If I say ‘words are meaningless’ and so is language, we’d better be without it, and write a whole whopping 5000 words blog post about it. It’d make me a hypocrite. But go over this puzzle first…

a man born in 1946 and died in 1947, and He has lived 86 years. Can you explain this?

I didn’t say those were years, did I? so it could be room numbers. It’s one of the silly “suck my dig bick” things. We as humans have certain proclivity and predilections due to some hardwired behavior and learning developed gradually for thousands of years. These tendencies turn into bias and play a part in not letting the out-of-the-box thinking unleash, which may be keeping humankind (relatively) slow in advancement (to other extraterrestrial intelligent species).

 There are various earth-shattering writings which were composed hundreds or thousands of years back. These writings have been accessible to the majority for hundreds or thousands of years. These writings portray the fundamental words and ideas in the most convoluted detail and with plentiful uses and examples. Compared to modern languages, which are more complex and with multiple level nesting and structures.

Most lamentably, the Words that truly matter, are good for nothing generally. Not on the grounds that they are good for nothing in themselves, but since in our larger part, we can’t get them.

WHAT’S THE WORTH OF WORDS, GRAMMAR, and LANGUAGE?

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

-RAM DAS

In the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, Siddhartha, the boy who left home to become a saint, the knowledgeable one. But astonishingly, when he finally meets for whom he was looking for, The Lord Gautama Buddha, he refuses to be the disciple. He realizes that he wanted to experience what Gautama did in his journey. Govinda, his best friend, chose otherwise and they both went on different paths. After a coon’s age, when both of them advanced in years living completely disparate lives. Govinda hears of the sage ferryman and he wants to meet him. The sage man is no other but Siddharta. He decides to visit him still in search of the right path, and when he finally meets him. Govinda is amazed to see such an enlightened man akin like Gautama. When Govinda asks him how and what made him so aware and wise, Siddharta is perplexed by what he could teach to the disciple of Gautama. 

Siddhartha doesn’t know what he can say to the Venerable One but suggests that perhaps he is seeking too hard. They both have turned really old, Siddhartha says that he has many thoughts, but he has learned that wisdom cannot be communicated. Words are too simple and are inconsistent. Knowledge can be uttered, but wisdom can only be attained through life. Words always destroy the meaning and words make everything seem conflicting to everything Gautama has taught. 

Siddhartha comes to his best thought. He tells Govinda that “the opposite of every truth is just as true.” 

While all this might seem lurid and fanciful, it is tantamount to the simplest summarization of ‘the purpose’.  Epistemologically speaking, we don’t even need grammar, conjunctions, fillers, connectors, and etc… Gary F. Marcus in July 1992 concluded that it was not necessary that children’s speech be syntactical to be understood by their parents, and with the help of experiments to prove this from 1970. We don’t even need experiments for this though; observe the infant growing up and ‘acquiring’ the language (According to Krashen ‘learning’ is less important than ‘acquisition’, ). Consider this…

They speak in a way …. For example: – “momma Da da na na TABLE” or “daddy da na na na Bathroom”

This shows their interest to go to the table or bathroom, and they just fill the sentence with random noise in place or grammar. Because they understand the logic first, and as they grow, they learn the grammar and syntax. Similarly, if we are exposed to Japanese and Portuguese speaking people, we tend to understand relatively quicker than we first speak a sentence.

You can understand the logic but cannot speak the syntax. David Everett explores his theory that language isn’t innate but a tool developed by humans to solve problems. Take the case of the Pirahã community of Amazon. Their language doesn’t consist of numbers, past or future, or Even Recursions. (Sapir, Reichenbach, and the syntax of tense in Pirahã) Recursions are nesting in the sentence, such as “He’s going to the park, wearing a cap, for a walk”. So the Pirahã community’s translation would be: “He’s going to park. He is wearing a cap. He’s going for a walk”. It doesn’t make sense; it makes the language unnecessarily verbose. But imagine you’re in a loud concert, would you use smaller and simpler sentences or long and complex ones? The short and curt ones. Although you might think this makes the Pirahã community less intelligent than us, they’re as smart as us, if not more.

Their language cuts out the noise and might seem abrupt and nonsensical but is more efficient. This is the reason why most programming languages’ syntax is short and concise.

