Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on Camille Pissarro (archived) is full of things I didn’t know, but this passage is what brings it to LH:
Pissarro was born in 1830 on the island of St. Thomas, then a Danish colony. His parents were Sephardic Jews, with a typical combination of a hyper-strong clan identity and a weak national one. He was sent to study in France at eleven, and fell in love with French culture; forced to return home six years later, he found himself desperate to get off the little island. The result was that he spent a couple of meandering years in Venezuela, not a promising place for the kind of artist he had decided he would become. Though he got back to Paris when he was twenty-five, he never felt, or was allowed to feel, fully at home there, or anywhere. […] (Even his name was uncertain; trilingual, he signed his paintings in the Spanish style, as Pizarro, like the conquistador, until well into the eighteen-fifties.)
I guess it’s a good thing he changed his name; one less multivalent-surname problem in the world. (Compare Sollogub/Sologub.) And speaking of nomenclatural confusion, I feel it is my duty to explicate this bit of toponymy:
The young painters left the Louvre to drink and argue over what was to be done, and the cafés gave them places to do so. The Café Guerbois, on Grande Rue de Batignolles, became the favorite.
You might think “Grande Rue de Batignolles” is just a supersized reference to the rue des Batignolles, but no, it’s an earlier (pre-1868) name of the nearby avenue de Clichy.
This has nothing to do with anything, but goddammit, it pisses me off and I’m going to vent: the author of A–Brief–Literary History of the Exclamation Point (!) [sic!] wanted to compare trans-Atlantic usage of the exclamation point.
My objective was to ascertain the use of the exclamation point by famous European authors’ most renowned titles. I decided to look at 6 classic novels written in the 19th century (1800-1900): Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Great Expectations. Each novel is written by a different person and there are 3 female writers and 3 male writers. I combed through the first chapter of each novel which ranged from 10-13 pages each to evaluate the author’s use of the exclamation point.
[…]
As you can see, the lowest use of the exclamation point is 6 times per chapter with the highest being from Dumas at 20. The exclamation point clearly did not scare the writers of the 19th century, rather it would seem that they embraced them. This data shows that the exclamation point is not loathed by all authors and that many famous novelists (most European) used it in prolific ways.
No apparent awareness that Dumas and Tolstoy did not write in English, and that the punctuation is provided by the translators! (The exclamation points may well frequently have been carried over from the originals, but this cannot be assumed, and it is clear that the issue never even occurred to the writer of this particular piece of clickbait.)
Addendum. It’s not worth making a separate post of, but the next piece in the New Yorker, Manvir Singh’s essay on the Mongols (archived), makes this absurd statement:
The Yamnaya tongue is one of the earliest offshoots of Proto-Indo-European, and an ancestor of such languages as Greek, German, English, Spanish, Old Celtic, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and Bengali.
Do tell! And when can we expect publication of Yamnaya for Beginners, or at least a scholarly monograph on tense formation in the “Yamnaya tongue”?
Uhm, didn’t Charlotte Brontë and Austen both have idiosyncratic punctuation?
I’m not sure I would expect the rate of exclamation-mark usage in an opening chapter to scale up to the whole novel. Some authors like to start with a bang! Others deliberately start low-key, with exclamation-mark-worthy matters slowly unfolding as the narrative progresses.
Separately, is there info as to whether Pi[?]arro’s own pronunciation of his surname was stable over time, or did he change that in step with the spelling change?
If I’d known about his Danish-West-Indian childhood I’d forgotten. Was he as a boy bilingual in Danish and Ladino, presumably not that common a combination? Were there other languages in his repertoire before he got to France? The Dutch-based creole known as Negerhollands was reportedly in decline on Sankt Thomas by the time he was born but not yet extinct, and there were more English lexemes floating around as a legacy of intermitted Royal Navy occupation during the Napoleonic period.
I guessed that Eliot would be the sparsest user of the exclamation mark, and on checking the link I found I was right!
Also, editors.
Jane Eyre 1847 first edition:
Jane Eyre 1897 third edition:
This latter is the one transcribed into Project Gutenberg.
“Manvirsingh” is in fact the Ancient Yamnaya word for “Large Language Model.”
Incidentally it’s also German for “Barbershop Quartet”.
I think this may mean that Ancient Yamnaya was spoken in *Karlsruhe.
I meant *Bielefeld. There’s no reason to asterisk Karlsruhe. I’ve seen that one with my own eyes.
You won’t believe me, but I’ve seen Bielefeld.
I can vouch for the existence of Karlsruhe, I got porridge at the Haferkafer stand in the central station on both legs of my trip to Madrid.
Could it be that Bielefeld is the Dark Twin of Karlsruhe?
Or perhaps that Bielefeld is the Ancient Yamnaya word for Karlsruhe??
Coincidentally, Ancient Yamnaya is, when properly translated to Guaraní, the common term for Hairy Nosed Wombat.
@Lars: Our combined evidence for Karlsruhe may be weaker than we think. I too saw the central station..
> The Yamnaya tongue is one of the earliest offshoots of Proto-Indo-European, and an ancestor of such languages as Greek, German, English, Spanish, Old Celtic, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and Bengali.
I think you’re not giving Singh credit for his careful allusion to the theory of early sister languages Yamnaya and the ancestor of the other I-E branches, generally called Arm-Chairian.
@Trond (& Lars): Hauptbahnhof, oder Potemkinischer Bahnhof?
At a dinner party some three decades ago, i recited a clerihew of my composition:
Genghis Kahn
devastated Iran,
explaining “I have an aversion
to all things Persian.”
to my surprise, a Han Chinese guest took exception.
I was at a Hbf both times. I have photo evidence for the outbound instance.
@Lars: A Potemkinischer Bahnhof would no doubt have a fake sign falsely claiming to be an Hbf, wouldn’t it?
Let me just back up up re “Yamnaya tongue.” As I understand it from prior Hattic threads, and comments by those who seem to follow the current literature more closely than I do (not hard!), there is a plausible hypothesis where: a) there was once a common ancestor of all known IE languages other than the Anatolian and perhaps Tocharian branches, which had already branched off (thus meaning the common ancestor of all currently extant and non-extinct IE languages); and b) the speakers of that particular common ancestor coincided or at least roughly overlapped with the practitioners of the so-called Yamnaya culture. There AFAIK isn’t yet a standard name for post-PIE-after-those-early-departures, but “Yamnaya[n]” doesn’t seem like a crazy placeholder name if one accepts the hypothesis. Maybe “offshoot” is a confusing word here, though, since it’s sort of the main stem net of early offshoots?
