The Trouble with Language

Welcome to winterastral. This is not anything significant.

The trouble with language is that language is truly very limited. I read a book of philosophy questions, and one talked about what it was like for a bat to be a bat. We might be able to imagine what it would be like to be a bat for us, but it's not possible to directly imagine what being a bat as a bat is like. It's an utterly foreign experience for us. This is what happens with language. Imagine a facial expression - a grimace perhaps. Now, imagine describing this grimace to someone who has never seen one. (Not that unlikely, actually.) You can describe all the fundamental features of this grimace, and the effect it would have on other people viewing it, but the actual impression - your personal view - is lost. There is something that cannot be defined using the words we have; an abstract concept floating, left behind in translation.

And even ignoring this first point, there is the much more pressing point of simply not having words for something. This is not entirely the fault of language itself - it is instead the fault of individual languages not having the words we need, or sometimes the word simply not existing in any form. Making up new words is not really a solution - when a concept or experience is an individual and personal one, what is the point of making up a word if nobody else understands what it properly means?

It's nicer to think abstractly as well. This has become difficult due to the nature of our culture, so our thoughts are often limited by the words we use so often. This certainly makes it easier to express things to others, but so much harder to get a better picture of the world, of everything.

I wish I could think in these abstracts. For now poetry will have to do.

I wish I'd hallucinate more. Every home is wired. No, this isn't poetry, if you were thinking that then