When studying anything uniquely human, there some inherent difficulties that one would not find with other subjects. Obviously, there is no way to step outside ourselves and become objective…ensuring a certain level of bias. Another issue is, as far as I know, there are no other instances of sentient, language-capable beings that we could study in order to provide contrast or comparison. With language, the difficulties are even more so, since there are very few examples of humans without a primary language. There are a few, third-world instances of deaf children being left to develop in silence and isolation. I recall the stories of so called, “wild-men,” who developed without any human contact. However, these stories are few and far between and often suspect.
What is the most general definition of language?
“A structured set of instructions detailing the interconversion of information to and from a more ordered state of representation”
“A structured set of instructions, common to, two or more distinct systems, detailing the interconversion of their own internal logic to and from some intermediary form of information exchanged between them.”
That seems like a fair enough generalization… now to drill down to the specific case of Human Language:
“A structured set of mutually understood signals, capable of being transmitted and received by two or more persons.”
“…for the purposes of information exchange”
The human ability to use language is best understood as a evolutionary trait, unique to the human species and emerging sometime after our divergence from our primate progenitor… roughly 1 or 2 million years ago. The ability to utilize language has proven to be one of the most successful adaptations ever selected for by the process of evolution. Our ability to cooperate and communicate is most certainly at the core of our success as a species.
Without a significant amount of mental rewiring, the evolutionary process is very unintuitive and there are many misconceptions about it. It is ironic that our inability to intuitively grasp the vastness of evolutionary time, is in fact, a byproduct of evolution itself. Evolution, through the process of natural selection, is nothing magic… you can’t read any purpose or grand design into it. It is simply the fact that genetic accidents happen, most of which are detrimental but on the rarest of occasions, it might produce some trait which increases the odds (however slightly) of its barer reproducing and thus, endowing all offspring with a similar, cumulative, statistical advantage. Therefore, the end result are not necessarily the best mechanism for accomplishing a given task and/or the most efficient… but rather, the culmination of a series of useful accidents. God does play dice with the universe…except that he can keep rolling until he wins and his losses disappear before his next turn.
OK… what does language do for us?
The human brain has the ability to use language at a very low level, such that it is deeply integrated into our mental processes. Acquisition of a primary language occurs at a very early stage in our development and from that point on, we encode and process most thoughts as language. Whereas, a computer must constantly translate to and from a higher language, to an unintelligible, intrinsic logic before being able to process information…the brain uses the same language for processing as it does for communication. The fact that we can think in a common language means we can receive, process and transmit language seamlessly and efficiently. This suggests that we are “hardwired,” for social interaction, able to interface and cooperate with our fellow humans on a fairly deep, intimate level.
The utility of language extends far beyond communication… it is also the software our minds use to catalog and index information. When we encounter something in our environments, we have various sensory and emotional indices from which to search. If we had only sensory-derived pictographic, auditory and/or tactical criteria for which to organize information, we would be severely limited. Language gives us added layers of descriptive power for which to describe and thus, index information.
There are certain concepts and ideas which transcend the tangible, concrete world on which we live. There are more esoteric… more abstract concepts which do not lend themselves to material descriptions or analogies. These things have no physical form and thus, the mind has no way to grasp the concept without language. Without language, our minds would be incapable of forming abstractions and our reasoning would be forever bound by the limits of our senses. Thus, language enriches our minds and empowers our species to conceptualize the world with added detail and clarity.
Our animal nature has an intrinsic ability to store emotional data along with our more objective perceptions. We are able to function as would any other animal, intuitively grasping certain cues from our environments without rational efforts. We know when we have seen a given thing before; when things just aren’t right; when we are in danger and a host of other intuitive perceptions about the world around us. Just because we have some increased capacity to think, and use language, does not entitle us to think of ourselves separate and distinct from the animal kingdom. Whereas lower animals have only their intuition, we possess the additional capability of employing rational thought and strategy to the problems we encounter. This is who we are, like it or not. We have limitations and if you really think about it, they make perfect sense if you consider where we came from.
Our lower natures inform our higher reasoning and visa-versa… they do not operate completely independent of one another. When we are forced to reason abstractly… especially with things outside of our earthly dimensions, our animal natures begin to cry out. We are forced to constantly suspend the feeling of disbelief in order to continue reasoning with unphysical or unearthly concepts. Our minds have certain intrinsic assumptions about the world which are deeply ingrained and, quite possibly, organically encoded in our species. There are also concepts and behaviors which our minds are programmed to forcefully reject. Even though our language may permit us to describe and encode a given far-out concept… there is a large component of intuitive, visceral information which is absent or contradictory.
