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Medicine, psychology, and neuroscience all have different definitions of this stuff.

understanding the meaning of language

Understanding is vague in these terms. You can notice someone calling your name while distracted with other activities. That’s an automatic process and assigning meaning for each word in English is a difficult task. How do you teach a computer what cells are in the abstract?

There is also some high level language decoding where people extract meaning from poetry etc. But, we need to get the low level task done first.

PS: As to ranking, their are a lot of high level tasks you can’t do at the same time. Often described as things that take concentration, but few language tasks make this list.

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> Medicine, psychology, and neuroscience all have different definitions of this stuff.

Well, maybe, but is it conventional usage in any of those fields to call the cognitive processes involved in producing and understanding linguistic communication low-level? Regardless, my ranking it high-level is not just my private usage, as you claimed. In fact, I would guess that it is a more conventional ranking than the one that seems to be implied by your method.

> How do you teach a computer what cells are in the abstract?

Well, precisely, it's at a higher level of abstraction than just picking out the word (I am pretty sure that's a conventional usage of 'higher'.)

>There is also some high level language decoding where people extract meaning from poetry, etc.

Poetry may be particularly obtuse, but that does not make all other meaning-extraction low-level. A lot of it, IMHO, belongs in that 'etc.'

PS to your PS: There are also concentration-demanding motor skills. And the point about your ranking method is that it seems to put thinking about a math problem at the same level as talking with someone, which you are claiming is low-level.

> thinking about a math problem at the same level as talking with someone

Plenty of people can hold a simple conversation while doing differential equations. As the conversation’s complexity increases that stops being the case.

There is clearly a difference when talking to a distracted person. But, decoding “Do you want a soda?” and responding appropriately seems to require little if any attention.

Neuroscience gives support of this in terms of what parts of the brain are involved in different aspects of language.

I am interested as to whether you consider doing differential equations a simple task, here? Presumably so, as your method puts it on a par with simple conversations.

No, you can’t do multiple high level tasks at the same time. Low level automatic tasks like breathing and balance fine to do at the same time.

Being able to do differential equations and simple conversations but not complex conversations means simple conversations are lower level.

Thus, it’s not language that makes complex conversations a high level task.

You seem to be missing the point here - your method is symmetrical, and it would be begging the question to break the symmetry the way you want it to go. One can do simple math (calculus, even) while having a complicated conversation -- and if you cannot, it could be because complicated conversations are so intellectually demanding that you can't even do simple math concurrently.

And your argument is also beside the point, now that you have restricted it to simple conversations.

The argument is not limited to math. You also can’t learn to play the violin while holding a deep unrelated conversation. This extends to a huge range of activities.

But, you don’t lose language skills during these activities.

Thus it’s (A, B, C, ..., or Z) and language. Thus language is clearly the lesser activity.

PS: People can often count or do memorized addition etc, but doing complex math tasks is off the table. It’s odd that some things even prevent you from recognizing symbols.

You need to show that, unlike the math case, it does not work the opposite way in each case.

What a coincidence it is that out of all A..Z , you should have picked math, the one that doesn't work, as your first example!

> The one that does not work

How so? You can recall facts not do math. Try adding say 2437 + 5627 while learning to juggle. It’s fine if you have already learned to juggle or have memorized the answer. But not if you are both doing the computation and learning to juggle at the same time.

On the other hand people will hold a simple conversation while practicing juggling.

How so? Just reread my 2nd. previous post. it, in its entirety, addresses how so.

If the math example works, why expand the scope to A..Z? Simply having math as an exception renders it pointless.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20708638

>One can do simple math (calculus, even) while having a complicated conversation<

As I said you can’t do math. You can recall facts, like say what the capital of France is or what’s 3 * 7, but you can’t do computation requiring working memory. So, at most your making a semantic argument based on misrepresenting what doing math is.

This is not a semantic argument, we can argue about the difference between practicing juggling vs learning juggling. But that’s all worked out in the literature and people doing decades of experiments.

So you are saying that complicated conversations are so cognitively demanding that it is not possible to do any sort of math while engaged in one. On the other hand, math is not so cognitively demanding that you can't have a simple conversation concurrently.

Yes, of course this is the limits, not everything requires absolute concentration. And conversation quickly passes that simple threshold.

OK, with this new-found agreement, let's revisit the original issue:

You claimed that my categorization of language (and, specifically, the cognitive processes involved in understanding linguistic communication, which is what I was discussing in the post you replied to) as high-level, was contrary to professional usage, where it is, you claim, regarded as a low-level capability. In support of that claim, instead of doing the obvious -- offering some citations (as I had done) -- you present, as the accepted way to make the distinction, a test: language is lower-level than mathematics because you can have a conversation while doing mathematics in your head.

