3.3.4. Limits of contemporary language

From the outset I should say I do not know how consciousness relates to matter, perhaps some single theory espoused by some monists, dualists, pluralists, reductionists, emergentists, or some other metaphysical school, is right. My position is that we should study more and see before we make up our minds, and, if we really have no idea, we should be open and explore, we should suspend judgment, after all we can continue doing everything we do while the mystery is open. Our current technology does not allow us to see the brain working in great detail, only when that happens will we have a decent hope of trying to determine if there is or not a "spirit in the shell". Until then we are only making bets and those that pretend to have an absolute access to the truth by proposing the "obviousness" of a certain kind of theory are just bullies trying to impose a particular way of thinking to the rest of us.

• • However there is one important aspect which I think is not sufficiently remarked in this context and that regards the limits of our contemporary language. Language allows us to reproduce a particular state of mind, either in ourselves or others. There are other ways to do this, we can paint, make music, spread odors, caress, "make faces", etc. But symbolic language has the remarkable property of reproducing states of mind that represent externalobjects, persons, etc. This is a great invention, dogs for instance cannot tell where is a certain bone buried by barking. Barking may convey many things but is not able to represent precise events or precise locations. This is what makes man different from other species: its gigantic collection of functional description of objects and their possible relations with detailed spatiotemporal references. Without this, we are just naked monkeys, and we could not easily survive or compete with other species.

  • We are justly proud of our greatest achievement, the one that has enabled us to put our vast mark on the history of the planet, but that should not make us forget that language has strong limitations. The most obvious and stringent limitation, for me at least, is that it seems completely unable to describe inner states of mind. For instance I may say ""I love you" to my cherished one, but the words do not describe what I feel, it is like saying "there is a thing in the room", while I am trying to describe a small dog, with straight fur, so long that it covers his eyes and draws to the floor. Now, although I can try to detail a little more what "I love you" means I can only do that by cumbersome and rather ineffective ways. I can say that I would die for her, that she is more important to me than anything in the world, etc. But, once again, I am not describing what I feel, I am only describing what the feeling would make me do in certain situations. It is like saying "there is a thing in the room, and if I run to it it might run too, and I like it a bit, etc". We would be relatively in the dark regarding that "thing in the living room". So it is with the words "I love you", they don't say much, in fact, they are almost empty. To express love one smiles, one kisses, one holds hands and so forth. All these gestures are much more efficient in expressing my true feelings for the one I cherish so much. But notice how there are very ancient and primitive ways of communicating. Caressing, showing commitment through life, supporting one another, are things that birds, many mammals and other animals do. So, in this respect, symbolic language has not really given anything new. We cannot penetrate the inner recesses of our mental states with it.

  • Another circumstance where this becomes obvious is when we attempt to describe the beauty of Mozart's music, the gravity and splendor of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the mystical nuances of Bach's music, etc. We can indicate the general direction like: happy, sad, deep, superficial, difficult, etc. But that is really very little. Our linguistic abilities regarding the description of mental states which have no spatiotemporal references, empirical properties (like weight, color) and obscure implications (being sad may lead me to work more but it may also lead me to work less), is like catching water with a fishing net.

  • The fact is, our language works mostly by establishing clearly defined relations between objects, if I know that a certain object is in a precise location in Antarctica, I will also know a lot of things, not only that "it is far away" and "cold", but I will know the direction in which is in, and I can make arrangements to get there, precisely to that spot. But when I look "deep inside" someone's eyes, I cannot really describe what I see, not even to myself. When I see "you" there are no words that will be able to transmit who you are to others. Even for me to remember you (the inner you) I won't use words but some other part of my memory. I also know that I can get closer to you, but how I do that precisely is difficult for me to describe (even to myself). Of course, if we are talking about manipulation, like some books do devising techniques to have many "friends" and acquaintances, well, many strategies can be accurately describes (looking people in the eyes, smiling, speaking about common interests, listening attentively - or pretending to -, a firm handshake with accompanying smile, etc) how to relate or have influence on others. But even when we are masters at that, we will not know them. We will know their weak spots, their habits, their aspirations, how to make them "traps" to make them think or desire certain things. Yes, that is certainly a describable technique. But it does not show you "what it is like" to be that person, not really. It is like learning to play a musical piece, we can describe how it is played precisely. Note upon note, no mistakes, with the right timing. That's it, any cd player can do it. Now, to understand the music, like Glenn Gould or Ingrid Haebler, a cd player is not enough. But how do you go about and understand it? Well, no one can really tell us, it has to be what we call "a personal journey", meaning, that, just like the dog who cannot say to the other dog where the bone is buried ("go and get it and will divided it by the two") so we cannot really say what we experience in these personal journeys, we have to actually go there. Just like "bones" don't get fit in barks, so our inner sea, of vague and indistinct feelings, freedom, creativity, and much more, does not fit at all in symbolic language. So, when I get close to you, not in the manipulative sense, but in the intimate sense, then that journey will not be able to fit in books or, in fact, in any words. "We", our inner worlds from which creativity, desire and dreams flow, simply don't fit in the meager confines of today's human language.

