Comment by joriJordan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joriJordan | Hacker News Reader

Because we don't experience reality through language but direct sensory perception. Language is arbitrary bird song and visual representations dragged forward from history, accepted definitions never uniformly distributed.

Testing based on contextual correctness makes no sense when there is no center to the universe. No "one true context to rule them all".

We learn from hands on sensory experiences. Our bodies store knowledge independent of the brain; often referred to as muscle memory.

Gabe Newell mentioned this years ago; our brain is only great at some things like language and vision processing but the rest of our body is involved in sensory information processing too: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gabe_Newell

The most potent evidence the brain is not the center of the universe we commonly think it to be is that patient with 90% of their skull filled with fluid while they carried out a typical first worlder life: https://www.sciencealert.com/a-man-who-lives-without-90-of-h...

States are banning a reading education framework that's been linked to lower literacy scores in younger generations; 3-cueing relies on establishing correctness via context assessment: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/more-states-are-tak...

"Establishing context" is a euphemism for "arguing semantics".

Putting the brain at the root of of human intelligence is a relic of hierarchical and taxonomical models. There are no natural hierarchies.

Your last statement misses the mark—of course the brain is the root of human intelligence. The error is in assuming that consciousness is the primary learning modality. Or, as you put it, “arguing semantics”.

From my own personal experience, this realization came after finally learning a difficult foreign language after years and years of “wanting” to learn it but making little progress. The shift came when I approached it like learning martial arts rather than mathematics. Nobody would be foolish enough to suggest that you could “think” your way to a black belt, but we mistakenly assume that skills which involve only the organs in our head (eyes, ears, mouth) can be reduced to a thought process.

”Because we don't experience reality through language but direct sensory perception”

That statement is patently false. We know that language influences our senses to a degree where we are unable to perceive things if our language doesn’t have a word for it, and will see different things as being equal if our language uses the same word for both.

There are examples of tribal humans not being able to perceive a green square among blue squares, because their language does not have a word for the green color.

Similarly, some use the same word for blue and white, and are unable to perceive them as different colors.

Only after we acquire language from sensory experience first.

It need not be language as we know it that fosters those outcomes either.

What you describe is reinforcement education which can be achieved without our language, without the word "blue" we can still see the portion of the visible light spectrum that we associate to the specific word.

> Similarly, some use the same word for blue and white, and are unable to perceive them as different colors.

You really think they can't see clouds in the sky because they have the same word for white and blue? I think you take those studies as saying more than they said.

We do adapt our perception a little bit to fit what we need for our every day life, not for language but whats useful for us. Language matches what people need to talk about, not the other way around, if a cultures language doesn't differentiate between blue and green its because they never needed to.

"There are examples of tribal humans not being able to perceive a green square among blue squares, because their language does not have a word for the green color.

Similarly, some use the same word for blue and white, and are unable to perceive them as different colors."

Both of the above is false. There are a ton of different colors that I happen to call "red", that does not mean that I can't perceive them as different. That I don't call them "different colors" is completely irrelevant. And unable to perceive blue and white as different colors? (Maybe that was a joke?) Even a hypothetical language which only used a single word for non-black items, say, "color", for everything else, would be able to perceive the difference with zero problems.

Japanese use "aoi" for a set of colors which in English would be separated into "blue" and "green". I can assure you (from personal experience) that every Japanese speaker with a fully functioning visual system is perfectly able to perceive the difference between, in this case, blue and green as we would call them.

