Derek McDaniel
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read

I completely expect that this article is wrong in its basic assertion, “a better grip on language does not change how you think”.

In my recent experience, developing knowledge around specific words has transformed the way I experience many things, including basic physical pain, as well as more complicated social angst and other experiences and emotions. What I describe about thinking, following, supports the possibility of this effect described in my mere personal anecdote.

This is my position: while there are “proto-linguistic” mental constructs or tokens, by which cognition can be performed without using external languages in our thinking, the performance of cognition necessarily creates and involves informational tokens characterized by a virtual mathematical identity in a mathematical space. These tokens can be either linguistic or proto-linguistic. Linguistic tokens can be interpreted and mapped to an informational form that can be performed in a social or peer based context. Proto-linguistic tokens cannot be, or such an interpretive form has not yet emerged. But either way, mind depends on physical structures imposing certain computational manipulations on these tokens within a virtual mathematical space. But the tokens, and the mathematical relationships defined between them, in the virtual mathematical space, determine the performance of cognition. The virtual space emerges based on a dynamic computational informational medium, which is in turn determined by the structural physical relationships of a physical system. Thus these tokens, once described mathematically, determine the performance of cognition, though perhaps with specific stochastic or conceivably(plausibly not) quantum variation. I mean, how else could it work? Anything else i can’t really see making sense. So yes, words are prerequisites for, and determinants of the thought abilities of mind.

This is a pretty natural perspective for programmers to realize with some exploration, because they are engaged in manually building crude versions of our rich biologically developed cognitive virtual environments in individuals and social linguistic virtual environments in peer cultural ecosystems.

Derek McDaniel

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Technology, programming, and social economy.