  • So it is not surprising that a language that cannot even describe conscious contents as well as music and other forms of art and bodily communication, is precisely the medium by which we attempt to completely explain consciousness and strip it of all its mysteries! Well we cannot even address it. It is as if we wanted to bark away at the world and pretend we were describing every minute detail of what we see. While, in fact, every minute detail is staying outside of our barking.

  • Writers of drama and fiction that attempt to transport the reader, through words, to the inner worlds of the characters, can do it only because they use symbolic language like a sort of music, in fact, the writer of stories knows that, when he we are inspired to the point of writing something that is worth reading, it is as if we are inspired by an inner music, and the paper receives this "music" in the form of words and phrases that express (or so we would like, when we are the authors) what we see and feel in many different levels. That is why it is more difficult to translate a good novel or romance, words don't sound the same, they don't have the same subtle connotation or even sonority. It was not by chance that Tolkien felt the need to create entire languages, with different sounds and associations, for elves, hobbits and orcs. Reading a novel demands much more than situating events in space and time, but what it envolves is difficult to say. Notice for instance this description of Diana Wynne Jones, in the start of Howl's Moving Castle:

• "In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes. Sophie Hatter was the eldest of three sisters. She was not even the child of a poor woodcutter, which might have given her some chance of success. Her parents were well to do and kept a ladies’ hat shop in the prosperous town of Market Chipping. True, her own mother died when Sophie was just two years old and her sister Lettie was one year old, and their father married his youngest shop assistant, a pretty blonde girl called Fanny. Fanny shortly gave birth to the third sister, Martha. This ought to have made Sophie and Lettie into Ugly Sisters, but in fact all three girls grew up very pretty indeed, though Lettie was the one everyone said was most beautiful. Fanny treated all three girls with the same kindness and did not favor Martha in the least. Mr. Hatter was proud of his three daughters and sent them all to the best school in town."

  • Now, from an empirical, objective (objectual) perspective, it's all very simple. We just have to adjust for the "magical", unpredictable properties that strange objects may possess. The set of goals, perceived difficulties, family situation and relations seems also clear enough. Yes, we could read this book as a simple report of some distant events, fictitious here just means that the author is not constrained by physical laws or historical events, he can "make up" whatever he likes as long as it maintains the story interesting, informative, or entertainment. This is certainly the view of many, and this is why the culture of "entertainment" has grown so much. But there is much more than this buried in this book, or in any quality literary work: literary authors manage to put conscious experiences in their books, as if they could describe the dog with the long silver fur in the living room even if they don't have the words for dogs, silver or fur. There is just one constraint: you can only see the dog if you "embark" on the fantasy, if you "let go" and immerse yourself in the "magical" words of the author. Then you start "seeing things", you start living in a different ways, you forget who you are, where you are, you became someone else. In that experience you see and feel things that are not really there, explained, described, written explicitly, but somehow the message passages through.

  • How do the authors manage to do this? Well, if we could explain it, in our objective language, we could probably do a science of it, we could replicate it. But the fact is, we can't. We say it is a matter of "genius", which is just a fashionable way of saying we really don't understand what makes it work. No one can reproduce Dali's geniality, it is not possible to put it in a computer and run. However there are signs that something beautiful or sublime is being said, so a computer might be programmed to attribute a probability for a certain text, painting, or music to actually have content instead of being pure noise.

