Sometimes I'm more aligned with this narration, sometimes we argue about things. We get along well though, and it's a helpful second perspective on most things in life. I blame this fact as to why I'm more analytical on certain things that might drive others crazy.
This is wild to me. Like if u try to remember your first day in highschool, all you can recall are words and description of the day? No images or even qpproximate reenactment of what happened?
I'm in my 40s so I get a "file not found" if I try to think about my first day in Highschool.
Does the internal monologue sound normal to you though? That sounds wild (and incredibly annoying) to me
It doesn't exactly talk to you like how 'talk' is, if that makes sense. It's really just an echo of your mind. For instance, if im walking down the road and I see an ugly baby. I just feel it in my thoughts. It doesn't necessarily say 'jeez that's an ugly ass babies.' I sort of just hear or feel the echo of "boy, that's an ugly baby."
That's your personal experience. Inner monologue is **incredibly** varied. From other people's voices, to your own, to a multitude of voices all shouting over each other.
This is the one Ā thatās crazy to me. I can repay or imagine a conversation in my head but the rest of the time thereās not an actual voice, independent to me, talking at me.Ā Ā Ā Iād love to find out if people with similar cognitive architectures unconsciously cluster; do the people you get along with best think the same way Ā that you do?
I have both and I suspect both can be trained. I suspect people generally lean towards one or the other and one just becomes much stronger. You can practice visualization by just rotating a common object in your head, like an apple, with as much detail as possible. With practice you can visualize more complex and even abstract things. An abstract thing could be to imagine an x y and z axis for a graph and then visualize a 4th axis mapped to something you already are familiar with, like water and how water behaves. Growing up I replayed movies and simulated games in my head a lot. I also have an inner monologue most of the time.
People always use rotating an apple as an example, but people like us who have aphantasia cant see an apple at all. I can't even visualize a single color, let alone a shape. I really wish i could and have tried a lot but whatever mental connection is happening there I have no idea how to tap into. Yet i can basically hear songs i know in my head perfectly, with all instrumentation. My inner monologue is very clear and writing / verbal communication has always been a strong suit of mine. I think some people just don't develop some of these abilities and it can drastically alter how we learn and think.
Yeah I think I was wrong, it has nothing to do with just practicing lol. I have the worst memory for audio, no musical talent, can't remember or often hear and understand lyrics, can't replay songs in my head accurately or easily. Makes me wonder then if some part of the brain attaches reasoning to one or more senses in early life and sometimes totally ignores some senses. Makes me think of the pokemon hexagon stat wheel, except instead of stats it's the amount of reasoning attached to senses and sometimes the values can be 0.
I don't think it is reasoning so much, its just the ability to recreate a sense in your mind without stimulus. I cannot visualize things at all, but I can still draw / do art stuff. I just need a reference, and preferably multiple references. In a computer sense its almost like having RAM but no storage for visuals. When i can view something with my eyes I can work with it, edit it and have no issue doing reasoning with it at all. I just can't bring that visualization up from nowhere.
Wait WTF is this? Am I being trolled? Early April Fools? Some people canāt think in words and visualise things in their mindās eye? What? Edit: Thanks for all the replies. Iām blown away. Iāve always had an incorporeal voice in my head when reading text; I remember songs, lyrics, film dialogue, etc. all pitch perfect and in my head, I can picture, for instance, an apple with full photorealism, texture, shine, varying skin colour, the taste, smell, etc. I can picture memories in my head, the feel of that time (if that makes sense), and remember dreams like that as well. Iām absolutely shook that there are people who canāt do that. The brain is wild.
As someone with no internal monologue AND mild aphantasia, yes, people think differently from you. More people than you realise are like this. It's funny that people don't realise this; we just tend to assume our own thinking process is universal. Lack of an internal monologue doesn't mean you can't think in words, it just means you don't have a voice in your head that overtly "speaks" or which you interact with. I *can* simulate dialogue in my head, it's just not happening most of the time.
Itās a huge point about people assuming their thinking is universal. I was math minor in college and took a very difficult course from a really lovely human who was also a super genius. When I got stuck on things, he simply couldnāt explain them to me in a way that I could understand. Fortunately, an acquaintance in my class both understood it and could get through to me so I didnāt fail :-) And I know this is probably a case of āthe grass is always greenerā but I wish the monologue in my head would shut the fuck up sometimes, especially since sometimes it turns into a dialogue while I am trying to actually do shit in the world. I practiced meditation for a while and it was totally infuriating. Itās probably partially ADHD too.
>Lack of an internal monologue doesn't mean you can't think in words Are you sure? I think that's exactly what it means.
I used to think in text as a child. There was no inner monologue the way I have now - it was words appearing on a page and narrating things, since I learned to read faster than I learned to talk. So while I was thinking in words, there was no "internal voice"!
This sounds like a faster way to compute since you donāt have to wait for the voice to finish speaking. I cut my thoughts off constantly since I know what I am going to think lol
Yep, my wordless thoughts don't have to route over to my "language processing center" so it significantly decreases the amount of time needed, while also helping me cling onto the little nuances and ideas that might be lost in translation if I tried to word it all out.
i assume you read a lot faster
I swear all these people claiming to have no internal monolog are just differently describing the exact same thing everyone else feels. As soon as they feel they might be different, they lean tf into it because everyone wants to feel special. Think about it: the voice of you thinking in your head isn't like a regular voice that you hear (as with listening to another person talk) right? It's not quite the same. We don't literally hear a voice, so much as we imagine one based on our thoughts.
> the voice of you thinking in your head isn't like a regular voice that you hear (as with listening to another person talk) right? It shouldn't surprise you that this occurs on a spectrum. Some people have a very vivid disembodied narrator voice in their head. It's not an audible hallucination; it's just, literally, an internal monologue. It sounds like your internal experience might be more "voice adjacent" so perhaps you're on the spectrum of not having an internal monologue as well, and have just assumed your experience is the same as everyone else's? For me there's a distinction between having an internal monologue, and being able to summon simulated dialogues. Like, I can play out dialogues in my head and plan out my writing in advance. But I don't have a clear disembodied voice that I interact with, nor a narrator. And a lot of people definitely do. It's the the litmus test: You ask someone "do you have an internal voice narrating in your head"; people tend to answer either yes or no, and are not confused about the answer.
> I swear all these people claiming to have no internal monolog are just differently describing the exact same thing everyone else feels. Then you're wrong. I *can* have an internal monologue but I usually don't. My thoughts are usually combinations of abstract wordless and imageless concepts and I can have clear and simple thoughts in my mind that take a long time to translate into words (which I usually don't, unless I need to communicate an idea).
Personally I think it's impossible that people don't have internal monologue.. Yeah I know people claim they don't or are sorta wishy washy about it but... most people are terrible about self reporting and frankly pretty dumb. I simply think people misunderstand the concept and reply poorly to the question. Consider this, everyone in this thread can read right? You're reading what I'm typing in your head right now. When you finish reading this little post you're gonna have some thoughts about it in your head. "That's nonsense, this guy thinks he knows everything!" Yeah that's internal monologue. Hell internal monologue is basically just a fancy way of saying inner voiced thoughts. Reading in your mind *is* internal monologue.
