PirateJoe
04-29-2009, 12:22 AM
Language is some pretty crazy shit. We use it every day without thinking about what an incredible piece of evolutionary technology it is. It is so integral to the way we think and act that some people think that it was language that allowed our consciousness to develop as far as it has. But what the fuck is it? How do we formulate thoughts in language? What does it mean that we even have that ability? Part of me wants to say that the answer to those questions will lead you straight to the source of creativity and consciousness itself (if they even exist in the conventional meaning of things), but I haven't really pushed the envelope on that train of thought yet.
But language. It is well known that when you are a child, having parents that read to you and interact with you verbally substantially increases your chances of academic success. It is also well known that children are much more adept at learning language than adults. It is in childhood that our growing brains can take in the most amount of sheer information, and turn it into useful skills, like talking, which we will use for the rest of our lives. It might be handy to look at our language not as a vehicle for transmitting thoughts, but as a mesh of concepts in the brain. Early on in childhood, we begin forming this mesh using 1) the words ingest from those around us, whether that be verbally from our parents or internally when we read. 2) Our interactions with the environment, sight and touch especially, but sound and taste as well. That is, when we learn, all we're doing is connecting new information to this mesh. We connect the verbal "cat" with the visual "cat" and the tactile, soft, fuzzy "cat". Somewhere along the line we connect the emotion of familiarity to the cat. Thus, the word cat instantly conjures in our mind all the immediate concepts surrounding "cat": the sight, the tactile feeling, maybe the smell and emotional connection.
Then we repeat this process billions of times. We include "mouse", and through our various experiences form a network of relationships between "cat" and "mouse", through various auxiliary concepts like "eats" and "chases" and "is not". We can even extend this to larger groups of words: phrases, clauses, and sentences. Take the sentence, "The boy catches the ball". Immediately, we have a visual of a boy catching a ball. We didn't build the "thought" up from the various constituents of the sentence, "boy, "ball", "catches", but in our experience we have seen this concept-word before, as a whole. This sentence is already in the mesh of concepts which happens to include the visualization of a boy catching a ball. Incidentally, this also explains how children are able to speak their native languages fluently without knowing a thing about tenses, conjugation, subordinate clauses, etc. They have millions of concept-words built up, and among them are "the boy catches the ball" and "the boy caught the ball" but never "the boys catches the ball" or even "ball the catches boys the". That we are even able to differentiate the "ball" and the "boy" is only due to the differences in connections with other concept-words. "Boy" is most surely connected to "run" but "ball" usually isn't (except maybe through the auxiliary baseball term "home run"). Understanding, then, can be thought of as a sufficient build up of relationships such that a concept is 1) completely differentiated from any other concept. (if you haven't differentiated boy from ball, you're going to be wondering wtf is going on once you encounter boy independent of ball.) 2) connected en mesh to as many other concepts as possible. (baseball..white...red...laces....basketball...ora nge...sports...bounce....play...etc) Thought itself might even be modeled this way in terms relationships and meta-relationships. The ability to form meta-relationships may then be an integral part of our pattern-recognition ability. And, of course, our ability to recognize patterns is the foundation of our logical thought.
In communicating with other humans, this mesh allows us to make relevant responses to certain stimuli. If I ask someone what the time is, and they respond with the 1874 East German wheat harvest yields, that doesn't help me much. Much more likely, however, is that the man's brain has connected "time" with "watch" and the interrogative "what is.." with an appropriate response, i.e. to speak the time which he reads from his watch. Conversation itself can be thought of as two people sharing the most relevant auxiliary concepts connected to a central subject-of-conversation concept. And as the central concept bounces around, so too do the auxiliary concepts, hopefully creating deeper, mutually beneficial concept connections in both parties.
Dreams could conceivably just be an extension of this en-meshing process. Dreams normally feature concepts that have been on your mind, or that you happen to be thinking a lot about, regardless of whether your conscious, awake self would ever make connections between these concepts. In this way dreams provide mental sandbox for concept-word connections that would never play themselves out for you to experience directly. A great example of this is the ubiquitous falling-off-a-cliff dream. In dream state, the brain connects mortal fear, a cliff, and the feeling of falling. Another example which I'm pretty sure we've all experienced is the clarifying act of "sleeping on it." Your brain takes this concept, connects it to a bunch of other concepts, and thus when you wake you can "see" the problem/concept from different angles or points of view, thereby increasing understanding. Dreams aren't always as useful as those two examples, but what occurs in the dream state, making connections between concepts that you wouldn't normally connect, incidentally makes a pretty good definition of creativity.
The phenomenon of hivemind can pretty much be explained in the same way. Take a group of people and give them all the same stimulus, give them all the same brain-inputs, and after a while they'll all start to have similar internal concept maps. Then, when prompted verbally or what have you, many of the responses would be similar. That is, the the auxiliary concepts most deeply connected to a central prompt concept should be roughly the same for those involved.
