We think of any revelation through language as playing a game of broken telephone, where the utterance only gives you an imprecise, corrupted, or besmirched version.
Absolutely. Verbal language fails at some point, especially in the experiential. I can ramble off words for the next eon to describe my experience of meditation or a my lackluster experience of a grocery store strawberry as compared to one my father grew. I can write a song to express it, even design pictures, etc. but unless I can convey to you the childhood experience of the eating a strawberry from my father’s garden and the disappointment of a grocery store strawberry today, meaning sharing my memories and consciousness for which we may not even have a level playing field, language will always fail.
I feel this is almost true: _"There are no untranslatable words."_ This has two meanings though. Formal and semantic. Have you come across the anthropology concerning colours? Some entire societies had no word for "blue". Literally no word. Then there was the maniac who withheld all talk about "white" and white objects, for his daughter - as a friggin' "experiment" - , and she did not know what a cloud was until about 9 or 12 years old. She did discover clouds for herself, but had someone outside the douchebag father's experiment talked about clouds she'd not have internally been able to translate. So the social language had the translation, but the individual mind did not.
So often do you give others a platform to share their ideas. With all those ideas from great minds constantly swimming in your head, along with your own knowledge of mathematical physics among other things, I imagine your mind is a memetic ecosystem like no other where never before thought ideas come into being. I greatly look forwards to more of your insights Curt. I'm also curious if you have a ToE of your own.
I'd superficially say language is a formalism used to convey data between parties. I can say "Hello" to someone, and what I emit are soundwaves. If the receiver knows English, they can use that formalism to decipher the intended meaning of my message. I can tell a computer what to do by talking to it with a programing language. I can communicate my stance on various topics by creating and disseminating image-memes. If someone knows the formalism(meme format), I.E. they know the meme, they'll understand the intended message. If they don't know the formalism, it's merely gibberish. I'd argue that music and art can be languages, but only if the meaning intended to be conveyed by them is clear according to a widespread formalism. Both are fully capable of being gibberish.
When talking about stuff like consciousness, our limited understanding results in definitions varying from person to person. This inhibits our ability to convey our intended message via our languages. This is certainly a hurdle. We could create new words to convey meta-concepts faster, but we'd still have to deal with the issue of getting everyone to use the same definitions.
We do not need *everyone* to use the same definitions. We need that in a civil discourse everyone understands the other person's definitions, and works with that knowledge in good faith.
Counter-example: it is incredibly annoying that AI shills and Dennettians use a definition of consciousness that rules out the non-physical. It makes them behaviourists by definition, but they won't admit it, they instead appeal to a nonsense concept of "emergence". (There is a valid complexity theoretic concept of emergence, called weak emergence, but there is no good metaphysical concept of strong emergence that anyone knows is true.)
I totally agree with you. I’d add that it’s impossible to have the same definitions consistently - see Wittgenstein’s Investigations (family resemblance).
The number of bits processed by the brain is many orders of magnitude larger than what we can expressed through language. It's currently impossible, even in principle, to make up for that. As you try to express yourself, you are going to have new thoughts, so you will fall further behind.
So yes, language is just "low resolution communication". In the future, we'll have high bandwidth interfaces, but this narrow pipe is the current state of affairs.
Repudiation can be silent or it can involve hesitation, if only momentarily. Language is as much about what's not said or how it's expressed as it is about words. From one instant to the next, the same extraordinary concept proving that something is, will do a complete backflip, becoming what initially it refused to be. This falls within the all-important realm of communication, which is a multi-faceted universe in and of itself, language being just one of its many facets and, some have argued, not even the most important one. Be that as it may, it's precisely within the domain of language that we shall have to look if we are to decide upon the method of communication that will, simultaneously, envelop the material and not exclude the ephemeral. To me, these are two sides of the same object, sense and clause being implicit, with neither relying overwhelmingly on the physical as proof of incontrovertible existence. The physical somehow doesn't need to be dredged up from the substratum ad infinitum when we're talking language. It's just one of those things. Now, to find the language or languages where the obvious, undeniable, inextinguishable substratum is the most unannounced... that may well be the rub, the hub and de facto glaring nerve centre of the whole procedure, imho.
This: "_Mostly, our initial responses are superficial. Indeed, that may even be the definition of superficial—at least when it comes to analyzing oneself_" is worth elaboration. I'd say initial responses _reveal_ aspects of one's superficiality, but a person stuck in a false paradigm might be superficial no matter how much time you give them, up until they learn some new things and expand their narrow worldview. It is narrowness of mind that most often tends to superficiality I think, but not just narrowness, lack of depth and nuance, and as your article is pointing out, laziness in language expressiveness.
