language.html

I was pondering an exchange between Alan Turing and Wittgenstein, as related in several places including the novel <em>A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines</em>.  Wittgenstein made reference to the Liar's Paradox -- "I am lying" -- and asked, why should there be a problem?  I see his point like this: language is not the thing it is referring to.  Our brains are not going to suddenly freeze up from the contradiction because there is no contradiction inherently contained within the words.  Where does the contradiction actually exist, if there is one?  Moreover, what is it in our thought processes that is capable of recognizing the contradiction and seeing the bind that it poses?  Turing replied that the contradiction would exist in some application, that is, if the contradiction were not taken into account, something would go wrong.  I don't think this is a very convincing rebuttal and neither did Wittgenstein.
<p>
In treating words separately from their referents, we are capable of reaching deep logical insights.  We are also capable of runaway attributions of meaning and significance such as lead to mental aberration and completely illogical conclusions, quite aside from any contradiction in a formal system.  Is it this ability which gives us something more than, say, a computer?  Is it some coordination between our older, temporo-spatial hindbrain that deals in literal truths like <em>here, a rock</em> without resorting to the use of language, and our more recently developed forebrain that is capable of pure symbolic reasoning?
<p>
What if you met someone from another universe to whom the English language was the same in its structure, but the meanings of certain words were different? An entire conversation could take place between a this-universe English speaker and one from the other, and no understanding at all between the two, even though each thought they understood the other perfectly, or, in the case of an incompatible statement, that the other made no sense at all.  Each speaker would harbor their own meaning, and invoke a different meaning in the other, which I suppose must happen to lesser extent in any conversation in natural language.  I believe that it would very rapidly become apparent to each speaker that something was wrong, no matter how tight you made the constraints around the different languages to attempt to convey a coherent meaning different from what the speaker intended.  Meaning or lack thereof would stand out almost at once.
<p>
In the movie <i>Inception</i>, there is a device which allows someone to hack into someone else's dream.  The hacker then attempts to repeat the feat in the dream world itself: the machine is used in the dream to create a second layer of dream-reality to further confuse the person being hacked.  The stack is thus pushed higher and higher until some primitive world is reached where extreme time dilation allows the hacker to live forever in a world of his own creation.  The problem is, after the first level, what medium are you dealing in?  Assume that the machine is real in top-level reality, allowing you to enter a dream.  Within the dream though, you are no longer dealing with the same physics: the machine would have to be part of the person's dream and it seems to me would depend entirely on the individual's belief that the machine does what it does in the top-level reality in order to have any effect within the dream -- and so-on.  You only get a single level down from the top and the same rules no longer apply, though they give the appearance of doing so to the extent that the dream world resembles the physical.  I rather thought that this was an argument for the entire movie taking place in dream, without ever reaching a top-level reality, as this seemed the only way the rules could be consistent.
<p>
As it is with the dream world obeying different laws from the physical, so it is with language: what is said only indirectly relates to what occurs in the hearer's mind, and the hard and fast rules of language, such as they might be, are little constraint on the realm of meaning.  Language and understanding exist in two different worlds and the laws that govern one are largely independent of the other.  And yet, how many thoughts has language allowed us to think that we could not have thought without it?  Symbolic reasoning in math has come a long way over the last six thousand years of recorded history, allowing today's high school students to readily contemplate things that to the Babylonians would have been inconceivable.  So has language in many fields, enabling the communication of highly complex concepts which are not themselves contained in language.  How is such meaning actually transferred between two individuals, or throughout a culture?