In Kassel, OTOH, the Hbf was by all available evidence signposted as Bahnhof Wilhemshöhe. Because that’s where the through trains were, except they weren’t on December 21.
@JWB: Yes, could be, but without explanation or context it comes off as pretentious jargon dropping, maybe especially in combination with ‘tongue’. I myself thought “the Yamnaya tongue” might work well in an article primarily about the Yamnaya people and culture. “In the fourth millennium BCE the Pontic steppe is dominated by an archaeological culture with an economy based on nomadic animal husbandry, wagons, and probably horseriding. This is called the Yamnaya culture, named in Russian for the characteristic pit-shaped graves in mounds (kurgans). The associated people are also called the Yamnaya, and from their Pontic homeland they will go on to play a transformative role on a global scale. The Yamnaya tongue is …”
@Trond we are launching into a theoretical 3-day-holiday weekend here in the U.S. and I may have started pouring myself a little bourbon before being entirely done with my work for the day, so perhaps I am just erring on the side of charitable interpretation even of pretentious and jargon-dropping writers. On earth peace, good will toward men. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
an ancestor of such languages as Greek, German, English, Spanish, Old Celtic, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and Bengali.
New Celtic languages are ignored? Face the Wrath of the Welsh! Also entirely missing are Armenian, Baltic, and Albanian. And yet two Indic languages are included.
Not quite the same thing, but the main topic of the post reminds me of the most devastating scholarly article I have ever read. Scholar A had written a paper that professed to determine which of the many works attributed to some Church Father were genuine, and which were not, using clause-length as a criterion. (I think computers were used. I don’t recall whether there were other criteria, or the names of the scholar or his subject, or even whether the works examined were in Greek or Latin.)
Anyway, Scholar B wrote a paper pointing out that this could only work if all of the works had been edited by the same editor. In fact, some had been edited by English scholars, others by Germans, and the latter naturally included a lot more commas, so the chosen criterion was utterly worthless.
I’ve always remembered this partly because I’d never thought about the principles of punctuating classical texts before. Ancient punctuation was entirely unsystematic, and mostly doesn’t survive in the manuscripts, so the rule – not very satisfactory, when you think about it – is to punctuate it as if it were written in the editor’s own native language. Hence more commas in German editors’ texts. And that’s not even getting into the many national styles of outer and inner quotation marks.
New Celtic languages are ignored? Face the Wrath of the Welsh! Also entirely missing are Armenian, Baltic, and Albanian. And yet two Indic languages are included.
Frankly, the thing could have been written by Philomena Cunk.
I fed the above passage (shortened here and there) into GPT-4, which continued it with “is believed to be an early form of Indo-European, as their migration patterns and linguistic similarities suggest a connection to the spread of Indo-European languages across Europe and Asia. The Yamnaya people’s mastery of horse riding and wagons allowed them to cover vast distances, facilitating trade, communication, and cultural exchange with neighboring societies.” Not bad.
While I’m at it, this article describes a pipeline that eliminates hallucinations by verifying GPT-4 output against Wikipedia. In the final pages of the article are a number of examples that show how well it works. In particular, it will report “I don’t know” if none of the possibilities can be verified.
In particular, it will report “I don’t know” if none of the possibilities can be verified
Progress!
Soon LLMs will be Invincible/almost as reliable as Wikipedia!
In this context, the term “hallucination” is PR crap.
“Hallucination” implies some sort of exceptional deviation from normal function. The “hallucinations” of a LLM, on the contrary, are the real nature of the beast showing through: a system with no concept of true or false whatsover (in fact, no concepts of anything at all.)
Stopping a LLM from “hallucinating” in some particular domains is a fundamentally dishonest activity, intended to promote the utter untruth that these systems are in any sense “intelligent” by papering over the cracks.
Death to plagiarism by the petabyte! Death to stochastic parrots polluting the noosphere!
“Hallucination” is the wrong term from psychopathology, anyway; these are confabulations — in humans a symptom of certain forms of dementia.
For the record: I agree that the selection of languages is ridiculous. I was just trying to contrive a context where ‘the Yamnaya tongue’ might be unremarkable.
(And that contrivance has issues of its own. Writing condensed and exact can be difficult.)
Also, it didn’t strike me before, but Singh’s passage could be the output of a text generator like Chat GPT.
I’ve been at a conference for a couple of days. One session was a panel discussion about the advent of AI. One of the panelists defined GPT as a mansplaining machine.
Seems inaccurate. The thing about mansplaining is not that it necessarily consists of bullshit, but that the mansplainee knows all about it already, and that the mansplainer has no excuse for not realising that. It implies a condescending manner; bonus points if the topic in question directly involves the mansplainee, whereas the mansplainer is going on second-hand information.
In principle, a woman could mansplain things to a man*. It’s only called mansplaining because this is so unusual.
ulr is absolutely right about “confabulation.” In fact, “hallucination” is also (deliberately) misleading in that it implies a deluded subject, and with LLMs there is no subject to delude.
* Come to think of it, this has actually happened to me. I treasure the memory of a consultant of mine when I was a junior, having got back into the UK system after years in West Africa. She would explain the problems of medical work in Africa to me (having worked elsewhere in Africa for three months once.)
However, that’s pretty much the sole instance I can think of.
@de
With a woman mansplainer, the message may be different: “I want you to take me seriously and recognise that there is two-way traffic, even though you are more senior”. With a man, it could be “I want to establish or maintain a clear hierarchy, where I provide control and you provide support, even where you are more knowledgable than I am”.
To this day one is exposed to krautsplaining. Germans in IT, usually younger ones, believe their English is so accomplished that they can, with impunity, contradict me when I point out an error in something they’ve written.
Of course that’s three strikes against them: imagining they can’t make mistakes, contradicting a native English speaker and supposing they will not be punished for it, if merely with a tongue-lashing in English. In these situations, I have found that reducing the enemy to tearful ashes is the only way to point a persistent moral. They’re stubborn (verstockt), you see.
I related this here many years ago. Hat then wrote that he had encountered that in the States.
