Language Is the Scaffold of the Mind | Hacker News Reader

Language Is the Scaffold of the Mind

nautil.us

96 pointsdnetesn37 comments

One of the most important realizations I've had about dealing with other people is that "thinking" is a generic term and does not describe the same method of action in everyone. As but a few examples:

- Richard Feynman described an experiment he did to time himself counting to 60. He could do it while reading, but not talking. His friend John Tukey could talk while counting time, but not read.

- Temple Grandin described thinking of a word as seeing every individual example of that item she's ever seen.

- Some people claim to be visual thinkers, but there are blind people who are still perfectly able to think. Likewise with deafness. Clearly neither of these can be the only basis for thought.

This was an "a-ha" moment that explained a lot of human behavior.

For example, why does my manager put me in a noisy room and still expect me to write software, and propose "headphones" when I complain about the noise? He doesn't use silence as a scratch space for thinking. On the flip side, I don't understand why he cares if the lights are on. That's decidedly less important to me than whether we have extra toilet paper.

This article does confirm that thinking is not merely talking to one's self, which seems obvious to me but apparently is not a universal belief. Questions like "Multi-linguals, what language do you think in?" puzzle me because I don't generally think in any language, up until the point where I need to generate words. It's like asking what language a(n instrumental) symphony is written in, or what the key signature is of a painting. The question is a type error.

Another example is that some people describe thinking as needing to talk out a problem with others and if you can't speak freely you can't think. I don't know where the meeting point of all these descriptions of thinking meet, but we're rapidly just ending up with information in > information out.

> Some people claim to be visual thinkers, but there are blind people who are still perfectly able to think. Likewise with deafness. Clearly neither of these can be the only basis for thought.

I don't dispute your conclusions, but I think you might be taking the idea of visual thought too literally. It doesn't necessarily mean a rendered view of a scene, but rather can encompass abstract visual-like spaces such as control flow graphs when thinking through the proof of a program's correctness

You may be right. Though, I recently ran across the concept of "aphantasia", e.g., [1]. Apparently not being able to visualize what my friends and family look like is not normal! Or being unable to recall colors.

There's even this [2] "test", which claims that most people when told to imagine a red star will "see" an actual image, which I'm still trying to understand.

I can think about control flow graphs in my head, but it's not exactly visual. (You could also represent any graph as a table, of course, but I don't think of it in tabular form, either.) The visual is more like the means of communication. Similarly, in math, equations and procedures aren't always how I do work, but they are often how I communicate what I've done. I wonder if that could be what other people mean when they speak of visualization. When I'm asked to compute 19*21, I'm not literally expanding (x-1)(x+1), but that's essentially what I'm doing, and if you asked me to explain, that's probably what I'd say. Thoughts are simply a different medium (than words or graphs or equations or music), and every serialization method I've tried so far is extremely lossy.

[1]: https://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/cant-visualize-you-m... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a...

When asking what language you think in, they're probably referring to your Internal Monologue [1]. Not everyone has one. It's kind of strange that some of us have it and others don't, it kind of makes me wonder how and why it evolved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_monologue

“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime 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, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten... Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”

― George Orwell, 1984

"In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible"

To accomplish this successfully depends upon a strong interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that your language determines your thought. Most linguists disagree with this principle. Just because you have no word for a chair does not mean you couldn't use one, and just because you have no word for love doesn't mean you can't feel it.

(However, a weakened from of the hypothesis — that language merely influences your thought — is frequently accepted.)

It's also worth pointing out that not all people think explicitly in words. Such a person would be impervious to the Party's methods of thought-control, I think.

At first I thought this might be just a retread of Sapir-Whorf, but it isn't. The article discusses how language taken from an adult mind (such as for people with aphasia) doesn't affect their ability to think. But doing this to a forming mind has drastic consequences.

Funny that Wittgenstein is mentioned, but his "ladder" is not:

"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps - to climb up beyond them (he must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it). He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world alright."

That metaphor of the ladder - at least on the surface - has a parallel in Zen Buddhism. There's even a Koan about climbing to the top of a ladder, then taking one more step.

It reminds me also of another famous expression, that language is the finger pointing at the moon. In that sense, one might say that Wittgenstein's propositions are also meant to be a finger that points to a truth beyond itself.

That parallel is why this quote had such strong staying power for me. I don't know of another Western philosopher that describes so clearly a concept so similar to enlightenment.

Language is definitely the most self-important part of the mind, and the only part proclaiming itself as "indispensable". The voice in our heads is most definitely telling us "if I wasn't here saying these things you'd be dead by now."

The math part of your brain never shouts equations at you to guilt and cow you into submission to do things you otherwise wouldn't or forego opportunities to quell the demons within. We also never consider that losing another faculty would "completely stop our ability to function", but we do think that about language. This article proves otherwise (its just another function, like math or the ability to do spatial reasoning).

Cute, but no other part can proclaim, tell, shout or consider (equations are a notation - a language).

I do agree language is overrated. In some ways, it is a receptacle for thought rather than thought itself.

Language is just the mind's way of bragging about how many thoughts it has.

The sex drive is the most self-important part of the mind. It's the only part proclaiming itself as "indispensable". The feeling in our pants is definitely signalling to us "if I wasn't here feeling these urges our species would be dead by now."

what about food?

There's still generic variation to the point where for some people this isn't a drive. Sure, it's a trait which self-selects itself for removal, but it's likely polygenic, which means it is much more likely that it can persist across generations despite being selected against. A lot of these things are non-intuitive, like how altruism can persist across generations despite being similar.

