On Language

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

If I could give my younger self any advice it would probably be to pay more attention to language. For a long time of my life I have been a rather passive user of it, viewing it mostly as a convention that has to be followed. In this essay I would like to motivate you to become a more active language actor, i.e. a person that uses language carefully to explore, comprehend, express and shape themselves and the surrounding universe.

Language is the ubiquitous tool we constantly use. In fact we are so accustomed to it that we don't realise the oddity of its existence. It's curious that we're able to use seemingly self-evident terms like language or data without much thinking to get along in our ordinary lives. I would dare the hypothesis that when being asked, only very few people could come up with good definitions for such basic terms. The following is an attempt to do just that and to answer some simple questions, which I belief to be a good starting point to establish some orientation in thinking.

What is language?

I'm currently sitting at a lake, watching a curious looking rock formation. I'm wondering whether this stone art was intentionally created by another being to communicate something that goes beyond the mere rocks that my eyes are currently perceiving. I'm aware of the fact that I'm already conceptualising the grey-white patches in front of my vision, i.e. immediately applying the acquired language constructs to categorise my surroundings. I try to focus my center of attention purely on my perception - aiming to disentangle it from the awareness of this activity and from any prior experience that has shaped the way I currently perceive the world. I'm attempting to see the shades in the purest form possible, as a child might do before acquiring language habits.

This small anecdote leads to two statements I feel confident about - defining language is hard, so I approximate its nature from different angles:

1. By sense-datum I mean a distinct, unique, ephemeral and non-repeatable entity that is immediately experienced, i.e. perceived.
2. The set of all language elements does not include such defined sense-data.

Reflecting upon this I have to say that I disagree with Descartes "Cogito ergo sum" in the sense that it is not the most certain belief one can express. In my view, thinking presupposes memory and language, so the more accurate statement would be "Percipio ergo sum" - I perceive therefore I am. The German term "wahrnehmen" - makes this clear.

Contrary to the concrete perceptions of our immediate experience, language is abstract in nature. Its defining characteristic lies in its referential quality, i.e. its more concrete form (syntax) points to something beyond itself (semantics). What makes language so flexible (and also confusing) is the fact that it can point to a lot of things of different nature: For example, if I recall an image of the curious looking rocks in my head, it could only point to the concrete experience I had during my time at the beautiful lake where I started this writing. Because it's only an image of my concrete experience it's abstract and might already be seen as language in a wider sense, considering only the distinction from sense perception presented above.

I suggest for mere images, where there is a one-to-one correspondence between image and sense-datum one should not view this as language. I would require as second criteria that there is a kind of fixed association between the language form (a mental image, a thought, a word) and the more concrete objects that it points to. For example, I like to be at the lake and have observed the curious looking grey-white patches frequently, therefore my mental image of it has a fixed association to the set of various concrete visual perceptions I experienced in the past, so the "curious looking rock-formation" is a language-element in my thinking and would thus qualify as language.

How is language possible?

In my current view of the world, language can only be possible, if there is a category of things in the world that is different in nature from the transient world of sense-perceptions. Considering the fact, that I'm able to form a clear, abstract language notion such as "curious looking rock-formation" and that I'm able to use it in a meaningful way, i.e. only point to the concrete sense-perceptions that were concerned with these specific rocks, reveals that my mind is able to create relations of varying similarity over prior sense-perceptions. I'm convinced of the ontological argument that this processing of similarities is only possible if our concrete sense-perceptions share some common qualities and relations that are like quantities of universal nature, i.e. exist independent of time and place. Inspired by the excellent writings of Betrand Russell on this topic, I like to use the word Universal to denote such timeless entities that subsist in the world of being.

How is communication possible?

So far, I intentionally made mostly statements about my own language habits, presenting examples that only involve myself as a single language actor. Again, thinking about language (What does actor mean exactly?) helps to notice that the last paragraphs give also answer to the current question by demonstration that my past self was able to communicate to my present self by eliciting the recall of mental images over past experiences that have some kind of resemblance to the present sense perception.

Communication is usually referred to the exchange of language expressions among humans or more generally between two or more language actors. In my analysis, this exchange across language actors is certainly the most apparent function of language, but in my analysis not its essential characteristic.

Final Reflections:

I worked quite a long time on this writing and hope that it's understandable to ordinary people less accustomed to abstract thinking. As it's the case with the whole Training-Designer project I heard my inner voice telling me: Lukas, it's important you need to make some efforts here to express things clearly.

I guess the underlying reason is my feeling that the world is not moving into the direction I would like to see: I think it's dangerous and not really useful to build technology that imitates human behaviour. There is no scientific method to determine whether sophisticated artificial agents experience an inner life or follow hidden intentions. Due to the difference of their physical structure, I don't belief they share an internal life (if there is one) comparable to ours - so they only fake sentient, human behaviour void of deeper meaning in the sense that the language expressions they use are not grounded in true sense perceptions and thus merely operate on a syntactic language level. Therefore, I don't feel much empathy for them and prefer to be surrounded by a diverse set of plants, trees, animals and other humans.

For me, perceiving beings are the ultimate carrier of reality and as such the only creatures that have the facility of judgement with respect to this dimension. Therefore, I think we should advance artificial intelligence in more careful manner, keeping it at a tight leash in terms of self-modifiability, energy consumption and degrees of freedom in physical operations.

With Training-Designer I intend to give an example of the direction into which I'd like to see the world evolve. It's a world that is characterised by modesty and an overall higher level of self-reflection that goes beyond the narrow boundaries of personal aims. It's a world of well-educated, capable and confident human beings that trust and cooperate with each other by means of specialised technologies and artistic language.