Wildcat
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Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. (Albert Camus)
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    Is Language a Window into Human Nature?
    It is obvious that we are in dire need of a new kind of language, a language that may be able to bridge the immensity of the gap we have created between the perception of the world and the manner by which we describe the same world.

    Our past is not a reliable companion to our future anymore, we cannot trust that the concepts, ideas and formulations which have allowed us to reach this point in time, as an evolutionary intersection, will yield the same results.



    the following is an excerpt from :"Is Language a Window into Human Nature?"

    The discrepancy between objective and inner reality is the reason we have difficulty understanding large numbers, the way statistics works, scientific theories like Newtonian physics and evolution, and quantum physics or how to navigate our complex modern society, which is so different from a small tribe of hunter-gatherers.

    Deeply ingrained in all the world's languages are conceptions about sex, intimacy, power,fairness—as well as ideas of divinity, degradation, and danger. This intuitive model of reality is a product of natural selection: the way it parses the world around us, the way it uses shortcuts and assumptions would have served our hunter-gatherer ancestors well, but it is less than perfect for dealing with some of the problems we face in the 21st Century.


    We need a new kind of language, but where are we going to find a new language, how are we going to find or create a new language?

    more:
    In the last chapter, "Escaping the Cave" (referring to Plato's allegory of prisoners in the cave), he points out not only the dangers that our intuitive thinking can pose, but how remarkable human achievements are in light of them.

    "Though language exposes the walls of our cave," he says, "it also shows us how we venture out of it, at least partway. People do, after all, catch glimpses of the sunlit world of reality. Even with our infirmities, we have managed to achieve the freedom of a liberal democracy, the wealth of a technological economy, and the truths of modern science."


    the rest of the article is here

    and the video is here:

    Fri, Jan 4, 2008  Permanent link
    12 comments
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    Comments:


    carel     Fri, Jan 4, 2008  Permanent link
    Language is a two edged sword. It enables us to stack metaphor upon metaphor, giving us the ability to juggle abstract notions. But by naming something, we also strip the object or idea of its uniqueness. A particular object loses detail in our mind when we give it a name. It is easier to draw a face upside down than right side up for those who are not experienced at drawing a portrait. When we view a face right side up, the verbal labels of eye, ears, nose and mouth blur the uniqueness of those features we are observing. Something similar is mentioned in this pasage from "Julian Jaynes revisited" :

    "It is certainly a remarkable fact that there was a long time gap between the cave paintings and the re-emergence of art in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and moreover the art of these civilizations is quite different from what preceded it. The new art is rigid, non-naturalistic, lacking perspective. When naturalistic painting and the use of perspective were rediscovered, in the Italian Renaissance, these skills were no longer spontaneous but required long training and practice for mastery. This suggests that the cave artists were functioning in a different way from us today, and that something happened between their time and our own. Was this 'something' the development of modern language?"

    There will (and should) always be a "gap between the perception of the world and the manner by which we describe the same world." No matter what form of communication we invent, its usefulness in evolutionary sense will come from its incompleteness.
    Wildcat     Sat, Jan 5, 2008  Permanent link
    I definitely agree with you about the incompleteness issue, yet the direction I am pointing to is not to create a complete language, but to increase the efficiency and descriptive power of language whilst simultaneously allowing the mind a much greater leeway in its capability of description, both self-description and observational description. It seems to me that our capacity for metaphors and synonyms is the mark for a language of the mind that bypasses many of the commonly assumed realities (such as gender bias or the innate need to refer to ‘my body’ as a possession).

    We need, I believe a more plastic kind of language. My main issue is with the fact that our world (and the perception of this same world) has changed dramatically whilst our language (both common and specialized) has changed much more slowly and to my mind both inadequately and insufficiently so.

    The usefulness of language’s incompleteness in the evolutionary sense diminishes if the mode of communication dwindles into platitudes and clichés.

    Witness the immense contribution of L. Wittgenstein to language and creativity, if not to the modern mind as a whole.
    Michael Garrett     Sun, Jan 6, 2008  Permanent link
    The usefulness of language’s incompleteness in the evolutionary sense diminishes if the mode of communication dwindles into platitudes and clichés.

    And I would agree it has to some extent. Perhaps we need to place more emphasis on better use of language. I struggle to improve my own word usage. The sloppy use of language, it seems to me, leads to sloppy thinking.
    Wildcat     Sun, Jan 6, 2008  Permanent link
    that would be an Orwellian statement? and yes I agree, we need upgrade
    Spaceweaver     Mon, Jan 7, 2008  Permanent link
    For a human, to be a human is to be immersed in language. To live the life of a human is to language. The emergence of a new language, is nothing less than the emergence of a new human being. These two must come together. When we change or invent a concept, a meaning relation, when we invent a word or a name that was not before, or we use a word or a concept in a manner that was not before, when we do all these, we re-describe our own identity.
    Wildcat     Mon, Jan 7, 2008  Permanent link
    Brilliant Spaceweaver, thank you, for this:
    when we do all these, we re-describe our own identity.
    for that is the issue i am dealing with, in regard to language.

