Initially, I thought Socrates' stance on writing was some kind of eccentricity but now that I have seen first hand how the meaning of words can change over time and differ between people and places, I now have a better understanding of how much context is lost in writing.
When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.
When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.
Also, subjective experience-based words like 'difficult', 'easy', 'entertaining', 'funny' or even 'good' and 'evil' can vary widely between individuals. I didn't realize this until I met certain people who had very different values to mine. They had completely different definition of 'good' and 'evil' or 'right' and 'wrong'.
Talking to these people is strange and sometimes uncomfortable because you're using the same language and can 'understand' each other superficially, but you know you're not actually speaking the same language. You know they interpret what you're saying differently; they have fundamentally different goals and beliefs about the world and about you.
For example, some action or belief which might be second-nature to you, might actually be seen as strange and a weakness from the other person's perspective. But there are many, many distortions like this.
In fact, no two humans understand the same language in the same way. Often, what people believe, is shockingly different; you just never realized because you never discussed in depth and never defined your words and broke them down into their atomic parts... And in elite social circles, many taboos exist precisely to prevent any such exploration from occurring as such explorations might jeopardize relationships. Many relationships serve a strategic purpose and aren't about truth discovery.
1. I'm the product owner, I can demo it for you.
2. I know who the product owner is, and I think it's live.
3. I think it's currently under development...or maybe we're still gathering requirements
4. Budget has been assigned, but work hasn't started
5. It's listed in a slide deck
It makes you wonder about not just writing but language as a whole. In transcription we clearly lose important dimensionality such as tone, intent, or body language. Socrates seems to have been alluding to accessing information beyond what was merely initially offered as well, e.g. follow up questions.
What sort of dimensionality do we lose when thoughts go from ephemeral forms transcribed into concrete english language structures? Is this lingua franca holding us back in some ways from different thought patterns that might be better in some ways?
Dream states or psychedelics probably get you closest to this sort of "knowing without having the knowing put into discrete words" state of low level cognition. I wonder what might be there in our minds if we managed to strip our thinking of being bound by the limited framing offered through our languages?
Also, and I found this idea in that newest translation of Homer, remembering is a kind of technology. We do not write books, poems, songs or tv shows to be remembered. But, when people relied on memory, they did structured knowledge so that it is easier to remember.
That is where rhyme and repetition comes from. We kind of lost how to do that.
But then again, when you talk to people who don't learn because "you can find it on the internet anyway", they come across as dumb. When you encounter people who can do basic arithmetic because calculator, there are situation where they are ... dumb and not useful. When you encounter people who use car to get everywhere, they cant really walk - they think 1km is a long hike. It is going to be the same with ai.
> When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.
On the one hand, yes, I agree with you.
On the other hand, I’ve played the game of telephone. I can’t imagine a game of telephone played over multiple generations has any sort of fidelity.
Perhaps if your imagination included a game of telephone which includes multiple error correcting codes/mechanisms, when instruction in those mechanisms is part of the teaching, and when preserving the wording is valued by most/all participants in the game/culture/conversation?
Here is one example where knowledge was well maintained over 12000 years.
>valued by most/all participants in the game/culture/conversation
The question then becomes one of cultural stability over that length of time. I personally can't tell you anything about the cultural and technological stability of of the aboriginal cultures, all I can assume is they were far more stable than europe, north africa, and the middle east. These later groups I listed had an absolutely massive amount of cultural exchange, and other things like mass genocide over the centuries. The exchange of new concepts and ideas is a powerful force in shaping the stories we tell. When two groups of people exist together over longer periods of time with conflicting sets of stories one of the stories tends to fade and die, and most likely a mixed story is created (Christianity ate a lot of Pagan mythos this way).
> When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.
True, but I don't think leaving it unwritten makes it better.
Even in the quote given in this article, most instances of the word "word" are "logos" in Greek, which means something closer to speech, argument, reasoning, logic, etc. This doesn't really change the meaning of the quote dramatically, but some slight nuance is lost.
I share your sentiment. What you're describing here was also very eye-opening to me when I first realized it.
