Language as Cognition’s Operating System

Updated: 2025.09.02 1M ago 2 sources
LLMs often translate math, vision, and engineering problems into text and then reason verbally to solve them. Even multimodal systems reportedly convert images into internal text-like tokens, suggesting a one-way advantage from perception to language rather than from language to pure spatial imagery. This points to verbal abstraction as a general-purpose substrate for high-level thought. — If language is the central substrate, education, testing, and AI design should emphasize verbal reasoning for transfer and generality.

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Links for 2025-09-02
Alexander Kruel 2025.09.02 72% relevant
It highlights a Nature study where text embeddings from large language models predict fMRI in high‑level visual cortex and even enable caption retrieval from brain activity, implying a shared, language‑like semantic code across vision and language.
LLMs: A Triumph and a Curse for Wordcels
Davide Piffer 2025.08.08 100% relevant
The article’s claims about multimodal LLMs internally converting images to text and the domino-tiling proof narrated verbally, plus GRE outperformance by philosophy majors.
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