Why is Reality describable?

[Magical Realist]

What accounts for the interface between the Real and the describable? Why is it that reality can be translated into language and represented AS what it is articulated as? It seems to me a huge assumption on our part that reality should conform to the structures of our grammar and semantics at all. In particular it seems to me anthropocentric, like an ant thinking it's chemical consciousness of the jungle IS the jungle as it fully is. Now don't get me wrong. Languaging reality definitely works. It appears to get us thru life and helps us survive in a relatively unknown world. But I guess what I'm asking is how language comes to represent accurately what it is taken to represent. Did language evolve out of our interaction with reality such that it could be a sort of hybrid consciousness of such? Or is reality largely a construct OF language, given only insofar as we take its representedness in our words and propositions as absolutely true and indubitable?

[Image: theportaloflanguage.jpg]

[elte]

I think you're right. Language doesn't actually describe things accurately. It uses certain conventons that makes it understandable to most all its users, given what is commonly known at the time.

[Magical Realist]

I think you're right.  Language doesn't actually describe things accurately.  It uses certain conventons that makes it understandable to most all its users, given what is commonly known at the time.

It becomes immediately apparent that what language describes and language itself are so inextricably intertwined when you try to separate reality from language descriptors. What is left of reality after we remove language? A virtual haze of probablistic qualia-packed energy pervading everywhere and every moment. A radiant pleroma of nascent potential always on the edge of about to be, but never quite correlative as to anything we can define with words. Without words we are pushed against the edge of things and events just becoming, without any anchoring into memorized signs of already existing. We are in the realm of pure energetic experience, the sole basis for anything being inferred to be real at all.

[C C]

[...] Did language evolve out of our interaction with reality such that it could be a sort of hybrid consciousness of such?

It surely developed in the context of social interaction first, since there's only a need to communicate about affairs of the environment if the latter also features others of one's species to exchange information with. Trial-and-error in combination with passed-on tradition seems to have honed out an innate, generic syntax which functions pragmatically enough. Which nevertheless needs to be exposed to the specifics of an existing language at an early age in order to avoid atrophy.

Or is reality largely a construct OF language, given only insofar as we take its representedness in our words and propositions as absolutely true and indubitable?

Due to either the lack of or the small number of concepts available to animals, it's difficult to imagine that they even need to abstract a guiding / prescriptive theory like "reality" from their experiences. Our very usage of "reality" seems to imply that the ideation is one-half of a dyad. That it is countering facets of an opposite (deceptive appearance, hallucination, erroneous belief, falsehood, misinterpretation, oblivion, non-consciousness, etc).

So unless the conditioned body responses of an animal can be construed as equivalent to or a substitute for beliefs, then they wouldn't even deal in beliefs period, much less be concerned with incorrect or opposing beliefs. They would just have effective, semi-effective, and ineffective responses to the content of their senses rather than concern over whether they're adhering properly to "reality" or not. Animals do sometimes have a surprising number of signals, like "danger", which humans construe as attaching meaning to the situations that a herd, flock, etc encounter. But it's unclear whether that's evoking an internal meaning in the animals or just triggering alone the outward body-reply of fleeing or hiding.

If eternalism is the proper philosophy of time (as suggested by conclusions about general relativity), then it raises questions about what the provenance of the "flow of changes" is that seems inherent to conscious perception. [Since there's little point in attributing validation of "flow/change occurring" to a cosmos abroad that lacks cognition of anything and to a static block-universe.]

Do animals experience our kind of coherent, ordered sequence of causes-effects, or is their apprehension of time jumbled? If the latter, then it might suggest that the structure of language (and language-based cognition) is responsible for imposing that temporal coherence. Lexical meaning relies on words and sentences which cannot be expressed in a single unit or slice of time, so the very nature of a language-based cognition would depend upon it being extended over multiple moments, with that cascading into a sequence of the whole lifetime of the conscious agent.

My earliest memories are kind of unsorted time-wise, as if they weren't deposited in a sensible chronological order. And before I had acquired language to any kind of good depth, there's the usual infant to proto-childhood amnesia. Maybe that phase was as close as we could get to feeling existence the way an animal does. Effective instincts and reactions may be taking place, but they and their results are a kind of confused and uncoordinated jumble when it comes to their representation by consciousness and storage in memory.

[Title] Why is Reality describable?

Because the only "reality" we've got is the visual, aural, olfactory, and tactile one as represented by the mind. It is quite "describable" since it is actually THERE to have signs attached to it, rather than being that invisible domain that the metaphysical realists have been wringing their hands over for centuries.

The latter is kind of like the Abrahamic God, when it comes to the invisible trademark. The majority seems to feel that this super-external world is very important, but no one can get to its mind-less character since that means leaving our own minds behind (death) so as to personally or directly confirm it. [Of course, those who believe that the nonmental world is really either a "God's eye-view" or is composed of qualitative manifestations which carry their own cognitive self-apprehension, instead of being abstract substance or quantitative properties -- i.e., that it isn't nonmental -- may not have that problem. The "world-mind" people, I guess they could be called, if panpsychism isn't suitable.]