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Language and Information

#1
Magical Realist Offline
I am fascinated of late by how language relays information to us. How it transmits data about factual states every bit as clearly if not moreso as our own senses can. Take the sentence: "There's someone standing behind you." Now that's a revelation to our awareness of an actual physical situation we did not perceive. It is easily confirmed by turning around and seeing someone standing behind you. But the fact of someone standing you is not contained in words. It is contained in atoms, and photons, and molecules, and space, and the neurons of your body. It is a geometrical construct of matter and space and light. How does language represent this state to us without us even previously knowing about it? I can think of nothing more UNLIKE a person standing behind me than the sentence written on a piece of paper, "Someone is standing behind you." And yet we know that fact the moment we read the sentence. We know it as certainly as when we turn around and confirm it.

Or do we? The truth of the sentence depends on whether what is says is actually the case. So this slipperiness of language, it's conditionality of truth, raises the disturbing question, does language ACTUALLY inform us of anything? A sentence is only known to be truly informative after it has been confirmed. But by that time, it no longer informs of us anything. It merely represents a description of our sensory confirmation of it. We now know the sentence "There's someone standing behind you." describes a factual state. But we didn't really know it till we turned around and looked. Does language inform us of anything then, if it's truth must always be confirmed perceptually?
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#2
C C Offline
(Jun 13, 2015 02:47 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] Or do we? The truth of the sentence depends on whether what is says is actually the case. So this slipperiness of language, it's conditionality of truth, raises the disturbing question, does language ACTUALLY inform us of anything? A sentence is only known to be truly informative after it has been confirmed. But by that time, it no longer informs of us anything. It merely represents a description of our sensory confirmation of it. We now know the sentence "There's someone standing behind you." describes a factual state. But we didn't really know it till we turned around and looked. Does language inform us of anything then, if it's truth must always be confirmed perceptually?

Language may even be a kind of necessary medium for establishing or engendering true / false values to begin with. Since its first purpose is as a representational system for communicating and thinking about our perceptual experiences, the concern immediately arises as to how accurately the aural or visual signs describe events and circumstances of the spatiotemporal realm. Eventually language expands to articulating the meanings of our personal feelings, and its rules and characteristics regulate our creative imaginations. As well as playing a role in how memories are categorized and stored; although infantile amnesia might very much be due to memory areas of the brain not being fully mature early on, increased language development in the child surely brings a radically different approach to the retention of the past than the more animal-like route a feral human child would otherwise employ.

Literary works can constitute information which is significant to people, even if completely fictional. There's even a kind of "true or false" status to their reproductions as movies, TV series, comics; and new authors continuing and adding to the original franchises. In the sense of how well their transductions to different media or recommencements are faithful to the original canon and style [example of the latter at bottom].

The ancient Greeks added a spin to spiritual traditions, elevating the "immaterial" from being some kind of invisible ghost-stuff capable of spooking people in the material world, to being an intellectual manner of existence abstracted from the nature of language. Which accordingly lacked conformity to space and sometimes even time (as in the eternalism of Plato's archetypal forms defying the changing contingencies of the sensible world). But up until the era of Berkeley, the transcendent version of one's mind was still often posited as being realized by time, a flowing dimension deemed so necessary to the character of language / thought.

Actually, though, the idea of the empirical world and its entities conforming to the logical consistency of governing principles (i.e., miraculously having the capacity to be intelligible), as well as such being the "true" nature of phenomenal bodies or particulars in the pre-Kantian noumenal realm (nou="mind, intellect; the reason"), was probably triggered by discovering that geometrical shapes could be converted into quantitative formulas. This ignited the "light-bulb" that spatiotemporal things or physical manifestations were simply one mode for such abstract instructions to be realized as. Later, the quantitative metaphysics stemming from Pythagoreanism seemed to be gradually assimilated under a metaphysics derived from a view of language being a hypernym for all "symbols and their relations" activity. In the 1800s, a return to special emphasis on a mathematical conception of space and time being more fundamental than their material expressions in human experience gained new fury:

Joselle DiNunzio: Modern neuroscience suggests that number, space and time aren't so much features of the outside world but more a result of the brain circuitry we evolved to move around in it. And this circuitry is all about judging less than/greater than relationships. In the 19th century the mathematician Bernard Riemann suggested that the mathematical ideas of space, quantity and measure should not depend on the outside world, but defined abstractly and in relation to each other. [...] Bernhard Riemann [...] acknowledged [...] that [...he...] was influenced, not only by Gauss, but also by ideas of the philosopher John Friedrich Herbart [...] Like cognitive scientists today, Herbart broke down the world of appearances into the subjective impressions that build it. He rejected the idea that space was the thing that contained the physical world. For him spatial forms were mental images derived from relationships among any number of things we experience. [...] In his collected works, published in 1850 and 1851, Herbart defined space as, "the symbol of the possible community of things standing in causal relationship." The eyes and the sense of touch, separately triggered, then later fused and developed, begin the production of space in our minds. For Herbart visual images were like hypotheses that are constantly adjusted in response to feedback from the eye which acts as the measuring device. --Cognition, brains and Riemann

==============================

Robert Silverberg novelized three of Asimov’s short stories. The following quotes document to which extent Asimov was involved in these collaborations.

"Essentially I wrote all three books […] In all three books I made an extra effort to mimic Isaac’s style and narrative approach." --Robert Silverberg in “The Worlds of Robert Silverberg” (Yahoo Group), October 6, 2000
Nightfall

"I said, ‘Bob, if you do this, you will have to agree to remain Asimovian. No vulgar language. No steamy sex. No excessive violence.’ Silverberg agreed readily […] Silverberg kept to the agreement. He sent me his outline, his first draft, his final copy. I went over everything meticulously and made some changes (very few, in fact). He wrote so carefully in my style and remained so true to the concept of the story that I was ravished with pleasure. It was as though I had written it myself – only better." --Isaac Asimov in the essay Nightfall, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1991

"I received the extended ‘Nightfall’ manuscript from Bob. […] Bob did a wonderful job and I could almost believe I had written the whole thing myself. He remained absolutely faithful to the original story and I had very little to argue with." --Isaac Asimov in I. Asimov (1994), chapter 161

"[…] with NIGHTFALL Isaac provided a lot of astronomical input, and made a few tiny textual changes […]" --Robert Silverberg in “The Worlds of Robert Silverberg,” June 10, 2000

http://nightfall.info/asimov/
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#3
Magical Realist Offline
Facts otoh seem to consist essentially of language. The fact of someone standing behind me, to be precise, isn't really in the physical world of spacetime. The someone is. And I am. And the spatial relationship between us is. But the fact of someone standing behind me is a proposition, as demonstrated by saying it is the fact THAT someone is standing behind. It is a truth conditional statement that expresses one event configuration. Saying it is a fact THAT someone is standing behind me is the same as saying it is true THAT someone is standing behind me. The factuality lies in the truth of language, not the spatiotemporal aspects of the physical situation.

But where is the event configuration without the proposition of it? It is unlkely that I would even be conscious of someone standing behind me AS a fact without the statement of it either literally or conceptually in my own mind. As one proposition in itself that we are aware of as true. We'd be aware only of the scene behind us, of the person,and ourselves, and their distance from us. Language enables us to be aware of matter, spacetime, and light AS coherent events that are happening or have happened. Language frames the spatiotemporal matrix in terms of temporal states of being so. Without its informing structure in our brains we would not experience the world in terms of these states/facts/events. There'd just be one experience after another, discretely existing as bundles of perceptions but nothing more.
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