Take a look at Sanskrit, it is so concise and straightforward, which facilitates it to be remembered and rehearsed. Henceforth, a whole competitive activity (Avadhana held at Gokhale Institute of Public Affairs ) is built around it. Another thing that makes Sanskrit unique is The “Sanskrit effect” observed by a Neuroscientist who found out remembering mantras increases cognitive functions in the human brain. (A Neuroscientist Explores the “Sanskrit Effect”)

 Hypothetically, Can we “train” an organism to learn a language if the language is being adopted by an intelligent species like humans? or vice versa with humans’ infants to be brought up by some other unintelligent species (like in the on Shanichar- the boy who raised by wolves, who could never speak or learn, Jungle book is based on him)? Or perhaps with only robots with food replenishment and books?

But wait, Doesn’t Language make us stand apart and make us intelligent species? 

Humans have language but all creatures communicate

Rudolf Carnap suggests the thesis of physicalism, in which the physical language is proved universal and inter-subjective which means it can be conveyed in another form, for example- using signs, actions, chirps, gestures or even thoughts. So human beings can be considered an intelligent species because they have a language? 

 When people think of highly intelligent animals, there are a handful of species that come to mind. Parrots, dolphins, and of course great apes have all been widely studied and demonstrate behaviors that indicate some level of higher cognition. Recent research has actually shown that species like dolphins and great apes may exhibit traits such as self-awareness and adaptive problem solving that are key parts of higher-order thinking. However, despite such advances in understanding, none of these species have been shown to have a detailed and expressive form of communication. Until recently no animal communication had been decoded outside the pages of Dr. Dolittle. That discovery was actually made in prairie dogs. Yes, prairie dogs. These members of the squirrel family, historically thought of as pests, have been found to have a form of communication that can only be called a language all its own. This discovery has huge implications for how scientists view behavior and value intelligence among animals.

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Prairie dogs, yes, they have their own language that has been proven. But they aren’t intelligent? Prairie dogs can distinguish and convey characteristics about seen dangers, for example, a predator’s stature, weight, size, and shading. They utilize various phonemes to recognize physical qualities and can even recall certain attributes from an earlier time. Not exclusively do these creatures use action words and things, yet they consider sentence syntax when tattling with one another.

Every morning the birds chirp and sing randomly right? No way they are communicating something. It can be observed that even birds have different accents in different regions and climates as well. (Birds have regional accents according to scientists). Even pet owners will agree their pets have a unique language of communicating to them. But it’s very limited to emotions such as hunger, excitement, sometimes sadness and others. But not anymore, Soon enough pet owners can be talking to their pets and other animals with AI ( Say woof in animal language).

So the language is more common than we think it is. Hierarchy, recursion, and grammar are all over the universe and are not exclusive to humans or even living beings. It’s shown in RNA Replication, which is a biological process. 

Humans are capable of walking hence we walk, but we can crawl too. Hence not speaking language can’t be a sign of intelligence. Humans have evolved to walk but that necessarily isn’t showing intelligence, in fact, our backs aren’t fully developed for standing upright. That is also the reason for backaches being so popular. (LANGUAGE ACQUISITION )

You are not alone feeling overflowed and inundated with the internet, books, news, even Youtube, and with the ever-increasing data and flawless communication systems. It feels it makes us more distracted and underproductive. And do we actually remember, comprehend, and apply everything we digest every day? Would it better off without it? Would we still be this technologically advanced and equipped with such great ideas such as traffic, currency, communication, law, and enforcement systems? Maybe. 

Living without language: Scope of development or is it destruction? 

Reverend Thomas Bayes, came up with the popularly known – ‘Bayes Theorem’. Bayes Theorem deals with probability and prediction, most importantly it needs some information existing to predict it. The more the merrier. This information is called priors.

A guy living at the poles would overestimate the amount of snow on the planet, similarly, someone living in the desert might overestimate sand on the planet. Both are well-tuned with their niche. Everything changes when humans acquire a language, they tend to state only the interesting things and not the experiences. So humans tend to talk about a snake bite or a double rainbow more than the usual, although the frequency of those happening is very low. 

