My current thought is that it would be useful to revisit the basic challenge of ‘inventing language’ so as to be able to share INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTUALIZATIONS that can trigger impressions of sense-experience reality.

 

Like Erich Jantsch in ‘Design for Evolution, I see THREE different options for approaching this challenge of designing language to deliver intellectual conceptual representations of sense-experience reality, a reality characterized by sense-experience of INCLUSION IN TRANSFORMATION which is NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT (wherein ‘everything is in flux’).

 

This ‘everything is in flux’ sense-experience reality is IMPOSSIBLE to capture in words (with explicit meaning) and one way around this is the Wittgenstein ladder or the Bootstrapping approach of using words-that-signify-things but arranging them (with GRAMMAR) so as to make use of the matrix of relations that can be thus prepared, so that the relations can be used to convey ‘reality’ in a manner that is not encumbered by the abstraction of ‘things-in-themselves’ as given by NAMING things.  That is, the NAMING, as in Wittgenstein’s ‘ladder’ description is only used to put together these THINGS as an expedient for building a WEB OF RELATIONS IN THE MIND.  For example, If my sense experience of wandering in the desert is that the landscape is transforming, that’s something naturally experience-able but impossible to capture in words since ‘everything is in flux’ and there is involvement of everything earth, sky, sun as my intuition informs me are ‘all related’ and thus the whole scheme of nature involved an UNBOUNDED relational Wholeness aka ‘the IMPLICATE ORDER in Bohm’s words, in which we, ourselves, are innately included.

 

I am speaking from the point of view of a LANGUAGE DESIGNER now, and while it is evident that there is no way of capturing in words, this UNDIVIDED WHOLENESS of the TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM, there is still open to me, some INFERENCE based schemes.  I could develop a RELATIONAL ACTIONS based representation scheme and develop a word vocabulary including forms such as DUNING as for example, ‘there is DUNING’ beyond the MOUNTAINING or the LAKING, so as to have my language grounded in MOVEMENT.  This is the approach taken by the indigenous aboriginals in their language architectural choice.  This corresponds to Jantsch’s level 1 reality where there is only flow and no fixed entities in the language architecture; i.e. DUNING is a relational forming and flowing which does not depend on the ONTOLOGICAL concept of ‘the DUNE’.

 

Now comes the interesting options where we (humanings in the flow) architect a language based on the abstract notion of LOCAL THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES and THEIR actions and developments.  This move has been described by Presocratic philosophers as coming bundled with THE BURDEN OF CONCRETENESS, meaning, that now we have invented a whole load of NAMING-instantiated notional things-in-themselves, we have burdened ourselves with having to come up with a scheme (a GRAMMAR) to manipulate these things, to make them move and grow or shrink or bloat or thin etc.  These OVERHEADS were NOT encountered in the RELATIONAL ACTIONS based language architecture.

(more…)