Or should that be that you can do mathematics in your head while having a conversation? The first problem with this test is its symmetry: in itself, it does not rank the one thing over the other, as you can switch them around (for that matter, it cannot even establish that they are at different levels.) To try and get around that problem, you insist that mathematics is a high-level one, and so language must be low-level.

Implicit in this move is the corollary that, by definition, one can do at most one high-level task at a time. I suppose that when people refer to a cognitive capability as high-level, that is explicitly what they mean (though I doubt it), but if so, it is an assumption that should be possible to verify empirically (and you should do so, if you want to make use of it.)

Therefore, your claim that mathematics is the high-level capability is begging the question, as, through the corollary of the previous paragraph, it is tantamount to an a priori claim that language comprehension is the lower-level one. You have not shown that language comprehension is lower level; you have asserted it.

To try to avoid the problem that mathematics is not feasible concurrently with all conversations, you next modified the claim to include only simple conversations. Not only does this render the test moot, as it excludes language in general (the observation that a simple conversation is easier than calculus is trivial and uninformative in the general case), it is also a tendentious move; for one thing, you have not made a similar bifurcation of mathematics. Also, as you acknowledge at one point, it implies that, in your way of looking at the issue, simple language comprehension (or, for that matter, simple mathematics) is on a different cognitive level than difficult language comprehension or mathematics (note that there is a four-way comparison to be made there.) Again, maybe most people think that is how the concept of cognitive levels are to be understood, but I doubt they do -- and if they do, then it is sufficient for the point I was making in my original post.

Now you have come to say that complicated conversations are so cognitively demanding that it is not possible to do any sort of math while engaged in one, while math is not so cognitively demanding that you can't have a simple conversation concurrently. From the corollary of your position (as explained three paragraphs up), that would make mathematics lower-level than language comprehension! This follows from your own position because the latter is capable of excluding the former, but not vice-versa.

This just goes to show that your test is not achieving what you think it does. It is possible that you are coming from some actual science, but if so, it is getting lost in your insistence on defending this test. More relevantly, it is possible that people working in the field do, in fact, regard language comprehension as a low-level cognitive capability, but this is not the way to show they do.

If you just want a quote with minimal context, here:

In-vehicle activities, such as listening to the radio or an audio book, were associated with a low level of cognitive workload. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00187208155751...

This stuff is not going to show up in a single study, but you can start looking if you really want to gain understanding.

Again I am talking the minimum threshold, complexity of speech is hard to control for. A book can easily get rather complex after all. But, the baseline does appear to be low.

I think you’re getting hung up on the mechanics of language as a communication medium vs the message it conveys. Decoding “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” is much harder than “Do you want a coke?” not because English got harder but rather the message was more complex. Wood being a collection of trees vs dead plant matter, yellow referring to the leaves at a time of the year etc.

PS: Related literature does say using spoken commons for common tasks is distracting. However, it's not clear how much of this is due to the task and the poor implementation of voice recognition features.

That is an interesting paper, but it does not seem to have much relevance to the claims you have being making, as the distractions were mostly linguistic; they all had a linguistic component, and only the synthetic OSPAN task, designed to be difficult by combining different types of distraction, included a mathematical component as one of its concurrent distractions. There was no subset of experimental subjects being distracted by problems of differential calculus. (Even if you think calculus would be at least as distracting as the linguistic tasks -- which is actually a debatable proposition -- that would not mean that this paper gives any empirical evidence for that thesis, or for the thesis that language comprehension is, in general, a low-level capability.)

from "Again I am talking the minimum threshold..." to the PS, you appear to be trying to perpetuate the tendentious tactic of only comparing simple linguistic tasks with arbitrarily complex tasks of other types. As I pointed out previously, poetry may be complicated, but that does not mean that every other language comprehension task is simple.

The PS merely seems to be backtracking from the certainty with which you previously presented your case.

I have an additional question about this post [1], where you say "being able to do differential equations and simple conversations but not complex conversations means simple conversations are lower level", which at least strongly suggests that complex conversations are on a higher level than simple conversations. Moravec's paradox, applied to this case, would imply that understanding higher-level (complex) conversations would be computationally simpler than understanding lower-level (simple) conversations. Would you agree with this, or do you think it is an exception to the paradox?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20708362

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