There's a Terence McKenna quote about this:

> So, for instance, you know, I’ve made this example before: a child lying in a crib and a hummingbird comes into the room and the child is ecstatic because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention, it’s just wonderful. I mean, it is an instantaneous miracle when placed against the background of the dull wallpaper of the nursery and so forth. But, then, mother or nanny or someone comes in and says, “It’s a bird, baby. Bird. Bird!” And, this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile, and o- places it over the miracle, and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum, and, from now on, the miracle is confined within the meaning of the word. And, by the time a child is four or five or six, there- no light shines through. They're- they have tiled over every aspect of reality with a linguistic association that blunts it, limits it, and confines it within cultural expectation.

and what is this quote supposed to explain?

that language prevents a child from learning nuance? sounds like nonsense to me. a child first learns broad categories. for example some children as they learn to speak think every male person is dad. then they recognize everyone with a beard is dad, because dad has a beard. and only later they learn to differentiate that dad is only one particular person. same goes for the bird. first we learn hat everything with wings is a bird, and later we learn the specific names for each bird. this quote makes an absurd claim.

Wittgenstein famously said "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

Alan Watts suggests people like Wittgenstein should occasionally try to let go of this way of thinking. Apologies if it is sentimental but I hope you'll give him a chance, it's quite short: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=heksROdDgEk

In reflection of all of this, I think that the quote you're responding to only meant to say that experiencing the world through language means building an abstraction over its richness. (I somewhat agree with you, though, that the quote seems a little dramatic. Maybe that's just my taste.)

One more thought.

I think there's a reason why various forms of meditation teach us to stop thinking. Maybe they are telling us to sometimes stop dealing with our abstractions, powerful though they might be, and experience the real thing once in a while.

the way i read the quote it felt less like building an abstraction and more like destroying the richness.

but abstractions are mere shortcuts. but everything is an abstraction. to counter wittgenstein, language is not actually limited. we can describe everything to the finest detail. it's just not practical to do so every time.

physics, chemistry, we could describe a table as an amount of atoms arranged in a certain way. but then even atom is an abstraction over electrons, protons and neutrons. and those are abstractions over quarks. it's abstractions all the way down, or up.

language is abstractions. and that fits well with your meditation example. stop thinking -> remove the language -> remove the abstractions.

How can you know that we have language to describe everything in the finest detail? That suggests that we are omnipotent.

There's lots out there we don't know. And it seems to me that the further afield we go from the known, the more likely we are to enter territory where we simply do not have the words.

Can't speak to it personally, but I have heard from a number of people and read countless descriptions of psychedelic experiences being ineffable. Lol, actually, as I type, the mere fact that the word ineffable exists makes a very strong case for there being experience beyond words.

ok, fair point. what i am trying to say is that when we see/experience something that we can not describe we can create new words for it. we see something, we can name it. this directly contradicts the idea that language is the limit and that we can't talk about things that we don't have words for. that claim just doesn't make sense.

the problem then is that these new words don't make any sense to anyone who doesn't see/experience the same, so it only works for things that multiple people can see or experience. psychedelic experiences will probably never be shared, so they will remain undescribable. quite like dreams, which can also be be undescribable.

Agreed, we can and will always come up with new words that attempt to approximate the experience, but, imo, they will always come up short. The abstracting inevitably leaves fidelity on the floor.

It's necessary based on the way we're wired, struggle to think of a paradigm that would allow for the tribalism and connectedness that fostered human progress without shared verbal language initially, and written word later. Nothing inherently wrong with it, but, language will always abstract away part of the fidelity of the experience imo.

yes of course, language is by nature an abstraction, so by definition it will never describe the whole world perfectly, but it can describe it as well as we understand it. and the point that matters, once we have a shared experience we can name that experience, and between us it will then describe the full experience, whereas to bystanders it will be an abstraction.

language doesn't replace the actual experience. it isn't meant to. me living in china, and me telling you about my life in china are not the same thing, no matter how detailed my description. but that does not limit my experience. and if you lived in china too, then my description will refer your experience, and in that case the description will feel much more detailed.

the way i understand wittgensteins claim it not only suggests that language can't describe everything, which is only partly true, because it implies that language can not expand. it also means that i can not even experience what i can not describe, which makes even less sense. i can't feel cold because i have no word for it? huh?

