Kanjis for streets
14.10.2020
A stream of random thoughts drifted, at times logically, from one topic to another. The starting point was a “Word of the Day” screensaver showing “quale”, which is the singular form of “qualia”.
And the thought jumps to “linguistic zombies”…
... a few small pages’ worth of text generated from a section of Chomsky’s lecture on the “Cognitive Revolution”. The continuation is incredibly convincing in both style and content. Back then when I listened to interviews and lectures of Chomsky, there was often that feeling of noticing the patterns in his ways of making an argument, it’s a mixture of intellectual nodding-along “yeah, makes sense” and a subtle wariness that the arguments are internally self-referential and circular, and a sense of intrigue and curiosity in deciphering what is to be said, even though the points are not immediately obvious. Well, now when I read the AI-generated text, I have pretty much exactly the same batch of mixture of feelings. I’m intrigued by the text, but rationally I know why the points are not obvious, because, you guessed it, the algorithm is designed for highly intelligible rambling.That says something about how people talk, especially when they have to “perform” talking. But who knows… It’s the listener who performs the perceiving and interpreting, and comes up with a feeling of “oh well, that makes sense”. It’s about the consumption of speech and text. What does it mean for content to have substance? Is it self-hypnosis of the reader who read into it and between the lines? Or the listener who hears the sound of one hand clapping?I don’t know… What does that say about people who speak in general? About thought? The AI-Chomsky tells of a story, a story about the automaton. It’s a kind of a thought experiment. Let's suppose that I'm in a room, and I've got a book in front of me, a rule book. The rule book tells me what words to put together to make sentences, and I've got a dictionary in the room, and I can look up the words, so I look up the words in the dictionary, and I put the words together according to the rule book, and I can do that indefinitely, and I can keep running through my rule book indefinitely, and then what will happen is that I'll produce sentences, paragraphs, and even a book that seems just like a book written by a human being, and it will be a book written in French say, and it will be indistinguishable from a book written by a human being who speaks French.“The question is, do I understand what I'm doing? Do I understand French? Does the machine understand French? And the answer is no, because I'm just following the rule book, I'm not really understanding French, just as an automaton following cascading sequences of determinant rules would not understand French.”Chomsky mocks the Turing test. Is appearing indistinguishable from an intelligent being, under some guises, a good test for intelligence? Descartes was dissecting large animals to understand physiology--scientists at the time even built machines that simulate digestion, but the goal was to understand digestion, they weren’t trying to establish that the machine was capable of digesting by trying to fool bystanders into mistaking the machine as a cow. I’m capable of digesting and I also think I’m capable of thinking. But how do I know what is really happening when I think? I guess other people can also think because they look like they can, just like I think I can.
Namely, some aspects of us are like being automata — we don’t use thinking to steer breathing, walking, riding a bicycle, even driving to work, munching on popcorn while watching a movie, all these can be done mindlessly. The machine is performing various actions, but where is the ghost? Can we say that some mental acts can also be done “mindlessly”, like small talk, or mumbling, or reciting paragraphs?
Is the ability to use language simply that we have internalised a “rule book”?
What does it mean to speak a language? To convert thought freely to expressions.
Languages are comparable because they can be analysed with rule-based systems, English has lexicon, German also has lexicon; English has parts of speech, nouns, German also has parts of speech, nouns, and so on
Much of classic linguistics is the study of the relationship between units and meaning, phonemes, morphemes, words, grammar…
Languages share some core universalities because they allow themselves to be analysed through at least a majority of these systems, you can make a dictionary and a grammar book for any newly discovered natural language.
Language is used to describe the world, but there are many worlds, some of which overlap. Life in England is different from life in Japan, to over-generalise. Life in one social setting is different from another. They can be worlds apart. Then, there are also domain-specific worlds, like engineering for bridge building or ship building, then you need a toolbox (including lexicon) for each.
Thought is clearly something that is separate from language — so are sentiments, world views, and largely memories and most of the aspects of cognition — but language (evolutionarily and introspectively) is developed (in a co-adaptive, each influence the other kind of way) to help with organising thoughts. Terminology for example serve as shorthands for complex concepts — otherwise it’s hard to even think about topics like “qualia”.
Therefore, as the worlds differ, and the language toolbox is developed to help navigate each particular world, the languages (in diachronic snapshots) are not easily “translatable”, sometimes additional work has to be done to develop and expand the toolbox, to add subsets, such that you can talk about naval architecture in both English and German.
It’s not that languages are at fundamental levels (those of linguistic analyses of units) are so different, it’s just that the worlds are so different.
One of Whorfism’s core apocryphal arguments was the “large lexicon of Inuit words for snow” (mentioned also in Pinker’s book)…I forgot my trail of thoughts here of what the point was — if Finnish has 100 different words for snow, does that mean one must first learn to appreciate the finer differentiations of snow, before learning these words and have them map to real meaning? thus before acquiring the subset of what constitutes a part of Finnish? and thus before really learning Finnish? This trail of thought relates to the “infinite depths of levels after projecting from A1-C2 to beyond — I would say such a claim — that learning a great extra amount about extra sub-worlds is part of acquiring a natural language — is by and large nonsensical.
Imagine you see a trade-specific word in German. Let’s say you don’t know what it means — it turns out that it means “glazing”, with English you feel you know the word, and that it’s the name of a special trade, but you also know almost nothing about the trade — while in German it’s a low-frequency word, in English it’s just a perfectly ordinary term that stands in for an almost completely unfamiliar referent. What has changed by switching the language? There is a boundary (loosely) between world-knowledge and linguistic knowledge.
Back to the thought about lexicon and the different worlds, in urban Tokyo (viewable on Google Maps) it is very common in many parts that when you look at the map, there are no streets to which addresses typically belong — they are simply the “space between blocks” — thus, a not-so-deep example of different world views. Meanwhile, in China there are streets, not only so, but also roads, lanes, ways, esplanades, avenues, all these different concepts and names related to streets, like in English or German, there is a word for each that exists, that forms part of the street name. Each of the concept, “street”, “road”, “way” etc. also corresponds to a character that perfectly plausibly exist in the Japanese lexical toolbox.
Here’s the koan/riddle, perhaps a distant corollary of “words for snow” — if there are no streets, what can we say about these “kanjis for streets”?
For this you also have to vigorously imagine the alternative urban perspective of not seeing the space and thoroughfare as “streets”.
Circling back to qualia, it’s hard to describe/imagine “the subjective”, e.g. “what is it like to see the world as a toddler” — at first it appears deceptively not-hard, you can imagine being as short as a toddler — but, that’s not how a toddler sees the world, that’s only seeing the world from a lower elevation, as you — the toddler has a different kind of brain.
Maybe it’s possible to imagine what it’s like to be colour-blind, or schizophrenic with visual illusions, by using props and exaggerating or extrapolating parts of your perception and cognition — but it’s not easy to imagine what it would be like to suddenly have a vast collection of surgical alterations to your brain that now it’s an entirely different brain.
Summary: languages are not entirely universally interchangeable — each is developed and co-adapted to suit particular worlds — but worlds can and do merge, especially in realms that have become decidedly non-relativistic.
There used to be such terms as “German science”, but it’s no longer a thing. What constitutes the science of Physics in universities situated in German-speaking regions is identical to that in the Anglo-sphere. “Alternative medicine” that passes empirical laboratory vigour is called medicine.
The reality of psychological facts, with very marginal adjustments, is practically independent of language, just like the physiology of tri-chromatic vision is independent of how many colour words there are in the perceiver’s native language. To put it more bluntly, linguistic relativism is wrong largely because relativism is wrong.
