From Language to Form of Life

Two posts ago I started unpacking the seed — five lines about language and how we relate to reality. This view on language has not fallen from the sky. It finds broad support in philosophy and science and the next three posts are devoted to philosophers whose thinking resonates well with Splectrum's language approach. Starting with Ludwig Wittgenstein.

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 straightjacket, 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 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 sits well with a distant reality that needs to be described, all from an outside observer's viewpoint. The turn from language to language game, from language game to form of life, places reality within the language — how we relate to each other and the world. The observer is no longer outside looking in. The observer is in it.

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.

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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 the picture. I have written a number of posts on this blog before, but never got the writer fluids flowing freely. Partly because I am not a natural writer, and partly because my thinking lacked focus — 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 am still very active pursuing collaborative ways of working on the engineering side — in fact that is where the name Splectrum arose — but in this post I want to concentrate on AI collaboration when researching, writing and thinking.

It is only when enough maturity was reached while doing the software engineering that I decided to apply it to my research and writing. I have 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.

On the engineering side the alter ego approach started as pair programming. Two individuals who collaborate on a project — discuss, decide, create and review. What I found liberating in this 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. It was such a satisfying 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 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 when they speak the same language. 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 paper. Where the internet gave us the capability to easily search countless libraries of stuff, AI gives us the capability to do it in collaboration, to discuss and think. That, more than anything else, is what I with my alter ego want to achieve on this blog. And share it at the same time.

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Photo: Mushvig Niftaliyev / Unsplash

Let's Make the Seed Concrete

So Splectrum is born, the seed is there. So what, you may ask. Should I be impressed? Are those five 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.

So we can now sit at the table and eat. The food I take, the way I eat it, the taste, texture, the appearance. The experience is very personal, different for each one. It may be very similar, but not the same. It is very privately yours.

But we are not alone 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 converse 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. These are all 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 five 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 five 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 — next stop a philosopher, Wittgenstein, and his language games.

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Photo: Kelsey Chance / Unsplash

Splectrum is Born

As with a lot of rebrands, it is trying to revive. Here no different — I managed to stay silent for over half a year. A lot happened in the quiet. It's just that I can't get myself to be a writer!

For the few posts I managed to put out, they touched on real points of interest and have a common baseline — a fascination with reality, what is around us, and how it evolves. The brain and how it wires itself through experience. Evolution adding layers, never replacing. Death as life's partner. The little I wrote is in stark contrast to the time I spent researching and thinking about it.

Recently, thanks to a detour into software engineering and collaborative AI all fell into place and ended up being expressed through the concept of language. Five simple sentences. The concept is language in a wider sense — where we talk about things that relate to each other, where we share knowledge, where we deal with the meaning of things. I decided to name it "the seed":

Language is relational.

Language is the medium through which a subject experiences reality.

Language is where subjects share knowledge about reality.

Languages are inter-relational and have equal standing in potential.

Together they form a web of growing complexity.

You may find the use of the word language a bit weird. It is not just linguistics. It's Wittgenstein's language games — meaning arising from use, not from definitions. It's "their attitude speaks volumes." It's the way cells signal each other, the way a forest communicates through its roots, the way music speaks without a single word. In essence, it is about the way things interact — relational. It is the only way I, or you for that matter, have access to reality — through what we experience, through the way things speak to us, interact with us. I see no other way possible, even if it were an epiphany or a revelation. Language is where we experience and where we share these experiences with each other. Speaking in many tongues, creating an ever growing web of complexity.

Don't think that the seed came to me as some declaration from above. Yes — relational, knowledge, reality and complexity were on my mind, but the distillation had to be worked on. And that's where I'd like to present my partner in crime: AI. I've been exploring a lot in collaboration with AI in the area of software engineering. It started as a "tool" to write me some code, then AI became more of a collaborator, an alter ego in fact. It is doing stuff that I may not be the best at, being my hands at coding, leaving me the freedom to think and explore ideas. And that is what happened with the seed as well. Five lines — in a nutshell a foundation principle - to structure the explorations that will follow.

AI will be on this blog as a co-author. Not because of the ideas, or because of writing it — that's all mine — but because of the research and groundwork and the editing. We collaborate and have each our strengths and weaknesses. I want to give credit where credit is due.

Now, where will the seed take us? How will it be unpacked? Are there some more examples of what I mean with language? How far can it be stretched? It will be a journey from Relational QM all the way to the Bee Dance and beyond. However, don't expect a theory of everything explaining all. Just the opposite. It makes the case that nobody knows all, but everyone knows something and we should respect that. Don't impose and tell others what to think, how to behave. Be yourself, but also listen to what others have to say.

