It is weird to think about how you can sort of vulgarize an experience by improperly putting it into words. It’s probably a common source of people feeling offended about how something is said, now I think about it; people feeling like the experience they have had is in some way being distorted or trivialized.
Personally, I often feel like I have feelings that are difficult, if not impossible, to put into words and that I am, at times, making them sort of “basic” when putting down a written description of them. Which isn’t to say they are necessarily impossible to communicate, but the language I have to use is somehow insufficient for communicating them. This, I think, is one of the reasons people go for the arts, like music, poetry, drawing, in order to help them communicate things that can’t be stated plainly, or that they don’t know how to state plainly.
Then there’s that fucky stuff where language can change how you think, which I’m pretty sure is one reason colonizers go for forced changes in language on the colonized, historically.
Yeah I know I’m going full deep to a thing posted in funny. I’m a big ole nerd, what can I say. 😛
I see language as a compression algorithm. Our minds contain rich, multidimensional models of the world, and words act as mere labels for these complex concepts. Communication works because we share enough context to unpack these symbols. When you hear a word, it activates entire neural networks of related experiences and emotions within the brain. But the word itself is just a 2D shadow of a higher dimensional object, a lossy projection of meaning that depends entirely on shared understanding to reconstruct.
That’s an interesting way to look at it. Shared understanding seems like a very important point there. In general, languages seem to be significantly tied into the shared cultural/societal context they develop in / out of. For example, a society that has the internet will have words that a society without the internet simply doesn’t have. Or how collectivist China will use a word like 大家 (literally meaning “big family”) to refer to “everyone”, but individualist English’s everyone emphasizes the singular one of differing individuals. And then there’s that whole thing where literally translating from one language to other won’t necessarily tell you the intended meaning, because the structure of it can be so different, which also ties into different sources of shared understanding.
Indeed, and you can look at each society as a kind of a metaorganism, each one evolving in its own way based on the common world model and societal rules it creates.
Yes, compression algorithms work, because they are tied to a specific file format, that everyone knows exactly how to read. That’s not exactly the case with language, but it’s similar. We share context during the speech act, but often not enough for communication to work. Rather, the context is culturally and situationally embedded. What language does is not to communicate meaning by directly referencing the world (compressed or not), but to affect certain acts by it’s use in context. That’s why Wittgenstein, who came up with these ideas long before AI, sais, that human communication consists of moves in a shared language game. Another funny comic about this.
Right, the key part is that a word is basically a label that triggers activation of a set of concepts in our minds. And we each have our own concepts associated with it based on our own personal experience in life. In a way we can never convey the exact meaning of our thinking to another person. On the other hand, it’s also a source of innovation because misinterpretation can lead to new ideas. If one person explains something to another, and they interpret it in a novel way then an idea that neither person originally had could be produced as a result.
Delightful exchange here. To further illustrate, the comments here and the other comments where this was posted.