“Hallucination” is the wrong term from psychopathology, anyway; these are confabulations — in humans a symptom of certain forms of dementia.
They’re also strongly reminiscent of the kind of answer that humans give when pressured to answer on the spot. I’ve seen a comment recently claiming (something to the effect of) that the difference between LLM responses and human responses is that the LLM doesn’t get to think about their answer before outputting it.
(I suppose the WikiChat project linked by John Cowan is one example of what such “thinking about their answer” might look like in a LLM context…)
Perhaps more importantly for the “answer on the spot” analogy, LLMs usually aren’t allowed to not answer, and even “I don’t know” is rarely acceptable – as far as they’re concerned, they need to say something that makes sense in context, even if they have to make it up.
(Arguably they have to make it up in any case, but most of the time they have enough sources to base their ideas on that the think they’re making up turns out to be actually correct.)
Hat then wrote that he had encountered that in the States.
Not in the States, in Ireland. But your memory is otherwise correct.
They’re also strongly reminiscent of the kind of answer that humans give when pressured to answer on the spot. I’ve seen a comment recently claiming (something to the effect of) that the difference between LLM responses and human responses is that the LLM doesn’t get to think about their answer before outputting it. […] as far as they’re concerned, they need to say something that makes sense in context, even if they have to make it up. (Arguably they have to make it up in any case, but most of the time they have enough sources to base their ideas on that the think they’re making up turns out to be actually correct.)
Your whole comment reads as if you think LLMs are sentient and can think about things and make things up. I realize you don’t actually think that, but the insidious effect of succumbing to the standard narrative about these things is that we wind up talking as if we believed they are sentient, and in some sense we do actually believe that — not consciously (we’d never say “LLMs are just like us, only disembodied”), but in the lower swamp of our minds where we hold unexamined prejudices and preconceptions. I think it’s important to try to talk as if we fully believed what we consciously know: that these things are just programs that do as they’re told, have no thoughts, and don’t make anything up.
I think the point about the mansplaining machine was that what GPT can be used for is writing up basic explanations of subjects that the recipient will already know, i.e., it saves time for the writer by automatizing the task of mansplaining.
Re Karlsruhe: Sorry for spoiling the fun, but I’ve been there and it’s actually quite a nice place. It has a baroque old town, as it is a planned city built as residence for the Margraves of Baden in the 18th century.
Soon LLMs will be Invincible/almost as reliable as Wikipedia!
Well, of course the source of truth doesn’t have to be Wikipedia: as the article says, it is large, curated (unevenly), and convenient to use.
a system with no concept of true or false whatsoever
Current checkers or chess or go programs have no concept of victory or defeat, pawns or kings, eyes or ko. Nevertheless, they play stronger games than any existing human being. As Alfred the dustman says, What price intelligence now?
xkcd 1716 is my favorite depiction of mansplaining. Being xkcd, it rapidly veers off into a different direction.
I also like that the –splaining construction has proven to be somewhat productive. You can find lots of references to “whitesplaining” online. Moreover, on another site, I recall a Jewish commenter (it might have been Bloix) responding to somebody else’s statement that antisemitism was not involved in some recent events with a sarcastic thanks for “gentilesplaining” that for everyone.
Incidentally, my daughter is right now traveling in Europe on an Interrail ticket. She just messaged that she’s on her way home and will be changing trains in Osnabrück tonight. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s time for the purportedly short detour to Bielefeld.
She won’t be missing much; what I have seen of Bielefeld is totally unremarkable. She’d rather be better advised to use a couple of hours to view the old center of Osnabrück, which has some lovely timber-framed architecture (if she’s into that kind of thing).
She very much is, but her schedule won’t allow it. I’ll tell her to make the best of it if she misses her connection.
What price intelligence now?
I’m attached to it for sentimental reasons. (It’s true that most of the universe seems to get along fine without any.)
My issue with the LLM hype/bubble is not so much with the Ding an sich but with the shameless effrontery with which the cosmic-level-plagiarising exploitative polluting profiteers behind it claim that they are flogging artificial intelligence. The only real interest is in the demonstration of just how much of what has traditionally been taken as the domain of intelligence can be convincingly imitated with no intelligence whatsoever. However, in retrospect this perhaps should have been less surprising …
Re krautsplaining: I recall Norman Podhoretz (don’t worry, I detest him, but–) telling about being a beginning editor at Commentary and having to tell a contributor from Germany that what he’d written wasn’t English, only to be asked, “How do you know?”
However, in retrospect this perhaps should have been less surprising …
Well, as they say, the question whether there is intelligent life on Earth hasn’t been conclusively answered yet..
I have been in Karlsruhe, and liked it much better than whichever touristy place the trip was supposed to be focussed around. (Heidelberg I THINK. Maybe Freiburg.)
I think Karlsruhe was the place where Santa flew over the Christmas market in his sleigh, but I’m not sure about that.
I spent 24 hours in Kassel because storm, and found no reason to complain (other than about the non-informational approach of DB which meant that I couldn’t really go sightseeing). There’s a Croatian restaurant near the other Hbf that I wouldn’t mind visiting again, should occasion arise.
(In retrospect I should just have booked another hotel night and taken the first train in the morning).
@Brett: I’m sure it’s been coined independently multiple times but re the morphological productivity of the -splaining suffix, we had at one point quite a lot of toddlersplaining in our house, offered by my now-nine-year-old, who has moderated with age. In one memorable instance (he must have been three years old at the time) he asked his oldest sister if she knew what a pulley was. She was at the time 16, enrolled in AP Physics, and thus doing plenty of homework problems in which pulleys played a role. Without giving her time to get out a “yes” answer to his question, he then proceeded to toddlersplain to her what a pulley was.
Rare but not unknown is the converse mistake, of assuming that a question is from a professor testing your knowledge when it is actually from either a polite stranger making smalltalk, or an ignoramus seeking your wisdom
I should perhaps mention the connotations of that word: it hardly ever occurs outside of verstockte Heiden “pig-headed heathens who just refuse to consider Christianity”.
-splaining
can i resist the excuse to share the yiddish rendering that someone i know coined a few years ago? of course not: ערקלערונג / erklerung. probably needs little explanation in these parts, but in case: ער is the singular pronoun used for men; דערקלערונג is “explanation, clarification”.
