Let's Talk Software Languages

Splectrum has a very broad view of language. It recognises a wide variety of language categories, although many categories may not feel that close to us. Natural languages and software languages are two categories that we as humans do have a close affinity with. By nature, natural languages can be ambiguous, context-dependent, evolving, full of implication and unspoken meaning. This is a real strength. Software languages on the other hand are not. They are fully explicit. Every rule is written down, all is well-defined by definition. Software languages are languages in the way that Russell always wanted them to be. That is their strength. It also makes them a good category to learn from.

Let's take a look using a simple addition as an example. In the Python language it is written as x = 3 + 4 — calculate three plus four and assign it to variable x. It's a straightforward instruction. But the computer processor can't read it that way. At the execution level a computer processor only reads binary — a language with an alphabet of two symbols: 0 and 1. Its vocabulary — the instruction set — is preconfigured and fixed. Note that the instruction set depends on the specific processor.

For our example x = 3 + 4 the translation of the instruction in binary language (for a 6502 8-bit processor) is:

10101001 00000011
01101001 00000100
10000101 00010000

Three instructions, six bytes. Each instruction is two bytes: an opcode (what to do) and an operand (with what). The result is 7, stored in memory. Binary is not very readable to humans. So the first step is to humanise the binary language and to assign human-readable mnemonics to the instructions — the assembly language. A computer then uses a program — the assembler — to convert the assembly into binary instructions which can then be executed.

LDA #$03    ; Load 3 into accumulator
ADC #$04    ; Add 4 to accumulator
STA $10     ; Store result in memory (variable x)

A one-to-one mapping with the binary. Same instructions, different notation. Already more readable without having 0s and 1s to decode. Next level up are the higher level programming languages using compilers to transform them all the way down into assembly.

Three languages, one computation. Python, assembly and binary instructions all yielding the same result: 7.

In 1936, Alan Turing proved mathematically that computation is fundamentally about symbols and interaction between symbols. A tape, a read/write head, a set of rules: if you see this symbol, write that symbol, move, change state. Nothing else. No numbers, no logic, no meaning built in. The meaning emerges from the rules. And the minimum is already universal. A simple setup that can compute anything there is to be computed.

Turing also proved there are limits. Some computations never halt — anything circular runs forever. And no general procedure can determine in advance whether an arbitrary program will halt or not. The language is universal but not omnipotent.

If binary already has the full power, why do we need higher languages? Because with full power and control comes complexity of expression. It is not easy to think in such language, to solve problems. Higher languages are there to reduce complexity of expression, to make complex operations simple. x = 3 + 4 absorbs six bytes of binary instructions into five characters. The complexity hasn't disappeared — it is encapsulated and unpacked by the compiler. This allows the programmer to think and solve problems with simplicity. That's what higher languages do: absorb the complexity into a vocabulary and grammar that lets you think in concepts appropriate for the problems to be solved.

Each language is a different language game. The binary game: every bit matters, nothing is hidden, the raw power, all of it. The assembly game: instructions with names, but still raw power. The Python or any other higher language game: thinking in higher-level concepts, the details encapsulated. The rules of the game set the shape of how to think.

Getting here required evolution. The first binary computers started with only binary language — everything directly written in the most basic instruction set. The first assembler — mnemonics mapper — was 31 instructions long written by hand in binary — David Wheeler, Cambridge, 1949. Those 31 words, loaded into the machine, were all that was needed to allow the computer to accept programs in a more human-readable form. Next followed higher level languages that used compilers to rewrite the instructions into assembly.

Soon higher level languages were used to rebuild the lower level tools. Evolution in action. The concept of intermediate language (IL) appeared, an assembly-like instruction set that is not processor specific. Higher level languages get compiled to IL, and then from IL to assembly. An ever-growing interrelated ecosystem of languages building a web of complexity.

All languages have this in common: none of them self-founding. It takes one language to spawn another. But wait, what about the beginning? What is the language used to create the first one, the primordial binary instruction set from which all other languages are created? The binary language, the binary instruction set is hardwired into the processor. That is a different language game altogether but it is a language spawning a language. Likewise are we now seeing another emergence taking place: with AI formal languages are spawning natural language. Gone is the formal straitjacket, a computer can now be addressed in natural language, ambiguities included. One can only guess how that will change the landscape, but that is for another time.