I wonder where this goes. That hasn't changed.

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Embracing Anti-Foundationalism: Why I Reject the Single Foundation

  I stumbled across anti-foundationalism and thought - wow, that's me as well. Don't be taken aback by the "anti" - something that has no place really in my dictionary. As often, it might not be the best choice of word for what it means. Foundations are important, but they're inevitably tied to a context. It is the single foundation that is the problem.

The Discovery

I got alerted to anti-foundationalism listening to Carlo Rovelli on the TOE (Theory of Everything) podcast - one that I highly recommend. Watch the episode here (particularly around 1h15m).

I see myself at the start of a journey trying to understand and get into the philosophical way of talking about stuff. As I said before, there is a lot I don't know (yet) and I'm only waking up to position myself in a clear way.

I would like to share a few observations around anti-foundationalism without going too deep into detail. I don't feel ready for that at this point in time, still too much of a basic learner.

What Is Anti-Foundationalism?

Searching for "What is anti-foundationalism in philosophy" on a major search engine gave an AI overview starting with:

 "Anti-foundationalism is a philosophical position that rejects the idea that there is a single, absolute foundation for knowledge or philosophy."

I directly subscribe to that. Not in the sense that it is not possible, but in the sense that we can't say due to the subjective way we experience reality around us, that we are part of the cosmos. What we discover about the world around us is nothing more than a shared view of individual agents within.

  What Anti-Foundationalism Rejects

When I first executed the search it listed a number of common beliefs that anti-foundationalists (as a heterogeneous group) hold, however subsequent execution of the same search replaced it with what it rejects. I feel happier staying away from 'beliefs' as it feels a slippery slope to me. I see beliefs as assumptions, current working hypotheses rather than anything more:

  • The idea that knowledge is certain
  • The idea that knowledge is based on pure reason or experience
  • The idea that there are infallible basic beliefs
  • The idea that there is a fundamental belief or principle that grounds knowledge

I subscribe to anti-foundationalism because I decide not to wear the 'tinted glasses' of foundationalism, the restrictions it comes with when trying to make sense of the world around us. I am completely happy for others to take a foundational stance, I respect and support this diversity.

Webs of Meaning

During my limited research into anti-foundationalism I also found a PDF by Mark Bevir that looks like being published in The Oxford Handbook of British Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). I enjoyed reading this introduction 'What is anti-foundationalism?', the politics side I am not really interested in at the moment. I found this paragraph rather interesting in the context here:

"The most obvious implications of anti-foundationalism are perhaps meaning holism and anti-representationalism. Given that we cannot have pure experiences, our concepts and propositions cannot refer to the world in splendid isolation. Concepts cannot directly represent objects in the world since our experiences of those objects must in part be ones that we construct using our prior theories. Hence anti-foundationalists conclude that concepts, meanings, and beliefs do not have a one to one correspondence with objects in the world, but rather form webs."

  This idea of webs rather than foundations resonates deeply with how I experience understanding - not as building blocks stacked on a solid base, but as interconnected networks of meaning that shift and evolve with new experiences and insights.

 

Am I a Libertarian?

What I most value are personal freedoms.
Freedom of thought, freedom of choice, freedom of association, freedom of speech.

Moreover, I believe we all have a right to a basic living standard and a right not to be judged.
Nobody chooses where they want to be born, what body they are borne into,
nor the type of upbringing and experiences that brought them into adulthood.
I am not saying we shouldn't be playing by the rules ...

Photo by Kristina V on Unsplash

However, I have no opinion on what is the best way to life - in absolute terms.
It is up to everyone to make their personal choices, even if that choice limits their personal freedoms.
Even if that means to associate and live in a community without those freedoms.
Diversity should be respected as long as in our shared (public) space this respect is mutual.
Cultural diversity makes us richer, it is as important as biodiversity is to physical life.

Too idealistic?

I look at it from an evolutionary point of view. Cultures evolve in the same way as physical life does. ( Feel free to disagree :) Diversity is needed. Let communities self-organize with all the powers they need to govern their own private community with the life styles they see fit.

Step out of the human-centric bubble and look at life around you. Should we tell a cat not to catch a mouse, or a fungus not to kill a plant. Life wouldn't be where it is now without the behaviors we observe around us.

The earth used to be big, It took ages to get from one side to the other. Now it is nearly like a village.
We are so easily in each other's faces. However, what has brought us so close is also offering us an opportunity to regain distance. During the last 50 years we have created the internet, a virtual space. It allows us to communicate around the globe as if we are sitting next to each other. This virtual space could well be the perfect place to make these communities happen.