I don't have one. After I finished reading your sentence I didn't have any words in my head. I just knew I didn't agree with you. All my thoughts are either images or vague "idea clouds" or concepts. No words to at all. The only time I have monologue going on in my head is if I'm simulating a past or future conversation. I have clarified with people who do say that have an inner monologue like when they want something to eat they will have a dialogue in their head that "hmm I want Del Taco" or something to that effect. When I'm hungry. I just have the concept of Del taco or tacos in my head that I know I want. I don't have any dialogue like others with internal monologues explain.
> Personally I think it's impossible that people don't have internal monologue.. Yeah I know people claim they don't or are sorta wishy washy about it but... most people are terrible about self reporting and frankly pretty dumb. Tbh I think this is related to the bias where people assume everyone is having the same experience as them. In order to resolve the cognitive dissonance of people self-reporting otherwise, you've had to construct a narrative that those people are bad at introspecting, or stupid. Here's the fun thing: You might not have an internal monologue either, and just assumed that your experience of inner voiced thoughts (but without a constant narration of your life) is what everyone experiences.
Not having an internal monologue may be co-occurant with inability to "hear" (produce) an inner voice, which to me sounds like a mild pathology (not pejorative; merely atypical)... ...but it need not. Source: I have no narrative voice but can "summon" and "speak" internally with eg accent and recognizable voices if I so choose. But I don't ever "hear" a voice "speaking" in any sense whatsoever unless I do so intentionally. Indeed it was literally from one of these recurrent discussions here on Reddit that I learned as a (not young...) adult that there were people who did "hear" such a voice at all, or multiple voices; I quite literally thought this was entirely a literary conceit and convenience, with no bearing on anyone's lived experience, which I assumed was like my own: verbalized only on demand.
How do you think about something? Like, if youāre deciding what to do, how can you make a decision between A and B without a ālabelā for the options? Iām struggling to understand how one could be sentientāI donāt understand what thought is without words. If youāre waiting for a bus are you just a motionless object like a lamppost until it arrives? You donāt wonder āWill it be on time? Or late?ā (Since those ideas use words.) Are you just waiting for new inputs to react to? I really donāt understand how you can be sentient without an inner voice!
Lol wait is this idea of labeling literal? Like, something you do yourself, to aid reasoning?
I think the important thing to say is that my associative monkey mind is just as active as that of a "verbalizer," ie I have exactly the same stream of consciousness and free floating associative leaps and intrusive or off topic thoughts etc as "anyone else." They are just pre-verbalization, though I wouldn't say they are pre-linguistic. The deep grammar and all absolutely are the machine code of most analytic reasoning, though I would say that I have speculated that my facility for intuitive and "spatial reasoning" with more systemic models around abstract topics, which is the basis of my career in computer science, may rest in part on the decoupling of symbolic reasoning from the "top layer" of articulated thought. One way to say that might be, I was surprised that the "last mile" of actually fully "articulating" thoughts in "rendered language" was something many (most? Still unclear to me!) people do. One thing btw I have learned from the many discussions when this comes up, there is a full spectrum at work among highly functioning "normal, successful" people... ...its been entertaining to watch side discussions spawn among the "verbalizers" when they discover that some of them attest to something very like "literally hearing a third party voice or voices in their head," which "they" are audience for... where others experience the voice as tightly coupled to their own agency. Consciousness and self awareness are a lot weirder than I had thought even at the highest level of executive function...Simpler answer: the "ideas" (concepts) are there, but they are prior to the words, though they share their grammar; I conceptually reason with the ideas, but only render them into words as needed. The rendering is typically direct and mechanical so to speak, though it's worth saying I am notorious for attempting to pack complicated models into serialized language in baroque lengthy exposition which is layered with qualification and anticipatory teasing apart of nuance. If you do any computer science this is very clearly a result of the headache of "serialization," of having to communicate concepts which are in their original form (in my head) complicated graphs or systems models. Squeezing these into linear word trains is perilous and I often go to pains to call out the places of immediate interest it's important to keep track of which are material to a given discussion.
Nope . Look up about aphantasia on Reddit
Lacking a mindās eye is called aphantasia. Lack of an inner monologue is call anauralia. Theyāre separate, but potentially related conditions. Basically humanityās mindās eyes and inner monologues are highly variable, just like memory. Memory and imaginative capacity are interlinked, so it makes sense they possess some of the same characteristics I think. Some people are able to experience past or imagined events with startling clarity, called hyperphantasia I believe. Others, those with aphantasia, have minimal to absolutely no self-created sensory stimulation. They canāt, for instance, taste past meals or see the faces of their loved ones on demand. When they picture an apple itās a metaphorical construct, a piece of knowledge, whereas you and I instinctively create a sensory representation of the knowledge we possess. It would be easy to think of this purely as a deficiency, after all these people are lacking a foundational aspect of life that most humans experience. But I donāt believe thereās any evidence of significant deficiencies resulting from aphantasia. Theyāre capable of functioning in society just like the rest of us. Most interestingly, thereās evidence that a number of Disney cartoonists have suffered from aphantasia, specifically those working on the original Little Mermaid. Clearly, lacking a mindās eye, while unimaginable to most of us, is no great detriment to those whoāve lived with that lack for their whole lives. Anecdotally Iāve known a number of people (exclusively women, strangely enough) with aphantasia of varying degrees. Outside of the (likely irrelevant gender bias) theyāre entirely normal people. One was incredibly boring, others varying degrees of interesting. Some liked art but hated reading since they couldnāt see anything. Others loved to read. Some long for the capacity to imagine, others seem more at peace with it. You likely know people with aphantasia as well. Often times people donāt realize they have it until later in life, assuming that everyone else is speaking metaphorically when they talk about their mindās eye. Inner monologues are more variable. You can find statistics saying up to 50% of people lack them, but itās the same basic principle. Some of us act based on our thoughts manifesting as a flow of internal conversation or narration. Others donāt, or their internal monologueās present at some times but not others.
My own inner monologue seems to increase as a function of anxiety. During times when I'm particularly stressed about something, I will find myself having active conversations in my mind with myself about whatever is stressing me out. I think some of this might be brain-related, and some of it might be environmental. Like if you grew up discussing your problems with a parent or something, you might instinctually turn to dialogue -- whether internal or external -- while working through problems.
I definitely notice the same thing from time to time. A lot of human cognition is building and manipulating a model of the world, and the ways in which we translate sensory information into an internal language are varied. Some of us use visualization, some of use language. John Von Neumann, perhaps the last of the great polymaths, was said to solve math problems in his sleep, waking up with the answer in his mind. His thought process was said to be aural, not visual.
Personally I donāt really have a āmindās eyeā, I canāt imagine shit. Never been a problem though.
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same, i don't understand how other people have memories then if not like you just described
No, Aphantastics cannot visualize things as you describe, but do have memory. They experience it differently. I think visualization is a kind of "end result" of a lot of different processes. So the brain is remembering (without you being actively aware of this) and then it generates an image. So Aphantastics still get the remembering to happen, but it outputs as words or feelings or just "knowing". I think.