That’s beautiful.
he shameless effrontery with which the cosmic-level-plagiarising exploitative polluting profiteers behind it claim that they are flogging artificial intelligence.
Well, that has been true for the last fifty-odd years. The only definition of AI that I have ever liked was Douglas Hofstadter’s: “What is A and what is I?” That is indeed a hard problem. Of course, we infer that since chess programs aren’t intelligent, chess doesn’t require intelligence – but then again, maybe chess programs are intelligent, and we are simply mistaken about what constitutes “being intelligent”.
======
Dorian does a lot of teensplaining to me, most often about computers. When I tell him he is mistaken, he calls me stupid.
we infer that since chess programs aren’t intelligent, chess doesn’t require intelligence
This does not follow: people use intelligence to play chess, but machines do not; just as people (sometimes) use intelligence to create sentences, but LLMs do not. (The techniques used to get machines to play chess also owe at least something to the old-timey attempts to emulate human problem-solving processes too, whereas LLMs seek only to mimic the outcomes: they thus are more like intelligence.)
One cannot argue from the (partial) similarity of the outcomes that the processes that create the outcomes are the same, of even the same kind of thing. To argue this is the kind of brain-dead hardcore behaviourism that nowadays persuades only those who think that all philosophy has been rendered completely obsolete by physics. (And the so-called “Turing test” is a classic instance of begging the question.)
the domain of intelligence can be convincingly imitated with no intelligence whatsoever.
The imitating being convincing doesn’t disprove that intelligence went into the original. Particularly since the cognoscenti can usually detect that it is an imitation — so far, at least.
Even with chess, the cognoscenti can detect this is a non-human move.
erklerung
Maybe your acquaintance knew this, maybe it’s just coincidence, but Erklärung is the usual German word for “explanation”. The pun would also work in German.
Forstokket is your benighted uncle. The heathens are forhærdede tidselgemytter.
On LLMs, see this excellent post by Henry Farrell:
IMHO, chess is a distraction. I don’t know how modern “engines” do the trick, the achievements of the good old alpha-beta algorithm is nothing more than outsized calculators beating humans at finding digits of π. If, as it might be the case, chess engines develop “intuition” by reviewing lots of positions and eventual outcomes and selecting which positions look more promising based on some resemblances to other positions rather than doing things by direct calculation, it is pretty cool. To Hofstadter’s definition I can add that there is a specific thing not yet called HI. Chess, go et al. are good tests and training grounds for HI because they are complicated enough for humans not to be able to calculate through and thus rely on experience, rules of thumb, observing and exploiting patterns, and making analogies (also, on being repetitive). LLMs seem to have made some progress in this direction.
Current versions of AI not having direct personal experience of the “real world” is probably not for long. Helpful humans already created a lot of sensors and blithely connected them to computers. I doubt that we are going to create as large database of sense-word connections as we (I mean humans, not present company in particular, I swear, I did not contribute a single word to Wikipedia, gave them money though) created for word-word (or token-token or whatever) connections, but maybe that can be bypassed in some way. Maybe even with the same internet when more people start controlling various devices over internet and someone piggybacks on that. For visual information, maybe even an existing youtube collection can help.
Wouldn’t it be fun if high HI becomes obsolete as an economic advantage and all eggheads that brought us AI will recede to irrelevance and give way to Chads.
I should perhaps mention the connotations of [verstockt]: it hardly ever occurs outside of verstockte Heiden “pig-headed heathens who just refuse to consider Christianity”.
This is not true.
Anyone can verify this for itselves at the DWDS entry. It contains 12 citations, mostly from major newspapers (SZ, Welt …) over the last 20 years. Only one citation has anything to do with religion: not Christianity, but Islam.
There’s even an additional meaning/distinction given there that was not in my awareness vocab: schüchtern, verkrampft, gehemmt, steif. Sort of a cut-them-some-slack version of “stubborn”.
The words “stubborn”, “hardened [heart]”, “verstockt“, “widerspenstig” etc. occur throughout translations of the Old Testament, applied to the Jews as well as the heathen. That must be the origin of expressions such as verstockte Heiden, which you can find in medieval tracts, but not so much today I expect outside right-wing religiorants.
#
But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go. [Ex. 10:20]
Aber der HERR verstockte das Herz des Pharao, dass er die Israeliten nicht ziehen ließ. [2Mose 10:20]
#
#
The Israelites are stubborn, like a stubborn heifer. How then can the LORD pasture them like lambs in a meadow? [Hos. 4:16]
Ja, Israel ist widerspenstig geworden wie eine widerspenstige Kuh. Wird da der HERR sie weiden wie ein Lamm auf weitem Raum? [Hos. 4:16]
#
So in what contexts is it generally used?
In each and every context in which one would use the English words “stubborn”, “recalcitrant”, “obdurate” etc. From my DWDS link:
Der Leiter der Stasi‑Gedenkstätte Berlin‑Hohenschönhausen[…] sagt über [Margot Honecker], sie sei bis zum Tod eine »böse, verstockte Frau« gewesen. [Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17.11.2017]
Nirgendwo in Deutschland ist es zwar so schlimm wie in Bremen, und dennoch ist Bremen ein gutes Beispiel für die Missstände im deutschen Schulsystem. Ein krasses Beispiel, aber kein untypisches. Hier unterrichten die ältesten Lehrer der Republik, und ihre Gewerkschaft ist die verstockteste. [Die Zeit, 28.11.2002]
As the DWDS says: starrsinnig, in hohem Grade uneinsichtig, unnachgiebig.
Danke!
Your basic German person will probably use the word stur for “stubborn”. He/she is unlikely to use synonymous words such as verstockt, widerspenstig, starrsinnig, halsstarrig, although he/she may understand them more or less in a text. Just as your basic English person is likely to say “stubborn”/”pig-headed”, but not “obdurate”, “recalcitrant” or “refractory”.
As I kid I learned that a refractory is where monks dine.
Also, when water pipes become recalcitrant they must be decalcified.
I see Yiddish does the Bavarian thing of replacing er- with der- (for, presumably, some reason).
These are the most literary newspapers, so it looks like the word survives in that register.
