does language influence culture?

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

(from this Wall Street Journal article by Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky)

The answer is so obviously yes that the question is essentially rhetorical. The more interesting questions to me are ‘What’s part of our universal grammar vs what’s culturally augmented?’ ‘Where do the boundaries between cognition (unexpressed awareness) and language (expressed awareness) lie?’ ‘Could we construct a language that supercedes our cognitive frameworks (given that so much of what we might ‘know’ is never even internally expressed or known consciously)?’ and of course, the perennial question ‘Where are the boundaries between biology and cognition?’ (Always, always I’m wondering where the limits are so I can figure out where to invest my efforts in inventing, shaping & creating.)

As people who know me know, I’m passionate about brain hacking and re-architecting my own brain. The most exciting part of this is that because there’s a very blurry line between hardware (the actual physical matter) and software (the lattice network of neural connections, experience, thought) – that there’s a lot of room with which to explore and experiment! And it’s a lot of fun. There’s no better guinea pig than me for all of my wacky and interesting experiments.

Anyways, I started talking about the article with my friend Matt. He lived in Mongolia for the Peace Corps for a couple of years, and speaks Mongolian. He was describing how their relationship to time is a lot more fluid, since their culture is nomadic and people live hundreds of miles apart. And how that is all reflected in their language. We got to talking…

me: could we construct a language that supercedes our cognition?

matt: I’m of the opinion that if you can’t formulate something in words, you can’t conceive of it either, whether it seems like you’re using words to think about it or not. So given that language precedes comprehension, it seems difficult to get beyond

me: i don’t think that’s true. a lot of buddhism is about training yourself to not use words, to not grasp at labels or structure, to understand your intuitive knowledge about the world sans formalized language

me: i’ve been trying to communicate a lot more gesturally and physically than verbally lately. i want to see how that changes my relationship with the world and with other people.

matt: that still constitutes a language tho. zen buddhism is the only religion I know of that tries to get entirely beyond the idea of words and make use of prerational notions

me: i think spoken, written, formalized language is pretty reductive and i feel like i’m missing out on a lot in life by relying on it too heavily

matt: well, I think your definition of language is far too limited. but, yes, you’re right, most of western culture assumes that written language is more important, or primary to, spoken, gestural, or visual communication

me: i agree. part of the work in terms of deconstructing language is also simultaneously deconstructing ego as much as possible

matt: well, most post-structuralist discourse proceeds from the idea that you can’t remove the idea of ego from anything that you do, that any attempts to do so are suspect because they assume some level of objectivity or absolutism, but I see what you mean

me: yeah in general we are sort of fucked with regards to the limitations of this sort of experiment. but we can try our best

matt: I like to think of anything I do as eminently suspect and self-serving

me: most of these existential questions are self flagellation (or self pleasure, whatever you prefer)

matt: the more I know about these things the less important they become to me. like the more languages I learn the more I understand how much of what I know is limited by language, but I’m not really that interested in trying to get past that

me: i’m interested because i can greatly improve my quality of life by changing my cognition. and i can change my cognition by changing my relationship with language.

matt: I’m constantly doing that, everything I do each day does that. but there are certain things I have to accept as given

me: yeah in a way we don’t even need to ask the questions because we are already doing the practice

matt: right, so using language to ask if it’s possible to get beyond language to pure thought is an interesting zen koan, but not really one of the problems I feel a need to solve

me: sometimes i like talking about the practice with other people, since i learn that way.

Anyways, the experiment of relying a lot less on verbal & spoken communication has been incredibly successful so far. I feel like my relationship to the world is much broader, much more expansive, much warmer. and of course, it is highly ironic that I’m blogging this.

peace and love,
su

closer to humanity

My friend Caterina recently characterized our work as symbol manipulation.

My interpretation of this is that our daily work is pretty abstract – we create software that provides a proxy by which we hope people can experience emotions that are hopefully authentic and translate to moments of humanity. (Enough of these moments of humanity and we have something…)

I found myself in technology quite accidentally. I was a philosophy & cognitive psychology student who wanted to experiment with concepts of identity formation, community building, world myths. The big question I was trying to answer was how much is malleable? what is the relationship between our biological and our cognitive systems?

(Much of my daily work right now focuses on this quite a bit – what kind of relationship do we want our players to have with each other? How do we facilitate that (or do we?) in the systems that we’re building? What’s the player relationship to the world narrative in a social game?)

I can see clearly now that what I was trying to do all those years was understand my own world better. I built up all these frameworks, used all of this language, to try to describe the world. Because to understand, to describe – maybe that led to mastery of some kind.

Nowadays, I’ve become much more interested in the individual experiences than the frameworks. I find symbol manipulation to be too abstract, too proxy. I want my life to be less filtered, less named, less tagged. I want to be closer to humanity, closer to other people. “I had long since decided to concentrate on the phenomena, and not worry about the theories.”

Yep, it will be interesting to see how this affects my work.

All software creators are like gods – we create rule sets in our own images, our software inherits our value systems, our ethics.

Personally, I’m thrilled. Without frameworks and filters and tags, the world is infinitely larger. I’m no longer constrained by my own brain. The brain hacking now happens through art, music, dance, movement. I’ve been hosting vagabonds and travelers through couchsurfing.org, a fantastic community that brings new worlds to my apartment every week.

Elise Boulding, an inspiration

I hadn’t heard of Elise before I read the obituary in the NY Times today. But now I feel comforted, invigorated that there are these everyday heroes out there that I don’t yet know about. The world is much bigger and more exciting than I even imagine sometimes.

I especially liked these parts of her bio:

“And that was when I realized that there was no safe place on earth,” she said. “And I knew that I had found my life’s mission.”

‘She came late to academia and a life of letters, receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1969 only after rearing five children. Her experience as a mother and a homemaker, she often said, informed much of her work.’

I love hearing the life stories of other people who are following unconventional paths. Often the ’shoulds’ are so loud and deafening that it takes significant effort to break free. But there’s frequently no choice. All the other folks out there are great inspiration for me. I’m just beginning, myself. There’s a lot left to build and discover!

happiness

This is what’s on my mind recently:

We’ve* grown up assuming that happiness and fulfillment were rights, rather than luxuries. We’ve been optimizing for some sort of idealized state. (Let’s keep moving up and onwards!)

The truth is we’re very fortunate to live in the time and place that we live in, with the tools we have.

The answer to lasting, sustainable happiness is actually quite simple. Whatever happens, whenever you feel like you might be faced with something seemingly insurmountable, you can choose to make it happy, regardless of the externalities. We’re human and it’s hard to always remember this. But this is my daily practice. If there’s anything I want to be a ninja expert at, it’s this.

* gross generalization.