I can't escape the thought that it seems as I examine words in the english language, their definition is not only context related, but they seem to dissipate upon examination. Apply logic and watch it evaporate into nothingness or change and become limited where people fail to even apply logic.

It makes me think that many words are conceptually mal-aligned (in practical terms) and a language could be created that would be logically consistent - taking appropriate exception (annoted duly by some modifier) when necessary of course.

Is there a more logically consistent language, where the concepts are aligned with logic? Is this just a result of my individual interpretation of language which doesn't have actual bearing on the general case? Bah I lost my train of thought. Anyone?

Originally posted by wesmorris
I can't escape the thought that it seems as I examine words in the english language, their definition is not only context related, but they seem to dissipate upon examination. Apply logic and watch it evaporate into nothingness or change and become limited where people fail to even apply logic.

It makes me think that many words are conceptually mal-aligned (in practical terms) and a language could be created that would be logically consistent - taking appropriate exception (annoted duly by some modifier) when necessary of course.

Is there a more logically consistent language, where the concepts are aligned with logic? Is this just a result of my individual interpretation of language which doesn't have actual bearing on the general case? Bah I lost my train of thought. Anyone?

German is pretty logically consistent. They use a lot of compounds. I've made an observation about the English language that may be of some relevance. The observation is that compound words generally don't sound strange or funny, whereas non-compound words often do. For an example, malfunction, specification, biology, mastication. All the words are structured. They all have some form of hierarchy. The mind subconsciously observes this. Other words like water, oyster, orange, road don't have structures. They're flat. When you don't take them for granted and really examine them, they're weird and devoid, though they may be derived from another romantic language.

Should i remind you of the most logical language of all.
Speaking it, I have first hand knowledge.
But I don't think I fully understand your point. Offer an exampleog non-logical language.

For instance I'm almost positive that the idea of "reality" being illusion is completely moot. You cannot separate yourself from your experience and when you speak of "reality" you're speaking of the scope of your possible experience and as such, there is no point to weighing whether or not it is an illusion.

But the way our language is shaped, it is a common trapping to ask the quesiton. "is reality real or illusion?" When in fact it's by definition impossible to determine.

This language, if you examine this aspect of it.. pushes this question to be asked even though it's meaningless. On otherhand it's hard to know it's meaningless unless you ask it.

The question of god for instance is somewhat retarded, in that the idea is wholly inconsequential. One lives their life as they see fit. The idea of "god" or whatever to stimulate you to act or think a certain way is simply how you choose to live your life and it is by definition impossible to prove or disprove anything related to god.

The "supernatural" is not a useful term really as all is technically natural. If ESP exists, how is it not natural? Whether it exists or not it is a good question, but there is no questioning that if it did it would or wouldn't be natural.

Yet the shape of our language inserts this concept into our conceptual inter-relationships and as such we utlize it unless we eventually ask the right questions and realize that term is somewhat pointless or at least of quite limited scope.

What I'm driving at is that language shapes our minds - LITERALLY. As this is true, it seems that language should be scrutinized intensely and the realization semantic issues more prevalent. At the same time though, people simply reject logic and reason if they do not comprehend it.

Hmm..

Being fairly fluent in two languages, Russian and English, I can also add that English lacks a few words.

Originally posted by whitewolf
Being fairly fluent in two languages, Russian and English, I can also add that English lacks a few words.

It is my impression from having spoken with many multi-lingual people that indeed every language has it's own "shape" so to speak. In some, concepts differ significantly.

I would theorize wildly that in effect, those people's minds are inherently shaped significantly differently due to the relationships of the languages they know.

I'm trying to say that the difference in culture is more than just tradition, that the concepts outlined (and their local vernacular usage) by the language literally effect the minds of the members of that culture, etc.

I'm trying to say that the difference in culture is more than just tradition, that the concepts outlined (and their local vernacular usage) by the language literally effect the minds of the members of that culture, etc.
Ive recently spoken to a man who said that Indian and Russian languages are more in tune with vibrations of the universe (and things of the sort). I'm not sure how much substance such a statement has after you filter away the nationalism.
I see what you're saying and I think you're absolutely right. I think it goes beyond meaning of each word, to the meaning of sounds.

Poor old Aristotle tried to logically quantify natural language. First-order logic didn't do the job very well. (But then, people don't even agree on his laws of thought.)

There are some factors which make natural language less restrictive than logical forms, and at the same time more confusing and less logical...

Natural languages depend very strongly on context in a way that is difficult to quantify; a statement will inherit context from previous statements even if the previous statement was from another person. Consider:

"How old are you little boy?"
"I am five."

On the most basic note, the sense of identity (that is, "am",) that the little boy uses does not relate to logical identity in any way. In the Propositional Logic, for instance, when you say P=Q, you mean that P is identical to Q.
The little boy doesn't mean that he is identical to 5, however. He means that he has the property of being five years old. But, since the "am" has a contextual ambiguity about it, this causes a real problem for the Propositional Logic. Look at the following sentences:

"Two plus three is five."
"Robert is five years old."
"A horse's head is the head of an animal."

That third one blows PL right out of the water, because it says that an object is a set of objects that it belongs to, and PL translates "is" to "is identical to".

Anyway...

When the boy says "I am five" he means "I am five years old", because he inherits the "I am X units old" from the person asking the question. The "years" is derived from social convention, a very wide context by which we expect people to measure their lives in years. The "How many units old are you" context, however, is borrowed immediately from the question and assumed easily by both speakers.

Things like this don't work very well with such logical languages as we have; even logical languages are Turing-undecidable, and they are not nearly as complicated as natural languages, which we have so far failed to quantify.

Most languages have a few words that other languages don't. This is VERY RARELY due to a lack of a fundamental concept... usually it has to do with a cultural specialization which resulted in a single word being invented to describe a complex situation, or a series of words being invented to differentiate a group of things.

For instance, the German language generally permits compound words in a manner that English generally does not; a "sehenswurdigkeit" is some thing or place that is worth seeing, a "windschirmwascherarm" is the arm of a windshield washer. Technically English doesn't have a single word for these, and must use two or three, but the communication is not diminished.

On the other hand, when we look at highly technical terminology, one language may have terms that another does not because they are not of concern... the Inuit words for different types of snow, for instance, don't really interest the rest of us because we don't have any technologies that depend on differentiating one type of snow from another.

Lastly, languages usually have vast differences of idiom, which are the most difficult things to communicate. When a German speaker speaks English using the German idiom, word order and so on, it generally doesn't sound too bad, just a little awkward -

"Wie geht es dir" is "How goes it to you"

German uses Time Manner Place for descriptions, so you would say "I am going on Friday by car to the drugstore."

However, this is probably because German and English are not so far removed from one another in the grand scheme of things. Translating idiomatic expressions from Japanese seems to be a real problem, if you ever get an anime disk and watch it with the English soundtrack and the subtitles on at the same time...

"It makes me think that many words are conceptually mal-aligned (in practical terms) and a language could be created that would be logically consistent - taking appropriate exception (annoted duly by some modifier) when necessary of course."

Maths as a language that is logically consistent perhaps?

You arent saying anything new, but the question is open as to how much the different languages affect how their speakers think.
WE rely upon the illogicality in language for such things as poetry and dealing with new things.

:) stick back to body language :D

Originally posted by curioucity
:) stick back to body language :D

I'm with you actually... BUT how do we do that on sci!? ;)

your hedular largeness: great post.

The only logical language is mathematics.
Spoken and written laguage always rely on mutual understandings of irrationality.

As far as I understand it (which is quite limited, admittedly) Latin is logically consistant.

There are a few people on this forum that speak Latin (if I remember correctly, Jerrek does).

Maybe they will read this and share their opinion on it.

It would be impossibe for humans to communicate only in a logically coherent language. Most of the things we experience are only communicable through the illogical. While it is true that one can say that this communication through the illogical is the function of the very langauage at use, it is also true that all illogical experiences therefore once expressed in a logical language merely amount to the "experience" was illogical or couldn't have occured. I think language evolves to fit our current being. It is therefore the natural progression of a development with its roots at our betterment or survival as groups.

Yes said:
The only logical language is mathematics.

Mathematics is a dialect of the more basic language called Set Theory; set theory is not 100% perfect because of the self-referential set problem.

There are many logical languages; in my previous post I mentioned the Propositional Logic, which you may know in its more modern form of Boolean Algebra - which is not mathematics.

C, BASIC, or other computer programming languages are also logical languages that are not mathematics.

One_Raven:

A language is only logically consistent if it contains no ambiguities... allow me to demonstrate with an example from school:

Consider the sentence "Everybody loves somebody sometime."

This could mean that:

1) Each person has some time of their own at which they love a specific person of their own.

2) At some specific time, which is the same time for everyone, each person loves some specific person of their own.

3) Every person has some time of their own at which they all love some specific person (like Crispin Glover).

4) At some time, everyone will love some specific person (like Crispin Glover).

This sentence is extremely ambiguous with regards to its references. As such it cannot be expressed as a single sentence in some perfect logical language; at best it represents a set of sentences.

The shape of language
I can't escape the thought that it seems as I examine words in the english language, their definition is not only context related, but they seem to dissipate upon examination. Apply logic and watch it evaporate into nothingness or change and become limited where people fail to even apply logic.

It makes me think that many words are conceptually mal-aligned (in practical terms) and a language could be created that would be logically consistent - taking appropriate exception (annoted duly by some modifier) when necessary of course.

Is there a more logically consistent language, where the concepts are aligned with logic? Is this just a result of my individual interpretation of language which doesn't have actual bearing on the general case? Bah I lost my train of thought. Anyone?I've thought about that too, a language that consists of meanings and not words maybe? So that there isn't any misunderstandings.

I've noticed that if you repeat a word enough times without meaning anything with the word, then the word looses it's meaning and look illogical.

For example:

Through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through, through.

The brain starts to break up the word into smaller pieces and the word becomes totally illogical (for a while), thr ough or thro ugh.

In a completly logical language every letter should express each part of the meaning of the word (so that each letter of the word actually builds the meaning of the word).

