[Tor3]

"There are examples of tribal humans not being able to perceive a green square among blue squares, because their language does not have a word for the green color.

Similarly, some use the same word for blue and white, and are unable to perceive them as different colors."

Both of the above is false. There are a ton of different colors that I happen to call "red", that does not mean that I can't perceive them as different. That I don't call them "different colors" is completely irrelevant. And unable to perceive blue and white as different colors? (Maybe that was a joke?) Even a hypothetical language which only used a single word for non-black items, say, "color", for everything else, would be able to perceive the difference with zero problems.

Japanese use "aoi" for a set of colors which in English would be separated into "blue" and "green". I can assure you (from personal experience) that every Japanese speaker with a fully functioning visual system is perfectly able to perceive the difference between, in this case, blue and green as we would call them.

[numtel]

There's a Terence McKenna quote about this:

> So, for instance, you know, I’ve made this example before: a child lying in a crib and a hummingbird comes into the room and the child is ecstatic because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention, it’s just wonderful. I mean, it is an instantaneous miracle when placed against the background of the dull wallpaper of the nursery and so forth. But, then, mother or nanny or someone comes in and says, “It’s a bird, baby. Bird. Bird!” And, this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile, and o- places it over the miracle, and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum, and, from now on, the miracle is confined within the meaning of the word. And, by the time a child is four or five or six, there- no light shines through. They're- they have tiled over every aspect of reality with a linguistic association that blunts it, limits it, and confines it within cultural expectation.

[em-bee]

and what is this quote supposed to explain?

that language prevents a child from learning nuance? sounds like nonsense to me. a child first learns broad categories. for example some children as they learn to speak think every male person is dad. then they recognize everyone with a beard is dad, because dad has a beard. and only later they learn to differentiate that dad is only one particular person. same goes for the bird. first we learn hat everything with wings is a bird, and later we learn the specific names for each bird. this quote makes an absurd claim.

[nimonian]

Wittgenstein famously said "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

Alan Watts suggests people like Wittgenstein should occasionally try to let go of this way of thinking. Apologies if it is sentimental but I hope you'll give him a chance, it's quite short: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=heksROdDgEk

In reflection of all of this, I think that the quote you're responding to only meant to say that experiencing the world through language means building an abstraction over its richness. (I somewhat agree with you, though, that the quote seems a little dramatic. Maybe that's just my taste.)

One more thought.

I think there's a reason why various forms of meditation teach us to stop thinking. Maybe they are telling us to sometimes stop dealing with our abstractions, powerful though they might be, and experience the real thing once in a while.

[em-bee]

the way i read the quote it felt less like building an abstraction and more like destroying the richness.

but abstractions are mere shortcuts. but everything is an abstraction. to counter wittgenstein, language is not actually limited. we can describe everything to the finest detail. it's just not practical to do so every time.

physics, chemistry, we could describe a table as an amount of atoms arranged in a certain way. but then even atom is an abstraction over electrons, protons and neutrons. and those are abstractions over quarks. it's abstractions all the way down, or up.

language is abstractions. and that fits well with your meditation example. stop thinking -> remove the language -> remove the abstractions.

[snayan]

How can you know that we have language to describe everything in the finest detail? That suggests that we are omnipotent.

There's lots out there we don't know. And it seems to me that the further afield we go from the known, the more likely we are to enter territory where we simply do not have the words.

Can't speak to it personally, but I have heard from a number of people and read countless descriptions of psychedelic experiences being ineffable. Lol, actually, as I type, the mere fact that the word ineffable exists makes a very strong case for there being experience beyond words.

[em-bee]

ok, fair point. what i am trying to say is that when we see/experience something that we can not describe we can create new words for it. we see something, we can name it. this directly contradicts the idea that language is the limit and that we can't talk about things that we don't have words for. that claim just doesn't make sense.

the problem then is that these new words don't make any sense to anyone who doesn't see/experience the same, so it only works for things that multiple people can see or experience. psychedelic experiences will probably never be shared, so they will remain undescribable. quite like dreams, which can also be be undescribable.

[snayan]

I think about this often. I've really come to appreciate over the past year the ways language can limit and warp our perception of reality. I think we under appreciate preverbal thought, as it seems to me that verbal thought by it's very nature has passed through our egoic filter, and our perception tends to be biased by our previous lived experience.

Socrates, Einstein, Nietzsche, Mozart.... So many of the greats described some of their most brilliant flashes of inspiration as just having come to them. Einstein's line about pure logical thinking not yielding knowledge of the emperical world, I really think these guys were good at daydreaming and able to tap into some part of themselves where intuition and preverbal thought could take the wheel, from which inspiration would strike.

[red75prime]

Haha. I'd prefer for him to dance this sentence or something. To not detract from the marvel of being with crude words.

[reliabilityguy]

Very poetic, I like it.