Assemblers and compilers aren't unique to software. Language mapping and transformation can equally be found in other places like in our bodies. Every word we speak is mapped to electrical signals, transformed into muscle movements, sound waves. Every sensation we receive — light, pressure, temperature — gets rewritten into nerve impulses and transformed into concepts we can think with. We speak different natural languages, do different language games — but eventually all of it comes from or is transformed into bodily activity. The parallel is structural, not metaphorical. An ecosystem of languages, each suited to its context, each absorbing complexity into its own vocabulary, all eventually becoming or originating from physical action.

The primordial hardwired language brings the raw power of execution. Higher languages bring the power of thought through the clarity and simplicity of its concepts and grammar. As thinking evolves, so do languages. It's only natural.

This post is part of the language series. More on Splectrum and language in the language area of the reference library.

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From the Turn to the Present

In the positioning series I talked about the turn in language — from representing an absolute reality to something relational (Wittgenstein, Rorty). Merleau-Ponty anchors the body as the 'frontline' participant in this relational activity. However, these were not isolated events but happened after a long evolution in thinking. In fact, this started at the beginning of modern philosophy and science about 500 years ago.

Although the turn is associated with Kant, it was in fact Descartes that fired the first shot: he shifted the focus from a God who reveals truth to humans who through doubt enquire what can be known of reality. However, his approach ended up using the inevitable existence of God as the main means of justification, not very satisfactory since it implicitly gives the last word back to God. But the transition was made: enquiry into the nature of reality had become 'personal' — even if it was still about holding up a mirror to a reality 'out there.' That mirror would persist for centuries.

There is another side to Descartes: he split the individual into mind and body, a clean separation. The mind is where enquiry takes place. The body forms part of the 'mechanistic' world of life and non-life, no thinking there. At the time this was very liberating — it opened the door to the birth of modern science. Describing a pure mechanistic world poses no threat to theologians and religion.

Triggered by Hume's empiricism in response to Descartes' rationalism, Kant responded with the question that defines the turn: How do objects conform to the mind? instead of How does the mind conform to objects?. It is the mind that structures experience. No God's-eye view. We see from somewhere, not from everywhere. However, the landscape under observation remained static — a reality to be observed and described, with a language that is referential.

And that is where Hegel's historicity makes its biggest contribution. We are in a totality that evolves: thought and reality aren't two separate domains requiring a bridge. Understanding develops historically, through contradiction and resolution. It has become a process.

After Hegel, Western philosophy gradually split into three distinct traditions: pragmatism, the continental tradition, and the analytical tradition. All three were strongly influenced by mathematics at their inception, though that influence only survived long term in the analytical tradition. Pragmatism — Peirce, James, Dewey — is straightforward: what works, goes, no strings attached. The analytical tradition — Frege, Russell, the early Wittgenstein — shifted the structuring from the mind to language, aiming to capture the logical structure of reality through the logical structure of language.

Husserl, in what will become the continental tradition, made a deceptively simple move: stop asking whether your experience matches some independent reality. Instead, examine the structures of experience as they are — a phenomenological treatment of Kant's question, but now described from the inside, through careful attention to what consciousness actually does.

Meanwhile, in linguistics, a development of equal importance was taking place. Saussure broke with the assumption that words are actual names for things. The linguistic sign is arbitrary and differential — neither the sound nor the concept has content in itself. Both are defined entirely by their differences from other elements in the system. Meaning is differential, not referential. Relational all the way down.

Whitehead, a mathematician, belonged to none of these traditions. His complaint: philosophy since Descartes had been mistaking abstractions for concrete realities. What's truly concrete are events, not things. Reality is process. Each occasion takes in other occasions. No substance underneath. Relations are primary — without them, no entities. He dissolves the mind-body split at the root: every occasion is both physical and experiential.

Heidegger, Husserl's student, embedded the observer deeper into reality. We don't begin as detached minds contemplating objects. We're already in a world, practically engaged. The hammer isn't an object you observe — it's something you use. Understanding is activity, not contemplation. Where Husserl had described consciousness with unprecedented precision, Heidegger went well beyond — the observer isn't examining reality from a distance, the observer is part of reality.

By this time the ground was prepared for Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty and Rorty — all chipping away at the same thing: the refutation that we can stand outside reality and describe it as it is. The outside view, giving way to the relational.

