It’s not a priori clear whether it’s easier to reduce language to intelligence or intelligence to language. We see them co-occur in nature. But which way does the causality point? It does seem that some level of intelligence is required to develop language.
It’s also not clear to me that humans developed intelligence and then language. The evolution of the two very plausibly happened in tandem, and if so, language could be fundamental to the construct of intelligence—even when we talk about mathematical IQ, the abilities are dependent on the identification of categories, which is deeply linguistic. Similarly, for visual IQ, the tasks are using lots of linguistic categories.
Yes. Moreover, the point I’m making with this post is that the existence of LLMs is an evidence to the contrary. That Language->Intelligence is more likely than Intelligence->Language.
The paragraph you’ve cited just reminds us that it’s not something that is obviously true.
It’s also possible that there is some elegant, abstract “intelligence” concept (analogous to arithmetic) which evolution built into us but we don’t understand yet and from which language developed. It just turns out that if you already have language, it’s easier to work backwards from there to “intelligence” than to build it from scratch.
It’s also not clear to me that humans developed intelligence and then language. The evolution of the two very plausibly happened in tandem, and if so, language could be fundamental to the construct of intelligence—even when we talk about mathematical IQ, the abilities are dependent on the identification of categories, which is deeply linguistic. Similarly, for visual IQ, the tasks are using lots of linguistic categories.
Yes. Moreover, the point I’m making with this post is that the existence of LLMs is an evidence to the contrary. That Language->Intelligence is more likely than Intelligence->Language.
The paragraph you’ve cited just reminds us that it’s not something that is obviously true.
It’s also possible that there is some elegant, abstract “intelligence” concept (analogous to arithmetic) which evolution built into us but we don’t understand yet and from which language developed. It just turns out that if you already have language, it’s easier to work backwards from there to “intelligence” than to build it from scratch.