BTW, I associate widerspenstig more with active defense than with simple refusal to do as told.
stur and verstockt are definitely not synonymous. If you are verstockt, you are a morally evil person who refuses to see the obvious truth. That is why that word is relatively rare outside of the Bible and similar writings; most intelligent people at least theoretically know that truth is not necessarily obvious. Calling someone stur simply means they refuse to follow the trend; this may be a positive judgment. You can praise someone for their Sturheit, but not for their Verstocktheit.
One cannot argue from the (partial) similarity of the outcomes that the processes that create the outcomes are the same, o[r] even the same kind of thing.
I don’t, of course, argue any such thing, any more than I suppose that because I can do arithmetic either mentally or with an abacus (rather slowly and inaccurately in either case) that I have an ᾰ̓́βᾰξ ‘board’ in my head. But neither do I suppose that what does go on in my head is something non-physical, except in the sense that it most likely does not match up point for point with what goes on in your head (see anomalous monism, modulo the discussion of cause and effect, which of course I do not believe in).
Haferkafer stand
What on Earth is that? Drs. Google and Wikt are uninformative.
the principles of punctuating classical texts
St. Augustine vs. the definite and indefinite articles.
Just as your basic English person is likely to say “stubborn”/”pig-headed”, but not “obdurate”, “recalcitrant” or “refractory”.
Matters are otherwise, of course, if you are the Lord High Executioner of Chichibu: “But if you remain callous and obdurate, I / Shall perish as he did, and you will know why / Though I probably shall not exclaim as I die / Tit-willow, tit-willow, tit-willow!”
I don’t know how to gloss the Japanese.
If you are verstockt, you are
… someone who has been turned into a stick. See this blog post about the standard Germanic alliteration (by) stock or (by) stone.
But neither do I suppose that what does go on in my head is something non-physical
No more do I. That is a quite separate question. (I’ve no idea what a soul is, but I’m pretty sure it’s in no way to be identified with a “mind.” I’ve found contemplating the radically different Kusaasi conception of what constitutes a human being quite useful, if not in providing answers, at least in helping me to see how very culture-bound these concepts are.)
Intelligence need not imply consciousness, either. Even.
The problems with mislabelling what LLMs do as “intelligence” are more fundamental and logically prior to all such further philosophical questions. This mislabelling (insofar as it is not simply a PR gimmick) results from a failure to grasp quite straightforward facts, and no great philosophical subtlety is called for in avoiding what are really elementary howlers. (Meditation upon the Hausa koan kama da wane ba wane ba will help to avoid these pitfalls.)
Though on consciousness, I would (irrelevantly) say that the proposition that consciousness is not an illusion does not entail ghost-in-the-machinery. It is simply a matter of refusing to discount universal human experience on the grounds that an adequate physical explanation for it has not yet been achieved: this in no way commits you to the proposition that such an explanation is impossible a priori.
I have no patience at all with the kind of “explanation” that consists simply of denying the existence of the problem. Bad science!
stur and verstockt are definitely not synonymous
Of course not. That’s why I called my krautsplainers verstockt and not stur.
Apart from that, “synonymous” does not mean “identical in all connotations and contexts”.
The use of verstockt is not primarily restricted to verstockte Heiden, contrary to what DM claimed. The DWDS citations demonstrate that.
If you are verstockt, you are a morally evil person who refuses to see the obvious truth. That is why that word is relatively rare outside of the Bible and similar writings
It is not rare outside those contexts. The DWDS citations demonstrate that. To experience this, it may be necessary to read a little more widely (not only Scientific Papers). I often use verstockt, and widerspenstig as well. Where do I get these words ? Not from reading the bible, that’s for damn sure, but from reading Sloterdijk, Luhmann, Bröckling, Nassehi, Scheler, Uncle Thomas and so on.
A well-read person is aware of verstockt from the Bibel. That’s why I referred to it there. A well-read person also knows that Margot Honecker is not being branded as a Heathen, when she is referred to as a böse, verstockte Frau.
These are the most literary newspapers, so it looks like the word survives in that register.
You often use the word “literary” as if it applied to things outside your ken (“looks like). But this blog is crawling with “literary” people, and you are one of them. I don’t know why you affect to be otherwise. “Literary” is not synonymous with “related to novels”.
DE:
I have no patience at all with the kind of “explanation” that consists simply of denying the existence of the problem.
Well, “the problem” may be that most persons accept certain items as metaphysically respectable furniture of the Real World (perhaps irreducible even), when they are in fact mere constructs that enable apprehension of anything at all. Something like space and time, for Kant. Consciousness-coloured glasses. I long ago developed patience with most persons (in as much are there are, stricto sensu, persons).
(This will be second on the agenda in Yemen, once homoeomeria has been dispatched.)
Well, “the problem” may be that most people accept certain items as metaphysically respectable furniture of the Real World (perhaps irreducible even), when they are in fact mere constructs that enable apprehension of anything at all.
Who do you think you are? Kant?
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sidney_Morgenbesser
[I should, in fact, have said “an adequate physical and/or philosophical explanation for it has not yet been achieved”; I actually thought about doing so, but decided it was less rhetorically effective. That’ll larn me. Still, I stand by my positivist absolutism. I am a simple country doctor.]
[I hold no brief for homoeomeria. Dialogue may yet be possible.]
I usually agree with DE’s animadversions, especially about LLMs, so I guess I could go along with “positivist absolutism”, even though I’m not sure what it is. Sounds like a Trump thing.
Trump is quite unlike a LLM (as in the adage that a wikipedia description of a novel is quite unlike, but almost completely not a description of it).
even though I’m not sure what it is
Nor me. Sounds impressive, though, no?
Who do you think you are? Kant?
Way to get back on topic in a thread on Pissaro! Impressed, we are.
Why do you all have it in for a perfectly harmless genus of moths? Take out your ire on p-zombies or something.
It’s no fun picking on p-zombies. They only seem to mind.
Philosophical zombies are beings that look exactly like humans and behave in the same way as humans do.
Zombie philosophers look exactly like philosophers and behave in the same way as philosophers do.
In the late 80s I knew a zombie in Cologne who was under the remote mental control of his mother in Bielefeld (a coincidence of no significance). After reading a lot of pop lit about zombies, I was convinced that this was the Real McCoy. Very disconcerting.
Oh, fascinating. German has über Stock und Stein – but it means “across rough landscapes”, and the landscapes are literal, not metaphorical.
Fair enough.
