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How effective is linguistic communication, really? (piefed.world)
submitted 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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Just-language, without any irl stuff, probably doesn't really achieve communication. Because the words don't carry their definition. And they definitely don't carry any real experience-stuff (sight, sound etc) either.

It's just assumed that you're connecting the word to the definition/experience, in your head, in a way that makes communication happen.

And that's a big assumption. It might be only 80% congruent. Or 50%. Or 5%. We could be a race of Chinese boxes for all we know.

IRL there is a verification to the process. If I order a pizza and I get a pizza then that's a pretty good sign that the communication is working.

But on the Internet, where it's just-language? Forget it. Howling solipsists all the way down.

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[–] 1 point 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Chomsky was big on the idea that we innately have a certain bunch of ideas wired into our minds at birth, and then we learn words that are connected with some of those ideas, and other words are related to the initial words. One of his examples iirc was the word "climb" being connected to an innate concept. We can imagine all kinds of species possessing this concept even without having language. Humans later evolved a language faculty that allowed associating words with the concept and the sensations of climbing. IDK how current that idea is among linguists nowadays.

I would say LLM's trained on internet text manage to communicate verbally to some extent, despite not having such biological priors. Their style ranges from annoying to sometimes hilariously wrong, but plenty of humans are the same way.

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