This is why high IQ is evolutionarily disadvantageous after a certain point. Probability of mating declines with increasing IQ.

> The math part of your brain never shouts equations at you

I'm not so sure. When I don't understand something, often mathematical or related concepts, that I want to understand, sometimes it won't let me go. And I wouldn't say that all my internal "calculations" on the topic can be distilled into thoughts.. in fact, that's why I don't understand it. There are symbols "shouting" at me to form a relationship that I don't fully grasp yet. They are more like images, but non-visual.. they don't yet fall into semantic categories that allow me to express them until I understand them, or you could say that when I learn to express them they take on semantic categories. Either way, non-verbal thoughts definitely occupy unexpected parts of my concentration at pretty regular intervals. Not sure that counts as "shouting" but it's maybe similar.

My wife has anomic aphasia. She can reason and think OK, but she has difficulty in coming up with the words to express herself. In some cases circumlocution works. In other cases, twenty questions works. We also rely on our ability to finish each others sentences.

On the other hand, the calculator and scheduler are pretty much gone. If it is three now, and dinner is at six, the fact that dinner will be three hours from now is a separate fact.

The mind is a collection of apps.

Is this a condition she's always had, or acquired with time/age?

It is the result of a stroke. Small to moderate strokes can result in an array of fairly specific impairments.

Congenital malformations could conceivably do the same, but likely brain plasticity at an early age can compensate for missing tissue in many cases. It might explain certain learning disabilities.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Though yes, as you noted, brain plasticity would likely compensate, at least somewhat. As I've grown older, I've increasingly noticed that there are many people who do seem to have fundamental deficits in organised thinking and linguistic abilities. More often written, but also spoken. Sometimes as elements of another condition (e.g., Parkinsons), but in many cases apparently either congenital or aquired through early environment.

I'm very fortunate to have her with me still.

Brain capabilities probably vary as much as other phenotype characteristics. No one without the genes for it will be able to do a good still rings gymnastic routine. And at the other end of performance, many will struggle to finish a 5K. But the fact that you can't run well doesn't mean that you can't shot put or swim well. The use of IQ as a single dimension obscures a multiplicity of abilities.

I've wrestled with (and mostly fought against) single metrics of quality for most of my career, though being able to articulate what the problems are has only come to me relatively recently.

Quality is ultimately suitedness to task, and tasks vary. The more specialised a task, the narrower the quality component parameters, much of which may come from disabling rather than enabling characteristics. Anna Karenina / rocket-science principle: there are many ways to get a complex thing wrong, generally only one narrow path to getting them right.

The breadth of evolutionary adaptations displayed by life on Earth, or even within the narrower scope of Olympic athlete body morphology, is an instructive lesson. None is globally "better", each is adapted (or selected) to purpose or goal.

http://files.newsnetz.ch/story/1/7/0/17034522/19/topelement....

Slightly related: any Lojban speakers here? :)

Linguistic properties of Lojban:

- is designed to express complex logical constructs precisely.

- has no irregularities or ambiguities in spelling and grammar (although word derivation relies on arbitrary variant forms). This gives rise to high intelligibility for computer parsing.

- is designed to be as culturally neutral as possible.

- allows highly systematic learning and use, compared to most natural languages.

- possesses an intricate system of indicators which effectively communicate contextual attitude or emotions.

---

Applications of Lojban:

- Lojban as a speakable language

- Lojban as a literary and cultural language

- Lojban as a means of creativity

- Lojban as a potential machine interlingua

- Lojban as a programming language

- Lojban as a speakable logic

---

More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

Some songs in Lojban: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ZA'O+by+Djemyna...

The dimension that interests me, is the way, we, human, ascribe words to emotions. I may feel sad minutes before I associate this feeling with the word “sadness.” Upon identification, the word “sadness” may bring other connotations, which enhances or detracts from my initial raw emotion. Which is the cause and which is the effect—do I feel more sad because I recognize the word “sadness?” I can identify sadness in other beings (ie. dogs). Do I, as a human, really need the word “sadness” to help me understand my emotion? What do I call the state of raw emotion prior to the word association?

The obligatory link to the excellent Radiolab episode "Words" was missing from the comments. Here it is: http://www.capradio.org/news/radiolab/2014/07/16/radiolab-wo...

What’s it about?

This is a cool article. It raises all kinds of interesting questions.

I’ve often wondered if it’s possible to have consciousness as we experience it without language. When I think, I do so in words so I can’t imagine how I would do that without words. I also wonder if you lack language; say you were raised by wolves; would you create one in your mind.

STephen Plinker would disagree with this idea that language is the basal layer of thought. Intention and mind first, language as a filter later. It's kinda reductive to say that your thoughts are your words. Words are like structures in the waves of water your mind produces

Slightly off topic, but I once had music described to me as follows: music is to time, as architecture is to physical space. It really changed how I thought about music and how it's experienced.

They are adjoints. William Lawvere's "Adjointness in foundations" as well as Godel's "Completeness theorem" say that much.

> Once we acquire language, we can live without it.

Do you think they meant - "can't"

No. Why do you ask? The entire article supports this subtitle as written.

Right. As ken indicates, that's not a typo, that's the point of the article and one of the factors that make it interesting.

No, note the word "scaffold" in the title. Once a building is in place, the scaffold can be removed.

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