The problem with words

This is probably going to be long. You've been warned. I'll also say that I don't think any of this will be groundbreaking by any means.

I started writing this about a month ago. I got like 3 sentences in, hit "Save as Draft" and brooded over it like a mother hen. But no matter how I scratched at the thing and clucked, I couldn't organize my thoughts properly.

Then last night something happened. I think I realized some things. They are, in no particular order:

Language is a primitive and ramshackle way for certain intelligent, intensely solipsistic mammals to convey ideas to one another. Languages are highly--though arbitrarily--structured series of symbols meant to point at things in the world. I think, as minds evolved, it also become a way to attempt to find common ground for the turmoil within ourselves. Where in more intelligent animal species it is a tool for coordinating movement in the world, among humans it has become a way to approximate and communicate the function of cognition and the structure of memory. It does that last thing poorly, but does it about as well as I think anything possibly could.

The problem that arises is one of interface. Any CS major knows it's hard to get two computers to talk to each other--the crazy handshake protocols and whatnot. For all that difficulty though, computers have essentially the same architecture. When they also have the same operating system, the job is simplified further. They might have different stuff on them, but they're essentially built the same way. There are standards in place to ensure these sorts of things.

There are no such standards for the human mind, which is not just fantastically complex, but is left, more or less, to create itself as it goes. Hence each mind is unique, and without some commonality, is completely foreign to other minds.

Into the cracks of these fractured and never-duplicated architectures, language takes hold and fights to maintain an interface. It does a decent job. I certainly couldn't do any better.

It's best at managing exterior commands and descriptions. Language can adequately describe and interpret the world and disseminate useful predictions and conclusions about it. These are tautological kinds of things. You point and say to your friend, "That is a cat." He slaps you because A) you are wrong and that's not a cat or B) you didn't need to tell him that because he already knows it.

This is useful for navigating one's way through life. Language is like the evolutionary buddy system. Walk this way. Kill that. Avoid the sharp things in that thing's mouth. It's a system of distributed survival skills for a class of particularly slow, fleshy omnivores.

But even here the cracks in language start to show. A cat is not merely a cat. Calling a cat a cat is a really crappy description. It says practically nothing. There are dozens if not hundreds of modifiers in the English language to abet this shortcoming. These modifiers, including but not limited to adjectives, are almost always a judgement call. Big, small, tall, short are the most simplistic of a group of words that are all highly relativistic terms that require interpretation on the part of the speaker and listener alike. This creates problems.

Even at it's most objective and straightforward, language causes profound complications in understanding. Which cat? That cat. Which one? Third from the right. My right or your right? And on and on.

What happens then, when the context shifts from describing exterior phenomena to the world of thoughts and emotions? Chaos. I think.

How do you define an emotion? Describe it. Crystalize what you're feeling right now with just the words you have around you. If somehow you possessed language but were without other agents to share yourself with, how would you describe an emotion? This situation is, by definition, impossible, given the dialogic nature of language evolution--but consider it.

Not only is such an attempt fruitless, it's also maddeningly hard. I'd say it's impossible. Language is a dialogue. How do you have a dialogic interaction with people who have no access to what you're talking about?

What is sadness? Not the emotion you feel. How do you recognize sadness in others? Tears? Pessimistic attitudes? Lashing out? Have you ever been wrong in your diagnosis?

If we understand that there is no one to one correllation of words to phenomenal objects outside of us, how can we hope to find any kind of correllation at all between the workings of two completely unique and experientially distant minds? How can you develop a series of dialogic symbols for unique feelings--feelings no one else has?

We can't. If we could, the human world would be a much better place. As humans, understanding other people's emotions involves several cues, only the least important of which resides with the other person him/herself.

• You notice something is wrong with X based on a survey of his/her complexion and demeanor. He/she appears to be Y
  
• You ask X if something is wrong (error checking).
• X says he/she is Y (we'll say he/she is "sad")
• You remember sad. You remember how other people have looked when they were sad. You remember why they say they were sad. You remember the context, nothing about their actual emotions.
• You cross-reference this against the times you have fit into that context.
• You attempt to remember how you felt then.
• You assume they feel the same way now as you did then.
• You ask them, "Why, what happened?"
  

That one in italics is the tricky one--it's a big assumption. And, after making that assumption, there's no way to figure out if it was the correct assumption to make. So regardless of veracity, you continue to make that assumption.

His sadness must be like my sadness. Is it? Often, I think, it's not at all like your sadness.

Why do some people have unexpected and strange reactions to anti-depressants and other psychotropic drugs? Is it because certain chemicals have different functions in different people? Perhaps because a drug designed to boost A also has an unexpected and undocumented affect on B? These are the prevailing thoughts I think, and they're probably correct very often.

Doesn't it also seem likely though, that the misstep might be happening in the process of diagnosis, when a doctor has to decide on whether medication is a good idea? The doctor looks at what the patent has told him: I'm depressed, I'm paranoid, I can't sleep. Once again comes the big assumption of correllating depressed, paranoid insomniac with previous--successfully treated--depressed, paranoid insomniacs.

Of course that's what all the training is for, to make those distinctions and judgements. But no amount of training can really get you access to the raw emotions that drive people.

At the level of human thought though, there can really be very little separation between emotions and the words you use to describe them. I express emotions to myself all the time in terms of words. It's a highly abstract association kind of thing. It's the kind of thing I've learned not to share with others, because the words I use to describe something new and peculiar to me (something lacking a culture-wide symbol like sadness) are not the words other people would use. I know these people wouldn't have used those words because they look like the culturally understood confused and worried.

How many times have you heard someone--or thought to yourself--I'd love to get this off my chest, but I don't want to worry X? Why do we say that? I think there are two possibilities, and each is rooted in what we call fear.

1. We worry that our feelings have never been experienced by the other person, and that we'll seem broken somehow, like non-functional humans.
2. We have, at a fundamental level, the knowledge that language just isn't good for certain things. We fear our own inability to articulate.
   

The first instance seems vaguely Freudian, but I'm not sure. I haven't exposed myself to much Freud because psychoanalysis hasn't been hip since . . . well, whenever Woody Allen stopped making good movies. I'm almost positive, however that almost all instances of case 1 can be subsumed into case 2.

What then of empathy? I think this is a special case. It can't be learned the way someone can be trained in psychiatry. For those that are considered to have it, it just is. They have a natural gift for understanding, without words, a person's feelings. It seems like empathy would have to be pre-cognitive, existing somewhere outside the region of the brain infected with language because everything touched by language becomes almost indivisible from it. Emotions exist on some kind of hinterland.

It's amazing and beautiful and I'm positive that I don't have it. I have, however, had profound connections with certain people that seem to transcend the barriers of language. My relationships with these people feel empathetic. I feel like I know what they're experiencing, sometimes when they don't. I've used this for good and evil. But it's not like a latent connection. It's an understanding born of proximity, study, sanguinity, infuriation, and above all, I think, luck. I connect with these people, I think, because the words I'd use to describe my emotions are somehow very close to the words they'd use. Like somehow, in the course of these lives, we've selected similar word sets to describe similar emotions.

I don't think this happens very often, but when it does, your connection with the other person approaches empathy because, inexplicably, the interface of mind to language evolved the same way for you as it did for him/her.

It's amazing sometimes.

Anyway, this was never supposed to be organized, but I feel like I'm rambling, so I'm going to stop.

I figured I had paid my debt to society, by paying my overdue fines at the Multnomah County library.