[freemrkt8]

Human languages are ~5,000 years old while human intuition for quantity (enough heat, food, water), spatial geometry has evolved along with us from the start. GabeN has discussed how relatively easy it is to make tech that can engage with the cortex, but seemingly impossible to read when a person “is cold” because more than the cortex is involved; spatial awareness and consciousness rely on full body sensory data not just the brain.

There’s no substance to the idea English is responsible for humans engaging in human things; we built tribal life and tools before they existed. Anglo history has largely relied on the ambiguity of the language to manipulate the masses, externalize the work to prop up a minority “educated in language.”

I’d go a step further than this article and call human language a historical barnacle that spreads mind viruses and empowers inept ideas, leading to fascist police state behavior; language comes along, humanity develops religion and violent nation states, vain figurative identity to defend through violence.

Our “natural language” is math as it’s a necessary intuition to survive the real world.

https://nautil.us/are-all-brains-good-at-math-238539/

[DiggyJohnson]

This seems bananas too me. Are you arguing that language is bad for us? Do you realize language is much older than the age of modern languages?

Linguists debate how long we’ve used complex language, but the most conservative estimates are 50,000 years, and evidence increasingly pushes this date much further back.

[freemrkt8]

Humanoids have been around for millions of years. In universal timescales language has existed as long a TV.

I’m arguing figurative identity built through linguistic structures is bad for us. That it binds inner monologue to circling fantasy. That’s it’s entirely built on emotional policing; reinforced preservation of spoken story and tradition, which binds agency to pledges of allegiance, other words of power.

Whether it’s good or bad, I don’t know. That’s too simple a set of choices. I don’t think it has much to do with engineering tolerances to build a bridge or machine. I see how it’s correct use is babysat by the educated, as is spoken tradition. But I have yet to see how those educated are more than one of billions.

I don’t buy into figurative identity. It’s all a bit repetitive. If I can just dismiss the truth in language I have a hard time seeing how it matters in concrete terms?

To be real this is a perspective I’ve adopted over time. I’m in my 40s. I used to love creative writing and fiction. Now it all seems prosaic and repetitive relative to experimental discovery. I don’t use English to guide my next experiment but the measurements of the previous one.

If, as a normal human, one of billions, can function like this successfully it’s hard to see language as a fundamental requirement of doing and more of a historical barnacle like religious texts.

Edit: I really don’t care about comment scores and online reps either. Chemical addiction to doing what’s acceptable in the aggregate is exactly the argument against language I’m making. Infinite potential sentences of meaning, constrained by politically correct memory.

I would hope it’s obvious words are not stored as real things in us. Speaking and writing are trained mechanical behavior. If you merely train the smallest amount of language possible, behavior is tailored to defend that language. This isn’t really a novel idea.

[taeric]

Claiming math as our natural language feels like a heck of a stretch. Unless you mean math as something other than the human construct we use to communicate it.

I am open to the idea that things can get better. Indeed, I hope they do. I am deeply skeptical of pushes that what got us here is flawed, inherently, though. Not adequate to get us further? Sure. But actively holding back where we could have been if we didn't have it? Seems ludicrous.

[freemrkt8]

I don’t mean the glyphs, “math as a language.”

I mean intuition for state change in our meat bags. I mean measuring and building things that fit what we’d call in language now a use case, has been a thing humanoids have done forever.

Literally engineering an easier life came before language.

The problem with language is it couples ideas to emotions. It does not couple outcomes to emotions.

[tgv]

We don't communicate in maths.

About that nautilus article: it shows no evidence. Not only that, 10 years ago or so, there were articles about a newly discovered tribe that showed they didn't have a sense of quantity. Now, that can be due to a genetic difference, but it's more likely that it's language that allows us to teach quantity. If we have a native sense of quantity, it certainly doesn't go beyond 20, which is far too little to be the basis of mathematical thinking on its own.