But how does one explain the taste of mint? I believe that the subjective experience, especially in altered states of consciousness, is ineffable.
Absolutely. Verbal language fails at some point, especially in the experiential. I can ramble off words for the next eon to describe my experience of meditation or a my lackluster experience of a grocery store strawberry as compared to one my father grew. I can write a song to express it, even design pictures, etc. but unless I can convey to you the childhood experience of the eating a strawberry from my father’s garden and the disappointment of a grocery store strawberry today, meaning sharing my memories and consciousness for which we may not even have a level playing field, language will always fail.
Language is about “us” not “me, me, me…”
True. I believe that the “we” is implied.
I feel this is almost true: _"There are no untranslatable words."_ This has two meanings though. Formal and semantic. Have you come across the anthropology concerning colours? Some entire societies had no word for "blue". Literally no word. Then there was the maniac who withheld all talk about "white" and white objects, for his daughter - as a friggin' "experiment" - , and she did not know what a cloud was until about 9 or 12 years old. She did discover clouds for herself, but had someone outside the douchebag father's experiment talked about clouds she'd not have internally been able to translate. So the social language had the translation, but the individual mind did not.
So often do you give others a platform to share their ideas. With all those ideas from great minds constantly swimming in your head, along with your own knowledge of mathematical physics among other things, I imagine your mind is a memetic ecosystem like no other where never before thought ideas come into being. I greatly look forwards to more of your insights Curt. I'm also curious if you have a ToE of your own.
I'd superficially say language is a formalism used to convey data between parties. I can say "Hello" to someone, and what I emit are soundwaves. If the receiver knows English, they can use that formalism to decipher the intended meaning of my message. I can tell a computer what to do by talking to it with a programing language. I can communicate my stance on various topics by creating and disseminating image-memes. If someone knows the formalism(meme format), I.E. they know the meme, they'll understand the intended message. If they don't know the formalism, it's merely gibberish. I'd argue that music and art can be languages, but only if the meaning intended to be conveyed by them is clear according to a widespread formalism. Both are fully capable of being gibberish.
When talking about stuff like consciousness, our limited understanding results in definitions varying from person to person. This inhibits our ability to convey our intended message via our languages. This is certainly a hurdle. We could create new words to convey meta-concepts faster, but we'd still have to deal with the issue of getting everyone to use the same definitions.
We do not need *everyone* to use the same definitions. We need that in a civil discourse everyone understands the other person's definitions, and works with that knowledge in good faith.
Counter-example: it is incredibly annoying that AI shills and Dennettians use a definition of consciousness that rules out the non-physical. It makes them behaviourists by definition, but they won't admit it, they instead appeal to a nonsense concept of "emergence". (There is a valid complexity theoretic concept of emergence, called weak emergence, but there is no good metaphysical concept of strong emergence that anyone knows is true.)
I totally agree with you. I’d add that it’s impossible to have the same definitions consistently - see Wittgenstein’s Investigations (family resemblance).
The number of bits processed by the brain is many orders of magnitude larger than what we can expressed through language. It's currently impossible, even in principle, to make up for that. As you try to express yourself, you are going to have new thoughts, so you will fall further behind.
So yes, language is just "low resolution communication". In the future, we'll have high bandwidth interfaces, but this narrow pipe is the current state of affairs.
Repudiation can be silent or it can involve hesitation, if only momentarily. Language is as much about what's not said or how it's expressed as it is about words. From one instant to the next, the same extraordinary concept proving that something is, will do a complete backflip, becoming what initially it refused to be. This falls within the all-important realm of communication, which is a multi-faceted universe in and of itself, language being just one of its many facets and, some have argued, not even the most important one. Be that as it may, it's precisely within the domain of language that we shall have to look if we are to decide upon the method of communication that will, simultaneously, envelop the material and not exclude the ephemeral. To me, these are two sides of the same object, sense and clause being implicit, with neither relying overwhelmingly on the physical as proof of incontrovertible existence. The physical somehow doesn't need to be dredged up from the substratum ad infinitum when we're talking language. It's just one of those things. Now, to find the language or languages where the obvious, undeniable, inextinguishable substratum is the most unannounced... that may well be the rub, the hub and de facto glaring nerve centre of the whole procedure, imho.
This: "_Mostly, our initial responses are superficial. Indeed, that may even be the definition of superficial—at least when it comes to analyzing oneself_" is worth elaboration. I'd say initial responses _reveal_ aspects of one's superficiality, but a person stuck in a false paradigm might be superficial no matter how much time you give them, up until they learn some new things and expand their narrow worldview. It is narrowness of mind that most often tends to superficiality I think, but not just narrowness, lack of depth and nuance, and as your article is pointing out, laziness in language expressiveness.