And philosophy was not alone. Physics was making the same move, independently. Next to be covered in the positioning series.

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The Body as Medium

The previous two posts in the positioning serie traced a language turn within the analytical tradition. First Wittgenstein turned from language as a tool to accurately describe an outside reality to language games, language as a form of life. And then Rorty went further: there is no mirror of reality, no privileged vocabulary for its description, just conversation. Language was freed from representation. But the conversation stayed focussed on what language shares — assuming it had already been absorbed by language users, ready for use. But how does it get into language in the first place? What is shared first needs to be experienced.

This takes us into different territory — the continental tradition. Where the analytical tradition looked from the outside in — language structure, logic, social practice, the continental tradition looked from the inside out — lived experience, perception, the body. There is also a third tradition, pragmatism, which cut across both — its motto: what works, goes. These three traditions coexisted with clear borders in between. Three angles on the same thing. Not arguing with each other so much as standing in different places.

Merleau-Ponty stood firmly in the continental tradition. He came from phenomenology — Husserl's project of examining experience directly. But where Husserl still kept consciousness separated from reality by what he called an abyss, Merleau-Ponty closed the gap. He put it in the body. Not the body as an object studied by science — but the lived body, the one that reaches, gestures, speaks. "The body is our general medium for having a world."

And it is this that feeds language. Speech is not a report of something already thought. It is a gesture — like pointing, like reaching. "It contains its meaning in the same way as the gesture contains its." Thought comes into being through the act of expressing, not before it. The body experiences before the words arrive.

And the body doesn't just transmit — it participates. Perception is not passive intake waiting to be processed into words. The body actively engages the world, and that engagement is structured and meaningful. When we speak, we don't translate an inner thought into outer sound alone. The body shapes the expression — through rhythm, through gesture, through the physical act of voicing. The hands that move while we talk are not for decoration. They participate in the thinking. Merleau-Ponty called it motor intentionality: the body's directedness toward the world is what makes meaning possible in the first place. Not mind first, body second. Body and meaning together, from the start.

He distinguished between living speech and settled speech — language in the act of creating and language already sedimented into habit. The living kind is where new meaning is born, in the gesture of expression. The settled kind is what we build on — the vocabulary already there. Every act of speaking moves between the two: drawing on what is settled, reaching for what is not yet said.

Merleau-Ponty arrived here through phenomenology — through careful description of lived experience, a view from outside — decades before neuroscience had the tools to look at it from the inside. When mirror neurons were discovered in the 1990s, researchers found proof of what he had described: the direct, bodily understanding of another's actions without needing to reason about them. Independent paths, converging.

In 1958, at a conference in Royaumont outside Paris, analytical and continental philosophers met face to face. Merleau-Ponty listened to Ryle — a leading figure of ordinary language philosophy — and responded: "I do not see much that separates us." Two traditions, standing in different places, recognising the same landscape.

Merleau-Ponty died three years later, in 1961. The full impact of the later Wittgenstein hadn't reached the continent yet, and it was another two decades before Rorty would shatter the mirror and declare the borders null and void.

Next up: we step back and look at the turn as a whole — from Kant to the present.

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Philosophy as Conversation

In the positioning series I talked about Wittgenstein's transition from language to form of life. A strong member of the analytical tradition opening the door to points of view considered more at home within the Continental tradition. However this never took the form of a public discussion, that part of his work was only published two years after his death. This allowed his turn to seep into the tradition quietly — colleagues absorbed the method, "meaning is use," while the radical core — language as a form of life — went untouched. The door was unlocked but stayed unopened.

It was Rorty who very publicly opened it and walked through.

Rorty was an analytical philosopher trained at Princeton, one of their best. His target was what he called the mirror — a picture of reality that had shaped Western philosophy since Descartes. The mind as a mirror of nature. Language as a tool to provide a description. Knowledge as accurate representation. The philosopher's job: to polish the mirror, to get the reflection right. But fifty years after the birth of quantum mechanics, this picture was more in the league of relics. Rorty said: there is no mirror, there is no access to outside reality.

No language mirroring reality, but language as a contingent tool — a form of life. In Rorty's words, many vocabularies, each shaped by history and purpose. "Our vocabularies have no more of a representational relation to an intrinsic nature of things than does the anteater's snout." Languages are made, not found. No vocabulary has a privileged relationship to reality, there is no meta-vocabulary ranking them.