I'll restate these ideas in a more explicit claim. All symbols are defined via one's own subjective experience.
One's own understanding/definition of every word can be traced back to personal experience. Imagine your life as a timeline, like a video, from birth up until now. You can seek that timeline to find the moments/clips that contributed to your definition of any given word or even mathematical symbol. To give an example, when I say "apple", the corresponding idea in my head is based on every apple I've seen and every instance of the word "apple" I've seen being used or being taught to me in the past. Even when we try to define the phrase "this specific apple" while looking at the same apple on the same table in the same room, the light bounces off of it slightly differently from my angle of view vs yours, and we did not see the same sequence of "video frames" about the apple, and so our mental models of that apple would necessarily be slightly different.
This is probably why the hard problem of consciousness / unified theory of physics appear forever out of reach. If no two observers/observations are fully identical, then you cannot even define what an ideal observer is. But we tend to assume such an ideal definition exists.
This seems almost trivial in hindsight because "identical" can be defined as 1) "one and the same", based on one thing OR 2) "mostly similar", based on pairs of adjacent things one has seen in the past.
And to sort of echo the original post, it seems to me that a lot value comes from the interactive nature of argumentation. But I think the specific medium/modality of those interactions don't matter for most things, and even when it does, like in this case, valuable insights can still fall out of a discussion in text. I derived the precursor ideas which led to this conclusion of definitional non-equivalence in past offline arguments as well as simulated discussions in my head. And I derived the actual conclusion by arguing with people here on HN, which helped me truly internalize the idea that even the definition of consciousness/observation differs from one person to another. That comment thread can be seen here:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338029">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338029
It's worth mentioning that I am not too proud of that specific interaction because I got needlessly defensive and adversarial, and lied about my subjective experience of having undergone general anesthesia even though I haven't really, and it was especially egregious in a discussion about consciousness. My original reflex/motivation was I felt that many other people would likely prematurely dismiss some of those ideas if I admitted that one of the tangential premises were wrong. And regretfully, by lying that time, I've introduced a cancer in my mental pathways when considering the problem of consciousness and adjacent philosophical problems because I'd always have this nagging feeling to try to justify that past mistake, even now. But in truth, I was just being an intellectually dishonest little shit trying to win an argument. And yet, something valuable came out of that interaction.
jongjong · · focus · HN ↗
When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.
When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.
Also, subjective experience-based words like 'difficult', 'easy', 'entertaining', 'funny' or even 'good' and 'evil' can vary widely between individuals. I didn't realize this until I met certain people who had very different values to mine. They had completely different definition of 'good' and 'evil' or 'right' and 'wrong'.
Talking to these people is strange and sometimes uncomfortable because you're using the same language and can 'understand' each other superficially, but you know you're not actually speaking the same language. You know they interpret what you're saying differently; they have fundamentally different goals and beliefs about the world and about you.
For example, some action or belief which might be second-nature to you, might actually be seen as strange and a weakness from the other person's perspective. But there are many, many distortions like this.
In fact, no two humans understand the same language in the same way. Often, what people believe, is shockingly different; you just never realized because you never discussed in depth and never defined your words and broke them down into their atomic parts... And in elite social circles, many taboos exist precisely to prevent any such exploration from occurring as such explorations might jeopardize relationships. Many relationships serve a strategic purpose and aren't about truth discovery.
garrickvanburen · · focus · HN ↗
jongjong · · focus · HN ↗
antman · · focus · HN ↗
Andrex · · focus · HN ↗
Terr_ · · focus · HN ↗
WCSTombs · · focus · HN ↗
garrickvanburen · · focus · HN ↗
antman · · focus · HN ↗
asdff · · focus · HN ↗
What sort of dimensionality do we lose when thoughts go from ephemeral forms transcribed into concrete english language structures? Is this lingua franca holding us back in some ways from different thought patterns that might be better in some ways?
Dream states or psychedelics probably get you closest to this sort of "knowing without having the knowing put into discrete words" state of low level cognition. I wonder what might be there in our minds if we managed to strip our thinking of being bound by the limited framing offered through our languages?
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
Inner speech/string of words.