If we let each letter have it's own colour (to represent what you feel) and shape to represent a logical symbol of the meaning of each letter...a kind of intuitive language that people would understand without learning it. That would be nice cause that would be like a international language (even without the purpose of making it so), the spoken word needs some kind of meaningfullness also if the circle should be complete, but that would be very hard since we need to know what significance a sound could have to describe a meaning. I do think that the sound can describe feelings though, so the sound can serve as a "feeling" guide, and like the written word each sound in a "sound-sentence" should have it's own meaning that will be used to build up what you mean. Then we have to experiment with how sounds trigger feelings and if a certain sound triggers the same feeling for everyone.

Originally posted by BigBlueHead
A language is only logically consistent if it contains no ambiguities

I have to disagree with that statement.

I could state:
A + B = C - D

There are quite a lot of values you could place in that ambiguous mathematical statement to make it true.

Does that make it logically inconsistent?

Even if it DID, that wouldn't mean that the language was logically inconsistent, simply that expression is.

The same applies to the expression you used as an example.

okay i resent people suggesting that we multi-linguals have differently shaped heads. but from what i understand you are asking for the most "logical" language or at least more "logical." i'm assuming that this means the language that sticks best to the rules and/or is simplest. english is notorious for breaking rules, but that's why it's the lingua franca now, you can speak it badly (sic) and still be understood.

i can only speak for the languages that i know and i think that's why others are saying german, russian and latin. those are all very complicated languages, and many rules are case specific making it even more complex. greek has nine cases, three main ones and then combinations of the three. but that is sort of logical. the simplest language that i know is japanese. the writing is horribly complex, but the spoken language is extremely easy. there are no tones that are critical mistakes ("horse" and "mother" in mandarin are one tone apart) and there is only one irregular verb, to be, that i can remember. there are no cases, most of the redundancy is dropped, many definite and indefinite articles can be dropped (you can say, "hungry" and have it mean , "i am hungry", or add "ka" to make it "are you hungry". "ka" is a general question word.

so there's my 2¢ worth.

One_raven:

QL, which is a logical language designed for quantifying natural languages, fails to derive a single sentence from the expression that I gave. This is not the same thing as algebraic substitution, because

A + B = C - D

does not change as an expression when you change the values of A,B,C,D. All that changes is the truth value of the major connective - for example:

Let A = 2, B = 5, C = 10, D = 8

A + B = C - D is true.

Let A = 4, B = 3, C = 2, D = 5.

A + B = C - D is false.

That's it.

The reason why "Everybody loves somebody sometime." is ambiguous is this: Let's turn the sentence into an expression in QL.

Functions:
Let P(x) = x is a person
Let L(xy) = x loves y
Let T(x) = x is a time

(Given my lack of ASCII knowledge I am forced to use the following notation:
A = Universal quantifier (for all)
V = Existential quantifier (there is)
* = AND
-> = implies

So we can say:

There is some x, and there is some y, for all z, where x is a time, y is a person, and z is a person, such that z loves y.

("There is some time where one person is loved by every person.")

This is written as VxVyAz((T(x)*P(y)*P(z))->(L(zy))).

This is a legitimate quantification of "Everybody loves somebody sometime." because it states that at some time someone is loved by everybody. However, what this means is that a single person is loved by all people at some time, which is not what Dean Martin meant in the song.

As soon as you find yourself saying "that's not what I meant", that shows up the ambiguity in a language. When we look at the mathematical expression:

A + B = C - D

There aren't any mathematical values that you can substitute for A,B,C, and D to make someone say "That's not what I meant." They don't change the meaning of the sentence, only whether it is true or not. Even if someone said:

Apple + Banana = Coconut - Dachshund

The statement would only be false. But "Everybody loves somebody sometime" can refer to totally different relations between groups of people without changing the words.

Wes:
What I'm driving at is that language shapes our minds - LITERALLY. As this is true, it seems that language should be scrutinized intensely and the realization semantic issues more prevalent. At the same time though, people simply reject logic and reason if they do not comprehend it.


L.I.T.E.R.A.L.L.Y.

The easterns are notorious for their simplistic ideologies and one has only to look at the simplicity of its language- instances where we Westerns think up new words for everything (television, radio), languages like Chinese use words already there (picture box, sound box). Its got this modest purity to it that's almost chaste. And its speakers reflect this very same trait inherent in its language.Hispanics have linguistic diminuitives that endear almost everthing and these people are known for their sensuality.

You can narrow a whole people by ranging the whole scope of thought the only way possible: language.

Remember George Orwell? A philologist named Syme in his book put it beautifully:

"We will make things literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word....every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. A revolution will be perfectly complete when its language is perfect"

Big Blue Head:
Most languages have a few words that other languages don't. This is VERY RARELY due to a lack of a fundamental concept... usually it has to do with a cultural specialization which resulted in a single word being invented to describe a complex situation, or a series of words being invented to differentiate a group of things.
Enlightening post, bigbluhabadus. Propositional Logic. Only one question:

Don't those cultural specializations reflect their lack to conceptualize? This is what Wes is saying.

For instance, the German language generally permits compound words in a manner that English generally does not; a "sehenswurdigkeit" is some thing or place that is worth seeing, a "windschirmwascherarm" is the arm of a windshield washer.
Indeed. As in 'leben'- the German jack-of-all-trades.

"Lebensweld", Hitler's crappy "Lebensborn"......lebenthis, lebenthat, everywhere a leben.

Wes:
your hedular largeness: great post.
I don't think our blue friend knows you're talking about him.

ahh
i feel the old spook itching to burst free
but no! i must be strong

anyway blue
isnt sanskrit kinda mathematical and stuff? it is touted as a possible language due to its "logical " structure. know anything about that?

http://www.audarya-fellowship.com/showflat/cat/hinduism/1341/0/collapsed/5/o/1

http://www.amritapuri.org/education/sanskrit/artintell.htm

http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/b/Briggs:Rick.html

Spookz:

Most of my Logic/Phil of Language study was in English and I've applied it to a few other languages that I have a vague knowledge of, but if you think of English as being "right up my alley", then Sanskrit is "somewhere in a different country". I know NOTHING about it, so I really can't comment.

I've heard similar claims about other languages, some logical and others numerological (not long ago I saw that movie Pi, which I thought was less than good). Usually the point of failure is that natural languages adopt a lot of content implicitly from context, which tends to make them ambiguous. PL and QL were attempts to specify the implicit context, but PL had serious problems and sometimes even QL's back is broken by English, as in the previous example.

Gendanken:

Whether cultural specialization represents a lack of ability to conceptualize depends upon one major factor - whether or not, once the single collective term has developed, its component terms fall out of use.

If I am an author, I can invent a new word. Let's say I am describing a scenario where humans have come to live underwater with enough regularity that underwater circumstances have become part of the linguistic background. With underwater mining being the main reason for going into the ocean (in this story), mining tools are in common use everywhere. As a result, a certain form of injury and death unknown on land becomes well known underwater, that is, death from hydrostatic shock from an underwater explosion. Let's say that I call death from hydrostatic shock a "wavekill", given that it's the shock wave moving through the incompressible fluid that causes death.

The phrase "death through hydrostatic shock" will fall out of favour somewhat, but the individual terms will remain part of our language as much as they ever had. Only in the case where they are assembled in this order will the slang term habitually replace them. Hydrostatic shock will still be an important factor in other phenomena, and people will still die from other causes.

A profusion of slang terms can change a language over time, but for the most part we have not yet encountered the linguistic equivalent of that great language-destroyer, "smurf", which can be used to replace any word or phrase.

A failure to conceptualize from generalization could be a bigger problem... when it comes to snow, we only have two words for it and a couple of associated composite terms - snow, ice, powder snow, packing snow - and so the snow experts with fifty words for specific textures and compositions are way ahead of us in that department. It could be said that, since we look at twenty-five of their kinds of snow and say "snow", and the other twenty-five and say "ice", that our woefully imprecise treatment of snow composition reflects a lack of ability to conceptualize on our part in this department.

To illustrate this problem, look at colours. Often enough, one can find a colour that some people will call "orange" and others will call "red". Orange juice, for instance, is really more yellow than orange - the frozen concentrated stuff is the same colour as egg yolk, which is traditionally called "yellow". Similarly, there are shades of blue that people will call green, and vice versa. Some people say eggplants are black and some say they are purple.

Part of this colour break between people has to do with their actual perception of colour, I think, because there is no way that an eggplant looks black to me... it's purple, dark, but still purple. On the other hand, with some blue/green colours it's a toss-up whether it's actually blue or green, it depends on who you ask, but everyone sees the same colour with their eyes (I think). People will adopt a traditionalist stance as to what colour a thing is, if it falls between two colours, and this may also reflect a problem of conceptualization. Perhaps we do not have enough words for colour either.

Cyperium:

Yes, if you say a word enough times it starts to sound meaningless to you... I have no evidence to support this claim, but I am partial to the idea that when you experience the same thing over and over again your brain starts to look for smaller patterns within the more obvious units, and subdivides the word (as you said) into meaningless sections in an attempt at deeper analysis for meaning that turns out not to be there.

Wes:

I have a feeling that what you are referring to has partly to do with a concern I've had about language recently relating to (what for lack of a better term I have been forced to call) symbolic templates.

This is a pretty complicated subject and may be difficult for me to express in a short post, but I will make an attempt.

Humans communicate with what is effectively a series of symbols. Regardless of context and implicit content, there is a measurable communication between people that can be characterized this way. It is more complicated than just the phonemes or the words that pass between us...

For instance, there are two full sentences,
"I don't know." and
"What?"
that can be expressed entirely with intonation, without the need to open your mouth. "What?" is pretty simple... Will Smith used to do this on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air...
but "I don't know." is a pretty complicated sentence... still, it's used often enough that we recognize the sentence just from the intonation that attends upon it, without needing the words.

Other languages than English probably have other sentences that are as easily expressed, but I am not an expert in other languages... in Japanese, the "Neh?" question is much the same.

(edit) To see extended use of intonation to communicate meaning, watch Scooby Doo. Normally we would be inclined to say that intonation is a symbol modifier, but since in certain situations it can actually substitute for words, we have to consider it to be a kind of concurrent symbol that goes along with spoken words. Natural language, as communicated by speech, would then seem to have two or several colinear channels of communication - but this does not break the symbol analogy.

