Does language increase what it is possible to think and experience? Do people with limited language ability have a less full life?
I'm casually developing some sort of mental model or representation of experience. I hesitate to characterize it as just that, but I have to start somewhere. I could say that it's a model of human experience, or the experience of reality, or the ultimate big picture. So you may not already know what I'm talking about. I want to include everything, but I don't want to go into detail immediately. I want the physical universe to be included, but at the same time, I have to acknowledge that I conveyed that idea to you through this sentence. This means I need to include language in the big picture. I also have been focused on there being another aspect of this picture, and that is the idea that there is something we might call subjective reality, something that everyone and possibly everything experiences. This subjective reality aspect that everyone experiences is confined to the experiencer, so much so, that it may be one in the same with who or what one really is, or with one's identity.
In this post, you get to read an un-well-thought-out version of this idea that there are three aspects to anything that can be thought, observed, or discussed.
One aspect is the physicality of the thing. For example, if we consider a pair of glasses, there is an aspect of the pair of glasses that you can touch. I am actually considering the pair of glasses that I am wearing as I write this. So, at least for me, there really is something for me to feel. I can take them off, fold them up, hold them in my hands, put them back on, and so on. They are really there, I can see and feel them, they make a sound when I set them down on the desk.
It is obvious that everything that you can touch or feel has this physical aspect. I am saying that everything in addition to those things that you can touch or feel also have this aspect. So most of you can only imagine the glasses I have just described. But where are your ideas coming from? You couldn't have these ideas if your physical nervous system wasn't processing the information you just read about my glasses. So, forget the fact that you can't see or touch my glasses, but realize that there is a process going on in your body that is making you or allowing you to think about my glasses. This is a physical process involving physical tissue and physical signals in your nervous system. I don't know much at all about physiology, but I am saying that when I think about something that I don't actually see or feel, there is still a physical component of that thing, whatever that thing is. That component is somewhere, primarily inside me, and I call it an aspect of that thing - the physical aspect.
The subjective aspect of something is what is going on in your mind about that thing. I don't want to say what is going on in your brain, because that is physical. The aspect I am talking about now is thought. I am thinking about this in a different way than what causes thought to happen, so I am not referring to the electrochemical processes that produce thought. I am not denying that they are there, obviously, because that is the physical aspect of things which I've already started discussing. But it seems to me that there is a whole world of stuff going on in my head. And it is not just that I know it is there because I experience it somewhat like a physical thing. What is different about this aspect is that only I experience it. When you think about something, at the moment you are thinking about it, you are alone in that those are your thoughts about that thing. But I don't want to emphasize the idea that you are thinking about a thing. I want to point out that you are thinking, you are feeling, you are seeing, and that you are doing it. Another way of looking at it is that you don't wake up in someone else's body, experience the world as that person, then wake up in your body again and see that other person and talk to them. That is not the way things work for me. For me, it's only me. I have a memory that goes back to when I was very young, and I have no recollection of ever being anyone or anything other than that person who I am now. For that matter, I have no memories of being someone or something before I was born into this body. Anything I do, think, see, or experience in anyway is confined to me. And I think that is the way it is for everyone. It is actually kind of mysterious when you think about it. All the experiencing and living and thinking that you ever do is limited to your doing it in your body. This is the subjective aspect I am talking about. It could be extremely similar to what someone else experiences, but the plain fact is that it is still just you.
The remaining aspect creeps in while all this stuff is going on. That is the aspect of language. You can't really deny that it is here in this text, so you are trapped into accepting it. But why not simply reply that the text here is simply physical pixels on my computer, making that the physical aspect; and whatever gets into my head and starts turning around there becomes my subjective experience of the pixels, and that is the subjective or thought aspect? I suppose that could be the case, and that what I should really be writing about is that there are two aspects to everything instead of three. But I think language is so pervasive in the working out of what is really happening, that it often stands on its own as a separate aspect. Consider language that gets recorded and is then encountered but not understood by those who encounter it. It is as if the message of the language were once a subjective experience, along with the physical processes that produced that experience of course; and then the experience was expressed in language and recorded in another physical form of that language and is now completely in a physical form. But since it is observed to be language in some form, it begins to trigger subjective experiences in those observing it about what it means, and the process continues. So is language really an aspect of what happens in this cycle of subjective experience, physical expression of that experience, physical interpretation of that expression, and subjective experience of the interpretation? Or is language "not there", but instead just either subjective or physical, like everything else?
I don't know. It gets kind of abstract and weird at this point, so I just observe that, wherever these silly notions of "subjective reality" and "objective reality" are or come from, they seem to always be accompanied by expressions such as "subjective reality" or "objective reality". These are linguistic expressions. And although there seems to be something very limiting about the idea that our language might be an aspect of everything there is or can possibly be, it also seems to make sense that language is contributing to these questions being asked and is a part of any sense that might be made of where we are or what we are doing here.
I just wanted to add the consideration that I could go on to there being four, five, six, ten, or hundreds of aspects to reality, and that my model is therefore a waste of time because I'm approaching it the wrong way and limiting it too much. But I have just explained why I think two is not enough, and I think that three is really pushing it, as I have also just tried to explain. Given that these are my own weird thoughts about what the universe is all about, and that I am using language to consider whether there is something other than language to add to the entire universe and my own inescapable little world-part of it, I think that is enough. It is language that would allow me to imagine additional aspects, and I would be imagining them in linguistic form. So I will stick with language as a third aspect and will require no more. Even acknowledging the possibility of more aspects requires language and seems to complete the thought, so is explained by there being no more than three aspects to the possibility.
Maybe the fourth aspect is action. But, again, we already have a word for that: "action". And action doesn't seem to differentiate anything I've already been considering in physical reality, nor does it divide my own subjective experience in any significant way. But it was a good thought.
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