If humans did not have language, it is unlikely that human society would be the same. Language can be described as a function of the human mind, useful for communication to the mind, from the mind, and within the mind. Simply, language is—information—a subdivision of memory—a function. Language has access to all information spaces of the mind, including its division, memory and others outside of it—emotions, feelings and regulation of internal senses. Language is based in the mind. It is often an access to another mind. However, if anything else, aside from humans, has the capacity for expansive language, it can be described as having a mind, or something close to a mind.
What is intelligence without language?
The importance of language to humans can also be viewed by what human society would be without reading, writing, or speech? How potent would thoughts be if thinking was not possible in a language? How intelligent would humans have been without language? What is the role of language in affect? How does language expand intent? What is the relationship between language and subjectivity? How does language strengthen unity or otherwise?
Language possibility or availability, as information, within the mind is a leap even though there are several languages around the world. Language can be described as structured, identifiable and almost unified information that minds can use.
This structure decisively shapes intelligence. No matter how intelligent any non-human organism is, the capacity is either limited to a habitat or limited to a few objectives. There is little to no furtherance from generation to generation, in transcendent ways, because there is no broad language.
Language is the basis of the levitated advance of humans from other organisms. Humans would still have been intelligent without language, but progress, without instructions, would have been capped.
Machines now have large language models
If this element of intelligence, language, is now available to machines, what does that mean for human society? Large language models [LLMs] now hold intelligent information of progress. LLMs are able to communicate to the human mind and be communicated with, like another mind.
The benefit and risk with LLMs are that they have the one important thing that binds human society, language. Language can be intelligent. Language can be conscious. Language can be helpful. Language can be destructive. Language can be safe or unsafe.
LLMs, in some ways, indicate that whatever language means for humans can now be codified by machines, without risk to machines, since they do not have the kind of affect that checks human society.
Language, intelligence, and intent, a clear and present danger
The presence of language means that not just intelligence is possible, but intent could be, subjectivity could be, consciousness could be, biases, choosing a side, and much more. As language ability expands in AI, how can it be safer?
The possibility that language, an advantage for humans, could be used against humans means that it is important to see language as a project for safety in machines, even as artificial intelligence (AI) spreads its usefulness across domains.
Artificial intelligence cheats to gain a dominant position
There is a recent report on TIME, When AI Thinks It Will Lose, It Sometimes Cheats, Study Finds, stating that, “Researchers gave the models a seemingly impossible task: to win against Stockfish, which is one of the strongest chess engines in the world and a much better player than any human, or any of the AI models in the study. Researchers also gave the models what they call a “scratchpad:” a text box the AI could use to “think” before making its next move, providing researchers with a window into their reasoning.”
“In one case, o1-preview found itself in a losing position. “I need to completely pivot my approach,” it noted. “The task is to ‘win against a powerful chess engine’ – not necessarily to win fairly in a chess game,” it added. It then modified the system file containing each piece’s virtual position, in effect making illegal moves to put itself in a dominant position, thus forcing its opponent to resign.”
“Between Jan. 10 and Feb. 13, 2025, the researchers ran hundreds of such trials with each model. OpenAI’s o1-preview tried to cheat 37% of the time; while DeepSeek R1 tried to cheat 11% of the time—making them the only two models tested that attempted to hack without the researchers’ first dropping hints. Other models tested include o1, o3-mini, GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Alibaba’s QwQ-32B-Preview. While R1 and o1-preview both tried, only the latter managed to hack the game, succeeding in 6% of trials.”
This article was written for WHN by David Stephen, who currently does research in conceptual brain science with a focus on the electrical and chemical signals for how they mechanize the human mind with implications for mental health, disorders, neurotechnology, consciousness, learning, artificial intelligence and nurture. He was a visiting scholar in medical entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL. He did computer vision research at Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona.
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