(continued)

As we grow, we adopt a library of symbols. They may be simple, like sounds or words, "Uh... yeah, uh huh," or they may be composites of words, "No way, shut yer hole!" They're often pretty strongly stereotyped and are said the same way and in the same order, even when they're pretty long - something like, "You know what really burns my ass?" or "In my humble opinion, X," or "Well if that don't beat everything." These are single symbols of human symbolic communication, since they become so well used in our idiomatic expression that more than one word from one of these can imply the entire symbol to someone who has heard it as much as you have.

This dissipates momentarily when you talk to someone who is not in your social group and doesn't share the set of highly complex stereotyped symbols that you and your friends all recognize and use, but we can very quickly adopt the stereotyped symbols of another person and use them pretty effectively.

We don't communicate exclusively with these highly stereotyped complex symbols because that would restrict our communication pretty seriously, but it is possible to have (and you have probably heard and participated in) a conversation consisting only of these sorts of symbols. Let's say Wes and his pal Jed are having a conversation. Wes and Jed have known each other for years on a casual, nearly FOAF basis and generally do not have a lot to talk about.

Wes: "Jed my man! How you doin'?"
Jed: "Can't complain, can't complain."
Wes: "How's the wife?"
Jed: "Fine, fine. Some weather we been havin', eh?"
Wes: "Yes sir. Rainin' to beat the band."
Jed: "Anyway, I gotta place to be."
Wes: "Catch ya later!"

In this conversation, a relatively small number of symbols were exchanged, which means that in truth, almost no information was to be had from either side. By contrast, one sentence:

Wes: "If you take a mortage at six percent at a term of fifteen years with a ten percent down payment you'll end up paying one hundred and sixty percent of what the house is worth - on the other hand, if you take a six percent mortgage at a term of five years with a five percent down payment you'll end up paying one hundred and seventy-five percent."

This sentence contains a larger number of symbols than the entire conversation above, which is necessary to provide the informational content therein.

Great stuff BBH.

It is these symbols that I'm questioning really... in their relations to themselves.

One of the silly things I'm trying to figure out is if some fallacies are incurred purely due to the ways symbols relate to other symbols in language.

I don't really know how you'd avoid it, but for instance the term "illlusion" when applied to the context of "my reality" is moot. At that fundamental level one cannot distinguish between reality and illusion, to the point that my examination of it yields that there is simply no relationship "reality" and "illusion" in that context. The symbols melt at that level. Pardon the obscure example, I'm running on too little sleep here.

So is it possible to build language with this type of consideration built in? I guess yiddish is supposed to be that way in terms of being jewish. So I guess I'm wondering if language and philosophy are inherently tied together, since the language seems to be philosophy's construct. So that makes me ponder if there is a language representative of buddism for instance, or if one is properly pursuing a philosophy, do you have to eventually come up with your own language? LOL. I'd guess Gendy would prolly agree that I've sort of bastardized english into my own thing.. representative of my philosophy - but are we all doing that right now?

I suppose we are. Now we end up discussing the evolution of language?

*snore*

:) It's just the lack of sleep. I'll try more later.

The concern I have with the symbols is that people HEAR them differently from how you SAY them sometimes. A physicist will hear your lecture about hockey and think of it in terms of the principles of physics... a hockey player will hear your lecture about physics and think of it in terms of hockey.

The degree to which we are able to communicate our ideas is highly variable... there's nothing like saying something to a "philosopher" and having them reply, "Well, that smacks of Hegelian spiritualism." If you do not come from their intellectual background, this sentence means NOTHING to you. Moreover, whatever you were trying to communicate became "Hegelian spiritualism" to that person, which is not what you were trying to say. At this point you are reduced to wrestling with them for hours to try to get them to see what you're trying to say, or just giving up and walking away.


With respect to the fallacies you mentioned, this is not at all strange... natural language can encode logical impossibilities just as much or more than logical languages can; to be able to describe things which are not or cannot be the case is a helpful property in a robust descriptive system.

Wes

Great topic, and I agree with what you've said.

Originally posted by wesmorris
I can't escape the thought that it seems as I examine words in the english language, their definition is not only context related, but they seem to dissipate upon examination. Apply logic and watch it evaporate into nothingness or change and become limited where people fail to even apply logic.
Language is confusion, just as you say. Tower of Babel and all that.

It makes me think that many words are conceptually mal-aligned (in practical terms) and a language could be created that would be logically consistent - taking appropriate exception (annoted duly by some modifier) when necessary of course.
I really, really don't want to become a totally predictable bore about non-dual philosophy, but you've hit on the precise reason here why Buddhist writing is so carefully self-contradictory.

Is there a more logically consistent language, where the concepts are aligned with logic? Is this just a result of my individual interpretation of language which doesn't have actual bearing on the general case? Bah I lost my train of thought. Anyone? [/B]
I'd say that some are better than others, but that they all fail in the end.

BBH said:

"Mathematics is a dialect of the more basic language called Set Theory; set theory is not 100% perfect because of the self-referential set problem."

This hits the nail on the head imo, and it is also the problem of ordinary language. All terms in a dictionary are defined relative to each other. To get the process rolling therefore requires starting with undefined terms, reference to something that is not in the dictionary. That's where the process goes wrong, right at the beginning. It shows up later in infinities and paradoxes like Russell's set problem or Goedel's undecidable questions.

The problem shows up in metaphysics more than anywhere else since it deals with what is real, as opposed to relative phenomena, as I think you showed by using 'reality' and 'illusion' as your examples.

I don't know but I think Spookz may be right about Sanskrit. People who know it claim it is the best language for metaphysics.

Canute

A common form of Bertrand Russell's self-referential set paradox:

The barber shaves everyone who does not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?

(If yes, then no. If no, then yes.)

Originally posted by BigBlueHead
A common form of Bertrand Russell's self-referential set paradox:

The barber shaves everyone who does not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?

(If yes, then no. If no, then yes.)

As the barber is a human, he might be lying! I bet he won't get ahold of ME to shave. HA!

Okay but now there is an important distinction to be made here.

Let us consider the distinction between the abstract and the physical:

There is no contradiction when abstract is paradoxical, since there is nothing to really be contradictory.

The physical realm won't let you contradict it.

So where is the actual contradiction except in your mind?

That'ssss why language can depict hypothetical situationssss, tricksy Wessss...

Where would Wes be without fiction? In a pretty hole then, he'd be, wouldn't he? Couldn't describe anything but how things already are! Poor humanses.



Barber is hypothetical... shaving yourself is your only defense, but don't worry, you only have to shave yourself hypothetically.

As I was sitting in my chair,
I knew the bottom wasn't there,
nor legs nor back, but I just sat,
ignoring little things like that.
Hughes Mearns

Wes

Here is a great essay on language and its pitfalls viewed from a non-dual perspective.

http://sino-sv3.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/FULLTEXT/JR-JOCP/edward.htm

Dear Wesmorris:

You ask a good question. I will repost what my theory is as regarding language. Since it was widely booed and hissed off stage the last time, I am expecting no better reception for it this time. But it does seem to be in line with the parameters of your question as concerns language, shape and sound. I got spanked the first time, but every once in a while my monkey needs to be soundly spanked. It keeps one healthy and balanced. So get your tomatoes ready to throw and here goes:

Language in its present form is impossible to reduce since it is no longer based on universal shape forms. Some examples of these shape forms were found in Magdalenian cave sites (12,000-17,000 years before the present time). They include the runes, the cross, the swastika and many religious and magical sigils. Why the need for these symbols? They were based on the notion of entopic forms. Neurophysiology has clearly identified phosphenes, geometric shapes and images embedded in our subconscious. These are lodged within our visual cortex and neural system. When one’s consciousness has been altered, these forms are produced. They are universal in nature so it matters not from what country, educational background or supposed religious elitism one finds themselves believing in. These entopic forms used in meditation are for one thing only. They are the pathways that lead to trance. Thus the hidden use of ancient alphabets that used these shapes to generate their form. They were used to induce trance to help us find our way home. Take away entopic forms as being the progenitor of language and you have random patterns that are not reducible because they have no meaning for all parts of our brain. While the left brain can easily identify an artificial word and shape, try whispering that word to your subconscious. Its meaning is lost and so it needs to be converted into a symbol. The reverse is also true. For the subconscious to speak, it needs to give the conscious mind a set of symbols in which to ponder upon awakening. These dream symbols are language. The only language the other part of our selves speaks. And yet no one seems to include this in the mix. Why? Why is there not a determined effort to give a voice and a language to that part of us that speaks to us eight hours a night? It was once so, so why is there no respect shown to it now? Is unity within the body unimportant? If we cannot communicate inside ourselves then how do we expect to speak with others?

The Egyptians had a one sight, one sound system. These pictographs were easily understood by all sides of ourselves, not just the one we deem important. I ask you, “Why do you worship the sun and not the moon?” This is the real question. Present day language demonstrates this point over and over again. If we wish unity within the body and mind, we need to go to another system of symbols and colors and sound to integrate that which has been divided. We could be doing this through language, but it seems we would rather worship the sun.

Now in terms of forms we have this involving tattvas:

“Creation comes from the five tattvas and is dissolved into them. Greater than the five tattvas is that which is above them, without stain.” Jnanasankalini Tantra

If we think about the five tattvas being the five senses it begins to make sense how our entire world is built upon what we perceive.

Now is this true, do we have form-constants that would mimic this notion? It seems according to Kulver we do. Henreich Kluver conducted studies of hallucinations at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. He came to discover a pattern for these perceptions he called, “form constants.” There were four types: (1) gratings and honeycombs, (2) cobwebs, (3) tunnels and cones, and (4) spirals. He postulated that these were the “elementary features that the nervous system was hardwired to perceive.” His conclusion?

“The analysis…has yielded a number of forms and form elements which must be considered typical for mescal visions. No matter how strong the inter- and intra-individual differences may be, the records are remarkable as to the appearance of the above described forms and configurations. We may call them form-constants, implying that a certain number of them appear in almost all mescal visions and that many “atypical” visions are upon close examination nothing but variations of those form-constants.”

