[nonrandomstring]

Why not "unable to express at all"?

Maybe you prefer the "languages are like Turing complete" argument? You've heard of Russell's paradox and Godel's incompleteness, I am sure. Wouldn't a concept that escaped our capacity, be by definition unthinkable? Someone literally can't think of an example.

So maybe we should approach it a different way - is there any possibility for the "existence" of a concept that could not be successfully communicated at all, say between a human adult and a 5 year old child, or the the adult and an advanced alien being?

If concepts exist only in the mind, that are more than literal depictions of physical reality, surely here must be conceits thinkable in some systems but not in others. (I am probably just replaying Douglas Hofstadter here)

The alternative is that every language is kinda "complete" and I could spend three hours trying to explain what a Alpha-Centurion has one word for.

Edit: sorry our discussion is getting down-voted for bizarre reasons. Is there a kind of racist/anti-pluralist thing here on HN?

[hnfong]

Russell's paradox speaks of logical contradictions. Language is full of logical contradictions, but it's fine to us (not to logicians though).

Similarly Gödel speaks of consistent proofs in logical systems. His incompleteness theorem talks about either a system has statements it cannot prove (but they can expressed!), or is inconsistent. Since natural language is probably not that consistent, the whole issue is moot.

It should be possible to show under some loose conditions that all natural languages are "Turing complete". Even the halting problem does not impose a problem -- we're really not interested in telling whether long-running computation halts in natural language. The expressivity is guaranteed by not insisting on strict consistency in language.

(PS: the situation changes where there is a mandate to only speak things that are "correct", for example, censorship. Now you get into the realm where something might be technically "correct" but the decision algorithm is imperfect and does not allow you to speak that truth)

> is there any possibility for the "existence" of a concept that could not be successfully communicated at all, say between a human adult and a 5 year old child, or the the adult and an advanced alien being?

I don't think so as long as the concept is constructed from physical objects or shared emotions/feelings.

There is a problem with something that can only be subjectively felt though. Let's say some alien can see the X-ray spectrum. How does the alien communicate to humans what the colors look and feel like?

But this is kinda off-topic.

[nonrandomstring]

> There is a problem with something that can only be subjectively felt though. Let's say some alien can see the X-ray spectrum. How does the alien communicate to humans what the colors look and feel like?

This is the kind of thing I'm thinking of, it's an old philosophical chestnut in epistemology.

Godel and Russell are relevant because we can always look for meaningful statements that can be well formed under wone system but not under another.

> But this is kinda off-topic.

I had theory about that. It's so _on topic_ to be discussing the nature of language itself in a time when the biggest festival in town is "Large Language Models". Nobody so violently attacks a comment unless it hits a nerve, And I don't want to believe that my fellow HN commenters are simple racists. I think some people worry about basing the computing work on something as precarious and pluralistic as language. And they'd be right to.

[stickfigure]

> This is the kind of thing I'm thinking of

I think you're focusing too much on language. If two humans (who experience similar things) can communicate, they'll figure out how to express themselves. Hell, they don't even necessarily need language.

The problem with a human and an alien trying to communicate is not that they speak different languages. The problem is that may experience different things (xrays, slitheryness, whatever).

I don't think a Japanese human is so different from a (say) English human.

[nonrandomstring]

> If two humans (who experience similar things) can communicate, they'll figure out how to express themselves.

An important point of agreement. Human experience absolutely transcends language (late Wittgenstein language games). Ninety percent of interaction being non-verbal has been a pet issue of mine throughout the post-pandemic descent into remote work, and a videoconf culture.

> I don't think a Japanese human is so different from a (say) English human.

Of course not. It's not the tangible differences that are of interest so much as why geographically separated groupings that are ostensibly the same beings, select and amplify certain features of human experience, and downplay others. That cultural development is complex and intricate. It encodes bits of history like old power relations, common achivements or sufferings. That information gets handed down by language as much as epigenetics.

The reason I am focusing a lot on language is that we're in an "age of language models". The dominant ones are English. But English is a particular way of structuring ideas about the world. This is something we should be paying close attention to, and almost any time people mention "AI" these days the topic is really about language.

BTW I am neither Japanese nor overly interested in their culture, except in a mildly curious and positive geeky way. It's probably coincidental that the last two topics I commented on here, which were "disappeared", involved Japanese culture. Probably. I'm sorry if what I said came across wrong, but it really gave me pause for thought about latent racist undertones here on HN. Probably best to forget about it now, but I'll be keeping an eye on that.

[drdeca]

The issue I see with the "can't express at all" view, is that, if it can't be expressed, then how do newborns learn to speak the language?

If from some sequence of sense perceptions, a child can learn to associate some word(s) with some concept, why couldn't one describe that sequence of sense perceptions in another language, and have the listener, by imagining those sense perceptions, grasp the concept?

Now, I don't want to be absolutist about that. Maybe some concepts get attached to some words through ways other than what sense perceptions pick out, somehow? Like, maybe when discussing theology or whatever, God intervenes and influences what meanings people learn for different words? (like, in a way that can't exactly be formalized and expressed in terms of math, sense perceptions, and any ideas that might be built-in to the human mind which one might intuitively associated with some combination of the previous two?)

But, outside of things like that, I would expect that meanings for words that are shared among an identifiable collection of people, can be explained in any of the most common natural languages.

(Though, maybe not so much for the meanings or aspects of meanings that are specific to one person.)

Unless there is some mechanism by which a meaning could be communicated from one person to another child-person, which can't be replicated with another language.

Now, that's all just for concepts between humans. For the Alpha-Centurion, perhaps they could have some innate ideas which they could learn words for, but which we would not learn to associate the idea with the word if we were given analogous sense perceptions, because we don't have those ideas built in to us? This also doesn't seem likely to me, but I seem to have less argument against it than I do for the same thing for the analogous thing between different human languages.

We should still be able to describe the statistics of how they use certain words together though, and how this correlates to the world, or at least, the world as described through those concepts that we can comprehend. And, perhaps we could also describe the statistics of what words they would use to describe the ways in which our description of how they use the words (including correlation with aspects of the world that we comprehend), falls short of the true meaning of the words.

There's an idea of "semantic primes", supposedly semantically irreducible concepts, that can't be defined except in terms of words that would be defined in terms of these (though, one might ask, "couldn't one pick some other collection of concepts as the base case instead?" and idk what the counterargument is), and which supposedly every natural human language has a word for each of these (though the word might not only mean one of these semantic primes/primitives, possibly having other meanings as well).

The idea goes that every word in any natural human language can ultimately be expressed in terms of these primitive concepts (of which there are supposedly like 65).

If this is true, then no idea in any natural human language would be entirely untranslatable to any other human natural language.

But, it does raise of course raise the question, "what if there was something else beyond these 65 or so, that we (humans) lack the concept of?" (which is I think similar to the question you were raising)

[nonrandomstring]

I like the idea of semantic primes and was pondering it these last couple of days.

If there are irreducible "experiences" with corresponding symbols then it sorta makes sense to follow a mathematical analogy that other ideas can be 'factored' into them. But we don't know that for sure about neural computers or brains.

On the other hand the problem may be constructive rather than reductive. If ideas are like chemical compounds we may know that some exist but have no known path to create them. Using your analogy, that would be like trying to guess prime factors or some special sequence of operators to get from A to B.

I'm still left with the strong intuition that some groups build a repetoire of ideas ineffable in another tongue.