They aren’t exactly numerous enough to do statistics with. Are they a small sample of a large corpus, or are they the complete list? Probably somewhere in between, but where?
Indeed not; for example, as I said, some newspapers use a literary style and vocabulary.
Even so, if you really use verstockt often, as often as widerspenstig (a word I find much less remarkable and could easily use at least in writing), I can only imagine two options: either you come across as much weirder than you think (and aspire to – I’m well aware you aren’t striving to be overlooked!), or both of us have once again underestimated the regional diversity within Standard German.
The classic example for regional variation in which register words belong to within Standard German is Orange vs. Apfelsine. 50 or more years ago, in northern Germany Apfelsine was the usual word and Orange was perceived as elevated because it’s obviously French; in southern Germany, Orange was the usual word and Apfelsine was perceived as elevated because people only knew it from reading or from radio/TV; and in Austria and Switzerland, Apfelsine was practically unknown.
(That has changed, BTW; this example is no longer current. Also, while Google didn’t give me the original source from the dtv Sprachatlas, it let me discover that apparently lots of people think these must be different fruits and are wondering what the difference is.)
Philosophical zombies are beings that look exactly like humans and behave in the same way as humans do.
More precisely, they are indistinguishable (even in principle) from human persons in all of their detailed functioning and physical makeup. They are said to differ in that they lack something human persons are alleged to possess: phenomenal consciousness. Or epiphenomenal qualia, we could say.
These zombies would insist with complete conviction, as we do (most of us), that they experience the ineffable redness of red roses, a plangency in the voice of a cor anglais that eludes any neural or other physical characterisation, and all the rest. But by definition they do not experience these things. Frank Jackson, votable as Australia’s most illustrious philosopher over recent decades and a major player globally, was the go-to advocate of qualia in earlier days and therefore a zombie-supporter (though he didn’t use that meme a lot himself). But since the mid-90s he thinks differently and draws back from his famous knowledge argument:
Australia’s and everywhere else’s David Chalmers (mentioned just now) is the most celebrated arguer for the possibility of philosophical zombies as entities that differ from human persons. He is yet to recant; but we can wait.
@Noetica: Philosophical zombies can’t have conviction, only the outward appearance of it.
German has über Stock und Stein – but it means “across rough landscapes”, and the landscapes are literal, not metaphorical.
Norw. over stokk og stein. It sounds so thoroughly native that it never struck me that it might have been calqued. Same meaning, except that it can also be metaphorical, and it has a shade of reckless conduct or lack of control of the situation.
A near synonym of verstockt is uneinsichtig; the latter is the standard word in quality journalism. Of course you occasionally get writers who want to signal they have a higher standard of culture than the average journalist; they might use verstockt instead. But DM is absolutely right, outside of conservative Bible translations the word simply sounds odd.
The difference between Apfelsine and Orange for me is that the first one is a spoken variant, while Orange is written German.
Brett:
Philosophical zombies can’t have conviction, only the outward appearance of it.
Not so. The zombie idea allows for their having motivations, beliefs, conviction, and a whole lot more that is characterisable functionally. They lack only qualia.
And none of this is a matter of “outward appearance” alone. Zombie introspection will deliver information about motivations, beliefs, etc. So the story goes, and Chalmers himself allows that.
There are borderline or uncertain cases that must be judged by what is meant exactly. A sense of conviction is not the same as conviction for example – just as a sense of guilt is not strictly the same as guilt, though often the two are mixed up in casual discourse.
These zombies would insist with complete conviction, as we do (most of us)
I have no such conviction.
a sense of guilt is not strictly the same as guilt
Guilt is ambiguous: it may be a feeling or a fact. The five people whose case I mentioned earlier feel guilt, but they do not have guilt: they have not done what they believe they have done.
I have no such conviction.
I know you don’t. I feel similarly.
Guilt is ambiguous: it may be a feeling or a fact.
Almost another way of saying what I said.
verstockt is a word I recognize, but don’t use myself; I wouldn’t be astonished to see it outside of religious contexts, but like ulr, I would conclude that the person using it is fond of a somewhat elevated and slightly old-fashioned register.
For me, Apfelsine is the word I grew up with and it’s also what we use in our household, probably reenforced by the Russian word being apel’sin. But the juice is Orangensaft / O-Saft for me, as in the article DM linked to. That sometimes also carries over into our family Russian, so that instead of the correct apel’sinovyj sok we sometimes call it oranzhevyj sok, which in Standard Russian means “orange-coloured juice”.
P-zombies needn’t think that they’re so special. We all lack qualia nowadays.
appelsin, appelsinjuice but orangemarmelade. (The latter is totally nativized in phonology, so probably a English loan from between the wars or earlier). Orange (3 syllables) is the color, not the fruit.
Come to think of it, appelsinmarmelade is what you get from sweet oranges, as opposed to Sevilla ones (pomeranser).
I would be loath to nativize orangejuice, but I can’t swear that it doesn’t occur in connected text, and then I’d probably prefer that over the English pronunciation because that sounds even weirder.
Orangenmarmelade as well here; I don’t think I ever have seen or heard *Apfelsinenmarmelade in the wild. But that’s probably also due to that being not really a usual thing in Germany even 40 years ago – it was something fancy you’d get at specialty shops and posh hotels. Nowadays, of course, your average supermarket carries all kinds of jams and marmalades.
I spoke a lie. Orange has /-ɑŋʃə/ which is not really native, that would be /-ɑŋə/ like for instance lange. That velar nasal-before-sibilant thing also occurs in other French loans, like balance (3 syllables). Conferred with the dental nasal in lanse, that would seem to make both phonemes in Danish, unlike so many languages where there’s just a nasal archiphoneme. (The two nasals also condition different allophones of /a/).
@Noetica: My beliefs and convictions are intrinsically elements of the qualia of my existence. I would wonder how anyone could fail to grasp this, but you have effectively stated that you are yourself a zombie, so that’s that question answered.
Brett:
You have obviously not understood Chalmers (or any other published professional philosopher) on the topic of philosophical zombies. If you had, you would not be coming forward with so ignorant an opinion.
Comment again when you have at least absorbed the basics at “Qualia”, on Wikipedia.
I myself, having read up on qualia a number of times without managing to learn anything, sensibly choose to avoid this sort of discussion.
