Thread by @IntuitMachine

The form of language (i.e. its syntax) does not tell you anything about its meaning. An ancient human language cannot be deciphered without a corresponding Rosetta Stone.

That's because languages are just frozen social habits of communication by their users. Social habits become norms via information propagation and replication. Not unlike a virus propagating its RNA.

This however implies that within human languages there are commonalities as a consequence of the common interactions with humans and their neighbors.

There are also cases because of mass group migration that you find human languages that are very different from the language of surrounding neighbors (see: Basque, Catalan, Georgian etc).

But independent of the movement and interaction of societies, are there patterns of language that exhibit convergent evolution? Are their features in human languages that exists independent of cultural evolution?

Modern human languages are noun-centric. It's only when we explore the language of smaller indigenous societies to we encounter verb-centric languages. This should be not a surprise that certain kinds of frozen habits are good enough for certain environments.

But what if our noun-centric languages bias our thinking in such a way that it leads to a civilization that is unsustainable? What if it is our language that prevents us from thinking outside our box and thus inexorably leads us to a fate that is not unlike the Easter islanders.

All our solutions to problems are formulated in the language that we've developed for ourselves. If the solution is outside of what can be expressed by a language, then no amount of combinatorial exploration will lead to a satisfactory solution.

You cannot solve a hard problem if you are unable to express it in a way that is solvable. You cannot think outside of your own language box. The only way to think outside a box is to see things differently and hence express things differently.

The way for humans to eventually understand complex systems is through the exploration of novel language forms. Mathematics is one such kind of language, which not only has its own peculiar encoding but involves its own semantics. Semantics that is driven by consistency rules.

There are of course limits to mathematics is that at best they only offer descriptive models of the problems that are being solved. Often for complex systems, there are limits to what can be described and hence what can be predicted.

The primary stumbling block of artificial intelligence is the intrinsic difficulty in fully describing the world. Our algorithms do not afford the ability to work within realms of ambiguity. Hence we are doomed to under-specify our problem domain.

When we express ourselves in words, we have an assumption that it is understood. This is always driven by the understanding of one's audience. Said differently, on the language that an audience is comfortable with.

We are not unencumbered to express everything that needs to be expressed because we assume our audience is able to competently fill in the blanks.

I learned a lesson just recently that's incredibly difficult to try to explain something from two different audiences. When speaking to multiple people, it is cognitively difficult to address multiple perspectives. Pick one viewpoint because that's all you can reasonably do.

Human language is fundamentally a language of instruction. It is instructions so that another mind can imagine what you speak of. Therefore, you cannot competently express words by addressing an imaginary multi-mind.

Computer languages are ever-evolving towards expressions that allow for greater abstractions. The design of computer languages is indeed fascinating. Languages are invented to address multiple conflicting forces.

Nature invents its own language through habit and natural selection. In contrast, humans have the opportunity to mindfully invent new languages. It is through the masterful crafting of new ways of expression that we begin to grasp our complex reality.