transition asked not long ago how our lexicon of words limits our thinking. That was one of transition’s questions that i found myself unable to fully answer. Is there a whole universe of entities out there that we cannot observe because our thinking is tied to words? I simply don’t know.

Just now I read a SciFi novella by Karl Schroeder that impinges directly on this question. As SciFi its unusual in not being either futuristic or historical. It could be set in the near future, or even in the present. It’s also unusual in being grounded in reality without any of the usual standard SciFi additions, not even AI or cybernetic implants.

The story eases us into a new online addition to language called “It 2.0”.

Why is It necessary? Because our present notion of “identity” breaks down in the virtual world and this spills over into the real world. Not just the identity of people, but also the identity of organisations, business, even nationality. “It 2.0” uses online metadata to reconstruct new entity elements that are beyond the reach of normal words.

The novella introduces the idea if identity breakdown slowly. Starting with the notion of a person in RL acting out commands he is being given online – to the point of parroting a language he doesn’t know and making gestures he doesn’t understand. This gives an online character a RL presence at a distant location. The RL character being “ridden” by an online character in this way gets the advantage of a rapid education, and access to places and people that they wouldn’t normally be able to get anywhere near, so it can be a win-win.

The next step in identity breakdown is the breakdown of nationality, first citing the Vancouver-Seattle conurbation as a national identity that transcends the separate nationalities of Canada and the USA. And then citing people who spend so much time online that they to refer to their preferred computer world as their dominant and legal nationality.

Then it talks about job as entity. A delivery driver is cited as an entity that transcends its human occupant.

This overlapping, duplication and loss of identities leads to slow chaos in RL, a chaos that can be handled at normal speed or speeded up in virtual reality. “It 2.0” provides a language lexicon for this chaotic changing of identities.

It will be interesting to see how robots develop language and see if they can transcend the limits of ours.

Which I think they will be able to do, they will have a larger vocabulary, communicate much faster, they will develop new emotions and develop words for them

Their understanding of mathematics will transcend ours.

Humans are still developing new words, new words are added every year to dictionaries.

If we had to start from the beginning to developing a new language, what features would it have?

“The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.”

Frank Herbert

Again with the Sapiens book… the author asserts writing happened to communicate mathematical ideas; words and ideas came later.

Apparently sign language has ‘better’ words than English. I don’t know details, a friend with a deaf parent told me.

Nah

>It will be interesting to see how robots develop language and see if they can transcend the limits of ours.

probably get around to saying equilibrium internal mental states need not involve a lot of activity, if you don’t mind i’d like to fold my senses back and retreat for a while

fairly much everything living has a retreat in some sense

conscious AI won’t be any different

all language points to something, but just as importantly from something

you ever noticed going in and out through the twilight state you’re sort of a toddler for a while, as if the developmental changes of age are part-represented in diurnal cycles. Humans have to raise offspring, so need be able regress, but the usefulness of regression isn’t limited to just that

you journey through mental states, different configurations, allowing contrasting and contrasts of configurations, contrasting the states is itself a tool (resource perhaps), or useful to the various tools

Divine Angel said:

Again with the Sapiens book… the author asserts writing happened to communicate mathematical ideas; words and ideas came later.

Apparently sign language has ‘better’ words than English. I don’t know details, a friend with a deaf parent told me.

That’s actually close. The first preserved writings (as opposed to graffitti) we have are of business contacts. Followed shortly by laws, which can be thought of as a business contract with the king, and entertainment. Business contracts do contain mathematics.

But earlier than that, I would hazard that writing consisted of mnemonics, a shorthand scribble that acted as a memory aid, a piece of ephemera that ceases to have value after the full message is received. That is how the Australian Aborigines used writing on message sticks.

On the topic of “identity”, I did a bit of thinking near my end of time in CSIRO about funding. At that time, CSIRO had a management structure consisting of entities: staff, consultants, sites, projects, divisions, programs, streams, themes, platforms, flagships, research centres, h-r, and other entities that all had their own identity. Thinking about this, I came to the conclusion that most of these separately funded entities were money-wasting-fluff. All that is really needed are the three entities people, sites, and projects. People and sites act as nouns, and projects as verbs. For example, a computer may be tied to a site, to a person, or to a project, but not necessarily to more than one of the three. The projects as verbs link the nouns. Funding needs to be split three ways – to people, to project and to site. And that’s all there is to running a research organisation. For instance, obtaining funding is a verb, so is just another project.

