LL-L "Language programming" 2009.01.11 (02) [E]

Sun Jan 11 17:47:31 UTC 2009

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L O W L A N D S - L - 11 January 2009 - Volume 02
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From: heatherrendall at tiscali.co.uk <heatherrendall at tiscali.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language programming" 2009.01.10 (05) [E]

from heather rendall  heatherrendall at tiscali.co.uk

Marlou wrote

So you think humans can perceive abstract things in principle independently
of language, and language is dragged behind? So there is more reality in
things than in language? -- And a metaphor is just a projection of strange
(not necessarily abstract) things into the known world of objects, hm?

Isn't this precisely why we have poets?

Don't they ( and in many cases religious thought and experience) try to put
into words the indescribable so that we can know the unknowable which we
may perceive with our more sensitive antennae from time to time but so
fleetingly ( like the 4D cube) that it is sometimes easier to persuade
ourselves there was nothing there and it was all a trick of our imagination
- until we pick up a certain book or hear a certain poem or experience
something profound, and get shaken out of our complacency once again?

Heather

----------

From: Luc Hellinckx <luc.hellinckx at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language programming"

Beste Marlou,

You wrote:

*So human thinking *is* limited because of language, or is it the other way
round? What is "well understood"? That which is pictured, brought into our
tangible reach. By analogy, by metaphor, by "model". I studied physics,
being anything but a natural talent. I found several concepts of math and
physics hard to imagine, and at some point I just said to myself: "Come on,
this is abstract. Just do not try to visualize it. You know how it works,
you can work with it. That's enough." I felt that at that moment I somehow
lost interest in the phenomenon. A stimulus was gone. Likewise, it was an
almost physical joy to really comprehend (german: begreifen = touch!) a
phenomenon, bring it into my "world of objects".*

* *

*Even that joy of comprehension can be learned, I know; mathematicians feel
it when the find solutions in their abstract world. For me it was always
difficult to let go of the figurative. I felt limited by this stone age
heritage very much and often grew impatient with myself. -- By the way, my
finest moment was when I really succeeded in seeing a 3D cube as a
projection of a 4D cube into 3D :-)) I "saw" the 4D cube. It lasted ca. 20
seconds and never returned. But my brain could do it at that time, thanks to
training.*

Personally I think one understands something as far as he/she knows what
characteristics/properties the object has (this number can be infinite).

"Das Ding" an sich, can probably never be fully understood because the
number of "interesting" features is dependent on your point of view.

Take for example the imaginary unit i, which can be defined as a number
whose second power equals -1 (giving rise to complex numbers). Why was this
number created? One reason is that we wanted certain equations to have
solutions, which they didn't have in a smaller number set. But what is i
actually, students often ask. Nobody can tell, because if you could explain
exactly what it is in nothing but old terms, it wouldn't be new. Moreover, i
is definitely not the square root of -1. On a more positive note, all these
intriguing numbers 0, 1, e, i and ∏ are "married" so to speak: 1 + e^i∏ = 0.

First time I heard about negative numbers they looked nonsense to me,
because I felt I could not HAVE, TAKE, SEIZE minus 3 objects. After a while
one's initial stubbornness fades as he/she realizes that it is indeed the
picture, the metaphor that counts. Temperatures have been very negative the
last few weeks, and rest assured, I did FEEL the effect of this (but maybe
less than having a negative balance on my bank account *s*).

Look at how electricians do their job: they know pretty well how to handle
electricity...vaguely remembering that in school they were taught that
alternating currents could be treated like complex numbers and realizing
that the current itself consists of "moving" electrons. Do they have to know
in depth what the substructure of an electron is like? Don't think so,
because working knowledge is enough. Same with using cars and computers.
Everybody's using them but nobody is fully aware of what is happening on a
subatomic level. Knowing a few basic properties is enough to deal with them.

Same with human beings. Can anybody ever fully know what a human being is
(including him/herself)? I tend to believe you know other people and
yourself in terms of features/properties/qualities which are pretty often
generalizations of former behavior.

I strongly believe in the power of a good metaphor, because the meaning of
words is shifting all the time (every couple of years another edition of a
dictionary is released). Take your brain. How can we study it? We make brain
scans, "slicing" it in dozens of 2D-images. Same is happening in M-theory,
which is the latest version of string theory. Space has 11 dimensions there
(got that from Michio Kaku, with whom I had the pleasure to spend some time,
waiting for a plane that had a huge delay). How do they interact? Slice
11D-space with a hyperplane and you get 10D-subspaces. Not simple enough?
Slice them again until you get 3D. This is just analysis, but like every
enquiring mind knows, taking stuff apart isn't that hard, fitting them
together often proves to be more difficult.

Kind greetings,

Luc Hellinckx

PS: Using a metaphor...language formats your brain in a certain way, just
like formatting a hard drive creates a file system (ext3, ntfs, hfs+
whatever) on a hard disk...another language will organise your brain
somewhat differently...so essentially without language your brain wouldn't
be organized..."language" should be interpreted in the broadest sense here:
some also consider math as a language, because it carries information and
enables communication (of a very formal nature).

----------

From: Luc Hellinckx <luc.hellinckx at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language programming"

Beste Sandy,

You wrote:

> Re Bushmen, I was somewhat wrong, they happen to count to four (not
> three) and then say many. Maybe their system matches the five fingers
> of one hand, with which they may want to sign those numbers. Btw, the
> Chinese use the fingers of one hand to show numbers from one to ten.
> With five fingers you could theoretically code 2^5 (= 32) numbers in
> one go; with both your hands even 1024.

Yes, I wonder what's really behind this though? I doubt if I'd try to
steal a cow from an owner of nine cows just because he uses this
counting system: my guess is that he knows how many cows he's got and
probably there is a way of expressing "nine cows" in his language!

Traditionally, Bushmen are hunter-gatherers, so their language is probably
still rooted in that stage. Once agriculture took off, the notion of
"property" must have boomed, making new ideas necessary. Even today however,
the concept of "theft" has cultural bias. I remember a Japanese girl telling
me she had a real hard time living in a close-knit community of Koreans
(they were sharing flats), because the Koreans were not only sharing the
flat, but absolutely everything. If she bought some food she wanted to eat
later on, it had often disappeared within a couple of hours, because
everybody was using/consuming everybody else's stuff.

Really, we need someone who knows the language properly to answer these
questions.

Oh yes, definitely.

1, 2, 3, 4 and many could be the base of a more complex system. Maybe 9 is
"many" in a normal situation, but in case of a conflict it becomes 3^2, and
if you would steal a cow from me I would still have 2^3 cows *s*.

Reminds me of how I had once organized a game in a Chinese class. Two teams,
and each team had to guess an English word asking their rep (who stood in
front of the class) questions in English. The rep was only allowed to say
"yes" or "no". I noticed a couple of things:

   - usually students were very quiet, but in this situation, they were
   almost eager to "kill" the other team
   - any trick was fine to beat the other team...first I hadn't noticed, but
   after a while, by accident, I saw that the student standing in front of the
   class, was often making minute movements with his fingers (he was hiding his
   hands for me)...after the game they told me that all of them knew how to
   sign, making very precise, small gestures only with their fingers...imagine
   how many words you can sign with one hand if you allow 4 modes on each
   finger: more than one million *s*
   - they didn't think this was treacherous, quite the contrary, being
   astute was morally perfectly ok

Kind greetings,

Luc Hellinckx
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