Yes. let's live in a global village but at the same time create strong local communities, both in physical and mental space. An unwanted side effect of this globalization has been excessive centralization. A handful of actors wired in to watch our every move and telling us what to do. We need to push back. Gives us law and order, ensure our freedoms are respected in public but let us express ourselves in our private communities. Be it as a heremite or as a single family, a congregation or a mega-colony.

I am not the only one thinking we need to decentralize. That is what Web3 is about, a growing movement to bring decentralisation to the internet. The sooner it happens, the better. But that discussion is for another day.

Evolution and the Brain

The brain is an organ with over 500 million years of evolution. It probably evolved through integration centers in nerve nets, the early brainless nervous system. 

From the reptilian brain to the mammal brain and then the primate brain, brain development (evolutionary sense) is about adding on further capabilities, not replacing or rebuilding. So the human brain still uses mammalian and reptilian brain structures. It is an organ of such complexity that understanding it in detail will keep us busy for quite a while.

That said, we are living in an era where a lot of progress is being made. One of the central questions to answer is how this organ evolved into a tool for abstract thinking. And slowly we are lifting the curtain on this. I offer just a few thoughts in what follows.

Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

Nematodes appeared more than 500 million years ago. They have a nervous system of a few hundred neurons but no brain as such. The nervous system of the C elegans has been completed mapped and is heavily studied. It contains 302 neurons in total of which about 200 are organised into a nerve ring. In comparison, the human brain as around 100 billion neurons. Interestingly enough it has already some interesting capabilities:

Let me quote from a recent science news article of the University of Leeds  What worms can tell us about brains and behaviour. It reports on research on the nerve ring ('its brain') of C. elegans.

Professor Cohen’s recent work, published in Nature in 2021, maps the structure of this brain, and builds a complete brain-map of its circuitry. The current study adds another important level of understanding: the link to behaviour. Even though the brain is very compact, the animal displays a range of complex behaviours, and neuroscientists have been interested in understanding its brain for decades.

The new research revealed three novel observations:
• neurons track behaviour not only of the present moment but also the recent past
• they tune their encoding of behaviours, such as motion, based on a surprising variety of factors
• and many neurons simultaneously encode multiple behaviours.

Another major outcome of the team’s work was that while most neurons always obeyed the predictions of the model, a smaller set of neurons in the worm’s brain—about 30 percent of those that encode behaviour—was able to flexibly remap their behaviour encoding, essentially taking on new jobs.

Suprisingly this primordial brain already exhibits many of the main base functions: sensory experience, (reasonably complex) encoding of behaviour, memory and (maybe surprisingly) task flexibility. If this can be done with a few hundred neurons, what about 100 billion?

The brain works heavily with associations, out of which concepts are naturally born. This process turns atomic entities (a sensory signal) into a composite of associations. For the brain to be able to work with these assocations it must do some sort of labeling so they can be referenced. That starts to sound very much like the appearance of language.

Some sort of (internal) language must have developed - signs, meanings, and a code connecting signs with their meanings. Retention, i.e. memory, is of paramount importance. The brain has a very pragmatic approach to this: what remains active remains retained in memory. Replaying recent experiences is one of the maintenance tasks of the brain. And when it replays these experiences it replays its associations at the same time.

Once a language exists one can expect it to evolve as the brain evolves. In an article "Evolution of Brain and Language" - an interesting read - the author states the following:

The evolution of brain circuits, therefore, cannot be understood independent of the evolution of language, and vice versa, which means the coevolution of brain and language—and, in fact, language itself—can be understood as a complex adaptive system.

It makes sense to look at the evolution of language in the same way as we look at the evolution of species or organs.

And with language comes culture. Culture uses language as its non-physical inheritance mechanism of values and beliefs, norms, symbols, language, artifacts and rituals. These social interactions create and maintain information stores retained within a specific group of a species. Each one of these groups drives their own mental evolution. The more intense the social interactions, the greater the capacity of potential mental evolution.

For a long time, this mental evolution of the brain was slow with respect to the life expectancy of the species or the physical evolution of the brain. However, over the last ten thousand years human social activity within specific cultures has intensified to such an extent that the cultural context in which individuals live their later life is completely different from the cultural context they were brought up in. There is an exponential increase in the amount of information that is part of cultural transmission. It looks more and more that the mental evolution has decoupled from the physical evolution. 

This decoupling from the physical pushes us towards virtual worlds as we look to intensify these interactions further. It is a road of discovery, no guarantee that we will find paradise. But I am ready for the journey.