The Shapes of Thoughts
Is Language Necessary for Intelligence?
Arena Magazine <[email protected]>
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Arena Magazine presents an article by Keegan McNamara, "The Shapes of Thoughts", which explores the idea that intelligence is not solely bound up in language. The article discusses how shapes and forms in nature optimize survival and function, from the talon to the cell membrane. Plaid sponsors the article, highlighting its own work in making AI work in finance.
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Telling the Great American Story, in Print!
The Shapes of Thoughts
Is Language Necessary for Intelligence? By Keegan McNamara.
Today's email is presented by Plaid
A model is only as good as what it knows. Finance needs a real-time understanding of how people manage money over time. Plaid has spent 13 years building an infrastructure that can connect every part of the financial system, giving AI the context it needs to make smarter financial decisions. Plaid makes AI work in finance.
Consider the talon. It is an object of menace, of capacity for violence, purely by virtue of its shape. It is exquisitely crafted by evolution to pierce through the skin of prey animals with its innate sharpness and to hold their bodies with its curvature. Remarkably, the talon is not exceptional; it’s not a uniquely exquisite thing in the grand scheme of the world’s biological heritage. Rather, everything in the chain of material reality from the protein up to the ecosystem is the result of form optimization according to the laws of Nature. The cheetah runs with explosive speed because of its musculo-skeletal perfection, the shark’s deadliness is due to the micro-vortices formed by its skin while pursuing prey in the great oceans, and even the cell’s semi-permeable membrane shapes itself as a sphere, so it can maximize productive volume while minimizing surface area. Every organism is a naturally shape-optimized survival machine.
The dominant perspective on the nature of intelligence holds it to be bound up in language. This isn’t all that surprising, given the step-change in synthetic linguistic production delivered through large language models. The Valley that created these AI models sees a deep truth to crafting intelligences that speak in the same way humans do. Although there really is something special about language and its role in the emergence of the modern human, I believe the present fixation is a red herring.
In contrast to the absolute primacy of form, language is a latter-day aberration, a monkey business that we can’t stop obsessing over because our every thought is expressed in it. But in the theater of non-human Darwinian competition, no organism argues its way out of a fight with another that has superior morphology. Confronted by a hungry tiger in the forest, you will be torn limb from limb no matter how good your rhetoric.
To get at the foundation of shape’s relation to life: anything that physically exists has a form. A form begets a certain set of functions, and evolution chooses the winners, the best expressions of function. So when Nature decrees that an organism shall go forth and multiply, the reason it survives is contained in its form. Form is the carrier of Nature’s intelligence. DNA is the plainest case: it does nothing but encode how form should arise across multiple scales within an organism. It is also the intelligence at the root of all known life.
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