5 ms·

This is a thought that's been floating around in my head for too long and probably doesn't exactly fit here but oh well. Isn't language a bit of a proxy for wh

This is a thought that's been floating around in my head for too long and probably doesn't exactly fit here but oh well. Isn't language a bit of a proxy for what we are actually trying to communicate? As in the statement "Yesterday, I saw a yellow bus" the are millions of shades of yellow, different bus styles, and of course different times of day and different scenery in which you could have seen that bus. Is it possible to convey that picture of the yellow bus (wherever and whenever you happened to see it) through a level of communication below typical "language." Is it possible to reconstruct thoughts that have not been put into explicit words? Additionally, if we were able to do this and do it in both ways (sending/receiving) would a Chinese speaker and English speaker be able to communicate without learning a new spoken language?

tim333 9y ago
People have thought about that stuff for a long time and it often comes up in fiction. Here's Spock doing it with an alien. https://youtu.be/65dzjOIkwwI?t=59s https://youtu.be/65dzjOIkwwI?t=59s It's interesting we may have a new way to communicate thoughts using tech coming up.
mywittyname 9y ago
I think the limitation of our language is a representation of the limitation of our memory and/or thought processing. In college, I remember hearing about people whose language did not have a distinct names for colors, such as blue and green, who also could not distinguish between the two. Meaning, if one held up a blue crayon and a green crayon and asked one of these people if they were the same color, their response would be "yes" in disagreement with your typical American.
captainmuon 9y ago
I would guess the internal representations are too different. Maybe some are inherited, but most develop over the course of your life. You can think of it as MS Word vs. Libreoffice Writer. You don't get better interoperability by letting an app access the other app's memory, whcih is a crazy historically grown representation of memory-mapped structs. And by accessing this private structure (and say memcpy'ing external data into it), you open yourself to lots of exploits, like buffer overflows. No way I'm letting somebody memcpy random information into my brain.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  It's theoretically possible to reconstruct exact images of objects you are imagining. You could just show them an image of the yellow bus you saw. I wonder how communication would evolve with such an ability.
- scarmig 9y ago
  But even exposing a brain to a visual or auditory input is letting an external environment inject random information into your brain, and that's not the kind of mental security vulnerability we worry about. Snow Crash notwithstanding.

tim333 9y ago

People have thought about that stuff for a long time and it often comes up in fiction. Here's Spock doing it with an alien. https://youtu.be/65dzjOIkwwI?t=59s https://youtu.be/65dzjOIkwwI?t=59s It's interesting we may have a new way to communicate thoughts using tech coming up.

mywittyname 9y ago

I think the limitation of our language is a representation of the limitation of our memory and/or thought processing. In college, I remember hearing about people whose language did not have a distinct names for colors, such as blue and green, who also could not distinguish between the two. Meaning, if one held up a blue crayon and a green crayon and asked one of these people if they were the same color, their response would be "yes" in disagreement with your typical American.

captainmuon 9y ago

I would guess the internal representations are too different. Maybe some are inherited, but most develop over the course of your life. You can think of it as MS Word vs. Libreoffice Writer. You don't get better interoperability by letting an app access the other app's memory, whcih is a crazy historically grown representation of memory-mapped structs. And by accessing this private structure (and say memcpy'ing external data into it), you open yourself to lots of exploits, like buffer overflows. No way I'm letting somebody memcpy random information into my brain.

Houshalter 9y ago
It's theoretically possible to reconstruct exact images of objects you are imagining. You could just show them an image of the yellow bus you saw. I wonder how communication would evolve with such an ability.
scarmig 9y ago
But even exposing a brain to a visual or auditory input is letting an external environment inject random information into your brain, and that's not the kind of mental security vulnerability we worry about. Snow Crash notwithstanding.