My today's thesis is that we are not using many of the core words that describe out existence accurately enough and that is be a problem if Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true:
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, refers to the proposal that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH) itself is still a hot topic of discussions even though the hypothesis is almost 100 years old - to me it means that we are lacking the right tools, in this case in neuroscience.
To me, it feels right- if we are lacking enough compression or are drawing wrong boundaries around concepts, we will have problems communicating with others or understanding what we really want from life. Good words help narrow down the action space, make us understand what we are really after in life.
At the same time, sure, there are tribes that cannot count past three and these guys would have a problem adapting into our civilization, but do we operate differently at some fundamental level? I would have a hard time saying whether this color is pink or orange and apparently it is called salmon, but does it really matter in this case? In my opinion not that much, unless your wife wants just this particular color in her room.
Back to the inaccurate use of words though - regardless of SWH, I think we can do better and work on our language to redesign it a bit. Take for instance the word love - to a first approximation, love is about feeling good about placing one's attention on someone or something. We use phrases like I loved him throughout his life and while it's fine, it doesn't describe the details of the relationship throughout the stages. Ancient Greeks were more sophisticated and would have divided this love relationship into stages, starting with eros and going to philia. Is it way better? I would say yes, because it sets certain expectations at each stage, thus leading to certain actions.
Happiness is another vague word: it describes linking/enjoying the state of consciousness at a given time. However, the boundary of prerequisites for one to feel happy is quite arbitrary: whereas for me the boundary of feeling happy is about living in a country without war and with warm water, for someone else happiness might mean getting a new car every year. That's quite an extreme case of hedonic treadmill, yet so many people do it. That's the reason I my boundary for happiness is quite low, to not get too caught up in it.
Other words that, to me, are too vague or are used interchangeably, which should not be the case are:
- progress vs. change: whereas progress has a vector direction upwards, a change can be negative.
- wanting something vs. dreaming about something: we say we want this or that, but if we are not making any effort towards it, do we really want it and are personally committed or simply are dreaming about it? I am dreaming about lots of things, but I also have approximately 50 years of my life left which is only slightly over 26 million minutes.
- consciousness, the famous c-word: what the hell is it even is, is it like an oomph in a car that will be broken down into scientific terms if science progresses enough?
Just to finish, a piece of advice: do your mental audit - language is a living thing that we all create!
