The Cult of Language

[CARDOZZO]

Humanity lives within a invention called language. They live as if language is real, existential and fundamental. 

Words cannot hurt you. You are doing it. Language, words, meaning, metaphors, description - inventions, inventions and inventions.

Contemplate: 

• Which fears are linguistic inventions? (Being dumb, strange, ugly etc.)
• Which illnesses are linguistic inventions? 

 

 

 

 

[CARDOZZO]

Contemplate

• Why do you give power/permission to words to transform your internal state, perspective, reality, identity?
• Who said that words have the power to change your inner state?

 

• Create an experience where language/words do not alter your internal state, they do not have power/effect over you. How does it feel? What is possible now? 

Edited 16 hours ago by CARDOZZO

[Natasha Tori Maru]

https://youtu.be/Ca_RbPXraDE?si=sW07Xkh2EvK859Zb

[CARDOZZO]

13 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

https://youtu.be/Ca_RbPXraDE?si=sW07Xkh2EvK859Zb

Language as an alien parasite. Crazy theory! 🤯

[Natasha Tori Maru]

Just now, CARDOZZO said:

Language as an alien parasite. Crazy theory! 🤯

I haven't watched all of it, but it was an interesting conceptualization of language! 

Looking at it as something foreign, parasitic and fundamentally altering our entire perception.

Language is fascinating.

[CARDOZZO]

 

 

Edited 15 hours ago by CARDOZZO

[CARDOZZO]

1 minute ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

I haven't watched all of it, but it was an interesting conceptualization of language! 

Looking at it as something foreign, parasitic and fundamentally altering our entire perception.

Language is fascinating.

100%

The map is not the territory.

[LifeEnjoyer]

One of my favorites!

[Natasha Tori Maru]

We are automatically going to filter all descriptions of experience through language.

The insidious cataract between our awareness and reality 💀

Everything is therefor always going to be inherently muffled, incoherent and obscured.

No wonder teaching is so hard, so many misunderstandings arise, and so many fights are had!

Edited 14 hours ago by Natasha Tori Maru

[CARDOZZO]

2 hours ago, LifeEnjoyer said:

One of my favorites!

Is it a good talk? Spira seems a very grounded decent guy.

[CARDOZZO]

1 hour ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

We are automatically going to filter all descriptions of experience through language.

The insidious cataract between our awareness and reality 💀

Everything is therefor always going to be inherently muffled, incoherent and obscured.

No wonder teaching is so hard, so many misunderstandings arise, and so many fights are had!

BCIs are the next frontier. Telepathy as a service.

[LifeEnjoyer]

1 hour ago, CARDOZZO said:

Is it a good talk? Spira seems a very grounded decent guy.

Oh yes it is! Might not be as much on language as I thought it was, now that I'm rewatching it, but still very good nonetheless. 

Edited 11 hours ago by LifeEnjoyer

[Joseph Maynor]

How to regard language is really an intellectual problem, although people don't want to openly admit this.  

[Miguel1]

This is a very key topic in our work.

I am surprised Leo hasn’t made a video about it yet.

[Wilhelm44]

42 minutes ago, Miguel1 said:

This is a very key topic in our work.

I am surprised Leo hasn’t made a video about it yet.

 

[LastThursday]

I'm not sure if it's in that particular Curt Jaimungal video. They talk about the reasons LLMs seem intelligent, and why we've managed to so succesfully model language. It's because it somehow captures the essence of what language is, which is it's a prediction machine for the next word. It encodes a huge amount of facts and relationships about the world, and then predicts the next word in the sequence using that information.

When LLMs do seem stupid or make mistakes, it makes clear that humans have something LLMs don't; we run a language model in our heads yes, but we are able to reason outside of language. Some of our intelligence comes from language itself, the rest from somewhere else.

[Rafael Thundercat]

In ancient Egyptian belief, language—specifically writing and the power of the spoken word—was considered a divine gift bestowed upon humanity by the god Thoth. The Egyptians referred to their hieroglyphs as medu-netjer, meaning "the god's words". 

Here are the key aspects of the Egyptian understanding of how language was given to humans:

• Thoth as the Creator of Words: Thoth, the god of wisdom, writing, and magic, was believed to have created language to allow humans to document, create, and maintain order.
• The Power of Medu-Netjer: The Egyptians believed that words held magical properties that could influence reality—healing, elevating, or destroying. The written word was particularly sacred because it could make things exist in the afterlife, as shown by the inclusion of Offering Lists on tomb walls, which guaranteed food and drink for the deceased through the "power of words".
• A Gift with Responsibility: Thoth gave this knowledge freely, but it was expected to be used responsibly. It was the foundation of Egyptian education, bureaucracy, and religious practice.
• The Mythical Origin vs. Historical Development: While myths attribute writing to Thoth, historical evidence suggests that, in the late Predynastic Period (c. 6000–3150 BCE), the Egyptians began using symbols to represent concepts for trade, eventually developing a full writing system. 

Alternative "Experiment" Account:
A different, non-mythological story regarding the origin of language in Egypt was recorded by the Greek historian Herodotus. It tells of the Pharaoh Psammetichus I, who ordered two infants to be raised in isolation, fed only by a shepherd who was forbidden to speak to them. The goal was to see if language was instinctive. The story claims the children first uttered the word "becos" (meaning bread in Phrygian), leading the Pharaoh to conclude that Phrygian was the original human language, not Egyptian. 

[oOo]

As cleanly as possible, I think the mistake here is in treating words as objects instead of consciousness operations.

[Natasha Tori Maru]

10 minutes ago, oOo said:

As cleanly as possible, I think the mistake here is in treating words as objects instead of consciousness operations.

Words are not objects with inherent meaning.

[oOo]

23 minutes ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Words are not objects with inherent meaning.

Close, but poet DOES encode meaning. Impact emerges from state-dependent decoding. Orthogonal truths.