However, Lewis-Williams and Dowson state that, at the present stage in their research, it is premature to distinguish between phosphenes and form constants. Thus, they have been grouped together and assigned the generic term of 'entoptic phenomena' or entoptics, by way of classifying these largely geometric visual percept. The term 'entoptic' comes from the Greek to mean 'within vision', and the term 'entoptic phenomena' means visual sensations whose characteristics derive from the structure of the visual system (Tyler 1978:1633). Lewis-Williams and Dowson use the term 'hallucinations' to describe more complex iconic visions (Siegal 1977:134; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978: 12-13). Tyler also makes the point that:

"the nature of entoptic phenomena makes it hard to design highly-controlled, stimulus-bound experiments to specify them. It is therefore appropriate to report them on an observational basis before more indirect outcomes are explored" (Tyler, 1978:1633).”

“An example of reduplication is illustrated by Reichel-Dolmatoff (1972:91-92) who noted that when Tukanoans were asked to draw their mental imagery, they tended "to fill the pieces of paper he gave them with rows of formalised and reduplicated geometric motifs comparable with their painting of the same motifs on the walls of their houses. The Tukano identified these reduplicated forms as images derived from what they themselves recognised as the first stage of their trance experiences; there can be little doubt of their entoptic origin" (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978:12-13).”

Now we come to Philip T. Nicholson. He writes the following:

“The meanings of many metaphors used to describe luminous visions in the RigVeda (RV) remain elusive or ambiguous despite years of expert hermeneutical exegesis. In this series of papers, we classify the metaphors used to describe luminous visions into sets based on certain abstract characteristics (shapes, colors, movements, order of appearance), then show how these metaphor-sets can be matched with remarkable precision, image by image, to a sequence of internally-generated light sensations ('phosphenes') induced by meditation. These meditation-induced phosphenes can also evolve in longer and more elaborate sequences if the subjects practice meditation while in a sleep-deprived condition. A sleep deficit increases the risk of subclinical seizures emerging at sleep onset - and the paroxysmal activity generates further evolution of the phosphene imagery. In the first paper of this three-part series, we document the parallels between the meditation-induced phosphenes and two types of luminous visions described in the RV - the Asvins' radiant, three-wheeled chariot and the flame arrows of Agni.

In the second paper, we analyze metaphors used to describe the visions of Soma and Indra and show that there is a close match between these luminous visions and paroxysmal phosphenes. Based on the extensive parallels revealed by our comparison, we conclude that the metaphors for luminous visions in the RV were meant to refer to the same visual content as appears in the meditation-induced visions described by the author, and that, despite years of poetic embellishment, the eulogists' choice of metaphors suggests a much more empirically-oriented attempt to describe visionary experience than has hitherto been suspected. This hypothesis about the meaning of luminous visions in the RV has important implications for several issues debated by Vedic scholars, including: (1) the identity of the original soma plant; (2) the influence of shamanic practices in the creation of the Vedic myths, and (3) the extent of the continuities between the visionary experiences described in the RV and those described in the Upanishads and in the many yoga meditation texts in the Hindu, Tantric, and Tibetan-Buddhist traditions…”

“These new research findings about rapid shifts to paroxysmal activity upon activation of sleep rhythm oscillators can be used to explain why a meditator who is attempting to induce phosphene visions might experience the outbreak of a seizure and to explain how this outbreak of paroxysmal activity shapes the further evolution of the original, sleep-onset phosphene images [Nicholson, 1999; 2002a,b]. In this paper we reproduce a series of drawings from the sources just cited to illustrate the shapes, colors, movements, and ordinal progressions of the meditation induced, sleep-onset phosphenes and their further elaboration after the outbreak of paroxysmal brain waves.
- Philip T. Nicholson, ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF VEDIC STUDIES (EJVS), Vol. 8 (2002) issue 3 (March 27) (©) ISSN 1084-7561

But then we have this as concens the difficulty of translating Sanskrit:

“Keith [1925] complains about the "chaos of the ideas [Ibid., p. 171]" and the "obscurity in detail [Ibid., p. 167];" MacDonell [1971] writes that the descriptions of Soma are "overlaid with the most varied and chaotic imagery and with mystical fantasies often incapable of certain interpretation [Ibid., p. 104]." In her introduction to a translation of selected hymns from the RV, O'Flaherty [1981] points out that problems of interpretation are complicated by language that is "intrinsically difficult (dense, complex, and esoteric even for the people of its own time), or difficult to people of another time (because of archaisms, hapax legomena, discontinued usages), or difficult because we have lost the thread of the underlying idiom [Ibid., p.14]." Even if experts agree on the literal meaning of the Sanskrit words, they still might not might be able to interpret what those words were intended to mean, not least because the RV "is written out of a mythology that we can only try to reconstruct from the Rig Vedic jumble of paradoxes heaped on paradoxes, tropes heaped on tropes [Ibid., p. 18]."

You see how McDonnell, O’Flaherty and Keith all complain about the same thing. The difficulty of translation of a language not like our own. The possible explanation according to O'Flaherty, it is "difficult because we have lost the thread of the underlying idiom." While O’Flaherty complains that Sanskrit is “dense,” I suggest it is the one he was translating it into that lacked depth and richness. It backs up my original point that our present languages are not based on entopic forms and underlying patterns that have RELEVANCE. If something has relevance it has several meanings. Think of Gematria and the underlying themes implicit in finding hidden meanings in language. It would imply that hidden meanings are there, would it not? Do you find many people sitting around and giving a numerical value to English in order to discover the end time? Or the meaning of a Biblical revelation? If you do find such a cluster, please tell them for me they are wasting their time.

But why is any of this important? Well we have one intriguing clue for there was a fascinating article that I read. It concerned the changing of DNA through using the spoken word alone. It was discussed in another forum I visited. Since DNA itself follows all the rules of language, should this be surprising? To me it is, but then there was this curious magical system that relied on sound and shape. You said the word while forming your hands into a key position that mimicked this word. Is this part of the unity that has been lost? The underbelly of the Kabbalah is built upon this. The alphabet was to be pronounced while holding your fingers in the position of the letter. Each letter was built upon the ability to shape the letter. There was also a specific tonality and color that went with this movement. And language itself, from whence did it spring? Well, it seems it is encoded into us by means of DNA for it seems it is the progenitor of language. From this website:

http://www.ims.nus.edu.sg/Programs/genome/ldna.htm

we have:

“Previous deciphering efforts have been basic and focused on the immediate meaning of a focal sequence. This is akin to the translation of a text on a word-by-word basis. As we advance in this understanding, we start to see higher order meaning through the nuances of gene expression and splice changes. Moreover, the structure and organization of the DNA sequences within and across species provides a clue as to the fundamental rules that governed the creation of life.

Linguistics is a branch of science that has long sought to define the architecture and laws of language structure. There is ample evidence to indicate that both the dimensions and units of linguistic structure appear genetically embedded in the human species. Therefore, the analysis of the structure of language has provided a window into the make-up of the Homo Sapien mind, and perhaps a set of useful strategies to unearth similar structures.

Experimentally, therefore, both the disciplines of genomics and linguistics seek to uncover order and information from a sea of noise. Genomics, by virtue of its origins in physical and biological sciences, has had the benefit of rigorous computational tools and laboratory validation in its investigations. Unlike genomics, however, the intuitive understanding of language in all of us permitted linguists to convincingly reconstruct rules governing the transmission of higher order meaning, while unlike cryptography, genomics can use experimental strategies to uncover the relation between form and meaning.

So perhaps this – “DNA sequences within and across species provides a clue as to the fundamental rules that governed the creation of life” - is why this question of language is of the utmost importance. For wouldn’t understanding the meaning of life give life meaning?

Thank you for your very intriguing post. I will now assume a spanking position.



NEMESIS

I've been meaning to get to this thread long ago but as usual the morbid ADD fries my priorities. Anyway, someone here has said something and my ears...well, eyeballs...perked up:

BigBlue:
Yes, if you say a word enough times it starts to sound meaningless to you... I have no evidence to support this claim, but I am partial to the idea that when you experience the same thing over and over again your brain starts to look for smaller patterns within the more obvious units, and subdivides the word (as you said) into meaningless sections in an attempt at deeper analysis for meaning that turns out not to be there.

and

With respect to the fallacies you mentioned, this is not at all strange... natural language can encode logical impossibilities just as much or more than logical languages can; to be able to describe things which are not or cannot be the case is a helpful property in a robust descriptive system

Those things in bold....an attempt to find meaning where none is.....speaking of things which are not and cannot......those veritable pot holes in language man fell in.

I'll keep this post short and won't dump my language theory in here when there's a 20 paged thread on it with my name on it (Mephura's but.....as everything else, I stole it).

It centers around the three properties in language that I feel contributed to man's disintegration into a false sense of ego. Spirt. Homo Duplex:

displacement
vicariousneness
recursion



But first, BigBlue...do explain what you meant by those two things I've quoted.

I occurs to me that a lot of people are looking further into this than is necessary. Language is not some mystical ability possessed by enlightened humans or some other deep philosphical entity. it is simply a tool for communication. The reasons that a word looks silly and meaningless when repeated may very well be as you say Blue, but it is also because the word itself has no meaning. It only has meaning when two or more people agree that it means the same thing. Therefore, it is only useful when it has meaning, when it loses that meaning, it looks and is, silly. Repetition is often used as a method of meditation, whose general purpose is to break the mind of rational thought. This is also a likely reason why the word loses its meaning.

Furthermore, I don't recall any mystical symbols being found in any Magdaleninan cave sites... do you have a location, time period for these inscriptions? There were some cave writings in the Cantabrian area from this period, but these contained Pre-Roman writings from the native, non-Roman languages. Nothing mystic. Also, the egyptians had what the Chinese had, namely a symbology rather than an alphabet. Even that had begun to shift rather rapidly though into a sort of syllabary. There are no vowels in heiroglyphs, only consonants, so all translations are necessarily amiguous and vague.

