I'm using language in the sense of, say, describing whatever Broca's
area does, not in the sense of "programming language" or "encoding".
Sure, if I transfer visual experiences directly from my occipital lobe
to yours, you could call it "language", but this is torturing the
phrase. No words, no syntax, no symbols - no language.
As for Damien's point about the "rigorous" thoughts being in English...
did I post my conjecture about the linguistic-semantic cycle here?
Apparently not. Well, anyway, from a discussion with someone who
started talking about "models of models of models of self" in the mind:
> Rather than moving offs in the direction of self-referential
> ordinals, I prefer to conceptualize the mind as being composed of many
> interacting modules, many of which have the power to refer to each
> other. This discrete model removes many of the paradoxes involved in
> the "self-reference" which results from viewing the mind as a unitary
> lump, and gave rise to the "meta-perceptions *are* perceptions" model of
> modelling above.
> For example, your reasoning thoughts also present themselves as
> auditory data which are then interpreted by the sentence-understanding
> module as semantic data about which we can reason; it is this loop which
> allows one to reason about reason and which is responsible for the
> belief that language has something to do with thought and
> self-consciousness.
So yeah, I agree with Damien's statement for humans: The rigorous
thoughts are in English because it's by hearing those thoughts that we
reason about them, remember them, and fill in the blanks. But there
could be a better way. Our future selves may call it the "linguistic
bottleneck" instead of "linguistic self-awareness".
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.