Comment by raffraffraff
1 year ago
I also find it astonishing that I can feel like I had an entire sentence in my head without any of the words, and fluidly produce all of the words as I say them, without having to search for them or consciously line them up. They're just there, one after the other, like tokens waiting to be picked up. (LLM anyone?) I don't even think that my conscious brain knows exactly which words are going to pop out, say 5 words on. It seems to magically find each word as I speak, without having to pause or rebuffer.
I don't think that language is slowing me down. I actually think that my brain is full of shit and needs to run thoughts through checkers (lint, syntax, logic, fact). I think it makes the language center of our brains all the more magical. As you say, it all happens so fast, and yet it assembles and sanity-checks those raw thoughts as you crystalise them into words.
How many times have I started explaining something, only to realise midway through that I'm taking crap, or that I'm extremely fuzzy on some important detail. Or maybe I infer some important new fact or make some new connection for the first time, while talking about it?
Dogs have thoughts... but we can speak. And every time there's been an innovation in the storage, retrieval or communication of language (not raw thoughts), we've had a gigantic evolutionary leap forward. Isaac Newton was a genius. But when he took up the challenge of explaining the motion of the planets, I bet that not even he knew what he was going to end up with at the end, and I bet that he realised, discovered or rained out a whole bunch of things in the writing of it.
Something else I've wondered. How come my brain holds a million different facts, records of! historical interactions with others, and a pretty decent track of time (like, I know the time, day, month and year and what I did-or-didn't do yesterday), but my dreams are total gibberish? Like I was in a hotel lobby last night with a bunch of people I don't know, realised I'm wasn't wearing any pants, then paniced because my phone was in my pants, how would I call my wife? So I turn to my (deceased) sister and asked which room I'm staying in... If my brain is so good, how come it does crap like that when the conscious bit is switched off?
I would never assume that the data inside my brain, or the subconscious babble that counts for thought, adds up to a genius that is hindered by some clunky language. Very much the opposite.
Side note: all of this is the basis for my extremely strong view that freedom of speech is an absolute necessity for continued prosperity, science, democracy etc. If people are unable to turn their ideas into concrete language, and to do this together as a group, without fear, then they are unable to reason things out properly and make good decisions. I only feel like adding that because within my lifetime I have seen an erosion of the importance of that freedom, to the point where it's no longer possible to discuss mundane, everyday things, or to point out some obvious truth.
> Side note: all of this is the basis for my extremely strong view that freedom of speech is an absolute necessity for continued prosperity, science, democracy etc. If people are unable to turn their ideas into concrete language, and to do this together as a group, without fear, then they are unable to reason things out properly and make good decisions. I only feel like adding that because within my lifetime I have seen an erosion of the importance of that freedom, to the point where it's no longer possible to discuss mundane, everyday things, or to point out some obvious truth.
A fun tangent :)
I think "freedom of speech" is perhaps the wrong place to describe the line: if everyone used words to try to learn about the world, to test their models against reality, this would be flawless.
But that does not fully describe us: we are social creatures, we use language not only to scout, but to fight; and freedom of speech also means freedom for rhetoric. It's cliché to criticise ethos these days, to say that arguments don't depend on the qualifications of one making them. Logos is the one I think you're interested in, based on what you wrote here. Pathos is the one I fear, because I know it works and it makes people believe falsely.
Still, I don't know how to actually get to just "freedom of logos". Some pathos may be necessary to avoid accidentally prohibiting some logos. Some pathos may be simply unavoidable, as the reason to care in the first place (see explanations of why "straw Vulcans" are made of straw: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan).
It isn't straw Vulcans, but a completely real thing.
Highly dimensional problems can only be solved through dimensionality reduction, you extract some key features that encompass the problem, get something that at least partially works, and eventually get to the actual solution, even for problems that would be too complex and multifaceted to approach analytically.
> fluidly produce all of the words as I say them
It's been a few days but I was thinking about this, and really - are we sure?
Deja vu exists, and as I understand is a bit of a processing issue where something we only just did seems to have happened a little while ago. As I understand it, our brain is in the habit of rewriting timelines a bit to have things make sense, and this could be another case of that.
Can you provide some concrete examples?
Social media silencing thoughts during COVID-19 that later to turn out to be right. And mostly nobody is very mad about views being silenced all over the internet.
That's the first thing that sprung to my mind.
Right or wrong, people talking their way around around keywords during the pandemic, when not even discussing the pandemic, was weird. They were scared of the YouTube algorithm falsely identifying them and harming their livelihood so would not even say things like "virus" in a video game or movie review.
Then you have the whole trend on various platforms with terms like "unalive" as a replacement for kill/suicide, or censoring words like "r*pe" or (even worse to me) "grape". Some of this is to dodge the algorithms too, but I've seen it said it's to also avoid triggers - which seems to defeat the purpose, it makes it hard to filter and eventually people learn and they become triggers anyway.
So I do see a definite chilling effect on discourse based on community standards and algorithms, even if it's not Government lead. There are two subs for my country on Reddit I check occasionally, one is heavily moderated and very predictable in how a comment will be received, while I feel the other has a more honest reflection of the widespread population. I don't particularly like the racists that share their thoughts, but on the balance of things I'm not sure it's best to lock them out completely. Twenty years ago the internet was less sanitised, but it also felt less hostile on a personal level, and more honest overall. Talking to discuss, not to score points.