What replaces the mirror? Conversation. Not to discover absolute truth but to keep the dialogue about reality going. Different vocabularies meeting obliquely — without shared foundations — just a willingness to listen, to redescribe, to change. And philosophy is not the arbiter standing above the conversation, it is just one voice among many.

Rorty did not arrive at this alone. He drew heavily on Wittgenstein — from the analytical tradition — and tapped equally into continental and pragmatist voices like Heidegger and Dewey. For him there was no border, just traditions with different vocabularies. This was seen as a serious provocation, enough for him to be considered a traitor to the analytical cause. He turned his back and left Princeton, moved on from philosophy to comparative literature at Stanford.

His critics sensed something missing — that conversation between vocabularies requires more than just willingness. Rorty said "no shared foundation", and left it at that. But meaningful conversation requires some sort of sharing, a shared linguistic base. Was that considered to be implicitly there? That question was not put on the table.

But the dam was breached. The relational view of reality gained more and more traction across different disciplines, albeit often still as minority views. And it was not only a discussion in philosophy. Similar discussions happened in physics, as covered in the positioning series.

Next up in the serie: let's go back in time a bit, to Merleau-Ponty who put the body back into the picture.

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From Language to Form of Life

Two posts ago I started unpacking the seed — six lines about language and how we relate to reality. This view on language has not fallen from the sky. This post is the first in a positioning series that explores the evolving thinking in philosophy and science. The focus is first on philosophy, starting with Ludwig Wittgenstein — singling out philosophers whose thinking was key in shifting the focus towards language.

There is a picture of reality that runs deep in Western thinking. Reality is out there, independent, fixed, waiting to be described. And it is the job of language to provide that description. The more precise the language, the closer we get to truth. This is all thought about from an outside viewpoint looking in.

That's where Wittgenstein started. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) is the most rigorous version of that picture ever built. Language works by picturing reality. A meaningful proposition shares its logical form with what it describes. Names stand for objects. What doesn't fit — ethics, aesthetics, the mystical — must be passed over in silence. A logical straitjacket, beautifully tailored. Wittgenstein thought he had done all he could, and left philosophy behind.

Then it tore.

After a few years doubts about the Tractatus started to settle in, and with the help of some catalysts by 1929 he had fully returned to the philosophical fold. What with the language of gesture? It has meaning, but no logical form, no proposition. No room for it in the Tractatus.

Wittgenstein resumed his career in philosophy, remaining within the analytical tradition, while his thoughts and work drifted ever further away from it. What came out changed the landscape. Meaning is not in the word — it is in the use. "For a large class of cases the meaning of a word is its use in the language." Language is not one logical system but an open plurality of language games — giving orders, telling jokes, greeting, praying, building — each with its own grammar, its own way of working. And these games don't float in the abstract. They are woven into activity, into forms of life. The builders calling for slabs — the form of life is building. The shopkeeper counting apples — the form of life is exchanging.

He finished his philosophical career in 1947, and continued to work in solitude. The fact that this part of his work was only published after his death is best explained by his own words: "I tried to force my thoughts into a unified whole but couldn't — the best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks."

A language with a strict logical backbone fits well when it is a distant reality that needs to be described from the viewpoint of an outside observer. The turn from language to language game, from language game to form of life creates a reality that has the observer placed within with language the medium that expresses how things relate to each other. No more outside observer, no more representation. And languages with a strict logical backbone cease to be the best fit.

He wasn't alone in making that turn. Physics was moving the same way — from the outside observer of classical mechanics to the participant-observer of quantum mechanics, where properties arise in interaction, not in isolation. Something was in the air.

Wittgenstein embodies the turn, he existed on both sides. He started on the analytical side of philosophy — logic, formal structure, precision — thinking he had nailed it. However, he returned, revisited and made the turn unlocking the door onto an approach more akin to the continental tradition. And that was where he left it, but he made the point.

Next up: Rorty, who walked through that door and kept going.

The reference library has an overview of the positioning series.

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Teaming Up With My Alter Ego

The desire of writing a blog was very much on my mind well before AI entered into the picture. I have written a number of posts on this blog before, but never got the writer fluids flowing freely, I am not born a natural writer. I also find it particularly difficult to write when there is lack of focus, when I lack clear insight — now fully resolved and condensed into the Splectrum seed.