Similarly, we experience this with news and social media, which tend to show events that are rare and interesting while actually the chances of that happening is very low and it makes the permanent estimates in our brain, biased ( another way to put it, as mentioned earlier, the Bayes theorem of probability works in such a way that utilizes Prior knowledge of the events. So if the input of prior knowledge is erroneous the output estimate will be fallacious. For example- if you get heads 100% times in a coin toss, we can estimate the winning chance is 100%, but the prior coin tosses were with biased coin and the considering result will be performed with a fair coin will be different). So to have true knowledge, we need to protect the priors which are more difficult than it seems, Minimizing news, reading social media enforced propaganda and even talking to your friend might force priors in you without your acknowledgment. 

On the other hand, the tribal or primitive species communicated only the necessary and the fundamentals which were based on experience, in lieu of interest, which didn’t hamper the priors of Bayes theorem and we had a better and truer perspective of the world.

Suppose we can go and live on any planet just like it’s done in star trek with a fresh start…  Would we have a better IQ or memory if we’re not inundated with language, goals, routines, how-tos and whatnots and in leu be using our inference to reinvent the wheel? The results could be interesting.

Well, then let’s go over to Hundredth Monkey effect

In an isolated island of Japanese monkeys, one monkey discovered sweet potatoes and figured out washing it would make it edible. One monkey taught another to wash sweet potatoes who taught another and soon all the monkeys on the island were washing potatoes where no monkey had ever washed potatoes before. When the “hundredth” monkey learned to wash potatoes, suddenly and spontaneously and mysteriously monkeys on other islands, with no physical contact with the potato-washing cult, started washing potatoes!

It is what the self-help experts preach, we’re all energy and we’re all connected? It can be telepathy.

Speaking of telepathy, the machine learning-based robotics arms.  How can robotic arms or legs be controlled by thought?

The nervous system (consisting of the spinal cord and the brain) is made up of cells called neurons, which have the unique characteristic of being able to communicate with each other using electrical signals, through connections called neural synapses. Using this communication system, one neuron can send an electrical “message” to another neuron or even to an entire network of neurons, allowing for an immense number of possible firing patterns. This complexity is the primary reason why, to this day, the exact mechanisms by which neural firing patterns create phenomena like memory, consciousness, sensory experience, and motor action remain largely unknown.

Hardvard Science Review

It turns out machine learning unsupervised models can do the job which seems difficult for us, it maps the signal of moving the arm to actually moving the arm without actually knowing what’s going inside.  This is BCI: Brain Controlled Interface. 

But that’s way too far from telepathy, right? (Here’s Ironman explaining the same in the YouTube original series: How Far is Too Far? | The Age of A.I.). While we are it…

Let me introduce you to synthetic telepathy: The Brain-to-Brain Interface: From Reading Minds to Controlling Minds(BBI) 

 In the 2013 study, “A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information,” two rats were placed in separate cages and each given a choice of two levers — one that resulted in a reward of water and one that did not. A rat dubbed the “encoder” rat was shown a flash of light above the correct lever and was trained to learn this association. The “decoder” rat, on the other hand, was given no visual cues, but its brain received the stimulation from the cortical area of the “encoder” rat through the BBI. In a breakthrough finding, Nicolelis discovered that the “decoder” rat was able to make the correct choice of lever with over 70% accuracy, with no cues or information except for the learned knowledge “sent” by the neural activity of the “encoder” rat’s brain.

Harvard Science Review

In this study, the brain of one rat controlled the other rat’s brain. While this may sound interesting, it’s not over yet.

This was mimicked by using the human brain to control the rat’s brain, to move the rat’s tail with 94% accuracy by Harvard’s researchers, and eventually connecting human brains together. 

That sure is exciting and fascinating. It’s like Professor X from X-men is not a distant wild imagination.

We can speculate that a world without language and grammar could’ve been just as advanced if not more. Philosophically, epistemologically, as well as biologically we survive with and without the language just fine. Although there are theories that the ancient man originated on the Earth with language pre-existing, the empirical evidence is debated by scholars. We could be using other means of communication like telepathy or some other form. But it doesn’t define any species intelligence. 

To sum up, it’s a complex topic of whether the language has done better or worse for mankind. It’s safe to conclude that humankind could benefit from experiments, and hit and trials, and maybe curfews on data and grammar intakes. It’s a planet full of surprises and unknowns after all.