Think About ‘Language’
Try you think of something that cannot be described by means of language. If you think of something, regardless of what it be, and you can describe it in words, then, you must move on to something else!Is it a difficult task?Surely, the English language (and any other, for that matter) cannot be efficient enough to properly describe, portray, and communicate all of existence, can it?
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Should this be the way one thinks? In accordance to the limits of the vernacular language? I don’t think so, though, it must be a difficult thing to overcome. It has to be admitted that language has a lot of influence in our thought; we are raised, from the day we associate our mother with the word “mom” and our father with the word “dad”, thinking in terms of language.
Is it good, though, when a person’s thought is fully capable of expanding beyond what has been taught, to still keep the mind within the limits of language? A good point to think about, brought about by George Orwell’s 1984, is: What if there was no word for, say, freedom? No adjectives or the like that would be able to work their way around describing the concept? What if the word freedom was taught to be as bad as the word murder?
No doubt, when one thinks of the word ‘murder’, it is associated with an array of inherent negative thoughts, intents, and emotions, a certain “punch” that the phrase, ‘the unlawful killing of a person’ is not.
My point, though, is not to somehow justify murder by saying that its word’s connotation is the only thing that makes it wrong, or anything of the like. It is to bring to people’s attention that language has an enourmous effect on thought, most certainly because said effect is rarely thought about.
Unless those reading this do not mind such an effect (I tend to put emphasis on many things people do not, while remaining well aware that, half of the time, no one cares) I suggest attempting to think of a concept, an emotion, a mere memory of something that you cannot grasp the words to describe, and slowly alleviate your thought!
Is there a person you love? Can you describe that love in words? How would you begin to tell someone you love them if the word ‘love’ did not exist?
There would, no doubt, still be that feeling of love, though, no?
I end.
2 comments
Language is part of a mosaic, a web of context, that maps across the whole of our local reality and beyond. As soon as a coherent mathematics of infinity arrived (Cantors set theory) it negated any single set of axiomatic principles, thoughts or language that could encapsulate everything. Godel’s incompleteness theorem demonstrates that all typographic number systems, based upon logic, are incomplete and are infected with infinite regress. Wittgenstein’s theory of mind is old hat and not relevant. However many in the philosophy of mind claim that we are no more than a narrative concocted to make sense of a determinist reality (Daniel Dennet, Susan Blackmoore, Christof Kotch et al). I have to laugh at a primitive sentient race just out of the industrial and into technological era that claims to know what reality is all about. In fact existence is a vast web of possibilities and probabilities floating upon infinite textures that we have not begun to explore. A list of confounding items may help: Particle wave duality remains unsolved; Inflation at the origins of the universe; symmetry violations that lead to a surplus of matter over antimatter (also in decay of kaons and mesons); the many worlds interpretation that has been modeled by Max Tegmart in relation to infinite universes supported by the fact that the collapse of the wave function should split of into every possible world at every moment in time; non-locality and interconnectedness that is instantaneous across the universes; time dilation in relativity e.g. the twin paradox; the enigma of micro-physical block time. the fact that humans reflect a symmetry violation through a preference for pleasure over pain, joy and happiness over pain and misery , the evolution of empathy, and sharing; and on and on it goes. If there are infinite universes there are no more atoms than grains of sand than planets stars, galaxies and sentient beings. Infinty times infinity to any power equals infinity in a one-to-one correspondence between all sets. Infinity is not fabricated by human minds it is imprinted upon the relationships between mind and reality in a way we as yet cannot understand. There is a another type of infinity called non-denumerable in which it is possible to take the diagonal of an infinite number series and come up with number series of even greater density. There is an infinite hierarchy of ever greater infinites. There is something really weird going on here. Every part of existence must be absolutely necessary therefore every subjective and objective experience is real in its own context. Contingency or choice is a product of unit volume complexity of mind. The universe was complexifying and self-organizing well before Darwinian natural selection occurred and it will operate beyond natural selection when we utilize genetic engineering, horizontal gene transfer and artificial intelligence. Language is simply one vector of an infinite existence that has no beginnings or ends births or deaths in the Absolute sense. Existence is beyond science, religion and human narrative. I would rather feel happy than read or talk about it. Sure we do not know what is going on here however if we keep the mind open to infinite possibility and potentiality we can dispenses with stupid ideas of human knowledge and infallibility. There is infinitely more to existence than can be encapsulated in language and narrative.
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