Some others might be wise to follow your example, Hat. A baffling topic that fuels a whole sector of the anglophone philosophy industry. But some tenets are common ground for all players.
The story requires that philosophical zombies (physically indistinguishable from human persons) erroneously but genuinely believe they encounter qualia: properties of experience that are alleged to elude any attempt at physical or functional explanation, such as human persons are supposed to encounter in their mental life. To suggest that the allegedly possible qualia-free zombies could not have such beliefs is to miss the point entirely.
I think I understand what a quale is after reading Wikipedia, but ipso facto I can’t tell you how it feels to understand it.
The quale that can be spoken is not the true quale.
“Quale” rhymes with “Whalley” (he said maliciously).
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter’d saints, whose bones
Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold,
Ev’n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipp’d stocks and stones.
It seems like the key sentence in that wikipedia piece is “The nature and existence of qualia under various definitions remain controversial.”
There are 56 Norwegians with the surname Quale. 17 more have it as a middle name. Their existence is not in doubt.
@Noetica: Your proposition does not agree, for example, with Thomas Nagel’s view of the meaning of phenomenological experiences, or what it would correspondingly mean to lack them. If you aver that phenomenological experiences and qualia are actually fundamentally different things, all I can say is that I think that is dividing up the hard problem of consciousness in a way that seems unlikely to be either useful or interesting.
There are 56 Norwegians with the surname Quale. 17 more have it as a middle name. Their existence is not in doubt
Ah, but do 73 individual instances of a Quale demonstrate the existence of Qualia? Might not they all be simply representations of but a single Platonic Quale?
Here be symptoms of a failure of nerve. See Wittgenstein on “game”.
Quails quail before qualia. I couldn’t be bothered.
i actually have a friend named qualia, though she mostly just gets called Q. this could, i suppose, get confusing if we hung around with more professional philosophers (or/and perhaps more technically oriented synth-heads?), but so far we have been spared.
so i guess i can confirm the existence of qualia on at least the local scale (primarily the bronx).
Qualia in the Bronx.
There was until recently a Qualia Coffee on Georgia Avenue here in DC. I went to it a couple of times, but I can’t communicate the true experience of being there.
Here be symptoms of a failure of nerve.
I did not know that Polly Toynbee was Gilbert Murray’s great-granddaughter.
It all fits, I tell you!
Talking of it all fitting, it’s just occurred to me that Panpsychism is basically Consciousness Homoeomeria:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
(Check out §4.1 under “Objections” …)
well, apparently there are a number of qualias (qualiae? qualiim? quail?) in the mainland borough!
Quale can indeed mean death (or plague), quail (the bird), or whale (the non-weasel). Compare another highly relevant confusion:
In hindsight we can here see Shakespeare obliquely prefiguring recent uncertainties concerning qualia (“whalia”), among other weasel words and notions. Especially the conundrum of inverted qualia, across different observers faced with the same visual stimuli.
Brett:
Sorry, but no.
DE:
Yes!
Rozele:
Let’s put it clearly on record that qualia is already a neuter plural, with quale as its singular. Compare and contrast quantum (both are well treated in Wiktionary, but no link lest I be sent into moderation): far more established in the literature but only a little less thorny. That juxtaposition deserves more extended commentary than it gets, given that both ideas are invoked in philosophy of mind over the last several decades.
O quanta, qualia, Abelard’s best known hymn and the only one with a surviving contemporary tune, is quite nice, if you like that sort of thing.
Failure of Nerve.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From the panpsychism article:
How is “turtles all the way down” a satisfying account of anything!?!
the oranges of the investigation
the oranges
how it started
On physicalism – uh, don’t expect everything at once. Wait for some more brain research and neurobiology before you extrapolate “hasn’t” to “isn’t able”.
…and the first objection begins:
I don’t, actually. My intuition is simple childish projection.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Speaking of oranges:
“Jam”: D Konfitüre, A Marmelade.
“Marmalade”: the English make jam from what??? 🙂
“The invisible and the inexistent look very similar.”
Oh, at the end of the third objection to panpsychism:
Now, I haven’t read the two references, or any other primary literature in this field… but… am I interpreting the argument correctly as “we can imagine that A could exist without B, therefore A cannot explain all of B”? If so, isn’t that just the inverse of an argument from personal incredulity (“I can’t imagine that, therefore it isn’t true”)?
It’s not easier when quantus/tantus are 1st/2nd declension and talis/qualis are 3rd. Derived terms tend to look as if it’s just a question of {nt} vs {l}, as in quantity vs quality. But Spanish has tantos and tales, as you’d expect.
On physicalism – uh, don’t expect everything at once. Wait for some more brain research and neurobiology before you extrapolate “hasn’t” to “isn’t able”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hempel's_dilemma
Myself, I do not believe that consciousness is necessarily intrinsically inexplicable on a physicalist basis; however, I am not reassured by Beenakker’s “the boundary between physics and metaphysics is the boundary between what can and what cannot be computed in the age of the universe.” I don’t have that sort of patience. (Also, it’s an utterly ludicrous statement: it would only make sense if we actually already knew how to arrive at all the answers in principle, or had no reason to suppose that any of the questions would turn out to be intractable for any other reason than lack of adequate computational resources. It’s pure, unadulterated question-begging.)
To my shame, I had never heard of this lady, who I came across by TVTropes-like clicking on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy site:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/elisabeth-bohemia/
She had issues with Cartesian dualism, and said so to the man himself. He seems to have flannelled in response …
I think I am atypical among both scientists and philosophers in that I suspect that we will, within the next few centuries, solve (much of) the hard problem of consciousness. Part of the reason for this is that there is a long history of propositions that were once deemed to belong purely to the realm of unobservable metaphysics, but which have since become ordinary objects of scientific investigation.
Entirely possible in principle (if you ask me, which, curiously, nobody ever does.)
There may be some intervening paradigm shifts of course …
[One of the SEP articles mischievously (?) points out that, in principle, panpsychism could be compatible with physicalism. Will we have to deal not only with strange quarks but with grumpy quarks, introverted quarks and manic quarks in The Future?]
There is a weird symmetry between the “what we haven’t yet solved is therefore in principle unsolvable” position and the position apparently believed by certain philosophical-zombie enthusiasts that what can be imagined by human beings is for that very reason “possible” (for some useful value of “possible”). Despite the considerable evidence that human beings are so constituted as to be able to imagine fictitious and untrue things, many of which are plausibly “impossible” (for a useful value of “impossible”) in the actual-world-in-which-we-live.