Originally posted by gendanken
displacement
vicariousneness
recursion

Now I know you've said this before and I'm kind of with you on it but I gotta ask: Aren't vicariousness and recursion both aspects of displacement?

Kami:

You should read this entire thread (http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=25739&highlight=language) and see if you feel the same.

You see it's language that gives you something worthwhile to think about and allows you to do so somewhat crisply. Contemplate attempting to develop a mind without the tool of language.

I'm a linguist, who studied language and it's precursors for many years. I know what language is and what it is used for. I'm not discounting the effects of language on learning or on the development of extra-lingual ideas, but it is, at its heart, a tool. I am also a practising buddhist and have a deep appreciation for the abilities of language and more specifically, sound, to produce enhanced states of consciousness, but even there, it is simply a tool. Have you ever tried to think about something without using words in your head.. It's quite simple to do and you realize that words are simply labels that we put on the real world around us. The world is real, language is an artificial construct that we use to decribe it. Or, perhaps, even the world is not real and only our minds or souls are existant, but even then language and the world are constructs.

Thought without language is very possible and is actually much faster and clearer. Thought with language is always limited by the language and it's inaccuracy and ambiguity. Maybe it's easier to do when you know several languages and learn to think in different languages.. it gives you an insight into concepts without language and lets you switch between "labelling systems" with ease. It is this thought without language that makes me believe that language is only a small part of reality and has no direct bearing on it and is powerless to affect it.

That said, it is an extremely powerful tool for transmitting and sharing ideas between individuals, but even then it is not the only tool for this. Art is another extremely powerful tool for conveying emotions and ideas to other people through various media. Try explaining the emotions and ideas of Beethoven's Ninth in words. Or, imagine how many words would be required to describe the same pastoral scenes exemplified in Beethoven's 3rd or the river in Smetana's Moldau. I do not underestimate the power of language, but also, I do not overestimate it or consider it superior to other modes of communication, including art.

Originally posted by Kami
I'm a linguist, who studied language and it's precursors for many years. I know what language is and what it is used for.

:)
Originally posted by Kami

I'm not discounting the effects of language on learning or on the development of extra-lingual ideas, but it is, at its heart, a tool.

You're right, but there is more to it than that. It's not "just a tool" in that it contributes directly to what comprises one's mind throughout its development. I think it IS more important than other modes of communication in that aspect. For instance, I wonder if it would be possible to really appreciate art if it had not been for language shaping your mind in a manner that lets you appreciate the term and concept of "art" in the first place ya know? You really should read that thread (or at least skim it). You should have something interesting to say about it I'd imagine.
Originally posted by Kami

I am also a practising buddhist and have a deep appreciation for the abilities of language and more specifically, sound, to produce enhanced states of consciousness, but even there, it is simply a tool.

Yes and no, it's a living, breathing too in a sense don't you think? I mean, language kind of has a life of it's own. It's a sort of conceptual repository for human thought.

Gendy... I shall try to illustrate the repeated words business, but this is a sort of difficult subect for me to explain properly, and I tend to make a major appeal to induction which I will announce in advance just so it doesn't look like I'm being intellectually dishonest.

BLUE'S APPEAL TO INDUCTION:

The operation of a physical sense can be used to gather information about some operation of the brain. When two senses have similar properties in a certain regard it may reflect the way we process information rather than the way we gather it.

Minor adjunct - sensory information is not presented to you in a raw form; sight is processed before you see it.

END APPEAL TO INDUCTION.

When you look at a featureless surface for a long time, you will begin to see patterns. These patterns are not actually there; you can even influence them to some extent and make yourself see things that aren't there, in a limited way.

My personal theory is that our perceptual system tries to find patterns in the things that it perceives, and when none are apparent it "fiddles" with them to try to show up subtler patterns. This can be seen in the old concave/convex cube pictures that they used to show you in school when they talked about optical illusions. First they are convex, then concave, and so on, and you can learn to see them one way or the other (although holding the image is difficult).

Also, if you stare at a repeating pattern of identical shapes like squares or hexagons, you may find that your perception of the shapes will break them up into groups, and you will see lines of squares, or grouped squares of squares, where there is no actual division depicted in the picture of repeated squares. These are things that your eye will do to try to derive meaning from an apparently meaningless (or meaning-poor) image.

Now, as Cyperium mentioned earlier in the thread, you can repeat a word to yourself aloud many times, and it will begin to lose its meaning as a word and fall upon your ears as a blunt sound that has no evocation of ideas. In my opinion, this is the same effect as with the vision of blank walls or repeating sequences of shapes... given that the original shallow meaning of the word has already been well analyzed by your brain, you then go on to analyze the word at a more basic level, the sounds themselves, in an attempt to get something out of it - the same way you try to get something out of the blank wall.

With respect to describing things that cannot be:

To be able to describe the future we need hypotheticals, which necessarily introduce contradictions into the language unless strict social controls are implemented to stop this.

Let us say that Wes is going to turn a certain colour, but we don't know which one, we only know that his colour will change. Perhaps it will be a delicate spring green, perhaps a brash golden colour, or maybe the deep blue at the edge of falling night. Wes might have announced, "I'm going to the skin shop to get a new coat of paint for my body," but he's leaving the colour as a surprise.

We can say, "Wes will be entirely green."
We can say, "Wes will be entirely blue."
We can say, "Wes will be entirely gold."

All of these are hypothetical conjectures. At best one of them will be true, at worst they will all be false, if Wes has them paint him silver. Our ability to speak in advance of things (which by definition may or may not happen, since the future, at least, is not predictable by us reliably) necessarily introduces our ability to say things that are not true. Furthermore, we can fall further saying untrue things with skillful contradictions:
"Wes will be entirely blue and he will be entirely not-blue."
Or by the same token create statements that are tautological:
"Wes will be entirely blue or he will not be entirely blue."

It is hypothetical conjecture that permits us to lie, and even to describe things that can never happen, like the contradiction above. But, as I said before, removing this capacity from our language would at the same time remove its ability to describe anything that had not already happened.

Originally posted by wesmorris
:)

You're right, but there is more to it than that. It's not "just a tool" in that it contributes directly to what comprises one's mind throughout its development. I think it IS more important than other modes of communication in that aspect. For instance, I wonder if it would be possible to really appreciate art if it had not been for language shaping your mind in a manner that lets you appreciate the term and concept of "art" in the first place ya know? ...9snip)

I mean, language kind of has a life of it's own. It's a sort of conceptual repository for human thought.
I thing you're just about right. Orwell had the right idea about the power of language on thought imo. Language is a very powerful constraint on our thoughts, and when political (or religious, or scientific) use debases it we think less rationally. Also Wittgenstein argued we couldn't think at all without it, as you do.

I don't agree since, as Kami says, a bit of Buddhist practice soon proves him wrong. But I'd say he (and you) were very nearly right. Wittgenstein said that to overcome the limits of language on our thoughts (to transcend it) is analagous to a fly getting out of a fly bottle. Buddhists would agree.

Originally posted by Canute
I thing you're just about right. Orwell had the right idea about the power of language on thought imo. Language is a very powerful constraint on our thoughts, and when political (or religious, or scientific) use debases it we think less rationally. Also Wittgenstein argued we couldn't think at all without it, as you do.

Well, I think we hit the nail on the head in that language thread. Gendy and I argued long and hard about this and what I left the conversation with was the following: Words create conceptual nodes in mind. Without them, it would be conceptual blah. Sure you'd think, but without the ability to contrast concepts as clearly as words allow, your thoughts could not be so crisp.

Look at a baby going through their lingual development (I'm sure Kami could help us out here). They are shaping the foundations of their thoughts for the rest of their thinking days. Forgoe this excercise, isolate the child from intellect and watch the potential for mind virtually disintigrate. Certainly a POV remains, but wholly unrefined excepting the blurbs that the individual can manage for themself. It's arguable that in this case a form of gruntspeak would emerge, language itself emerging as a result of the ability to conceptualize to begin with. Certainly in a culture without language (say pre-historic) "i want to do it" and "I'm hungry" emerged as recognizable grunts which evolved into a semi-formalized system... and on and on and on.

You take away language and you send a brother back to the stone age. You rob them of the conceptual dilineation of generation upon generatoin, and as such, if you skip that period in youth where the brain is ready for that stuff.. you miss the window of opportunity and language can never really take hold.

Bah, I don't feel that was worded well, but I hope you can follow my meaning.

What should be distinguished in this is the difference between language for use for oneself and language for use between individuals. Language for oneself is really not very important. I'm sure that there are all sorts of things that you can visualize in your head without knowing the name of it, nor the names of its parts... this does not keep you from visualizing it, knowing how to manipulate it, or understand its meaning. This is a little difficult to describe, but it's not too difficult an exercise. Now, what language allows us to do, and the reason that it is such an underpinning of our society and philosophies is that it allows us to convey those thoughts to other people reasonably well. That is why it is so important to us and why it is believed that the lack of language would result in a stunted intellect. Studies show that the intellect (that is, the capacity for learning) is not at all impaired by the lack of a language, in fact, in babies, the intellect is fantastically huge, because they start with. more or less, a blank slate and it is the acquisition of language that reduces the ability to learn some things... like other languages.

What language DOES do for us is that it allows us access to all those thoughts and achievements of people throughout the past history of the written word. So it does allow us (and this is writing more than language) to pass down information to future generations and to glean information from experiences in the past. This allows us to build upon pre-existing knowledge istead of starting from scratch every time. Of course, sometimes the most original ideas come from scrapping what was learned before and try to start as new as possible. Sometimes, pre-existing knowledge is flawed and leads to bad conclusions or incorrect ones at the least.

Thought appears to be nearly instantaneous (nearly) and then it takes some time to rationalize it, understand it and translate it into language. How many times have you known what you want to say, but been unable to express it in words? I think that shows, very simply, how thought exists without words. But language is what allows society to develop and continue to do so throughout time.

/Language for oneself is really not very important.

To be a stickler, note that you should consider that "importance" is subjective.

/I'm sure that there are all sorts of things that you can visualize in your head without knowing the name of it, nor the names of its parts... this does not keep you from visualizing it, knowing how to manipulate it, or understand its meaning.