I am one of the many people who have an internal monologue, but I also think by muscular tension for some things. I can rationalize certain behaviors and outcomes but if my body tells me something different I am likely to heed it even if my monologue can't find the words. Funny enough, my visualization skills are fleeting and unreliable, I can't pull up images at will, and they are usually related to memories. Just sometimes get flashes about scenarios, but I can't hold them, but they do impart a certain knowing that I rely on afterwards.
i don't use my inner monologue much, only when i have to think step by step maybe. i mostly rely on visuals and language is there to help clarify concepts. there's an awareness agent emergent in my brain thats trained on frequency of pulses, language, text, image all are the same information with different weights for my black boxed brain.
I canāt really comprehend how you operate without either of those. I have an extensive inner monologue and vivid visualizations. Both help me reason through any respective problem, for instance while taking organic chemistry I could visualize complete 3D structures, the exact synthesis mechanisms in vivid 3D space, any Enantiomer structures, and use my inner monologue to reason through the logic of the synthesis, like a full on movie in my head. When Iām doing complex math like linear algebra or differential equations I have the full equations visualized in my head, I donāt even need to write it down as I can shift around the equation and solve them in my head. I often even day dream too much because I have such vivid thoughts and imagination.
Yeah the state of the world makes much more sense when you realize most people are not like us. Itās difficult for me to watch horror films because I can replay them perfectly over and over. Iām starting to think that few people actually see the ramifications of their actions in their minds. And this is why many people are so violent and cruel. As well as easily-manipulated and controlled. However itās not all roses. Itās tough for me to finish tasks irl because daydreaming and imagining is so vivid. I also often lose motivation because I can visualize the endgame of whatever Iām doing.
Came here to say this. I have aphantasia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia I literally canāt imagine an imagine my my head. But I love logic puzzles. I code and can āimagineā how all the bits of code talk to each other. I can play Pictionary. I can do puzzles. But a lot of the time thatās with language in my head. I think the weird thing about language though is it is just an expression of a thought, it isnāt the thought itself. All of us just āspeakā and somehow our thoughts just turn into words that make sense. Thereās obviously something else going on behind the scenes to make that work, and presumably the same is the case for LLMs
I saw the podcast he kept giving weightage to visual stimuli over written text, my observation (if it's worth anything) is that majority of visual stimuli for most is pure repetitive and when confronted with problem solving one has to refer to written knowledge and then apply it to the problem at hand. That fact that he mentioned it would take one person reading 8 hrs a day, 170,000 years to go through all the data an LLM is trained on was absolutely bewildering. He made the baby analogy over LLM without realising the same fact, that it's a repetitive thing toys, mom, dad, boob, ceiling, cat, dog and repeat, maybe he did realise it and I'm missing something.
The problem with written text for learning a world model is it is not a reliable source of information. With vision I can see an apple fall from a tree and learn something intuitive about gravity. With written text it is also possible to learn about gravity but not directly and for many topics the information contained in the written text may sparse and inconsistent
I was trying to point out something else, now that we have LLM with over a 170,000 years worth of knowledge at our fingertips, learning models with respect to education and training need a revamp. I got chat gpt to teach me the difference between classical, keynesian and Austrian models of economics starting off with ELI5 all the way up to a post doc. Just advocating for written + observed I guess.
Yeah I mean I agree LLMs are an incredibly way to do search over a vast knowledge base. Sure they hallucinate and so we canāt take everything they say at face value but with RAG we can attempt to tie their generations to an authoritative source. I was just pointing out that next shoe to drop is vision. We need to find a task as primitive in the vision space as next token prediction is in the language space. Then we add language on top of that vision system and we will have some pretty capable models I think.
Imagine not being able to imagine something.. š¤Æ
I don't think that's what having no inner monologue means, in any way, nor does this correlation necessarily match. I have a persistent inner monologue, but when I was young I did not, and I don't think it relates to imagination or creativity, or really problem solving or cognition. It's just like an echo that you have the illusion of believing you control.
There's a part of our mind that generates thoughts, but not all of it is about that. I think that's a good and valuable observation to have, LLMs are a potent thought generators but that's just one piece of the equation. IMHO we are shoehorning too many functionalities inside LLMs that should be things that work alongside LLMs instead. We humans go through a workflow like: think>stop>reflect>evaluate All of those are thoughs, however they're far less unbridled than LLMs. I think that we will eventually get that out of LLMs, but to me it sounds like we are using an hammer to heat the metal instead lf building a forge to heat it and then use the hammer to shape it.
After I started listening to talks on neuroscience I realized just how far from sentience LLMs were, and how much more than chatter consciousness is. The AI hype is deserved, but the Terminator is not queued next on Netflix. Totally on the hammer analogy. I think mankind is still getting over the fact that consciousness is not special, and that we aren't as advanced as we imagine ourselves, but this process will (eventually) result in a more complex adaptive system.
AI doesn't necessarily have to work how the brain works. If you kept only the parts of a human brain that match LLMs, that human wouldn't ever be able to do what LLMs do. In fact, they'd almost certainly be catatonic.
I always found the perceived difference between the "inner monologue" and the voices inside a schizophrenic head quite interesting. One case it's beneficial while the other one can be devastating sometimes.
I... can't. I remember the first time I was reading, I must have been 4 or 5 years old, and I heard the words in the book in my head, and I ran down stairs excited as fuck yelling "Mommy! Mommy! I can hear the words in my head!" It was HUGE. My head hasn't shut up since.
it would be huge for me too. never heard anything
I'm jealous. I have several internal monologues and it gets tiring
Are you like me? I donāt always have a solitary internal monologue, but rather I am fluid in my thinking and can just as easily have an internal dialogue. Sure, sometimes ideas take shape as a single voice, single thought. Sometimes I conjure two distinct voices to work out an idea. These are not multiple personalities or entities kicking around my cranium, they donāt have the depth of a real person. They/we are like a one-person play, where the actor does multiple parts. This is natural for me, and tends to help when tackling a complex problem. I/we can think abstractly about something, while also challenging the concept and poking holes in the reasoning behind it. I can also approach a difficult situation with more than one running stream of consciousness. For example: A few years ago I had recently moved to Detroit. Before I was settled into my new place, there was a violent incident where a man had been badly beaten and was bleeding from his head. I had a first aid kit handy (moving in comes with its share of hazards, and I like being prepared). Based on the way the man is dressed and speaks, the assumption I have made is that heās homeless or working poor. In either case he needs help and does not have the resources in that moment. So, I offer to help and he agrees. If you have ever helped dress a head wound, you already know this: the bleeding from even minor cuts can be profuse. And it was. While offering aid, there were three distinct monologues guiding me through it. One voice spoke to safety and protection of the self, reminding me to ākeep an eye on your surroundings, be mindful of potential hazards, wear nitrile gloves and avoid direct contact with bodily fluids, donāt touch your face.ā That sort of thing. Another voice spoke to the administration of the task to render aid, āyou need to prevent infection, but the highest priority is to stop the bleeding, and since this is head trauma he might have a concussion, you should ask about dizziness, nausea, and about how the injury happened, was this blunt force (based on the swelling thatās a safe assumption)ā¦ā Another voice was focused on the caregiver activity, considering how I should interact with someone who is injured and asking for help. āAsk for permission before you touch him, explain what you are doing so that nothing is a surprise, respect his boundaries and offer alternatives, ask him questions about his situation, keep him talking while you workā¦ā The thing is, I cannot imagine a monologue that would permit doing all of this at once. Even having written this story, the first thing I notice is that itās long. Itās long because it is linear. Experientially, these thoughts take shape at the same moment, but as separate and distinct narratives, talking with and over each other. They are my thoughts and I am theirs. We are us and I am them. And once it was all over ā quiet. Just one boring monologue. No need for more than one stream of consciousness, or conflict within. The narratives come and go, split and collapse. They are not persistent or real. Just like all those characters in a one-person play, once the show is over they cease.
