Stars beyond the cave: cognitive frontiers in the AI ​​era

AI is both a mirror that reflects our cognitive limitations and a melting pot for forging new cognitive dimensions.

The big language model is the intelligence of non-physical space, while the physical space data is understood and expressed through human language. This distinction between physical and non-physical intelligence is mainly concentrated in language understanding and use, which is also the premise of human cultural creation and accumulation. It is under this premise that we are trapped in the big language model as a whole, and multimodal understanding is also a linguistic understanding path. In this absolute sense, cognition and imagination are nothing more than language generalization. How to re-evaluate the future?AI  brings us all of this. It has both a mirror state and the complexity of the virtual world. How can humans climb out of the cave on the language ladder of intelligence? Or see the larger universe?

The above questions touch upon the nature of human cognition, the core position of language in intelligence, and the profound impact that AI technology may have on future human civilization. This thinking framework itself is extremely philosophical, and we can explore it from the following dimensions:

1. The Cave of Language: Both a Ladder and a Shackle

The " linguistic dilemma " in Plato's cave allegory is revealed here: humans construct cognitive frameworks through language symbol systems, and large language models ( LLMs ) are the super accelerators of this symbol system. This " language-first " cognitive path has a dual nature:

Mirror projection: LLMs are essentially statistical modeling of the human language database, and their intelligence is a mirror reconstruction of the existing human knowledge structure. When an AI system such as GPT-4 generates text, it actually reproduces the language patterns accumulated by human civilization over thousands of years, including logical paradigms, cultural biases, and cognitive limitations.

Generalization Trap: When multimodal data (images, sounds, etc.) must be converted into language symbols before they can be processed by AI systems, the richness of the physical world is compressed into the poverty of language description. Just like we use the word " red " to refer to the light waves of 620-750 nanometers in the electromagnetic spectrum, this symbolization process will inevitably lead to a reduction in information entropy.

2. The triple breakthrough of cognitive revolution

To break through the shackles of the language symbol system, we may need to find a breakthrough from the following paths:

1.Paradigm shift in multimodal interaction

The current multimodal AI is still at the stage of " language-centrism " - visual and auditory information must be converted into text labels before the system can understand it. The real breakthrough may come from:

Cross-modal direct mapping: For example, the CLIP model establishes a joint embedding space for images and texts, bypassing the language intermediary to directly achieve modal association

Physical interaction of embodied intelligence: Boston Dynamics robots understand the concept of gravity through body movements. This physical experience may build basic cognition beyond language description.

2.The dimensional expression of mathematical language

When the language symbol system encounters a bottleneck, human beings have used mathematics to achieve cognitive leaps many times in history:

Quantum mechanics uses state vectors in Hilbert space to describe the microscopic world, which goes beyond the language description of classical mechanics.

Deep learning captures features through high-dimensional tensor operations. This non-symbolic representation may point to a new cognitive dimension.

In the future, AI may form an autonomously evolving knowledge system at the level of mathematical representation, completely breaking away from the linear constraints of natural language.

3.Cognitive coupling of hybrid augmented intelligence

Neuroscience reveals that the language area (Broca's area) and the non-language cognitive area (parietal spatial processing area) of the human brain work together. This tells us:

Cognitive exoskeleton: Using AI as an extended " thinking organ " , such as brain-computer interface to directly stimulate non-language brain areas to produce new perceptions

Reflexive evolution: Humans design AI systems to understand their own cognitive limitations, similar to the boundaries of formal systems revealed by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem

3. Stars outside the cave: the cognitive frontier in the AI ​​era

As we climb the language ladder, we need to be wary of falling into " symbol fetishism " , but we don't have to fall into deterministic pessimism. Several key trends are worth paying attention to:

The awakening of physical intelligence: Quantum computing simulates molecular dynamics, AI+ robots conduct scientific experiments autonomously, and are establishing a direct dialogue channel between the physical world and the digital world.

Paradigm innovation of cognitive tools: Topological data analysis reveals the shape characteristics of high-dimensional data. This non-verbal pattern recognition may give rise to new forms of knowledge.

The emergence of collective intelligence: Humans and AI systems form a hybrid cognitive network, similar to the symbiotic evolution of the biological world, which may produce cognitive leaps beyond individual intelligence.

4. The Rope to Climb Out of the Cave: Human Metacognitive Revolution

The final breakthrough may not lie in technological breakthroughs, but in the profound reflection of human beings on their own cognitive mechanisms:

Second-order observation: Establishing metacognition of the language symbol system, just as Wittgenstein revealed that " the limits of language are the limits of the world "

Negative entropy cognition: actively introduce the randomness and complexity of the physical world to avoid the entropy increase and rigidity of the cognitive system due to language filtering

Poetic dwelling: Preserve non-symbolic cognitive methods such as art and intuition. As Heidegger said, " language is the home of existence " , but we need to build a new home.

In the future, humans may be able to maintain the practicality of language tools while clearly recognizing its projective nature, just as quantum physicists understand wave functions. AI is both a mirror that reflects our cognitive limitations and a furnace for forging new cognitive dimensions . The key lies in whether we can remain vigilant about the instrumentalization process when using tools.

2025Xiamen , April 13 ​