  • One of the indicators the computer could use was to try to depict the information in different orders or with similar words. Contrary to what happens in an objective description everything is important in a literary text, not just the situation depicted, the correction of the description, but the way it is depicted, the order in which it is depicted, the words used, the ambiguities present, etc. In reality the author must be in a particular state of mind, as if he is just the first to witness such a state of affairs, and then he just describes what he sees. Just like a musician choosing notes, the author chooses the words that seem most appropriated, and, like the musician, he will probably be unable to say why these particular notes are more appropriated than some others. But they do feel more in tune. So, truly, it is a mystery why or how it works. How or why a bunch of sounds, colors or words manage to say the unsayable, what is clear in literature is that the information is densely packed. For instance, in this passage the first thing said is that we are living the land of magic, where magic is possible. This is implicit counterpointed by our daily lives, with duties and so on. However the book rapidly introduces the mundane themes of failure and competition, against which a "chance of success" is given. Now this chance of success is quite ambiguous, but we are implicit said that it is not the kind of normal success that we are used to, since in our "real" world money gives us a better chance of "success", so this kind of success must be different. "Seven-league boots" and "cloaks of invisibility" also project ways of advancing in a secret way, somehow not seen in society. Then comes the description of Sophie's family relations, we learned that a grave tragedy occurred, her mother died, but, strangely enough, her father married shortly after having a child of her new and attractive wife shortly after. Was she pregnant before the death of Sophie's mother? But we also learned that "Fanny treated all three girls with the same kindness and did not favor Martha in the least." So, we have many conflicting impressions, the general good impression of Fanny is reinforced by the last sentence "Mr. Hatter was proud of his three daughters and sent them all to the best school in town" for it suggests that Fanny had a good influence on her husband and the family in general. But her central point in the family stage also heightens the chance that she might have had an affair that precipitated the death of Fanny's mother. Now all this and much more (how could Fanny possibly have such a stronghold on Mr. Hatter?) is certainly in the background. We may not be aware of it, but it helps shaping a state of mind that, together with the inexpressible musicality of the story, makes us enter, as if by magical arts, in the inner world that Diana Jones wrote for us to sip through.

  • This shows at least two things: that the literary discourse is very different from the objective discourse and, more importantly, that these differences are not sufficient to explain why or how the literary discourse is able to show us the sea of the inner world. Individual words don't do it, so it must be some hidden beauty caught between the lines. Poetry, literary works, music, paintings, and in general all forms of art, seem to rely on some mysterious extra ingredient that does not fit in our symbolic language. In other words, there is more than meets the eye.

  • Why does this happen, the reason is simple: language describes the world by making connections between objects, agents, numbers, etc. Take color for instance, we can say many things about the way colors are related: we can speak about how phenomenal color is associated with electromagnetic frequencies, how all colors can be made by the junction of just three primary colors, which parts of the eye and brain decode electromagnetic frequencies and how they connect to each other to determine color, we can establish relations between colors and pigments, we can distinguish about primary, secondary and tertiary colors, opponent colors, etc. All that is said here concerns relations: relations between colors, between phenomenal colors and electromagnetic waves, ways of combining colors and pigments, etc. To a color-blind person all this might be entirely clear, but it would not help her to feel what seeing yellow or blue feels like. We could perhaps say that symbolic language can provide descriptions of the relations between colors, but they don't acquaint us with the experience of seeing color. The same happens with everything else, you can describe the temperature or mass of the sun, although that has no relation to anything in our phenomenal experience. However this functional description seems precisely what is necessary to act on the world. Knowing the precise effects of precise actions is what we need to be efficient, experience seems to have nothing to offer. That's why science can continue to prosper even if we are completely in the dark regarding our inner world of experience. Although we cannot understand it, or even describe it (it is difficult to mention it!), we can happily build nuclear weapons and the whole industrial civilization. It works.

  • But when we turn this extraordinary power of describing relations between objects to our inner world we find ourselves lost. Because minds and feelings do not have the kind of rigid relations, they are not well defined, they are like the sea, vague, ambiguous, with no clear-unambiguous relation with the world.

  • Does this mean that consciousness will never be explained by a language designed to describe empirical properties, causal relations within a spatiotemporal framework? Well, that depends: if consciousness can indeed be reduced to a set of physical facts and relations, then perhaps a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence or an alien intelligence will be able to understand that all this vagueness we feel can indeed be reduced to a vastly complex set of well defined variables. Somehow the discrete generates whole, somehow the distinct generates the vague, somehow a jumble of individual variables creates a unitary experience of a self. We never know, perhaps in a thousand years things will get clearer on this respect. But, it might also turn out that consciousness is not reducible to the physical world, perhaps it turns out that both the physical world and the conscious world are different aspects of a much more complex reality. In this case we will perhaps need a different language to address consciousness and its set of mysteries.