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Comment by chronikewok | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the film Arrival and relates to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [1]regarding how language affects our perception and cognition. It's certainly a very interesting design (there's a hieroglyphic electrical circuit quality to it), but it wasn't clear what we can infer or gain from this non-linear form of writing. I feel like non-linear thinking is naturally how our brains work (or has more potential to work), but not how we have been trained to decode symbols, so it'd be interesting to see how this type of language might alter our cognition.

Would this help us look at ideas more holistically? Would this help us be more sensitive to relationships rather than just the objects? Could this open up new patterns of thinking? Lot's of interesting questions.

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

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Part of the inspiration for UNLWS was Heptapod B from Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life, from which Arrival was made.

See also my essays Non-Linear Fully Two-Dimensional Writing System Design ¹ and On the design of an ideal language ², which I wrote before we started to make UNLWS.

The written "language" in Arrival is purely babble (though it has some nice aesthetics at the fine level). It also violates explicit features described in the story, e.g. that an utterance is composed of unbroken strokes (i.e. a connected graph).

FWIW, I asked Chiang years ago whether he had any actual implementation or visualization in mind for Heptapod B. He didn't; it was purely an abstract set of properties for him.

¹ https://s.ai/essays/nlf2dws

² https://s.ai/essays/on_the_design_of_an_ideal_language

I believe that understanding relationships between units (objects, people, etc.) explains high intelligence, especially in autism, more than most average thinkers assume. People tend to fixate on the unit, and presume a relationship apropos between units. So, if we give core focus to memorizing the relationship then the unit, we may actually reinforce the neural pathways for both units and the abstraction between them without additional repetition.

My long-term memory is more efficient when I learn something from multiple angles. So, I don't look at basic algebra and just think, "X and Y are placeholders for numbers." I also think, "X can contain the value Y expressed as X=!Y." and "X can be a function of X expressed as X=X(X++)." and so on. This kind of ad-hoc modeling is about testing and defining the context of a relationship between units. And in that respect, I can say, anecdotally, that I consume information quickly and rarely have recall errors.

Fascinating. Can you explain this: "X can be a function of X expressed as X=X(X++)."

This is my (incorrect) attempt to make sense of the equation: X++ = X + 1 (?) X() What does this mean? How can X be a function?

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