The Problem with Language

Language is the essential human tool.  Language is one of two methods of providing information of which I am aware, the second being modeling (seeing someone do something and copying it).  The state of humanity as the (perhaps) dominant animal on the planet is based on the ability to pass on information from person to person and generation.  Without language humanity would essentially start from scratch every generation.

As a result of the significance of language there are many people who believe that language is the key to understanding how the brain works, that if you understand how language operates you can to a very large extent understand how the mind and brain operate.  I think to an extent this is true, but largely with regard to the reasoning part of the brain.  This is the bit that has that running dialogue in your head.  The one that obsessively goes over what you should have said and the one that plans what you are going to do in the future. 

Most people throughout history, and almost certainly most people now, believe that this dialogue, this language based thinking, is essentially who we are.  The idea is that human beings are largely rational creatures who decide what to do and how to react based on language-based cognition.  I certainly won't eliminate this as something human beings do, but research shows that this is not what people do most of the time.  People act unconsciously most of the time.  Sam Adams has a nice, quick experiment to demonstrate the pervasive nature of the unconscious.  Here we go.

Pick the name of a city.  OK, I feel very confident that you have managed to think of a city.  Now, how did the name of the city come into your mind?  Was there a conscious discussion in your head that led to the name or did it just pop into your head?  For most people a name simply pops into our head and we don't know why, it just appears.  Afterwards we can explain why we think the name came into our head (I thought of Paris, where the Tour de France just finished) but we don't consciously go through the process, it was unconscious.

Emotions also play a huge role in how we think.  If we are angry we don't spend time in a long chain of logical thoughts, we don't tend to unconsciously nurture children etc..  We put most of our attention on things that are emotionally charged, on agents (other things that can make decisions), on things that justify our opinions.  We also categorize things, we divide the universe into separate things (a tree and the ground)

So, probably the greatest tool for understanding brains is language, but language is not the primary way the brain works.  There are all sorts of cognitive biases that precede our use of language, and language tends to flow from emotions rather than the other way round.  The problem with language is therefore that it is the waves on the sea, but we tend to think of it as the sea.

This path from biases, unconscious decision making, and emotion to language based cognition means that there are mistakes made about the world because of how we think.  There are language constructions that fit how we think but are poor at describing the world around us.  The example I want to use here is evolution.

In english is extremely difficult to briefly and accurately describe evolution.  I'm sure all of you are somewhat familiar with the theory so see if you can do it.  Here's the thing about this, pretty much everyone, including biologists, describes evolution as a process where things do things in order for there to be a point.  We talk of plants adapting to the environment.  We talk about the design of a dolphin's body being perfectly suited to its environment.  We talk about how species of animals change over time in an arms race against another species.  That all sounds pretty reasonable to us and most people.  This is because of our biases.

In evolutionary terms plants don't adapt to the environment.  Over generations a plant does not sense the environment and then alter itself.  The ones that don't reproduce in the environment don't reproduce.  What is left are the ones that reproduce, and so on through the generations.  The plant is not an agent doing something over time for a reason.  The plant isn't really a separate thing anyway, internally it's a giant conglomeration of different things in an environment, "plant" is simply a human category.

Dolphins do not have a design.  Dolphins grow according to information in their DNA.  Information in DNA that doesn't lead to a body shape that enables that information to reproduce doesn't reproduce and therefore is no more.  It was extremely hard for me to write that without saying that the shape of dolphins is produced by a set of instructions and the ones with bad shapes die off.

There is not a thing that is a species.  A species is a category of objects (a category itself) that are categorized by similar traits.  As a result it actually doesn't make sense really to talk of a species changing, because change would make it a different species.  The species certainly didn't decide to produce better equipment for dealing with other, conflicting species, it simply happened that way.

I have tried multiple times to describe evolution without the use of any agent doing anything despite the fact that there is actually no agent doing anything.  Even down to the basic point of reproduction.  DNA does not reproduce itself, reproduction happens with DNA.

The truth is that in english we have almost no capability to properly describe something happening without an agent and a purpose.  We have very little capability to say that things are what they are and because of that, after some time, things will be different than they were.