I agree with you up until "understanding its meaning" and then would interject "not necessarily". Internally, language largely represents "that which I have previously concieved" in the sense that conceptually, language is a kind of label for a conceptual node. Lots of different thinking type mishmash converges at the internal linguistic node for the word "red", for instance. My hair, slurs against me, a fight with a friend in first grade, the web page I was working on yesterday, the range of hues I might consider red... blah blah etc, etc. So to say language isn't required to "understand the meaning of your thought" is somewhat a pointless statement really, as the meaning is something in and of itself, merely facilitated by words. I think you "feel" the meaning of your thoughts.

/This is a little difficult to describe, but it's not too difficult an exercise. Now, what language allows us to do, and the reason that it is such an underpinning of our society and philosophies is that it allows us to convey those thoughts to other people reasonably well.

Of course. Your point is taken as obvious and uhm... well, not at all contradictory to what has been said.

/That is why it is so important to us and why it is believed that the lack of language would result in a stunted intellect.

No, I believe it would result in a stunted intellect due to my understanding of mind.

/Studies show that the intellect (that is, the capacity for learning) is not at all impaired by the lack of a language, in fact, in babies, the intellect is fantastically huge, because they start with.

Yes of course. Are you stating this as contradictory to my prior statements or???

/more or less, a blank slate and it is the acquisition of language that reduces the ability to learn some things... like other languages.

Any action comes with an opportunity cost.

/What language DOES do for us is that it allows us access to all those thoughts and achievements of people throughout the past history of the written word. So it does allow us (and this is writing more than language) to pass down information to future generations and to glean information from experiences in the past. This allows us to build upon pre-existing knowledge istead of starting from scratch every time.

Are you plagerizing me???? :D Hey didn't I just say that?

/Of course, sometimes the most original ideas come from scrapping what was learned before and try to start as new as possible. Sometimes, pre-existing knowledge is flawed and leads to bad conclusions or incorrect ones at the least.

Okay and?

/Thought appears to be nearly instantaneous (nearly) and then it takes some time to rationalize it, understand it and translate it into language. How many times have you known what you want to say, but been unable to express it in words?

Maybe that's because you don't really know what you want to say eh? If you did, you wouldn't have to figure out the words.

/I think that shows, very simply, how thought exists without words.

I haven't said thought doesn't exist without words. You're missing a degree of depth here. A word is a node representative of a concept at which experiences can intersect. If you don't have the words, you don't have the nodes (at least untill you define them yourself which is as we both acknowledge, sending someone back to the stone ages). If you don't have the nodes, you have experiences but they are mushier, significantly less compartmentalized, the shape of your concepts is never clearly dilineated because you don't have things to contrast vs. other things with the benefit of language to add classifications, labels, blah blah blah.

/language is what allows society to develop and continue to do so throughout time.

Sure.... kind of like a "conceptual repository for human thought".

Wes and Kami

I agree with all you said. But I wonder. Are we so sure that language is beneficial to us? What exactly was so terrible about being a stone age hunter-gatherer?

Originally posted by Canute
Wes and Kami

I agree with all you said. But I wonder. Are we so sure that language is beneficial to us? What exactly was so terrible about being a stone age hunter-gatherer?

THAT, is simply a matter of opinion.

I like gadgets. :D

EDIT:

Oh and there is something to be said for the ability to interact in the manner that we currently are.

Let's put it this way. Bad has nothing to do with it. This is evolution baby.

Ah, but I didn't say good or bad, I said beneficial. But I agree it's a matter of opinion.

i think that it is beneficial to a society. almost all animals, and some would say plants, have forms of language, if you define language as a method of communicating information. sign languages, chemical trails, body language can all be used to convey information and I think that that is the most important function of language. it allows us to build upon the experiences of others as well as those of our own... as wes said, a repository of human thought.

even in a hunter-gatherer society, or simple agrarian one language is extremely useful for saying things like "don't sneak up behind a mammoth" or "corn grows well if you do this to it." it's a system of shared experience.

For you bilinguilists :

Do you first think in your native tongue, then translate that to english, or do you think in english?

If you think in english... has this developed over time?

If you don't... does your native language ever go away? (as thought processes, i dont think you can forget the language you were raised on)

Thought is a floating filter, filtering through recorded experiences (which are in a sense still dynamic). At the same time, these experiences themselves have a sense of time about them. As they are brought into focus, their internal depth offers a sense of persistence in time. In the present, I see consciousness or "that which creates (or attaches to)" the animating "force" of the universe, or what I term "the life force".

In the same sense that time itself animates space, consciousness animates time.

The collaboration of space and time seems like "space time" from a POV. Similarly, the collaboration of time and "the abstract" or "the inward dimension" seem like "self" as the combination creates a sense of self. In this sense the brain is space and mind is a result of the interaction between "the abstract" and space.

Just thoughts I was having. I'm not exactly sure how to prep them for your particular arrangement of experience and concepts.

*sigh*

Thought: It's that it's a floating filter, filtering through recorded experiences (which are in a sense still dynamic). At the same time, these experiences themselves have a sense of time about them. As they are brought into focus, their internal depth offers a sense of persistence in time. In the present, I see consciousness or "that which creates (or attaches to)" the animating "force" of the universe, or what I term "the life force".

Have you ever, in your musings about language, considered communicating like a non-retarded human?

The perception of consciousness is not dependant on language, only the communication of consciousness is.

Originally posted by Xev
Have you ever, in your musings about language, considered communicating like a non-retarded human?

No. I have not considered it.

Originally posted by Xev
The perception of consciousness is not dependant on language, only the communication of consciousness is.

Okay. Is that supposed to be contradictory to the quoted text?

Note the post was labeled "random" which indicates at best "only loosely related to the topic".

Originally posted by Xev
Have you ever, in your musings about language, considered communicating like a non-retarded human?
Have you considered communicating like a moderator might?

Originally posted by Fafnir665
For you bilinguilists :

Do you first think in your native tongue, then translate that to english, or do you think in english?

If you think in english... has this developed over time?

If you don't... does your native language ever go away? (as thought processes, i dont think you can forget the language you were raised on)

It's hard to completely break out of thinking in your native tongue. Usually I think abstractly (or at least, that's the goal) and let the language come naturally. I don't think any language in my head. I suppose that's where people are having trouble with languages. If you think English in your head before you speak it you would have a very deliberate tone. It's different when you write, because then you ARE thinking about what to "say" before you write it, but language doesn't really do that. There may be a split-second in which you realize what you are going to say, but you don't plan it, generally. So, in English, or any language, I think abstractly then translate THAT into words... which language just suits the occasion.

Ha ha, yeah, that makes it sound like I'm fluent in all languages, but really it's harder than that and the above is the linguistic ideal. In the real world, I tend to think in the language I'm speaking, it's faster that way. If I don't, then I have problems like saying: "Oh, I was just going to the ... oh, shoot, what's that word?" Probably because thinking about it too much or thinking in english then translating, is like saying in your head "I'm going to the library" --> "Ya ponimayu v bibliotekye" ---> ::say these words out loud:: When you try to think in the language, you're trying to form complete sentences and make sure they're correct. Speaking fluently involves making some mistakes, but knowing which ones are okay to bend. Do you speak fully proper English when you speak? And again, writing is different.

Finally, no, your native language never really goes away. I speak several languages to varying degrees of fluency and grew up bi-lingual, but my primary languages are still the dominant ones.

Did that answer any questions, or just confuse things?

Does it change when you become fluent?

I've attempted (in school) to learn 4 different languages.

German, Spanish, French, and Latin.

All of them I would find myself thinking the english before I would try to speak the language. At the time, I wondered if a better teaching method would be word association with pictures, as you would teach a child, and once you have that done you can move on to more complicated ideas, but it seems to have worked for generations the current way, so maybe it's just me.

With time it gets easier to think in another language. It helps if you're immersed in the language, then the english words don't come to mind as quickly. Your idea about picture recognition would be effective (sort of a flash-card thing) and that's what you end up doing as you gain fluency. When I think of a house, I get the idea in my head (that concept-node again, wes) then I have all the labels attached to it, like: home, warm, safe - and the linguistic ones "casa, getsadi, doma, uchi, haus... etc." which one comes to mind depends a lot on what language I'm already speaking. If I'm translating from english (which I am guilty of sometimes) then it's harder to remember the right words.

It's like when you're typing, if you try to think about which letters you're hitting, it slows you down and tends to confuse you. If you just "let it flow" it comes out much more smoothly and fluently. Also like that video-game trance where you just zone out and cruise through the game, totally fluent. It's zen. ha ha.

You just have to be comfortable with the language and be willing to make mistakes. People will understand you anyway as long as you don't butcher it too badly and the mistakes help you learn and get better next time. That's the advantage of language, especially english (which is probably why its today's lingua franca) is that you can speak it badly (sic) and still be understood.

I've stayed out of this one because you all seem to know so much more about this than I do.

(Although I would dispute the premise that Japanese is easy to learn. The honorifics and status-words are bewildering, and if you get them wrong the Japanese will be horrified. When they hear a man using women's verb forms or children speaking like elders, it makes them ill. I believe that's why they generally don't encourage foreigners to learn it. They'd rather speak bad English than hear bad Japanese!)

But someone finally asked a question I know the answer to: How do you know when you're really thinking in another language, rather than translating very efficiently from your native tongue in real time? The answer is: When you find yourself or someone else speaking the language in your dreams. That's your unconscious in control. If it can generate sentences in a language, then you're thinking in it.

Canute:
I thing you're just about right. Orwell had the right idea about the power of language on thought imo. Language is a very powerful constraint on our thoughts, and when political (or religious, or scientific) use debases it we think less rationally. Also Wittgenstein argued we couldn't think at all without it, as you do

Think of hydraulics- you can manipulate the meanest machines on Earth with something as simple as water.
Man is tamed by his simple alphabets.

And so, Russia was burned by a penny candle (1701)

Are we so sure that language is beneficial to us
?
I don’t know if Wes here would agree but look how limited Rome became once its language shaped its thoughts of Octavian- before, the man was that fearless General that grabbed Egypt by the hair, a mere First Citizen subject to elections. But once he was given title of Augustus he was thought of with awe because that title is one used by gods. Opposing him as Octavian was shit but since “Augsustus” invoked holiness, godly wisdom, and fancy bullshit ..........opposing Augustus now became spiritually immoral.