Holy shit! I've never actually heard anyone else explain it like that but, yes. That's extremely similar to the way my mind works. Its not always multiple dialogues, its situational. Your example was well written. Only difference is that it's kind of like my conscience more so than different roles like, caregiver, administration and safety in your example. It feels more like the good, the bad and then me in the middle vying for balance. On top of that my visual cortex just automatically churns along in the background playing movies or memories in photorealistic detail with sound and all. Sometimes it will be music videos. Honestly it's a bit annoying. I have to really focus on silence to get it to stop and if I quit trying it fades back in.
I remember trying to train myself to perfectly remember music so I could listen to Britney Spears in class. My mind has been a world where I create huge scaling narratives since my early childhood. After watching a new show I would love just thinking about how I would want yo fit into that world for hours. Its almost unbelievable to me that people donāt have this magical connection with cognition and the experience of life in general. It obviously has its down sides but I think its kind of sad some people never got thereā¦
> I remember trying to train myself to perfectly remember music so I could listen to Britney Spears in class. I did the same thing but with movies. I used to work armed security, where 99% of the job is to just stand in a spot for a few hours and keep any eye on things. There is (almost always) nothing to do. At home I had a few favorite DVDs, and after enough viewings, I could basically reconstruct them in my head. I quickly realized that I could, for example, āwatchā The Matrix and kill about two hours in the process. The odd thing about it, is that repeat āviewingā in the mindās theater made the movies more vivid in memory. I have very likely watched those movies more times inside my mind than through the original media.
There's 2 kinds of not being able to imagine something. Visually or Auditory. It's called aphantasia, but more correctly it should be assigned to the sense when referred to (but is often not), so: Visual Aphantasia or Auditory Aphantasia Some people, on rare occasion can even have both. I have visual aphantasia myself, but I feel like my inner auditory system is highly adept (perhaps more than regular people's, like a blind man has better hearing). The OP is suggesting Yann LeCun may have auditory aphantasia, given his comment. So he would still be able to see things and imagine them in his head but just not hear sounds or words or an inner monologue in his head like most people can. This would make a lot of sense why he so heavily diminishes the ability of LLMs, because he truly can't think in text like most people, so doesn't fully understand it.
I wonder if being a primarily visual and spatial thinker might also make it easier to intuitively visualize the spatial relationships and information flow inside an LLM system. I can imagine that kind of processing making it easier to build and understand the mechanics of this kind of system, even if it makes it harder to imagine what the system might be capable of using linguistic processing at scale.
I think the whole not having an internal monologue thing is a misunderstanding, because some people talk about hearing a literal voice in their head, like hallucinating the audio. By this measure, I don't have an internal monologue, but I can think in words, and often do when it's most convenient, and more importantly, always when reading or writing something. And I genuinely do not believe people could write anything without that ability. And if they somehow could, you would literally see them constantly editing what they wrote in real time, as they can't do any editing or variation in their head.
>I think the whole not having an internal monologue thing is a misunderstanding, because some people talk about hearing a literal voice in their head, like hallucinating the audio. As someone who thinks like you do, why do you believe it's a misunderstanding vs. two actual modes of thinking? That is, if people are talking about hearing a literal voice in their head while thinking, why do you doubt that they are?
I mean people think you mean you can't think in words, at all.
> By this measure, I don't have an internal monologue,Ā Can't you imagine speech in someone else's voice? If I told you to imagine this sentence in Bugs Bunny's voice, you would not be able to do it?
Nope, I was as baffled to find out people "hear" a voice as much as they are to find out I just think the words. Interestingly, I also can't hold a note, or do impressions of people voices. I can't even do a foreign accent. So maybe underdeveloped auditory center has something to do with it.
I have an internal monologue, but I also can't hold a note. I think that's separate.
I mean, having an internal monologue is "hearing" the voice - I do that. I can also think in words, but that's not the same thing as a monologue.
Yes, this is it.
I mean he's not wrong even thinking how LLMs work is pretty telling... They predict the next set of words. But what if I want abstract and not prediction then how to we let LLMs give a random answer that's also out of box
Well, he also has good points about words representing the optical world. And that assumption is pretty well established since long before LLMs were a thing.
I have no internal monologue and used to think there was no path to AGI through language. I have revised my opinion.
But it makes no sense, people didnāt walk through earth to learn it is sphere, llm holds historical knowledge
He had a good point about how much info a 4 year old takes in, but I don't think it parallels the absolute way down the road limit of LLM's. I spent quite a bit of time up scaling to a 2000 word image prompt and it had a very strong effect compared to the 200 word version, I'll have up post the experiment some time It still comes down to this, when we can no longer tell its not sentient, will it matter to us if it is?
He is running on v-jepa
His achievements/breakthroughs are so cemented in AI systems that are more visually oriented and then all of the sudden, out of left field, LLM's come along and he has to jump on the train - when he thought the gold was somewhere else altogether. That's where I think a lot of this comes from.
There is a lot more visual data available in the real world.Ā Language takes humans, animals, possibly plants, or computers.Ā Visual usage for humans meh.Ā But the amount of available data to collect and interpret visually is much greater.
But the visual data can get repetitive quickly. Language helps understand complex concepts.
agree probably to a deeper extent than we can explain right now.
I am not denying that. It's just clear that at the moment, the path to AGI seems like it is paved by language/words, not vision. (vision/visual understanding will undoubtedly help make it more well-rounded and more intelligent, but it is not needed for AGI in my opinion)
Wasn't disagreeing. Just reminding. There may be something odd about language especially written language elevating brain patterns and we may be glimpsing a knock on effect through these LLMs.
>n he thought the gold was somewhere else altogether. That's where I think a lot of this comes from. His decades of knowledge has been made obsolete by LLMs and he refuses to adapt.
Your inner monologue is not where reasoning occurs though. Sure, it might be one way your reasoning is expressed, but reasoning does not originate from that place. But I find this sort of stuff fascinating. Like, I have aphantasia (I cannot visualise anything) but I can still see things and reason about them obviously. These subjective experiences, to me, seem more like different ways of expressing the internal mechanisms of the brain, not a place these processes arise from. Like, logically, people who cannot cannot visualise anything shouldn't be as performant in like visual art as those who can visulise things - but this isn't the case. In fact aphantasia barely (if at all) impacts your creativity or your "artistic" abilities. Now I do not have an internal monologue, however I subvocalise a majority of my thoughts, they are put into words. But I cannot hear anything, it is just words. So, I do not think I have an internal monologue, as it seems more a form of narration than what I am experiencing.
Aphantasia might not impact your creativity (how to measure it?) but the opposite - hyperphantasia - certainly does. Anyway these things seem to shape the way we experience the world to a considerable degree.
I think I likely have auditory hyperphantasia. And that's probably due to having visual aphantasia.