The loss of our intuition is registered as a feeling of discomfort and vulnerability. When we lose our intuitive grasp on something, most of who, and what we are is forever denied access to that information. Our primitive brain can not use that information to make a better sense of the world around it, recognize danger or aid in our survival in any way. An important distinction worth noting is that our rationality and ability to reason are adaptations to a antecedent animal precursor brain… not the other way around. There is no inherent sense of self, residing in our higher centers of reason. Thus, pure abstractions… things without form or substance are often perceived as unreal and/or superficial. For things that have some road back to an objective reality, there are mental tools we can employ such as analogies and substitutes. However, for things like cosmological space-time, quantum effects and extra dimensions… there is no clear path to the familiar. For such cases, we humans have developed a special language called mathematics.
Mathematics is a language, such that it fits the general description that I laid out:
“A structured set of instructions, common to, two or more distinct systems, detailing the interconversion of their own internal logic to and from some intermediary form of information exchanged between them.”
It is also a human language, such that:
“A structured set of mutually understood signals, capable of being transmitted and received by two or more persons.”
“for the purposes of information exchange”
However, this language is much more specialized and can be described as:
“ …describing the evolution of quantitative relationships between components of a dynamic system”
More specifically:
“A logical framework, beginning with axioms from which all things must follow, such that a clear, logical line of reason exists between any derivation, back to some fundamental axiom. “
Once a derivation has been proven to be true, it may then be added to the lexicon and from that point, assumed to be true in all applicable cases (until proven untrue). This framework establishes ever-more complex, encapsulations for witch, future users may simply assume to be true… without the need to prove (or understand) the inner logic therein. Since mathematics is a logical language, each new encapsulation invariably yields a definitive increase to the descriptive power of the language. Whereas, verbal languages are subject to obfuscations, ambiguity, drift and a whole list of interfering factors….the rigor and precision of mathematics ensure that there is always a unambiguous, incontrovertible, and reproducible result.
Most mathematical concepts have no corporal form and it is extremely difficult to conceptualise such things on a intuitive level. There is a certain sense for small quantities, such that we know when we see a pair or a group of three, four and maybe a few more. However, beyond that there is no intuitive grasp of large quantities. There are also concepts that have absolutely no basis in reality, like zero, infinity, imaginary numbers, negative numbers, and so on. Thus, operating with mathematics is a purely rational exercise and our animal brains have almost no mechanism to grapple with such abstract concepts.
Another problem with the human brain is that our higher centers of reason have a very limited ability to calculate. Our short-term memories (STM) are both shallow and transient, such that we can only store a few independent facts, at a modest level of precision, for a very short amount of time… and without constant rehearsal, these facts rapidly fade away. What is worse, is that our ability to perform conscious, rational thought is strictly a linear process, such that we can only focus on one problem at a time. Thus, the unaided human brain is wholly inadequate to the task of performing complex operations, or keeping track of more than just a few, relatively imprecise values… and really falters when trying to simultaneously track values and perform operations.
Due to the intrinsic difficulties of our brains in dealing with complex reasoning, Mathematics is almost always done in written form however, any mathematical statement is also a completely valid sentence in when spoken aloud. The act of writing it, allows our feeble minds to break down complex problems into manageable parts and keep track of arbitrarily large sets of discrete values, with any desired precision.
We humans have also developed technological tools in order to perform laborious and/or difficult calculations. As the these tools get faster and more capable, the descriptive power of the language become ever-more comprehensive. Without human frailties working their way into calculations, the confidence in our calculations, level of precision and speed at which we can arrive at results has revolutionized human society.
Until recently, mathematics was in the sole domain of mathematicians, who were called upon to give mathematical rigor to existing classical ideas. Most of today’s scientists are first and foremost, mathematicians, who work within a specialized mathematical framework, specific to their scientific discipline. Long gone are the days of the Philosopher-scientist, who applied pure reason and thought experiments to the pursuit of knowledge.
Today, a theory not expressed in the language of mathematics would not be taken seriously and quite possibly ridiculed by the scientific community. Even expressing classical ideas in mathematical form would be inadequate, if it was evident that a mathematical framework did not underlie it’s formation. The scientific community believes that invention and discovery have progressed to such a point, that our evolutionary constrained brain is incapable of making sense of these crazy-new realities. Thus, the conventional wisdom is that only through the rigors of mathematics, can we rise above our organic inadequacies, ensure our human frailties do not skew our thinking, and only then can we make progress.