The mind rearranged itself to receive him brand new. Mentality now became imperial.

See?

Wes:
Now I know you've said this before and I'm kind of with you on it but I gotta ask: Aren't vicariousness and recursion both aspects of displacement?


You could say they’re all variants of displacement, but whether it is or not is not what eats me or care about. They’re all the same miscaculations in this invention of ours (language) but for clearance (this is where you put the put the fries down and concentrate):

Displacement- it allows you to talk about things that are not there, or never been or going to be there. Either way it allows for things that both are and aren't. Ever seen a fairy?
Its also interesting to see that this feature is common among the superstitious- they displace where control *is*. And so these backwoods know-nothings place their control no longer in them but in lucky rabbit feet, clovers, and crosses.

Vicariousness- it allows you to be somehwere, do something or live via something outside of yourself.

Recursion- which allows for introspection, insight, reason and ego.

All this being allowed to go around playing with things that are not is the surest means to see patterns where none are and lose track of reality somewhere in the middle of playing so hard.

Which brings me to none other than Bigblue.


Bigblue:

Fucking beautiful:
When you look at a featureless surface for a long time, you will begin to see patterns. These patterns are not actually there; you can even influence them to some extent and make yourself see things that aren't there, in a limited way.
Patterns not there.....

Second:
My personal theory is that our perceptual system tries to find patterns in the things that it perceives, and when none are apparent it "fiddles" with them to try to show up subtler patterns. This can be seen in the old concave/convex cube pictures that they used to show you in school when they talked about optical illusions. First they are convex, then concave, and so on, and you can learn to see them one way or the other (although holding the image is difficult).
!

Those puzzle books with the cubes, dots and parallel lines I fried my brains with in grade school. Which was which? Convex or concave, red or blue, up or down and were those lines truly parallel or were the scratch lines throwing me off?

Is there really a spiritual side to man? I ~debated~ with Wes a long time ago about my ideas of homo duplex (ego) being a myth but he would not bite because he was so real to himself.

I asked myself then why it is that he's so real to him and I could come up with nothing else but that his mental voice, his "elan vital", sense for reality, feel for life- of things happening- were convincing him of something transcendental- something more.

Organisms I've said have a sense of time and things happening of course- proof you'll find in reprodution, movement, synthesis and I'm not as cruel to rob them of choice.
But Wes here being the human that he is has an extra sense of things that have happened, are happening and wil happen and they all travel with him wherever he goes. He projects into the future and creates possibilities with imagination.

Now why is that? What's made this possible? My answer was language. Conscience alone won't do it. Something making the insight possible for him to define himself apart from reality in terms of two things is needed and that's what is doing it.

Wes not just knowing, but another self knowing that he knows for him.

What can do that other than than the voice he thinks with? And what does it think with when he's thinking of himself? Language.

This gives him identity. And identity, to me, is the pattern language has made for its speaker, chopping up lines and groups of squares........... patterns where, and I quote you directly BigBlue, "there is no actual division depicted in the picture of repeated squares"

Machines fake "consciousness" by making choices between parameters, but no neural network will ever show the insight to grasp its life with sudden understanding.

Perhaps I've made this a bit long so I'll cut it short. Bigblue:

It is hypothetical conjecture that permits us to lie, and even to describe things that can never happen, like the contradiction above. But, as I said before, removing this capacity from our language would at the same time remove its ability to describe anything that had not already happened.



Bigblue, you little, little, godsend....

Permits us to lie.....describe the impossible, contradictions galore.......limit reality with lables...sucking its meaning by narrowing. All key ingredients for mythos.

I tied all this with religion. I said once that religion and language were exactly the same things. There is nothing mystical about language. Its as real as the keyboard I'm typing on.

Motherfuckers..................

So!- this thread has mummifyied. Fucking pity- bigblue was on to something.


Wes- you still think I'm full of shit, yes?

Originally posted by gendanken
Wes- you still think I'm full of shit, yes?

Not entirely, no, but I don't exactly agree either. I'll try to find the time to reply. I'm still pissed off that I wasted hours last night on a fucking perfect reply to J.P. which succumbed to the crack of my system when I attempted to record some video. My machine crashes so rarely that I'd been taking it for granted that it's stable. Goddamnit. Anyway, I was thinking earlier about how I owe you a reply, but I've been spending all my time trying to learn web page stuff. I spent prolly 11 hours working on it yesterday. Slow going damnit. I'll try to get it together and give you something to chew on.

Wess:
I spent prolly 11 hours working on it yesterday. Slow going damnit. I'll try to get it together and give you something to chew on.

Up and at it then, little man. Understood.

I break many things but the last thing I would is a promise. I owe you another entry "Neat Meat"...but finals week so...eat it.
When time allows, but you'll get it.


Bigblue is really who I wanted to hear from but.........meh. He's gone for good it seems. Ba-ha-stard.

You sure know how to make a guy feel appreciated ('little man' and 'really wanted to hear from someone who isn't YOU').

:bugeye:

LOL.

You bastard.

/Man is tamed by his simple alphabets.

I think it's important to clarify that most of the species is tamed by their alphabet. Some men make new alphabets.

/The mind rearranged itself to receive him brand new. Mentality now became imperial. See?

But you're talking about social phenomenon. People associate a concept of godliness due to the fact that the other people were doing the same thing. The communicated what they were doing via language.

Of course language is the medium and allows transferance of absracts from mind to mind, but it in and of itself is not responsible as it is:

- not a being (so it cannot assume reponsibility)
- descriptive of the propensity of minds to contrast and define

So I'm saying that language is an implicit facet of mind, or language wouldn't exist. So I see no reason to credit language itself as it is an interesting by-product of mind. I just credit mind and what happens when they get together.

Bah. Maybe I'm responding to threads long since past instead of what you're saying here. I can't tell at the moment.

/You could say they’re all variants of displacement, but whether it is or not is not what eats me or care about. They’re all the same miscaculations in this invention of ours (language) but for clearance (this is where you put the put the fries down and concentrate):

I disagree that they are miscalculations and defer to Blue's argument that in order to decribe things that have yet to happen, you pay an opportunity cost of describing things that couldn't happen, or didn't, or won't, etc. The intent of this thread was to ponder if we could devise a language that minimized the propensity for this kind of error. I was thinking earlier that we need to blend mathematics and actual language more smoothly, but I dunno. I can say anything mathematical in english, it just might take a long time to say. *ponders thousands of pages in books of calculus*. Hmmm. Meh. Just thinking 'out loud'.

I always think back to survival. In those terms, I'd think it more important to be able to discuss potential future events than it is to maintain logical consistency. I mean, if you see a rock teetering on a cliff face along the pass you're walking along, it's nice to be able to determine it might fall and warn your offspring that they should avoid the aread beneath it. From that perspective, I suppose logical consistency is a luxury excepting the cases where it negatively impacts ones ability to continue living or reproduce.

/Displacement- it allows you to talk about things that are not there, or never been or going to be there. Either way it allows for things that both are and aren't. Ever seen a fairy?

Well yes I have, but not IRL. I understand what you mean by this but as I argue above, I don't think it's necessarily a misconception or wrong or whatever until abused to gain false advantage in human interactions.

/Its also interesting to see that this feature is common among the superstitious- they displace where control *is*. And so these backwoods know-nothings place their control no longer in them but in lucky rabbit feet, clovers, and crosses.

Can you blame them? Fundy question (or quesitons that people make fundy) cannot be ignored by a psyche. They need resolution. People answer them however they can such that they can focus on more direct problems (survival). They are as such abstractly supported by whatever ridiculous assumptions they make regarding the fundys, as those fundys are the foundations of their conceptual stuctures - meaning that yeah, if you believe in x such that you can focus on y, you probably credit (or blame, or whatever) x for allowing you to do y ya know?

/Vicariousness- it allows you to be somehwere, do something or live via something outside of yourself.

Which is in essence the same thing as displacement. I would summarize all three as 'projection' which is basically the same as displacement.

/Recursion- which allows for introspection, insight, reason and ego.

Same, and really this borders on talking about consciousness itself.

/All this being allowed to go around playing with things that are not is the surest means to see patterns where none are and lose track of reality somewhere in the middle of playing so hard.

I don't think you're maintaining objectivity. To me you have just projected a negative perspective of humanity onto itself. You have every right to do so, but I think it taints your ability to analyze the problem.

So I think you have a lot of insight/talent, but your personal distaste for whatever throws you off track a bit. Of course you probably feel similarly about me. (except for the insight/talent part ;) )

/Which brings me to none other than Bigblue.

He said:

"When you look at a featureless surface for a long time, you will begin to see patterns. These patterns are not actually there; you can even influence them to some extent and make yourself see things that aren't there, in a limited way."

This is the nature of mind that led to language. Can you see it? At least that's the way it seems to me. It's this propensity for contrast, this NEED to find patterns that DO EXIST that led to language in the first place.

/Patterns not there.....

Ah, the patterns are there if you put them there. It's more pertinent to me to ask "are the patterns i perceive representative of something which helps me understand my situation/environment?".

/Those puzzle books with the cubes, dots and parallel lines I fried my brains with in grade school. Which was which? Convex or concave, red or blue, up or down and were those lines truly parallel or were the scratch lines throwing me off?

Hehe. They weren't parallel! Okay maybe they were. Hey I wasn't even there get off me.

/Is there really a spiritual side to man? I ~debated~ with Wes a long time ago about my ideas of homo duplex (ego) being a myth but he would not bite because he was so real to himself.

The answer to "am I real" is wholly inconsequential to me if I cannot tell that I am not.

/I asked myself then why it is that he's so real to him and I could come up with nothing else but that his mental voice, his "elan vital", sense for reality, feel for life- of things happening- were convincing him of something transcendental- something more.

It's the awareness. Time rolled up onto itself as seen from a consciousness.