My journey into AI is about one year old. As a software engineer it started with AI as a helping hand for writing code. But soon I got focused on a collaborative approach where solving problems through discussion became more important than the implementation — I happily offload implementation to an autonomous AI when I can. The collaborative engineering work is still in full swing — in fact that is where the name Splectrum arose — but in this post I want to concentrate on collaborative AI while researching, writing and thinking.

It is only when the software engineering AI collaboration had reached enough maturity that I decided to apply it to my research and writing. I have also been blessed in that I was able to help others with AI-assisted research for academic use, which gave me a taste and hands-on experience of its strengths and weaknesses. I was impressed. Many tend to emphasise the weaknesses, AI being mistaken or hallucinating. But that is like blaming a junior member of the team for being a junior. It is very important that we are the senior in the collaboration.

The alter ego AI collaboration on the software engineering side started as pair programming. Two individuals who collaborate on a project — discuss, decide, create and review. What I found liberating was that I could chat conversationally in my language, my words, and pretty seamlessly AI would run with it and infuse me with the proper vocabulary in the process. That can be such a satisfying and intense learning experience. As typically happens in pair programming, one has the hands on the keyboard with the other engaging from a short distance. AI as hands and me as head — essentially one body. And so the alter ego was born.

So how does that translate into shared authorship for my blog, or for my research and thinking for that matter? Here the output is different — it is a public voice. Not a piece of code that executes and does stuff. There is still only one author, a single entity, a combination of a head and a pair of hands, so to speak. Being a person with a high vagal tone, tone of voice is very important to me. It needs to be right for my thinking to activate properly. So any division of labour between head and hands is only going to work well when the same language is spoken. How do we deal with the inner voice when we chat and discuss, and with the outer voice when it is put out there for you to read?

I could decide to ignore co-authorship. The voice is mine and the ideas are mine — should I acknowledge that inner collaborator? I believe I should. Not only to recognise the work done by my alter ego colleague but more importantly to draw attention to the future ahead. The hands-on collaborator gives me more space and time to do what I really want to do: think, analyse, research and get better at putting it on (virtual) paper. Where the internet gave us the capability to easily search through countless libraries, AI gives us the capability to do it in collaboration, while discussing and thinking about it at the same time. That, more than anything else, is what I with my alter ego aim to achieve on this blog. And share it at the same time.

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Let's Make the Seed Concrete

Splectrum is born, the seed is there. So what, you may ask. Should I be impressed? Are those six lines really so special? I happen to think so. So much is hidden in their apparent simplicity. I am not talking about subjects for discussion at high table, but about what is happening in everyone's daily life. Let's unpack a little.

What if we thought of language differently, as something you live rather than something you speak? Let's try it out on something that is great at bringing people together — a dinner party.

Before we can sit down and eat there is some cooking to be done. It's all in its own language, the ingredients we need, how they have to be prepared, how they are joined together. All relational, a relational language that you live, experience as you are doing it.

Now we can sit down at the table and eat. The food I take, the way I eat it, the taste, the texture, the appearance. The experience is very personal, different for each one of us. It may be very similar, but not the same. The experience remains private.

We sit together at the table. Yes, the food experience may be strictly personal, but we do love to talk about it. We share experiences and opinions, and get more knowledgeable in the process. Food is part of our culture, it is a reality that we share and makes us feel we belong together.

Cooking the food, or eating it at the dinner table does not stand on its own. We share it with each other using the same natural language. We hear, we see, we taste and feel. These all produce experiences that compose a 'higher level' activity, while each speaks its own living language in the process. All are interconnected. And we don't blink an eye, we just take it for granted.

Everyone has their own unique way they experience the world, how they relate to what is around them. Here it was just a dinner party. Think about everything else we do — working, playing, raising children, making music, arguing, falling in love.

The simplicity of six lines — the seed — versus the complexity of what follows from it. Does that hold? Isn't there a way around it? All well and good me saying this, but is there actually support for this way of thinking? Let's find out — that is what unpacking is about. What do these six lines allow me to say? And is it supported by what other people think? And yes, this will involve philosophers with their special vocabulary and ways of thinking, but also biologists, physicists, people in the arts, religion, all walks of life. Let's go on that journey!

This post is part of the seed series. More on the seed in the seed area of the reference library.

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