    I was thinking today that the very fact/act of thinking (and doing research) about the coming/existing singularity is changing me and redefining my identity in the process ('en passant' i am not certain i had/have a clearly defined identity to speak of) but as we speak it appears that some aspect/s of the usage of a/the new language does allow a self-metamorphosis (Kafka?) in a process somewhat akin to what Badiou calls 'evental site' (site événementiel).. (the event in this case is the language appropriation and the site is the mind of one..)
    wilfriedhoujebek     Tue, Jan 8, 2008  Permanent link
    While I admire the sentiment, the history of constructed languages hoping to solve some problem or other of current languages has been very rich in failures. And this unsatisfactory track-record of man-made languages is perhaps enough to forsake the effort to produce a new one. As reference I can recommand Umberto Eco's book on perfect languages.

    Language is a great thing, that does reflect the world we live in. But like evolution in biology, you can't outsmart it. Languages change all the time adopting to a changing world. I would not give up on it too soon.
    obvious     Wed, Jan 9, 2008  Permanent link
    I endeavoured to respond to this post, but ended up writing my own. There's just so much to respond to when it comes to language.
    lateral     Fri, Mar 7, 2008  Permanent link
    I am undecided as to how specific language is to humans. Other animals have language. Even plants speak to one another by way of aerosol chemicals. I for one would be interested in a way to transcend language. It is imposed upon us right from the beginning of our lives.

    One concern is the transmission of thought between ourselves. Another is the internal processing of concepts; thought. The degree of marriage between the two determines how much ones thinking is determined by the language one speaks.

    I speak three languages fluently. In periods where I rely on all three for verbal communication I notice falling back on different languages for different areas of thought: Norwegian for mundane, day-to-day stuff. English for abstract concepts and factual knowledge. German for emotional concerns.

    This is probably highly reliant on imprints on my part, but what I want to illustrate is this question:
    By new language, do you mean some evolved bastard child of current spoken and written languages that primarily enables

    • more sophisticated communicatoin.

    • more sophisticated mental processes/thinking.


    Or are you looking for some new kind of language that trancends our current use of symbols?
    Wildcat     Fri, Mar 7, 2008  Permanent link
    Thank you Lateral for an insightful comment, let me start by saying that language I see as an abstract apparatus (or technology if you prefer) operating on a multidimensional platform of emergent phenomena such as minds (it is my view that there may be other kind of platforms that at present are unknown to us). Taking into account the possible fact that the universe is a vast information processing system, it goes without saying that communication is a fundamental of all existence. given these two premises I now go on to hypothesize that all transfer of information is fundamentally a communication but not all kinds of communication are languages. I believe that ants or bees (some plants, whales and dolphins come to mind) have a very sophisticated form of information transmission, retrieval, processing and acknowledgment, but is it language? language need be structured, syntactical and structured, able to evolve and transmute for it to be properly called a language. So these diverse forms of life may have communication procedures but most I wouldn’t call language, especially not when it comes to abstract conceptualizations.
    Having said the above, I believe that what is needed for us humans is not an upgrade of the language we already have, but a completely different form of communication, able to propel us into the next step of our evolution as a specie.
    So to answer your question clearly, yes I am looking for a language that transcends our current symbol oriented system of communication.
    rene     Thu, Mar 13, 2008  Permanent link
    I'm glad to see that you're "looking for a language that transcends our current symbol oriented system of communication." I'm planning to contribute to this discussion more extensively, but for now let me use this context to make a few more remarks about the “exuberant” laughter you and your friends experienced during the road trip you described in Nothingness Rules. You commented that your fit of laughter had "the sense of the universal, a sensation not unlike an insight into the nature of things." I have many friendships that likewise have transcended language on several memorable occasions, forging enduring bonds that were strengthened by the sensation of having spontaneously tuned into a similar wavelength that often remained inaccessible to others in the room. I even know families that are permanently at odds with each other except for such inexplicable shared moments. I’ve often wondered how it’s possible that something as significant as sharing an “insight into the true nature of things,” which has an unmistakable philosophical component, is so much more effectively expressed by laughter rather than words. This phenomenon appears to be some kind of end run around every known rule, convention or discourse, bypassing symbolism, code and language to tune into the way things actually are; like a glimpse into another dimension among the many that are currently imperceptible to us.
    Wildcat     Sun, Jun 22, 2008  Permanent link
    a current article in Cognitive daily proposes that music may help us learn language and maybe offer a glimpse into a richer form of learning.

    "One of the first steps to learning a language is figuring out where one word ends and the next one begins. Since fluent speakers don't generally pause between words, it can be a daunting task. We've discussed one of the ways people do it in this post — they focus in on consonant sounds. Other researchers have found that we also focus on the statistical properties of language.

    Certain syllables are likely to follow each other within individual words, but unlikely to follow each other between words. Take the phrase "between words." In English, within a single word we're much more likely to hear bet followed by ween than ween followed by wor.

    Researchers have found that if you make up nonsense words like gimysi and mimosi and play a constant stream of these words to listeners, the listeners will eventually figure out the boundaries of the words based solely on the statistical properties of the words."

    read the rest here
     
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