5 ms·

as my old fried Witty used to say, the limits of my language are the limits of my world.

wilg 3y ago
Do languages have limits? I mean, the poster explained the situation in English. How much does terseness matter I wonder?
- grey-area 3y ago
  Clearly they do have limits.
- godelski 3y ago
  > Do languages have limits? Yes. Language is itself compression of thoughts. Thoughts themselves are compression of something larger (observations, experiences, combinations of other thoughts, etc). It seems that there is more than one very famous mathematical proof that dictates that systems such as these cannot be complete, or even consistent.
  - wilg 3y ago
    I meant different human languages. Is there something that cannot be expressed in one vs another in any way, even if it's long? I doubt it. Seems like there is something similar to Turing-completeness in effect.
  - defrost 3y ago
    It's a question sorely lacking in a definition of "limit" > It seems that there is more than one very famous mathematical proof that dictates that systems such as these cannot be complete, or even consistent. At least three approaches to similar results arising from questions posed by Hilbert - but do these results impose "a (undefined) limit"? Axiomatic systems that can never be complete or consistent can still be used to reason about objects without limit; both the countable and uncountable numbers spring to mind. Is an axiomatic system that can never be complete "limited"? Surely there's always something more to add on that asymptotic(?) approach to 'completeness'? Is it possible that being complete or consistent is a limit, bounded by completeness , unable to discuss the paradoxical? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems
resolutebat 3y ago
That's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has been pretty thoroughly discredited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
- godelski 3y ago
  I think you're thinking of the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The strong version is that language dictates how one thinks while the weak form influences. The weak version is near universally accepted and it should be fairly easy to see why. Most people think in words, but note that not everyone does. That sentence alone should give evidence to the strong being false and the weak being true.
- numpad0 3y ago
  you know, Turing completeness doesn't mean you can actually port arbitrary Turing complete code on another Turing complete environment. You can't transpile x86_64 Linux Kernel image into a bare HTML+CSS file, or random generated and filtered valid sequence of Turing machine tape instructions into a well structured and annotated Rust code. I believe that is what "languages determine perceptions of the world" in Sapir-Whorf hypothesis means. Not "not all languages are Sapir-Whorf complete, only some are", which is obviously wrong, and also what is probably catching you. All languages on Earth are probably complete, just except that says nothing about modeling paradigms and syntaxes and all sorts of mannerisms shared and not shared among those equal and complete languages.
  - greiskul 3y ago
    > you know, Turing completeness doesn't mean you can actually port arbitrary Turing complete code on another Turing complete environment. You can't transpile x86_64 Linux Kernel image into a bare HTML+CSS file, or random generated and filtered valid sequence of Turing machine tape instructions into a well structured and annotated Rust code. It depends on how you define things, but in a very reasonable definition it does actually mean that. If we consider a computational model to be a way using a finite string in countable alphabet to represent every single computable function, then yes, there is an algorithm that can take a program in any computational model 1 and find another program in computational model 2 that also implements the same computable function. Implements here means that both programs will for the same input return the same output if they both halt, or both will not halt. Now the running time, or algorithmic complexity of both algorithms, is not under consideration here. The x86_64 program running in native hardware might finish the computation in milliseconds, where a browser that does the same computation using purely HTML and css that our universal transpiler generated might run in trillions of years.
braindead_in 3y ago
The quote "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" is attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian-British philosopher. He expressed this idea in his work "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus." It's one of Sw Sarvapriyananda's favourite quotes. Wittgenstein was quite Vedantic it seems.

wilg 3y ago

Do languages have limits? I mean, the poster explained the situation in English. How much does terseness matter I wonder?

grey-area 3y ago
Clearly they do have limits.
godelski 3y ago
> Do languages have limits? Yes. Language is itself compression of thoughts. Thoughts themselves are compression of something larger (observations, experiences, combinations of other thoughts, etc). It seems that there is more than one very famous mathematical proof that dictates that systems such as these cannot be complete, or even consistent.
- wilg 3y ago
  I meant different human languages. Is there something that cannot be expressed in one vs another in any way, even if it's long? I doubt it. Seems like there is something similar to Turing-completeness in effect.
- defrost 3y ago
  It's a question sorely lacking in a definition of "limit" > It seems that there is more than one very famous mathematical proof that dictates that systems such as these cannot be complete, or even consistent. At least three approaches to similar results arising from questions posed by Hilbert - but do these results impose "a (undefined) limit"? Axiomatic systems that can never be complete or consistent can still be used to reason about objects without limit; both the countable and uncountable numbers spring to mind. Is an axiomatic system that can never be complete "limited"? Surely there's always something more to add on that asymptotic(?) approach to 'completeness'? Is it possible that being complete or consistent is a limit, bounded by completeness , unable to discuss the paradoxical? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_problems

resolutebat 3y ago

That's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has been pretty thoroughly discredited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

godelski 3y ago
I think you're thinking of the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The strong version is that language dictates how one thinks while the weak form influences. The weak version is near universally accepted and it should be fairly easy to see why. Most people think in words, but note that not everyone does. That sentence alone should give evidence to the strong being false and the weak being true.
numpad0 3y ago
you know, Turing completeness doesn't mean you can actually port arbitrary Turing complete code on another Turing complete environment. You can't transpile x86_64 Linux Kernel image into a bare HTML+CSS file, or random generated and filtered valid sequence of Turing machine tape instructions into a well structured and annotated Rust code. I believe that is what "languages determine perceptions of the world" in Sapir-Whorf hypothesis means. Not "not all languages are Sapir-Whorf complete, only some are", which is obviously wrong, and also what is probably catching you. All languages on Earth are probably complete, just except that says nothing about modeling paradigms and syntaxes and all sorts of mannerisms shared and not shared among those equal and complete languages.
- greiskul 3y ago
  > you know, Turing completeness doesn't mean you can actually port arbitrary Turing complete code on another Turing complete environment. You can't transpile x86_64 Linux Kernel image into a bare HTML+CSS file, or random generated and filtered valid sequence of Turing machine tape instructions into a well structured and annotated Rust code. It depends on how you define things, but in a very reasonable definition it does actually mean that. If we consider a computational model to be a way using a finite string in countable alphabet to represent every single computable function, then yes, there is an algorithm that can take a program in any computational model 1 and find another program in computational model 2 that also implements the same computable function. Implements here means that both programs will for the same input return the same output if they both halt, or both will not halt. Now the running time, or algorithmic complexity of both algorithms, is not under consideration here. The x86_64 program running in native hardware might finish the computation in milliseconds, where a browser that does the same computation using purely HTML and css that our universal transpiler generated might run in trillions of years.

braindead_in 3y ago

The quote "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" is attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian-British philosopher. He expressed this idea in his work "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus." It's one of Sw Sarvapriyananda's favourite quotes. Wittgenstein was quite Vedantic it seems.