(i feel like my argumentation jumps around or goes in circles, it doesn't feel well thought through. i hope it makes sense anyways. apologies for that.)

Na, your argument makes sense. Loving this discussion.

Ok, so I don't agree that it implies language cannot expand. I believe it's a bit more nuanced than that, I believe what he's trying to say is that it cannot expand sufficiently to truly capture the experience. We will inevitably dumb it down or lose fidelity or whatever. The 'unsayables' as he called them, I believe he felt he was trying to protect their integrity by saying we should not attempt to distill them down to words.

As for the I cannot experience what I cannot describe... I agree with this statement deeply. Well, I think it's a function of ego or whatever you want to call it. We go through life and are shaped by our experiences. As we continue to experience life, we have more and more beliefs bouncing around in our head as a function of more experience. Ahhh, this just happened, it's like when I did X, etc etc. As we get older we get more and more bogged down by these limiting beliefs until everything we experience is going through our personal interpretive filter rather than just being experienced for what it is.

It's the Buddhist idea of the finger pointing at the moon. Don't mistake the finger(thoughts, words, etc) for the moon (the direct experience).

Well, that's been my personal experience, until I started looking inside and poking around at my belief structure, I had noooo idea how much my interpretation of the world had been shaped by prior lived experience, personally, and societally.

In your cold example... If you had no word for it, I believe most people would end up using the closest approximation out of the words they do know effectively blinding themselves to the reality of this new/unique experience for them. How though, would someone know, ahh there is no word for this, lets expand the language.

Gotta embrace not knowing/the beginners mind, and in my personal experience this is a process of subtraction rather than addition.

I had noooo idea how much my interpretation of the world had been shaped by prior lived experience

this is an interesting point. it's very true of course. there is probably some philosophical or biological explanation for this, something about optimization, because interpreting every situation from first principles takes to much effort. living in a different culture is one way to teach you to look at things differently.

but i think it is an issue independent of language. the problem is not lack of ability to describe the experience, but mistakenly using an already familiar abstraction to describe a new experience. but that's not the end of it, because repeatedly making that experience eventually helps you realize that the description you used is wrong, and you adjust to create a better description.

actually a better example than cold is the word umami. in our languages we have terms for sweet, sour, salty and bitter. turns out our body has dedicated receptors for umami, but we were not aware of that, and we never named it. even today it still feels like a foreign concept, but we have evidence that it is a real biological experience and not just a cultural idea.

the thing, is we certainly experienced umami in some way, but we could not talk about it, we were not consciously aware of it. and we still are not. i can tell very sweet from somewhat sweet to not sweet at all, but what's very umami or not umami? how does that even work? there is a whole dimension of language that our culture is missing. but, it's a cultural problem, not a linguistic one. because now we do have a word for it. and still, at least i struggle with the concept.

interestingly i think this example shows how humans learn from context. our (western) culture is missing the context for umami. we need to build up that context to allow others to learn about it.

Very poetic, I like it.

Haha. I'd prefer for him to dance this sentence or something. To not detract from the marvel of being with crude words.

I think about this often. I've really come to appreciate over the past year the ways language can limit and warp our perception of reality. I think we under appreciate preverbal thought, as it seems to me that verbal thought by it's very nature has passed through our egoic filter, and our perception tends to be biased by our previous lived experience.

Socrates, Einstein, Nietzsche, Mozart.... So many of the greats described some of their most brilliant flashes of inspiration as just having come to them. Einstein's line about pure logical thinking not yielding knowledge of the emperical world, I really think these guys were good at daydreaming and able to tap into some part of themselves where intuition and preverbal thought could take the wheel, from which inspiration would strike.

If you're referring to the Himba experiment (or one of the news or blog posts tracing back to it), the outcome was far less decisive than you're implying. Language showed an impact on perception time of color differences, not a complete inability to distinguish.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18237 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00100...

Come on, people. This has been debunked a million times. See this Language Log post for thorough takedown of this BS: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970

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