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Aswad -> RE: Indoctrination (11/15/2012 11:20:08 AM)
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ORIGINAL: vincentML
Excuse me if I point out that yours is a silly proposition.
Hardly, if you go back to read what I replied to, which was the logic that "our ideas about deity are expressed in language, and thus deities were invented at some point after language", which you'll hopefully agree is the sillier notion.
That notwithstanding, you're excused, of course. [;)]
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All relationships in Nature hold true without our knowing them.
That is a common belief, which I happen to share with you, or at least lean in the general direction of assuming to be true. [:D]
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If you prefer discovered to invented that's fine.
It's not a matter of preference.
We didn't invent mathematics; we discovered it.
We didn't discover the power grid and the computer; we invented them.
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The point is that symbolic language is the distinctive human feature that allows our species to analyze and synthesize to the greater degree of capability those relationships we encounter in Nature.
Actually, symbolics permit abstract thought, but language itself merely permits serialization and deserialization.
Please trust me when I say that I don't underestimate the importance of language.
In fact, I think books like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs should be a mandatory part of the educational curriculum in any country that aspires to call itself educated, civilized or secular; the subject possibly a prerequisite to citizenship, and probably a prerequisite to suffrage; law expressed in such clear thoughts as are permitted by going beyond the limitations of pragmatic, everyday language in this manner. Imagine what Wittgenstein could have done if that were the case.
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Without language the processes of the cerebral cortex are much more limited, mnottertail's Sir Isaac Newton parrot not withstanding.
Look, you need to distinguish the structure of thought from the process of language.
I can render a perfectly good explanation of entirely abstract matters in several languages, though if it gets very comprehensive, I will have to rely on either English or Norwegian. Back in the 80's and 90's, I did a fair bit of programming, and I can render a solution to any adequately specified problem in any programming language known to man. Heck, the job of a programmer (and this is why I moved on) is to apply their own knowledge to translate a loosely specified problem in one language into a precisely specified solution in another, with arguably no relation between the languages.
Structured thinking is the underlying subject matter, and it is seperable from language, though people rarely do so.
Just because I don't have enough slots in my working set memory to do the job of serializing a construct does not mean it isn't coherent, let alone that it doesn't exist, just that my thoughts aren't constrained to a linear format and that it takes a lot of time to spool out a huge graph in a manner that allows someone else to reconstruct it in their own minds after reading the serialization thus produced, and that the bulk of the capacity required to do it is related to padding the difference between how I can think and how language can express thoughts (the latter has more constraints, but can express the same thing, given sufficient resources, e.g. time).
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That's why we create fewer gods these days.
Absolutely not. It could've been, but other reasons are more important. That's a digression, though.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
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