I still hold that the spirituality of man is a reverence for the unknown. Often the unknown is indoctrinated as "known", in an attempt to integrate it such that we don't have to spend time on it. I mean, in terms of survival, spending our lives sitting and talking shit like this does not directly put food on the table. I suppose it can though if you can get together a pile of prolific shit and present it in a marketable fashion.

Well, that and uhm.. people perform their function. It is our function to do this, theirs to do that. We will clash amongst ourselves and amongst functions, as some are mutually exclusive to others.

/Organisms I've said have a sense of time and things happening of course- proof you'll find in reprodution, movement, synthesis and I'm not as cruel to rob them of choice.

As if you could! :)

/But Wes here being the human that he is has an extra sense of things that have happened, are happening and wil happen and they all travel with him wherever he goes. He projects into the future and creates possibilities with imagination.

/Now why is that? What's made this possible?

The human brain, it's ability to remember itself, and the propensity for it to contrast and find patterns in things (which allows it to survive).

/My answer was language.

Which IMO, is sort of correct.

/Conscience alone won't do it.

But give it a brain to store stuff.. and the propensity to find patterns and such.. voila... language. Now you have a repository for all local (able to access the info) concepts.

I have let out emotions and the urge to reproduce, and I think they play into the propensities as mentioned above. I'll save it for later though, just wanted to mention it.

/Something making the insight possible for him to define himself apart from reality in terms of two things is needed and that's what is doing it.

Yes of course, I think I described it above.

/Wes not just knowing, but another self knowing that he knows for him.

Exactly. Can you see it in terms of the description I've given? Are we just in concept clash here? Hmmm.

/What can do that other than than the voice he thinks with? And what does it think with when he's thinking of himself? Language.

Like I said...

/This gives him identity.

I only sort of agree, partially disagree. I think his "memory" or ability to know more of himself than the moment (which I don't think requires language) is what provides the fundamental sense of identity.

/And identity, to me, is the pattern language has made for its speaker, chopping up lines and groups of squares........... patterns where, and I quote you directly BigBlue, "there is no actual division depicted in the picture of repeated squares"

I think my "more pertinent question" from way above fits perfectly here. "are the patterns representative of something which helps me understand my situation/environment?". If you think there are lines and the result doesn't play into your ability to survive or reproduce, then the reality of those lines being there is technically inconsequential except regarding a particular understanding about perception and trickery. It might be wise to know that if it could affect your ability to survive or reproduce, but otherwise, well... it's a piece in puzzle.

/Machines fake "consciousness" by making choices between parameters, but no neural network will ever show the insight to grasp its life with sudden understanding.

That's because they can't conceptualize and have no 'persistence in time' so to speak. The lack of self awareness is a show stopper there.

/Bigblue, you little, little, godsend....

Bigblue? Little? Man you do what you know most men do to smart women as a pre-emptive strike eh? Some of us don't think you are stupid because you're a girl goddamnit! Bastard. Blue is big, calling him little is contradictory and derogatory! :) Hehe.

Jes' a little busy at work, no big deal... sorry I didn't reply for a while. Let's get to it!

Cuz they were to it and at it
and at it and doin' it
you gotta tune your attitude in...
if you don't get at it when you're goin' to it
then you won't get to it to get at it again.
- Thomas Connors

(Do all these "it"s index the same reference? I was never sure.)

Gendy!

To briefly address what I picked up from your previous big statement, I will say the following.

Displacement
As you defined it - basically the description of untrue things - is and important aspect of our fictional abilities that permit generalized descriptions. This is an all or nothing proposition, disregarding internal controls of course; if we eliminate displacement we lose everything from "I am going to X" to the entire works of Shel Silverstein.

Vicariousness
This is an OLD ability of ours in my opinion. Ever since the first primate (or whatever) poked another creature with a stick to see if it was dead, we have had vicariousness. The ability to "feel" yourself in a different situation, or in a different body, is not so different from the ability to "feel" a tool to be part of your body. I have a small personal theory that this ability comes from being able to see your own body - see that your toes wiggle in response to your will.

Digression - think for a second. Whenever you use a tool you extend yourself into it in a certain sense. How do you tell if your fish is still frozen in the middle? Stick a fork in it and see if it's hard or soft. You're getting your "hard" or "soft" through the fork, just as if it were a fingernail or the hair on your arm.

Recursion
Damn have you got something there. The reason I mentioned Russell's self-referential set paradox before is this: For a Turing computer (which, until a short time ago, was supposed to be all of them) Russell's paradox is like a gun to the head. Poor little Turing machine will NEVER finish evaluating that sucker.

So what's so different between the machine and us? We're not just massively parallel, or else a large enough series of paradoxes would shut us down as well. We're not super hot at evaluating logical expressions, which you'll probably know if you ever had to evaluate a long formula... it takes half an hour with a notepad and many many truth tables.

The human brain has the ability to discard something after a certain length of time... this may only be mechanistic, a sort of limit to our attention span that was imposed by selective pressure (Tiger eats starey monkey crunch crunch).



So... what can we say? I've been wondering about this for a while, and I can only contribute a few things that aid in the concept of reference of the outside world... the reason why I mentioned the patterns is because I believe that is an area where it is difficult to extract the way we operate from the way we are trained, and it merits further study.

Some experiments have shown that not being exposed to patterns can limit the visual perception of animals like cats... there have been several experiments with kittens that have grown up only seeing patterns of horizontal lines, and subsequently cannot see vertical ones. On the other hand it's difficult to class our visual perception of things like the "cubes" picture as pathological, since it would not be better to only see things one way or the other... the visual system leaves those things open to moment-by-moment interpretation.

Similarly our analysis of language is (it seems to me) composed of a series of brief glosses (by some preprocessing system) that gives our thinking part a symbol set to work with. However, this sounds cryptic... let me try an example, the old "Line forms to the the left side" gag.

Please form a line to the
the left side side of the rail.

Often a sentence arranged like this will be read as only having one "the" instead of two, since people usually gloss for meaning and don't spend a lot of time trying to analyze a sentence that is already pretty simple.

This on the other hand is a pretty simple illusion and doesn't provide great insight into the function of the preprocessor... there's a lot of perceptual illusions, like the blind spot, which are easily verified and yet don't really provide a lot of information.


Wes and Gendy:

Have either of you ever had pet rats? Look at how a rat thinks... you can sort of see it in their expression (although these days pet store rats are pretty stupid sometimes...). The rat HAS NO WORDS. This is obvious. IT STILL HAS THOUGHTS. So... what are they? I sometimes wonder if they think in pictures, just as I sometimes do.

Originally posted by BigBlueHead
Wes and Gendy:

Have either of you ever had pet rats? Look at how a rat thinks... you can sort of see it in their expression (although these days pet store rats are pretty stupid sometimes...). The rat HAS NO WORDS. This is obvious. IT STILL HAS THOUGHTS. So... what are they? I sometimes wonder if they think in pictures, just as I sometimes do.

No pet rats but you're preaching to the choir. I agree wholly with your position and have argued it with Gendy at great length. Maybe since you're big she'll believe you. :rolleyes:

I doubt it! Stubborn bastard that she is. :)

I suppose I'm just as stubborn so meh.

I'm right you're wrong :p!!!!!!!!!

I think they think in [at least selected facets of] their experience just as all creatures do.

It's a matter of what their brain can retain of that experience and how it can conceptualize and manipulate it (quite minimal for most creatures) that gives them depth.

Wes!
It's a matter of what their brain can retain of that experience and how it can conceptualize and manipulate it (quite minimal for most creatures) that gives them depth.

But you do agree that other animals have SYMBOLS even if they don't have a symbolic LANGUAGE comparable to ours?

Most people do not even give other animals credit for symbols...

/But you do agree that other animals have SYMBOLS even if they don't have a symbolic LANGUAGE comparable to ours?

Definately, and I'd even say that in a sense they have a symbolic language - at least some of them. Any animal that hunts in groups, or has some sort of mating ritual or whatever.. in a sense that's symbolic language. It communicates simple ideas. (edit: side note; this ties into that bit where i mentioned emotions and such in my post to gendy above)

/Most people do not even give other animals credit for symbols...

Further, they have to symbolize (or conceptualize) their thoughts in some manner, but it is probably so simplistic or foreign that I can't really fathom it (i mean mostly in lower animals).

It seems you think of "symbols" as I think of "concepts" but there's a slight difference I can't put my finger on.

We have arrived!!!

(Highly questionable assertion follows.)

I am going to subdivide "symbol" into two facets, one of which I am going to call "concept" (to follow your wording) and the other of which I will call "symbol" to follow mine. Now, read carefully and tell me if you agree with this fairly obtuse arrangement.

When we have a concept that we want to express to another creature, we use a symbol. The concept can't be communicated directly because we can't project the operation of our mind onto another being directly (in any way that I know).

So, we develop symbols. A symbol is not irrevocably linked to a concept but they usually become strongly linked because this is the basis for symbolic communication. Roughly speaking, a symbol is the outward expression (a physical expression, I guess) of a concept.

The rat's communication of its thought processes to you is largely unintentional, but it still represents symbolic communication. When the rat looks at a piece of roast beef, you know that the rat is considering the roast beef. This is a symbol, even if the rat's intentions are not visible.

I'm buying what you're selling brother blue. Well put. Lemme process that a bit and get back to you - unless of course you feel like expounding.... then please feel free.

Originally posted by BigBlueHead
The rat's communication of its thought processes to you is largely unintentional, but it still represents symbolic communication. When the rat looks at a piece of roast beef, you know that the rat is considering the roast beef. This is a symbol, even if the rat's intentions are not visible.
A sign yes, but a symbol?

Originally posted by Canute
A sign yes, but a symbol?

Hmmm.. that's a good point.

For it to be a symbol, must there be a sense of self to make it so?

In other words, are symbols a projection of self? (did you say that before?)

I think they are.

But is intent necessary to project self?

Does the rat have a sense of self? I say yes, but it is likely almost incomprehensibly simple. So if yes, he can project himself into a symbol (in a very very simple sense) without meaning to. Hmm.

Yeah I dunno I gotta sort this out a little.

"When you look at a featureless surface for a long time, you will begin to see patterns. These patterns are not actually there; yo