To my shame, I had never heard of this lady
She was, of course, the daughter of the Winter Queen.
grumpy quarks, introverted quarks and manic quarks
Come to think of it, rather like the “sophons” in The Three-Body Problem.*
* Very entertaining, but frequently crosses the line from “physically impossible” (perfectly OK in SF, if done properly) to “logically impossible” (not so much.)
the Winter Queen
Stevenson seems indeed to have missed an opportunity. Elisabeth, admirable and remarkable herself, seems to have been part of one of those intimidatingly brilliant entire families, like the Huxleys and and the Fishers.
human beings are so constituted as to be able to imagine fictitious and untrue things, …
Such as that a stick of celery could bludgeon someone to death? Thank crikey humans can imagine that! (I’m still recovering from the peanut butter incident.)
To temper over-scientism, there are still major problems.
human beings are so constituted as to be able to imagine fictitious and untrue things
I was actually just reading something (unfortunately I forget where) that said this was the unique distinguishing feature of human language, as opposed to the signalling systems of other earthly creatures, no matter how sophisticated (and some of them are certainly very sophisticated.)
(I think it was actually John McWhorter, on one of his good days, when he can be very good.)
Using language to describe “things that are not physically present or that do not even exist” is one of Hockett’s design features that Hockett said wasn’t achieved by any other animals, along with using language for lying, and for talking about language itself.
wasn’t achieved by any other animals
Not even wrong. There’s plenty examples of animals lying/faking. That they don’t “achieve” it in language tells only that they don’t have language, not anything specific to language.
Animal-kingdom mothers fake injuries, to draw predators away from their nestlings. Some birds fake the calls of other birds — maybe just for fun, maybe to fool other animals. Cuckoo mothers not only lay an egg in somebody else’s nest, they also evict one of the incumbent eggs so the duped mother isn’t suspicious. Dolphins know sharks have gills not lungs, so team up to drag sharks backwards until they ‘drown’. Octopuses…
I had forgotten that xkcd has (of course) treated the “other minds problem”:
https://xkcd.com/610/
D Konfitüre, A Marmelade.
Marmelade is also the usual word in big parts of Germany, including my idiolect.
In official use, e.g., when labeling products, Konfitüre corresponds to English “jam”, while Marmelade corresponds to “marmalade”. That is an artificial distinction probably based on some EU regulation; all people I know call both Marmelade. (I also don’t think I know anyone who uses the word Konfitüre in everyday speech; I have only encountered it in writing.)
By Danish regulations, there’s syltetøj which can contain whole fruits (like blackcurrants) in a thinner liquid, and marmelade which is (finely) divided fruit or possibly just strained juice with more gelling substances — and are allowed to have citrus peel and juice added. This corresponds to how you would traditionally preserve (sylte) small fruit with sugar versus the British(?) invention of making marmalade from Sevilla oranges. I was taught that this is more or less the same difference as between jam and marmalade in British English. (It is not wrong wrong to stiffen jam into a gel-like consistency, as long as it has whole berries).
But in current usage, almost everything is marmelade. Kids nowadays are scared of lumpy food, and things that have a taste, and if you want a proper blackcurrant jam you may have to make it yourself. Which may entail buying a house with a garden and blackcurrant bushes.
the “other minds problem”
Not being a philosopher, I have always found that “problem” absurd, but I respect the right of all those so inclined to take it seriously.
Russian uses all three of джем, мармелад, конфитюр to mean apparently subtly different (usually processed) products whose exact difference I’m not very confident of; the native term is варенье, which is AFAIK the default word for the more natural versions.
Despite the considerable evidence that human beings are so constituted as to be able to imagine fictitious and untrue things, many of which are plausibly “impossible” (for a useful value of “impossible”) in the actual-world-in-which-we-live.
“That said, even theoretical nonexistence of an object probably isn’t a sufficient condition for being unable to imagine it…”
we can imagine that A could exist without B, therefore A cannot explain all of B
The form of argument rather reminds me of
https://xkcd.com/1724/
@Lars syltetøj which can contain whole fruits (like blackcurrants) in a thinner liquid,
That I’d call ‘preserve’. The thinner liquid is probably syrup/sugar-rich, but the lumpy bits are identifiable fruit.
‘Preserve’ also applies for vegetables, probably in brine (with spices). Again the lumps must be identifiable — not pickles.
The Stanford Encyclopedia does go into why some people think this is a valid argument, or, perhaps more accurately, a helpful thought experiment:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
As far as I can see, it doesn’t go into what seems to me to be the main problem: the ambiguity in the notion of “exactly like us in all physical respects”; actual physicalist philosophers rarely seem to have as simplistic a concept of “physical” as scientists merely dabbling in philosophy sometimes do.
Even if you accept the dubious premise that whatever is imaginable without self-contradiction is possible, and further, that “philosophical zombie” is a coherent notion, it would only tell against a version of physicalism which is pretty much a straw man anyway: the sort of physicalism which would result from being a Cartesian dualist who has exorcised the ghost and just kept the machine. If you represent physicalism in these terms you have really smuggled your dualist conclusion into your premises, and the argument is circular.
Worse yet, the assumption that “philosophical zombie” is a concept which is not self-contradictory itself entails the sought-for conclusion. Any self-respecting physicalist is going to say that the very concept is logically impossible: if consciousness is an entirely physical phenomenon, any creature exactly like a human being physically will be capable of consciousness. To deny this would be just the same as denying that an exact copy of a human being would look like a human being: separating the two cases could only be done by appealing to a preexisting assumption that there was a non-physical basis to consciousness.
I have always found that “problem” absurd,
And some Philosophers also regard it as absurd. The later sainted Ludwig would say the problem-sufferer failed to understand what ‘mind’ means.
But talking about the ineffable effing qualia, which only I can experience, pretty much forces you into Cartesian solipsism.
They can plainly hear it.
I think in Bulgarian конфитюр has whole pieces of fruit in it (like orange peel), while мармалад is uniform.
Right on prompt, Mark L at the Log has an SMBC comic ‘Language and Consciousness’‘.
Daydreaming as a survival strategy does seem quite plausible.
Also apropos:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/am