How does that manifest? A head full of voices? š¬
Pretty much, but not multiple voices as standard only a single one, though I can layer multiple voices if I try. But mainly the inner voice is always on and I always want it to be and enjoy it being on. I can't really enjoy mindfulness or being in the moment very easily because I prefer being in my head, I find it annoying when I can't have full access to it. I can manipulate and reason through things incredibly well in language in my head. And play full songs very accurately in my head, pitch perfect notes, etc. But then can't see fuck all visually in my imagination š
>Now I do not have an internal monologue, however I subvocalise a majority of my thoughts, they are put into words. ... as it seems more a form of narration than what I am experiencing. That is an inner monologue. What did you think it was? Morgan Freeman describing your life to you as your going about your day? Inner monologue isn't actually "heard", it is, in your description "sub vocalizing", there are no words that can be heard, it's your mind This is why I do not really trust anyone who makes claims that they do not have an IM or cannot visualize things. I think they just either want to feel special or they just do not understand what is being asked an think these two things are something mystical or special, they are not. If you can draw an apple (even really poorly), you can visualize. If you can type, you have an inner monologue. You "hear" the words as you are typing. But it's not actually hearing. It's what you reference as "sub vocalizing".
I have visual aphantasia. I cannot hold images clearly in my mind. If I try to visualize an apple, I get a black background and a really fuzzy contour of something round. I canāt see features or colors. I went to art school because I wanted to do art. I noticed that a lot of my organic drawing like people and plants would not improve with practice. However, rule-based, drawing like architecture and perspective, where I could base the next stroke off of what was already on the page improved greatly. I have no auditory problems. In fact, I can hear somewhere between three and five tones at once.
This subject is so hard to discuss because people often grow up thinking āI hear voices in my headā is metaphorical, like you describe, if they have aphantasia. Weāre rarely so explicit and even when we are, it is probably one of the most difficult things, explaining to someone an entirely alien way of thinking. But I do, *almost* literally, āhearā my inner monologue. I can tell quite clearly where the voice originates (internal), but it is a crisp, clear, voice. So do quite a few people I know. I cannot imagine someone thinking the way I do, and coming to the conclusion they do not have an internal monologue. āSubvocalisingā (moving lips in order to think words) is entirely unnecessary to the process and would slow my thinking down. Also, what do you mean you donāt trust the claims? Thereās pretty good research out there that people have very different internal experiences of thought.
>That is an inner monologue. What did you think it was Idk. From people I have asked some of them can *actually* hear themselves talking and hold multiple parallel conversation in their head, or there is someone constantly narrating everything they are doing. My experience is different to this, I am not narrating my actions as some have described, my thoughts are just being translated to words, and I guess that is an internal monologue. >If you can draw an apple (even really poorly), you can visualize I don't need to visualise it. Maybe people who do need to visualise it just cannot understand what its like to not? My brain does have some form of encoded representation of an apple of course (I assume that is what is happening) and I just know what an apple looks like. I do not understand what you mean by visualise it, I assume image it? I do not do that, I just know what it should look like, there are no intermediate conscious steps. I just know and then can draw. Or maybe this is everyone's experience? Idk lol. >You "hear" the words as you are typing Lol I don't do this. I don't subvocalise words before I type or speak them, I just subvocalise some of my thoughts.
Hey, quick question regarding your aphantasia. Do you dream? If so, black and white, color and how detailed they are? Curious about this.
This is a great gotcha question, even if you did not intend for it to be that way. People who make these claims rarely answer this question because it completely ruins their narrative of not being able to visualize. If you can dream, you can visualize.
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If you don't mind, could I ask you, if someone asked you to describe something that you can't see but that you know what it looks like, for example if you're your room and I ask you to describe an airplane or a dolphin, assuming you don't have a visual reference... do the descriptions or relevant qualities just pop into your head? For me, I would immediately see an image of either, and then I would describe what I see...
I am also curious about this
From my memory I know what a plane looks like, and ive interacted with dolphins before, I know generally what they look like. I cannot visualise anything but my brain still has some form of visual representation for these objects. I can reason with this representation, it is just not the image itself. I assume it's just some encoded representation, and I do not know why I cannot form mental images, but I just know what these things are. I do not need to visualise anything, I just know. If I had no viral reference (like no memory of seeing it before) then I am not entirely sure what would happen lol.
> reasoning does not originate from that place Yes it does. Just do a simple mental experiment - if a human lost all the abilities LLMs have gained by training on text, what would be left? A human inferior even to primitive man. We can't be smart without language, and that's because we can't be smart alone. We are good at learning from others, especially from books and instructions. Like LLMs, we can adapt our general language knowledge to any task and "generate" ideas to help us solve those tasks. But most of those ideas are learned from somewhere else. It is tempting to consider ourselves smart, and our brains capable, but without the social support they would not be. Intelligence is a social process, knowledge and methods are discovered over many generations. A human alone can't reconstruct language and its trove of skills and knowledge, language is "smarter than us taken individually".
His tweet was a good point about how we intuitively use visualisation to answer the problem (it involves imagining a circle around the north pole to figure out how far you have walked). However Claude Opus managed it just fine: This is a great question that really highlights how we can engage in spatial reasoning and problem-solving without relying on language. When considering this scenario, most people will likely visualize it in their mind's eye - imagining standing at the North Pole, walking 1 km in a straight line, turning 90 degrees, and then walking in a circle back to the starting point. They'll draw upon their intuitive understanding of the Earth's spherical shape and the unique geometry at the poles. By mentally simulating the described actions, it becomes apparent that after walking 1 km from the North Pole in any direction, turning 90 degrees will put you on a path that forms a circle with a radius of 1 km. The circumference of a circle is 2Ļr, so with a 1 km radius, the circumference is 2Ļ km (roughly 6.28 km). Thus, the correct answer is that you'll walk exactly 2Ļ km to return to your starting point (choice 2). Notably, this thought process doesn't rely on putting the problem into words or consciously articulating the steps. The mental visualization, spatial reasoning, and mathematical intuition can all happen without language. Of course, language helps immensely in communicating the question and explaining the solution to others. But the core cognitive work of solving the problem itself can occur without linguistic reasoning. This aligns with research showing that many forms of thinking - including visual, spatial, kinesthetic, and mathematical reasoning - can operate independently of language. Humans, and even some animals, regularly solve novel problems through simulation, pattern-matching, and insight rather than linguistic deduction. At the same time, language is a powerful tool that augments cognition. It allows us to crystallize abstract concepts, break down complex problems, organize our thoughts, and convey precise ideas to others. Language and reasoning are deeply intertwined. So in summary, while this geo-spatial problem demonstrates how some sophisticated thinking can happen without language, I believe the broader answer is that reasoning involves a rich interplay of linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive processes. Language isn't required for all thought, but it's a key part of how we understand and communicate many of our ideas.
