Definitely smarter people than me have thought about this already, but I’ve been trying to think about human language and how thoughts form in my head lately. How does thinking feel to you?
I feel like thoughts appear in my head conceptually mostly formed, but then I start sequentially coming up with sentences to express them, almost as if I’m writing them down for somebody else. In that process, I edit a bunch, so the final thought is influenced quite a bit by how English ends to be written. Maybe even constrained by expressability in English. But English has the ability to express fuzzy concepts. And the kernel started as a more intuitive thing.
LLMs aren't monolingual so you might want to expand that beyond English. Consider how multilingual people think.
Also, apparently it's pretty common for people to think in words and have an internal monologue. I hadn't realized this was a thing until recently but it seems many people don't think abstractly as you've described.
There have been psychological experiments that have shown what OP experiences.
In this particular experiment subjects were asked to make a series of arbitrary choices between 2 items, while being hooked up to some brain scanning equipment. Subjects were asked to think about it for 5 seconds before making the choice.
The experiment showed that scientists were able to predict the choice before the subjects consciously reasoned about it. So the experiment indicates that the choice is made subconsciously, and the reasoning ends up on whatever choice was made.
This aligns pretty well with some other psychological theories, and it points at that a lot/most of our brain processes happen subconsciously, and our conscious experience mainly serves as a way of providing a coherent story about why we experience what we experience.
So it seems that no matter if you 'think' abstractly or visually or with a monologue, this is merely a small step in our overall cognition, and doesn't really change the fact that thing bubble up from our subconscious before we become conscious of it.
5 seconds is an interesting amount of time. I think we all can simulate an argument in our heads, and it could even convince us. But, that takes time. 5 seconds seems like just enough time to result a thought into words.
I wonder if they could plot the mind-changing process resulting from that sort of argument. If that is what even happens.
I feel like thoughts appear in my head conceptually mostly formed, but then I start sequentially coming up with sentences to express them, almost as if I’m writing them down for somebody else. In that process, I edit a bunch, so the final thought is influenced quite a bit by how English ends to be written. Maybe even constrained by expressability in English. But English has the ability to express fuzzy concepts. And the kernel started as a more intuitive thing.
It is a weird interplay.