There isn't really any clear delineation between 'thinking' and 'language processing' in the brain.
Language processing is thinking as far the brain is concerned and there's no evidence that these are 2 cleanly separated processes whether you 'think' in words or not.
Language is a lot more than parsing syntax, whatever your thoughts are on the matter, even LLMs are clearly doing more than that. Are there any experiments where subjects had severe cognitive deficiencies and language in its full breadth or maybe i should say communication ? came out unscathed ?
The chris experiments don't seem to go into much detail in that front.
> That doesn't contradict the argument that “thinking” and “language processing” are not two sequential or clearly separated modes in the brain but deeply intertwined.
It's not an argument, it's an assertion, that is, in fact, contradicted by the experimental evidence I described (Moro and "Chris"). Of course they are "deeply intertwined" but because of the evidence it's probably an interface between two distinctive systems rather than one general system doing two tasks.
There's no contradiction because i never argued/asserted the brain didn't have parts tuned for language, which is really all this experiment demonstrates.
> There's no contradiction because i never argued/asserted the brain didn't have centers tuned for language, which is really all this experiment demonstrates.
I don't know what you are trying to say then.
I don't see how you can say his language ability is much higher than his general problem solving ability if you don't know what proficiency of language he is capable of reaching.
When you are learning say English as a second language, there are proficiency tiers you get assigned when you get tested - A1, A2 etc
If he's learning all these languages but maxing out at A2 then his language ability is only slightly better than his general problem solving ability.
This is the point i'm trying to drive home. Maybe it's because i've been learning a second language for a couple years and so i see it more clearly but saying 'he learned x language' says absolutely nothing. People say that to mean anything from 'well he can ask for the toilet' to 'could be mistaken for a native'.
>I don't know what you are trying to say then.
The brain has over millions of years been tuned to speak languages with certain structures. Deviating from these structures is more taxing for the brain. True statement. But how on earth does that imply the brain isn't 'thinking' for the structures it is used to ? Do you say you did not think for question 1 just because question 2 was more difficult ?
> But how on earth does that imply the brain isn't 'thinking' for the structures it is used to ? Do you say you did not think for question 1 just because question 2 was more difficult ?
The point isn't to define the word "thinking" it is to show that the language capacity is a distinct faculty from other cognitive capacities.