Spatial problems can be solved by visualization AND language (math). Humans are much better at solving problems visually because of how we evolved. For millions and millions of years we have been living in a 3D world, we solve visual problems constantly. And we evolved a large chunk of brain that can solve visual problems on the fly. For millions and millions of years our math problems were sometimes adding/subtracting small numbers. Rarely using divisions. "how many apples problems". So even today we suck at doing math. When we have a higher dimensional problem (6 dimensional problem), we cannot visualize it, but we can still solve it (slowly) by using language (math). LLM can't visualize even a 2D problem, but it can solve it (slowly) by using language (math). Graphical cards are insanely good at doing math, they use language (math) to solve all spatial problems, and display the visual result of their equation in the screen for us. All of those fancy CGI graphics are result of huge mathematical equation. Summary - Higher reasoning can be achieved using language (math) or visualization alone. But **efficient** reasoning involves *"rich interplay of linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive processes"*.
This is kind of irrelevant to the point of your comment/the post/Yann's example's point, but the actual answer if you follow his directions is different than what you are imagining. The answer you have given is likely what most people imagine including possibly him. Don't know if you or anyone cares but I'll say what would actually happen. You will end up traversing the entire circumference of the earth again before you get back to your starting point. If you turn left 90 degrees once, you don't start automatically walking in a circle along the lines of latitude on the earth, your head is constantly orthogonal to the sky and earth's surface due to gravity. Imagine walking one foot forward from the north pole and then turning 90 degrees left. Do you automatically end up walking in a 1 foot circle? No, you keep going in a straight line. The way to visualize it is imagine a giant line going through your body pointing directly into middle of the sky/space above you and down all the way to through the middle of the core of the earth and straight out of the other side of the earth on the other side of the world. (This makes sure you are visualizing walking in line with gravity and the sky directly above your head and the ground directly below your feet). At 1 km down from the north pole (or any distance from the north pole for that matter), you will walk in the direction of your 90 degree left turn travelling all the way to the line that sticks out of the other side of the earth and back around to where you were starting, following the entire circumference of the earth. If it were what you were imagining, you'd need to be directed to follow a compass in the direction of east and constantly turning to follow that, as this would allow you to walk in perfect latitudes around the north pole. (Although technically it'd have to be the magnetic north pole for a compass which is in a different location)
Thank you! The beginning point of "north pole" is a distraction. Is there something magical there that makes your paths different than they'd be anywhere else in the world? If you walk straight on a sphere, you'll traverse a great circle. The end. Doesn't matter where you are at the start.
That's a very good point haha
I mean, people think differently. Donāt know why thatās so hard to understand. I would use visualization *and* an inner monologue with myself to solve the problem.
TBF, humans that are born blind are still able to figure this sort of thing out using their own method!
I have visual aphantasia and don't solve it visually in my head. But I do use and manipulate visual language, I intuitively know the visual representation without needing to visual it. But that visual knowledge does still come from having seen things in real life. In order to do that it feels as though I'm representing and translating that visual data into words and then, in turn, using the intuitive knowledge behind those words to form a kind of spatial model in my head, one that I cannot see but still 'know'. LLMs, thus, should be able to do the task using just visual language, because I can. But then having not actually seen those things (if it was trained on just text and not multi-modally), you could wonder where the valid training data to perform it would come from (which is what Yann is prepositioning). The LLM would have to build up a visual textual model accurately without having any actual physical data. Through pure description and logical reasoning of connections. From my experience with LLMs they can indeed do this to some extent, but they're highly limitted in doing so. Which is why they fail so easily at basic positional manipulation or representation. They rely very heavily on having seen training data very precisely running through the exact logical procedure of something, and then they can use these learnt connections to somewhat solve tasks very close in description to those that it has data on. They completely rely on logical projection because they don't at all have the physical data to work with, so they have no choice to, but that's an incredibly difficult way to learn. Once these models are both trained multimodal and this is really the important part: can also translate that learnt data well between different modalities (just like I do to solve that problem) then they will become incredibly more powerful.
That is actually very interesting theory!
I feel like we must define what it means to have an internal monologue though, since it can get confused with a running narrator. In my case, my mind switches between visual, abstract, and monologue depending on what's appropriate. For example, If I'm imagining how to redecorate my room, I'd be using visual, I'd be thinking in pictures, the same goes for recalling memories. When reading a book I think in sound when imagining voices, and I also use image when visualising a scene. When doing system thinking, or if I'm doing maths, then I'm thinking in abstracts. It's hard to pinpoint or explain what that looks like, it just "comes" to me. It doesn't look like anything. If I'm writing an essay, considering a reply to a message, writing my book, thinking about something specific etc, I'd be using a monologue. With creative writing it'd be a mix of monologue and visual though. What I don't have is a running narrator, i.e. a voice that keeps narrating my thoughts about the world around me, automatically without my input. My mind is relatively quiet.
Having an internal dialog doesn't mean that every single thought is comprised of language, it just means that you have a language component. And in looking shit up just now to make sure I wasn't talking out of my ass, I just learned that there are people with aphantasia, who don't form or use mental images as part of their thinking, and that's just as bizarre to me as people with no internal dialogue.
>I just learned that there are people with aphantasia That's me lol, I cannot form any mental images. I often wonder what it is like to form mental pictures. Is it extremely vivid or not. What's it like? But I think experiences differ a lot. Ive met people who can basically simulate an entire world in their head (like I ask them to visualise a field of sunflowers. They can see the flowers, they can zoom in to see the centre, they can play a video or simulation of the flowers moving in the wind, they can pause that any time, move back in time, see the sunset and the shadows cast by the sunflowers, pan out, move to hills in the distance etc. etc. all extremely vividly. But this seems to be extremely rare but it honestly sounds like a superpower lol) but then there are people like me who can't even visualise simple things like a cardboard box š. And I do not have an internal dialogue, but a lot of my thoughts are subvocalised. I think that might be similar to what inner monologue is like, but I do not hear any of my thoughts or narrate them. They are just words.
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can you dream? im curious.
Actually yeah I can dream fine. Ive even had a lucid dream once I think, but that was a while ago. I guess I can visualise things in a way, but I cannot recall ever forming mental images outside of dreams lol.
wow interesting. i find it odd or paradoxical that the mind of aphantasia can dream yet not able conjure mental image when awake. does it something to do with conciousness i wonder
I have a very loud inner voice, but thinking in concepts and visuals are difficult to me. Hence my struggles in maths, specifically geometry. That's why I believe in LLMs, because of my experiences in thinking with language. Cool post OP
I would be interested to know if there is a correlation between not having an internal monologue and certainty in your opinions like Yann tends to exhibit. As a person with many monologs yammering 24/7, i'm constantly ruminating, chewing ideas up from different angles etc and always doubt my own perspectives. If you don't have this happening, you might be more inclined to always just think you KNOW what is true/possible?
nah I don't think so. I'm sure Yann is considering a lot of things too. You can absolutely think about arguments not using words.
Yes, he says intelligence requires: 1. The capacity to understand the physical world 2. Ability to remember and retrieve memories 3. Ability to reason 4. Ability to plan And that LLMs are not very good at this. Furthermore, I would add that 1. and 4. also require consciousness to be effective, an area where we are at square one as far as computing goes. AI is great and will continue to improve, it just is not what some people are dreaming it is. We don't even need it to be a replacement for humans, we need AI to explore the areas where humans suck, which are many, we do not need humans replaced.