Pictures/visual memory. Think more of the form of a picture a movie or camera works in.
Conceptual thought. In my mind this works more like simplified iconography with action/logic occurring but otherwise unspecified.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
That is where rhyme and repetition comes from. We kind of lost how to do that.
But then again, when you talk to people who don't learn because "you can find it on the internet anyway", they come across as dumb. When you encounter people who can do basic arithmetic because calculator, there are situation where they are ... dumb and not useful. When you encounter people who use car to get everywhere, they cant really walk - they think 1km is a long hike. It is going to be the same with ai.
r3trohack3r · · focus · HN ↗
On the one hand, yes, I agree with you.
On the other hand, I’ve played the game of telephone. I can’t imagine a game of telephone played over multiple generations has any sort of fidelity.
ds_opseeker · · focus · HN ↗
Here is one example where knowledge was well maintained over 12000 years.
<a href="https://indigenous.sl.nsw.gov.au/recent-updates/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-rise-sea-level" rel="nofollow">https://indigenous.sl.nsw.gov.au/recent-updates/ancient-abor...
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
The question then becomes one of cultural stability over that length of time. I personally can't tell you anything about the cultural and technological stability of of the aboriginal cultures, all I can assume is they were far more stable than europe, north africa, and the middle east. These later groups I listed had an absolutely massive amount of cultural exchange, and other things like mass genocide over the centuries. The exchange of new concepts and ideas is a powerful force in shaping the stories we tell. When two groups of people exist together over longer periods of time with conflicting sets of stories one of the stories tends to fade and die, and most likely a mixed story is created (Christianity ate a lot of Pagan mythos this way).
WCSTombs · · focus · HN ↗
True, but I don't think leaving it unwritten makes it better.
v9v · · focus · HN ↗
txrx0000 · · focus · HN ↗
I'll restate these ideas in a more explicit claim. All symbols are defined via one's own subjective experience.
One's own understanding/definition of every word can be traced back to personal experience. Imagine your life as a timeline, like a video, from birth up until now. You can seek that timeline to find the moments/clips that contributed to your definition of any given word or even mathematical symbol. To give an example, when I say "apple", the corresponding idea in my head is based on every apple I've seen and every instance of the word "apple" I've seen being used or being taught to me in the past. Even when we try to define the phrase "this specific apple" while looking at the same apple on the same table in the same room, the light bounces off of it slightly differently from my angle of view vs yours, and we did not see the same sequence of "video frames" about the apple, and so our mental models of that apple would necessarily be slightly different.
This is probably why the hard problem of consciousness / unified theory of physics appear forever out of reach. If no two observers/observations are fully identical, then you cannot even define what an ideal observer is. But we tend to assume such an ideal definition exists.
This seems almost trivial in hindsight because "identical" can be defined as 1) "one and the same", based on one thing OR 2) "mostly similar", based on pairs of adjacent things one has seen in the past.
And to sort of echo the original post, it seems to me that a lot value comes from the interactive nature of argumentation. But I think the specific medium/modality of those interactions don't matter for most things, and even when it does, like in this case, valuable insights can still fall out of a discussion in text. I derived the precursor ideas which led to this conclusion of definitional non-equivalence in past offline arguments as well as simulated discussions in my head. And I derived the actual conclusion by arguing with people here on HN, which helped me truly internalize the idea that even the definition of consciousness/observation differs from one person to another. That comment thread can be seen here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338029">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338029
It's worth mentioning that I am not too proud of that specific interaction because I got needlessly defensive and adversarial, and lied about my subjective experience of having undergone general anesthesia even though I haven't really, and it was especially egregious in a discussion about consciousness. My original reflex/motivation was I felt that many other people would likely prematurely dismiss some of those ideas if I admitted that one of the tangential premises were wrong. And regretfully, by lying that time, I've introduced a cancer in my mental pathways when considering the problem of consciousness and adjacent philosophical problems because I'd always have this nagging feeling to try to justify that past mistake, even now. But in truth, I was just being an intellectually dishonest little shit trying to win an argument. And yet, something valuable came out of that interaction.