Tag Archives: Language

The Impending Doom of Written Language

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Sci Fi and Fantasy are often lumped together, but they are very distinct literary forms. The core difference is not simply whether the subject matter is dragons or space ships, but whether the subject matter is plausible or not. Whether it could become reality. Dragons could be Sci Fi if originating in a plausible manner and if they adhere to the laws of chemistry and physics. Conversely, a space ship becomes fantasy if it jumps through time and performs “science” feats what would consume fantastically implausible amounts of energy. Lots of Sci Fi fans are actually consumers of fantasy every bit as unrealistic as Lord of the Rings.

Really good Sci Fi is not merely plausible, but likely, even predictive. Great Sci Fi is unavoidable, or more aptly inescapable, given our current trajectory.

But even mind-boggling Sci Fi can often reflect a disappointing lack of imagination.

Take for example the obligatory transparent computer screen that we see in every Sci Fi show. Or even the bigger budget full-on 3-D holographic computer interfaces that provide eye-candy in every major feature nowadays. These look cool, but are probably pretty unimaginative. Plausible and likely, but crude interim technologies at best.

Take for example my own short Sci Fi story Glitch Death (see here). In it, I envision a future in which direct brain interfaces allow people to use computers to “replace” the reality around them with perceptual themes. In that future, we skip quickly past archaic holographic technology and beam our perceptions directly into the brain.

But even that only touches the surface. For example, why would a future direct-to-brain technology be limited to flashing words across our visual field and allowing us to hit “virtual buttons” floating in mid-air? To explain my thoughts on this, let’s digress and talk about math for a moment.

Today we have entered a time where math hardly matters anymore. Oh yes, we must of course understand the concepts of math. We must understand addition, division, and even the concepts of integrals and derivatives and more complex algorithms. But we don’t need to learn or know how to compute them. Not really. We have computers to handle the actual manipulative mechanics of numbers. Most of us don’t really need to learn the mechanics of math anymore, even if we use it everyday.

We are already well on the way there with language as well. We have devices that “fix” all of our spelling and formatting automatically. We don’t actually have to produce typographically correct written text. All we need to do is to communicate the words sufficiently for a computer to understand, interpret, correct, and standardize. We are at the verge of being able, like math, to simply communicate concepts, but not worry about the mechanics of language construction and composition.

So, back to my Sci Fi vision of the future of direct-to-brain interfaces and their likely ramifications. Interfaces like the one envisioned in Glitch Death would soon make written language, and perhaps much of verbal language, prohibitively cumbersome and obsolete. Why shoot words across our visual field, forcing us to read, comprehend, process, and assimilate? Why indeed when the computer could instead stimulate the underlying processed and interpreted symbols directly at their ultimate target destination in our brain. We wouldn’t need to actually read anything. We would simply suddenly know it.

In this situation, we would not need written material to be stored in libraries in any human recognizable language. It would be more efficiently housed in computer storage in a language-independent format that is most closely compatible with and efficiently transferrable into the native storage of the same concepts in the human brain.

In this future, all of which is directly in our path of travel assuming we survive our own follies, we deal at basic symbolic levels and tedious processes of math and language become largely offloaded. Forget tools to translate human languages. We will be able to simply discard them for a symbolic language that essentially transforms us into telepathic creatures. And in this form of telepathy, we don’t hear words in our head. We just transmit ideas and thoughts and understanding and experiences with the aid of our computer interfaces. The closest depiction in popular Sci Fi is perhaps the implantation of memories in the 1990 film “Total Recall.”

A real fascinating unknown to me is, how would humans process and interact without language? Do we require at least an internal language, internal dialogue, to function? I have always wanted to be a subject in an experiment to be made to forget all language, say by hypnosis or drugs, and to experience functioning without it. Like a dog might process the world. Technology may inevitably force that experiment upon us on a huge social scale.

It’s not true that “A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Magic would defy the fundamental restrictions of physics and chemistry. That’s how we’d know the difference. A telepathic future facilitated by direct-to-brain computer interface is Science Fiction, not Fantasy.

Synonyms and Morality

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moralwebThe purpose of a thesaurus is to help us to find synonyms; that is, words that have exactly or nearly the same meaning as another. But in truth, there are very few exact synonyms. The vast majority of synonyms, while generally related, each have very distinct and important nuances of meaning. A thesaurus alone doesn’t help us to appreciate those critical distinctions. In fact, it tends to minimize and obscure those differences by creating the impression that all of the synonyms are interchangeable.

The proper use of a thesaurus is to help us think of the right word, the better word, the exactly perfect word to precisely convey a particular meaning. The harmful and more common use of a thesaurus is to simply pick a different synonym so that we don’t repeat the same word twice in a paragraph. The good use of a thesaurus expands the richness of the language. The bad use of a thesaurus compresses the language, destroying its richness and subtlety of meaning.

So a thesaurus should be used with tremendous caution. For example, when a young author looks up the word “supple” in a thesaurus, they may conclude that they can freely substitute it with agile or limber or lithe or flexible or spry. But each of these words has its own uniquely distinct and important meaning. To ignore these differences and misuse a synonym is frankly a terrible waste and diminishes the language tangibly.

One book that I’ve held on to for decades is “Choose the Right Word” by S.I. Hayakawa (found here). This is an essential reference for anyone who cares about language and writing. In this book the authors compare and contrast groups of synonyms to help you understand how they are different and therefore how and when to best use them. It is one reference book that you really can just pick up and read cover to cover for fun.

In fact, “Choose the Right Word” is not only mandatory for writers, but for readers as well. If the richness of meaning is lost on the reader, it is like listening to music through crappy speakers. The reader misses out on much of the brilliant nuance that makes the writing worth reading.

This morning I was thinking of a possible blog article on morals and ethics. So as soon as I got out of the shower I naturally consulted “Choose the Right Word.” According to Hayakawa, the words moral and ethical were once nearly synonymous but have recently diverged in meaning.  Moral is now generally used in a religious context while ethical is usually used in a more secular context. We talk about the morals of a priest or saint but the ethics of a lawyer or legislator. Moreover, morals has come to mean “personal conduct as set by an external code or standard” while ethics refers to “just and fair dealings with other people, not by the application of an external standard but by a pragmatic consideration of all aspects of a situation in light of experience.”

Or to put it more succinctly, “moral can often be taken to mean private, codified, rigid and a priori; ethical to mean public, improvisatory, flexible, and a posteriori.” As the authors point out we can “agree despite differing moral values on ethical ways to work together.”

The discussion then contrasts some related words. Upright suggests moral conviction while decent suggests an ethical concern for others. Virtuous suggests a personal life free from moral blemish while honorable suggests someone who deals with others in a decent and ethical manner.

These distinctions, like all such distinctions, are critical to gaining a nuanced understanding of the world. Even though these words are often thought of as synonymous, there are good reasons why conservatives and religious people are quite comfortable talking about morals but are wary of ethics. And there are likewise good reasons why liberals and nones are frightened by the word moral but are very happy to talk about ethics. Whether we are talking about morals and ethics or anything else, we must first understand the powerful nuances inherent in the language we employ. That is the only way to ensure that we are speaking to, and not talking past, each other to gain real understanding.

Ideas cannot be simplified into a few generic synonyms compressed down into a convenient thesaurus and a rich language is all we have to express them.