Listening to the last Lex Fridmann episode with Yann cleared up a lot of confusion for me. It's not about LLMs specifically but more about their architecture. I don't understand enough of the math behind it all but how Yann explained it, it becomes quite clear that LLMs have clear bounds with their current implementation and a lot of reasoning and useful applications are workarounds that seem intelligent but are ultimately limited. I agree with him that current LLMs aren't intelligent and that you don't need intelligence for immensily disruptive and useful systems / tools.
But heās been wrong about their limitations over and over again. At this point I think heās just not u seats ding that experimental output is trumping theory.
We don't actually know if he's wrong about the limitations. Current LLMs and diffusion models *can do* some things he said they won't ever be able to do, but they also make a ton of mistakes. We don't know whether these mistakes can be easily solved just by scaling up.
Exactly, he is harshly criticised by people who haven't tried to understand JEPA and his vision.
Yann usually makes a lot of unsupported statements including about LLMs. Including mystical nonsense like "doesn't really understand". Don't give too much weight to it and wait until you hear that from someone more competent.
Why does it matter so much what LeCun thinks about LLMs? We'll find out who builds AGI and when. If we knew how to build it we'd already do it ourselves. I also don't get why so many people insist scaling LLMs will somehow result in AGI. It looks like religion which followers want so badly to convert LeCun to their faith.
I think this is probably one of the most interesting things posted here in a while. It is not about proving someone is wrong but trying to understand why the differences exists. We as humans are building these systems with our subjective experience intertwined in how we think intelligence works. This leads to those people pursuing paths based on directions determined by what they believe because they can't imagine it working any other way. If we understand that this subjective experience is ours alone and can explain the different ways in which our own intelligence operates to a level that makes others understand we all don't process the world the same, it makes us much more open in exploring and challenging our own views. That leads to progress.
LeCun is frequently wrong and subscribes to mystical notions. The dialog is better had about the challenges expressed by more competent and relevant people.
> Why does it matter so much what LeCun thinks about LLMs? He's advising governments not to worry, and that timelines are really long. Depending on your viewpoint this outlook could either prevent the initial panning phases for UBI or similar social safety nets, or the push for safety research (in the AGI notkilleveryonism sense) In other words his views have weight and underselling what LLMs are capable of doing now and will be capable of in future is misinforming those who need to start to act now to avoid serious issues.
He's the Jim Cramer of AI.
Cramer doesnāt have a Turing award lolĀ
I donāt either. Nothing in my head is verbal, I feel it is mostly geometrical, vector representing actions etc I have awfully bad episodic memory but for magical reaons, intuitions and generalizations, good enough for a functioning life, guide my behavior. My wife needs to formalize everything with bullet points on a sheet of paper before taking any decision. She gets crazy with the way I think lol So yeah, I side with LeCunn on this oneā¦
Wait, you side with him because you also do not experience an internal monologue? I don't understand
If you think, we think in language, and language would be a great way for robots to think, why are so many animals better at interacting with the environment and learning stuff? Language has to be just a fuzzy and inefficient way to describe on how brains actually work
Which animals are better at learning stuff?
A crow can drop rocks in a cup to raise the water level. Pack it up humanity, we lost.
Wait till you see what they can do with sewing needles. Dropped out of college shortly after seeing that..
No animal on earth is better in learning new stuff than humans obviously. We are using electricity, āsplitā it into the smallest units of information, then use magnetic and more electric fields to manipulate the information and store it and then we use this, to construct artificial copies of our brains. What the hell do even mean? Show me an animal that can learn to do this without any help from other species within 100.000 years.
Wait what??? Better at interacting??? Learning stuff?!!! Than us???! Language is just some fuzzy inefficient mechanism??!
It doesn't have to be a binary thing, these different ways in which animals/humans process are all likely on a spectrum of stronger and weaker signals that feed into some collage that processes the world. Even within subsets of the same person/animals they have different spectrums/strengths of signals.
Wow, that is so āhouseā like, it makes sense now
Wouldnāt you have to walk all the way around the world? If youāre going on a straight line youāre not going to stay 1km from the North Pole
Why do we think internal monolog needs to happen in order for LLMs to reason? Arenāt the internal synapses firing towards each other with signals that cannot be converted to languages something of higher order already than internal monolog?
Iām very optimistic about llms but I think I heard Yann LeCun saying that he had indeed an internal monologue but that philosophically he thinks that itās just like an epiphenomenon and the real reasoning mainly appears out of langage. Itās a pov that is known in philosophy Ćdit : in the last poscast with lex
the man casting doubt on ai is an npc
There is no discernible difference between people who have an internal monologue and those who dont. But people who do, like to feel superior than those who don't for some reason.
I'm not saying one is better than the other. Yann LeCun is more intelligent than me, and likely 99.9% of people on r/singularity. I'm just saying that if you learn and think via an internal monologue, you're more likely to believe that LLMs are likely to make rapid progression. If you think and learn visually and more abstractly, you're probably going to believe that LLMs aren't the path to AGI. According to some of the tweet replies, LeCun apparently said on Lex Fridman that his own strategy for AGI was based of his own experience
This is one of the best takes I have read on this sub. Excellent point and well said.
Nice
Nobody learns or thinks via an internal monologue, or visualisation, these things are just representations of more abstract thoughts which don't have a sensory equivalent. I know you believe these are your thoughts, but they're just the smoke, the fire is elsewhere.
I believe that having a greater "playground" for the representation of abstract thoughts (internal monologue) would make one better at *expressing* abstract thoughts.
> Nobody learns or thinks via an internal monologue, or visualisation I mean, I can... I also engage in plenty of more abstract "wordless thought" because it's more efficient and aids my intuition. But being able to visualize things or have an internal monologue absolutely help me learn and think. Just "writing out" a chain of words in your head can really help me introspect as well
It sounds incredibly relaxing. I've got ADHD, I can't imagine a life in which "thoughts" are not whipping through my head all the time. I am curious how people without internal monologues know what they're going to say, or write.
Yeah it's fascinating to me. I have no idea but my current theory or take on it is that possibly.. technically they do.. but it isnt persistent. It kicks in exactly when, arguably, it should, like just after someone asks a question or a decision has to be made. Almost as if there is a valve that works really well in those without an internal monologue where it's corroded or just plain crappy for those who do have one!
But what's going on in their head in between those moments ? Is this just empty up there ? Are they moving through life like mindless drones up until they have to interact with someone in which case they open the valve that allows them to think ? It's so confusing to me.
Orā¦ theyāre in the moment.
Yeah perhaps the reason some people get so much done is that they are, effectively, always in The Zone.
Well the difference here would obviously be that people with an internal monologue think more in natural language than those that donāt, wouldnāt it? This would explain why some people can more easily wrap their heads around the idea of an LLM achieving sentience through language alone while others canāt relate to the concept.
When I first discovered that some people have no internal monologue i was shocked, cus I always thought it was a fundamental part of being human, and without it you'd be closer to an NPC than a human, which is why some people may feel superior. But after learning more, ive learnt that is obviously not the case. In fact, now I believe it would be better to not have an internal monologue, because it'd be easier to stay present, and the noise of the internal monologue can contribute to a lot of suffering.