Anyway this is getting pretty tl;dr. Those of you with actual training in psychology I look forward to hearing what you think.
But language. It is well known that when you are a child, having parents that read to you and interact with you verbally substantially increases your chances of academic success. It is also well known that children are much more adept at learning language than adults. It is in childhood that our growing brains can take in the most amount of sheer information, and turn it into useful skills, like talking, which we will use for the rest of our lives. It might be handy to look at our language not as a vehicle for transmitting thoughts, but as a mesh of concepts in the brain. Early on in childhood, we begin forming this mesh using 1) the words ingest from those around us, whether that be verbally from our parents or internally when we read. 2) Our interactions with the environment, sight and touch especially, but sound and taste as well. That is, when we learn, all we're doing is connecting new information to this mesh. We connect the verbal "cat" with the visual "cat" and the tactile, soft, fuzzy "cat". Somewhere along the line we connect the emotion of familiarity to the cat. Thus, the word cat instantly conjures in our mind all the immediate concepts surrounding "cat": the sight, the tactile feeling, maybe the smell and emotional connection.
Then we repeat this process billions of times. We include "mouse", and through our various experiences form a network of relationships between "cat" and "mouse", through various auxiliary concepts like "eats" and "chases" and "is not". We can even extend this to larger groups of words: phrases, clauses, and sentences. Take the sentence, "The boy catches the ball". Immediately, we have a visual of a boy catching a ball. We didn't build the "thought" up from the various constituents of the sentence, "boy, "ball", "catches", but in our experience we have seen this concept-word before, as a whole. This sentence is already in the mesh of concepts which happens to include the visualization of a boy catching a ball. Incidentally, this also explains how children are able to speak their native languages fluently without knowing a thing about tenses, conjugation, subordinate clauses, etc. They have millions of concept-words built up, and among them are "the boy catches the ball" and "the boy caught the ball" but never "the boys catches the ball" or even "ball the catches boys the". That we are even able to differentiate the "ball" and the "boy" is only due to the differences in connections with other concept-words. "Boy" is most surely connected to "run" but "ball" usually isn't (except maybe through the auxiliary baseball term "home run"). Understanding, then, can be thought of as a sufficient build up of relationships such that a concept is 1) completely differentiated from any other concept. (if you haven't differentiated boy from ball, you're going to be wondering wtf is going on once you encounter boy independent of ball.) 2) connected en mesh to as many other concepts as possible. (baseball..white...red...laces....basketball...ora nge...sports...bounce....play...etc) Thought itself might even be modeled this way in terms relationships and meta-relationships. The ability to form meta-relationships may then be an integral part of our pattern-recognition ability. And, of course, our ability to recognize patterns is the foundation of our logical thought.
In communicating with other humans, this mesh allows us to make relevant responses to certain stimuli. If I ask someone what the time is, and they respond with the 1874 East German wheat harvest yields, that doesn't help me much. Much more likely, however, is that the man's brain has connected "time" with "watch" and the interrogative "what is.." with an appropriate response, i.e. to speak the time which he reads from his watch. Conversation itself can be thought of as two people sharing the most relevant auxiliary concepts connected to a central subject-of-conversation concept. And as the central concept bounces around, so too do the auxiliary concepts, hopefully creating deeper, mutually beneficial concept connections in both parties.
Dreams could conceivably just be an extension of this en-meshing process. Dreams normally feature concepts that have been on your mind, or that you happen to be thinking a lot about, regardless of whether your conscious, awake self would ever make connections between these concepts. In this way dreams provide mental sandbox for concept-word connections that would never play themselves out for you to experience directly. A great example of this is the ubiquitous falling-off-a-cliff dream. In dream state, the brain connects mortal fear, a cliff, and the feeling of falling. Another example which I'm pretty sure we've all experienced is the clarifying act of "sleeping on it." Your brain takes this concept, connects it to a bunch of other concepts, and thus when you wake you can "see" the problem/concept from different angles or points of view, thereby increasing understanding. Dreams aren't always as useful as those two examples, but what occurs in the dream state, making connections between concepts that you wouldn't normally connect, incidentally makes a pretty good definition of creativity.
The phenomenon of hivemind can pretty much be explained in the same way. Take a group of people and give them all the same stimulus, give them all the same brain-inputs, and after a while they'll all start to have similar internal concept maps. Then, when prompted verbally or what have you, many of the responses would be similar. That is, the the auxiliary concepts most deeply connected to a central prompt concept should be roughly the same for those involved.
Anyway this is getting pretty tl;dr. Those of you with actual training in psychology I look forward to hearing what you think.