Think of identity as for example “president of the USA”. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter whether the president is represented by a computer bot, a person in a latex mask, or Rump himself. It’s the identity of “president” that matters, not the incumbent.

Similarly, the US secret service men with their dark glasses and earplugs are “ridden” by voices and images from the ether that tell them what to do. For many of them, their individual identity is submerged by another while they are at work.

How can chaos theory help? Attractors have an identity on the web that is like the wave that web-surfers surf. They have a limited lifetime, like organisations and real life organisms, then dissolve. A similar extension of the lexicon also in “It 2.0” could describe the natural web of gaia. An animal carcass attracts vultures, or sharks, an attractor.

Without the notion of identity, could mathematics still work? Perhaps, we could no longer say “1 apple” except as a transient event between fertilization and rotting. But concepts from set theory such as “larger”, “overlaps” and “contains” could still work. And applied mathematics with its emphasis on “approximately” could also work in an identity-free gestalt.

But that’s a bit extreme. “It 2.0” would not dispose of the concept of identity by redefine it to include say “sphere of influence”. Thus a person may be partly within the sphere of influence of a geographic location, a project, another person, or a strange attractor, for example.

But I’m still really stuck on the topic of whether words (as a general concept, rather than as a specific language) intrinsically limit thinking.

Divine Angel said:

Again with the Sapiens book… the author asserts writing happened to communicate mathematical ideas; words and ideas came later.

Apparently sign language has ‘better’ words than English. I don’t know details, a friend with a deaf parent told me.

What does better words even mean?

sibeen said:

Divine Angel said:

Again with the Sapiens book… the author asserts writing happened to communicate mathematical ideas; words and ideas came later.

Apparently sign language has ‘better’ words than English. I don’t know details, a friend with a deaf parent told me.

What does better words even mean?

You’d need sign language to explain it.

sibeen said:

Divine Angel said:

Again with the Sapiens book… the author asserts writing happened to communicate mathematical ideas; words and ideas came later.

Apparently sign language has ‘better’ words than English. I don’t know details, a friend with a deaf parent told me.

What does better words even mean?

Think of “model making” with gestures. Clearly that can carry more subtlety of meaning than a string of letters.

>transition asked not long ago how our lexicon of words limits our thinking.

i’d need go back and find that, to be sure I said that

I did get around to suggesting punching out letters from a qwerty keyboard lends to sort of stereotypes, patterned and even habituated word formulations, and expanded that idea to the proposition the alphabet does that more generally

kids look at my keyboard and to them it’s broken (even wife has that feeling) kids ask what letters are missing (b and h), then how do I know which is which. Most of them have used the keyboard, and were instructed to press the exposed circuit board and find out

that’s try and test, to verify, closer to making it up

my view is that a reluctance (aversion) to verifying the most basic things is a potential shortcoming of sorts, that then secretly migrates into larger or broader assumptions, and of interest was shared assumptions

if there are easy, little-thought-required assumptions right under your finger tips, convenient to share, from the habits and ‘competencies’ of using the alphabet, this probably extends to efficiently sharable word-concepts, notions, concepts, stereotypes (categories employed etc), and this has implications for an egalitarian ethic

shared assumptions, that aren’t rethought, have an impositional power

sibeen said:

Divine Angel said:

Again with the Sapiens book… the author asserts writing happened to communicate mathematical ideas; words and ideas came later.

Apparently sign language has ‘better’ words than English. I don’t know details, a friend with a deaf parent told me.

What does better words even mean?

I think ‘better’ words is misleading. Sign language gets rid of a lot of grammar.. you basically sign an idea, a concept, rather than a sentence.

like there is one sign for the word ‘washing the dishes’ and then another sign for ‘washing your body’. You also use a lot of facial expressions in sigh language to help convey meaning.

Arts said:

like there is one sign for the word ‘washing the dishes’

I’d love to teach my kids that one. They would of course misconstrue it every time and then I’d start with the facial expressions.

sibeen said:

Arts said:

like there is one sign for the word ‘washing the dishes’

I’d love to teach my kids that one. They would of course misconstrue it every time and then I’d start with the facial expressions.

I’m surprised you don’t already have a sign+facial expression for “go and wash the dishes now” .