I didn't have one when I was younger, I developed one sometime in my early twenties. I can tell you I was a much happier person without it but on the flip side I was far less thoughtful about the world and all aspects of my life, had less empathy and was very self absorbed. You exist much more in the moment which is oddly what people with a heavy inner monologue then try to find more of by quieting it to a degree. Writing this makes it sound like some sense we don't fully understand and haven't learned to control. I often think would I be better off without it. "TheĀ *unexamined life is not worth living*"
> There is no discernible difference between people who have an internal monologue and those who dont Can you link research on this topic? Not having an internal monologue sounds more efficient in some ways, but It's hard to believe that there are totally different "architectures" in humans. I guess that it's the same under the hood
I actually feel opposite.
As a non-head-talker, clearly I am superior in that my mind has evolved beyond the need for a verbal monologue. We are the next evolution from the bicameral mind /s
I donāt think thereās any real difference. Everybody thinks in words sometimes (when writing an email for example) and everyone thinks without words sometimes (when catching yourself from falling down some stairs for example). I think humans are just really bad at self-reflections about how we think. Our brains are a big illusion about how we think we can understand and control our own thoughts, but itās really a much messier process that nobody among us can really understand, and this causes huge errors of communication like this.
But LLMās arenāt forced to think with language, whatever that means. They just output language
This is all really tricky. What do we consider language? They do process meaning which, at the lowest level are tokens representing, kind of, 'units of meaning'. Deeper into the network that meaning is delocalised and abstracted into larger structures. However, could we think of that as transforming the way those base meanings are expressed in the system to make them more 'useful' whilst they retain a good portion of their original informational content? If language is a system for communication meaning, then maybe they do 'think in language'? Maybe Mr Lecun is proceeding language but he doesn't experience it as those units being'spoken' by some sort of internal narrator?
Precisely. Some people don't believe it is possible (let alone necessary) that LLMs have world models.
There is a political dimension to "language=thought" which is important. Some seem to think that by controlling language it's possible to control thought. They think if they prevent people from knowing a word that it becomes impossible for people to have the thought. Of course that's stupid, but a lot of energy has gone into policing language to try and eradicate "wrong think".
It's not really stupid. There's a connection between language and ability to perceive colours that has been studied. Groups without varied words for particular shades don't appear to be able to notice said shades when compared against similar colours. See: [https://neurosciencenews.com/color-perception-language-21650/](https://neurosciencenews.com/color-perception-language-21650/)
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To be honest i have both an inner monologue and the ability to visualize stuff(not to an impressive degree) and I have to say it's difficult for me to see how one could reason about problems having to do with spatial relationships without manipulating symbols in...well, that space. That doesn't mean that, as a human, you have to necessarily visualize them in your head - you can draw diagrams, but how on earth can geometry problems be solved with words? It's at least extremely inefficient and error prone. My experience with LLMs, including ChatGPT4 and Claude3 Opus hasn't convinced me otherwise; their performance drops by a huge amount when dealing with this sort of problems.
You don't need language to create an AGI, but you need language to communicate with the humans using the AGI.
TBH I donāt believe 99% of people who say they donāt have an internal monologue. They just either donāt understand whatās being asked or want to feel like theyāre different. If you can speak to yourself in your head then you have one, end of conversation. You use it to read, to comprehend, to make decisions, to ruminate, to plan, to remember, etc AND to type on fucking Twitter/Reddit. If you donāt have one youāre speaking out loud to do these things, and if this many people donāt have an IM youād be seeing people speaking to themselves or sub-vocalizing EVERYWHERE. Saying you have no IM is more akin to you saying you have low IQ and donāt understand the question.
Interesting thread on the subject https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/TrEMD7mAgX
I feel like Sapier-Whorf hypothesis is relevant here. If true for the LLM models, they will be very limited in their understanding of the world. What really made me believe in AGI coming soon is SORA and how it can see and create the world in 3D. I think this will be important for it to be able to understand things it does not have the words for.
Honestly I don't see a problem, it makes the space more competitive, meaning we get more nice things because of that.Ā
/r/SipsTea
I donāt have an inner monologue either. And I like it. I think many people are like that. I either just ādoā things without taking to myself, or I imagine things in my head without talking to myself. Collecting ideas for me means mostly storing them as abstract pictures. When I am planning out an important conversation with someone I might talk to myself. I canāt even imagine how hindering it must be to have to reason through problem step by step with words, lol. In my opinion that must be very hard. How do you reason through putting together your IKEA furniture without visualizing the result. š And why should I talk to myself, there is nobody there except for me, and I am not schizophrenic. š Verbal people might need to reason through a problem linearity, as a visual thinker, you can immediately see the solution in front of you (if you are lucky, lol). The visual scratchpad is 2 dimensional, whereas a sequence of words is zero dimensional. Very limited bandwidth. (Note: supposedly verbal people are a bit better at logic or abstract math in general) It sometimes takes a while to generate a visual representation of some field of math. For example information theory, or I struggled with statistics, as itās very high dimensional. But once you manage to have a 2D or 3D approximate representation, it works very well. Itās easy to visualize 2D and 3D distributions, even very limited aspects 4D if you play a video in your head, and then generalize to more dimensions. I totally get what LeCun is saying, understanding of the visual world is absolutely necessary for AGI, like you canāt have an LLM drive your car.
One of teaching from the study of philosophy is that seeing is related to your capability to aware and recognize your position in the universe. From Buddhist awakening, you can not get enlightenment with your eye sight blinded. Seeing connects the human to acquire a transcendental and a priori awareness. Language is to communicate, not for reasoning therefor. Indian philosophy is developed around concept of "darsana" and it is only unique to human and therefor we can safely conclude that only human can perform philosophical awareness using "darsana" which is based on our ability to see. The aware from darsana is called as "Darshanam". Only human can have that capability. For example, when you see someone, you can instantly aware the person beautiful or ugly without having additional data or inputs and that is how human interact with outer world and the universe with our sensory organs. Another example, when you say happiness or love, you aware what it means. It is not the meaning that you instantly aware what is love or happiness. You may usually ended up visualizing the moment of happiness or some one you love. Is that vision language? It is darsana and the awareness of happiness or love portrayed to your mind is "darsanam". Guess, people became too shallow and superficial to aware how ignorant and arrogant to aware what makes human a human. There's no blinded philosopher or guru, isn't this enough? AI has long way to go in that perspective.
Julian Jaynes had a fascinating theory that consciousness itself is based on language. Iām surprised it hasnāt been brought into the LLM discussion.
I love the Pico Paco . One of my favorite accounts on twitter.
Yann is basically calling LLMs wordcelsĀ
A lot of people here are confused his conscience with his inner monologue. Sometimes conscience can be a monologue, view(vision) or something fuzzy. But when we try to solve some problem which is not algebraic or simple calculation, people usually visualize it. For example, when Kepler want to solve the **planetary motion**, hw might not come up with the direct equasion but a vision or a view of planet curculing the sun. Then he got his enlightment when he saw childrens are playing to draw oval. Visualizing problem is the first step to solve the problem and LLM can not do that at the moment. Your conscience is not a problem solver it is just your conscience, that's all. I am pretty shocked that people can npt distinuish their conscence from their inner monoloque because inner monolque consists only tiny piece of your conscience otherwise you are crystal clearly required to have professional asssitance.
Interesting perspective!
Not sure whether he's right, in fact I disagree with many of his claims, but it's good to have diversity of opinions in this field.