- I noticed one day that I was absent mindedly staring into the refrigerator. This has happened before of course, many times actually, but at the time I was trying to learn a bit about mindfulness and I thought this was an opportunity to try to decompose how I got there. Working my way backwards, I realized that I had experienced this little pang of a sensation that I 'chunked' as 'hunger'. But then, instead of responding to the sensation and all its subtlety, I responded to the word and went to the refrigerator. It then occurred to me that I probably do that a lot and don't even realize it. The subjective experience is full of these incredibly rich and nuanced sensations, and yet I compartmentalize them with my relatively coarse and dull vocabulary, and then act on that chunk.
I'd be curious if people that have a native tongue that is more expressive in a specific domain tends to cause them to operate differently within it.
- Second thought is that language, or specifically the ability for one mind to inject an idea into another without the second having to experience it AND the ability for the second mind to retain that information almost as if they have experienced it, is an evolutionary shortcut that our biological evolution has enabled. Essentially an evolution of evolution. (I then see technology as the third type of evolution, in which our language allows us to develop capabilities that exceed our biology, and ultimately AI will likely be the fourth, in which technology enables a mind that exceeds our own).