Wittgenstein was only half right
Language also shapes consciousness.
We talked about Wittgenstein three months ago
It was about his famous quote that shocked the entire philosophical community
Anything unspeakable
We have to keep quiet.
In that video we were talking about the boundaries of language
The discussion is about the fate of AI trapped in a language bottle
But today I'm going to flip this coin.
Show you the other side
Because Wittgenstein was only half right.
Hello
Hello.
I am Wang Lijie
Wittgenstein says
The boundaries of language are the boundaries of the world
There are two layers of meaning hidden in this sentence
Many people have heard of the first floor
It's something other than language, you can't tell.
So it must be silent
But the second floor
Few people savor it carefully
Now listen up.
If the boundaries of language are the boundaries of the world
It's the other way around.
How rich is your language?
How big is your world?
What is the structure of your language?
What shape does your mind have?
This is not a philosophical slogan
Not chicken soup for Moments
And this is a cognitive science fact that's been proven over and over again.
In the last century, there were two linguists.
Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Wolf
He put forward a famous hypothesis.
Academics call it
Principle of linguistic relativity
The core proposition is only one sentence
What language do you speak?
What world do you live in?
Not a metaphor
Is literal
I know you might think this is an exaggeration
Isn't language just a tool?
I think in Chinese and I think in English.
Would the conclusion be different?
Don't worry.
Let me show you a few experiments.
And you're probably going to have to re-examine your brain.
Those thoughts you thought you came up with
The first experiment
About color
In English.
Blue is blue.
One word, blue
From the light blue of the sky to the navy blue at night
But it's different in Russian
The Russian language has two completely independent basic color words
Goluboy for light blue, siniy for dark blue
Attention
This is not an adjective modification like light blue and dark blue in Chinese.
They're two fundamentally different words.
Just like red and orange are two completely different colors to you
Year 2007
Boroditsky, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University
And her team did a very elaborate experiment.
It was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They got Russian speakers and English speakers
And at the same time, look at the color blocks that flash across the screen.
Determine if two blue squares are the same color
It turned out that
When two color blocks, one is light blue and the other is dark blue
Russian speakers react significantly faster than English speakers
And here's the thing.
When scientists had these Russian speakers do color judgments
Perform a language jamming task simultaneously
Like having them mentally recite a string of numbers.
occupies the language processing channel
That speed advantage disappears.
But if the jamming mission is spatial
Does not occupy a language channel
The speed advantage still exists
What does that mean?
Language is not an afterthought.
The moment you see a color, language intervenes.
Your vocabulary
It's your perceptual filter.
You have the word
Your brain is faster at recognizing the difference.
You don't have the word
Of course you can see it too
But your brain puts them into the same category by default.
Slow and rough
Think about what that means.
You learn from the language of fiction
Before you know it
It has been decided for you.
What differences are worth noting in this world?
What differences can be ignored?
The second experiment was even more shocking
Regarding time and space
Boroditsky is in a place called Pomprao in northern Australia.
We studied an Aboriginal tribe.
They speak Kukutayore.
Now, this language has one amazing feature.
It doesn't have left and right.
You heard right
There's no such thing as left or right in their language.
They describe all spatial relationships using absolute positions
southeast northwest
No matter what the situation is
They all say
Pass me the cup southeast of you.
or
There's an ant on your north foot
Say every sentence with a direction
You have to predict where the north is
That sounds like an inconvenience.
It has the opposite effect.
Because their language forces them to speak before
Location must be sensed at all times
Everyone in this tribe
Including children
Have an amazing sense of direction
In a completely unfamiliar indoor environment
Without the sun, without reference
They can also pinpoint the southeast and northwest
And those of us who speak Chinese and English
You can't tell north from south by turning twice in a closed room
But the highlight was Boroditsky's experiment with time.
She gave these people a set of photographs.
For example, the process of changing a person from childhood to old age
Let's put them in chronological order.
English speakers, without exception, go from left to right.
Because English is written from left to right.
Hebrew speakers from right to left
Because Hebrew is written from right to left
What about the Kukutayore?
They row from east to west
If they sit facing south
The photo is from left to right
If they sit facing north
The photo is from right to left
If you sit facing east
The photo is spread in the direction of your body
Their mental timeline is not fixed to their bodies
It's fixed to the ground.
Follow the sun
From East to West
You savor this
They perceive time differently than we do.
It's not that they voluntarily chose a different arrangement
It's their language that installed them from birth.
A completely different spatiotemporal operating system
Language isn't describing their world.
Languages are building their world
This is the missing half of Wittgenstein's quote.
Language boundaries are more than just walls
Block your view beyond the wall
The boundaries of language are a scaffolding
It holds up your entire cognitive structure inside the walls.
How you categorize the world, your sense of time
Your intuition of cause and effect, your sense of social hierarchy
It all runs on top of the underlying operating system, the language
Speaking of which
I have to talk about a topic that touches me personally
Semantic collapse in Buddhist translation
We Chinese read Buddhist scriptures
Probably the first core concept I encountered was suffering
The Truth of Suffering
Kuji Mie Dao
All beings suffer
See the word suffering
What does the brain of a native Chinese speaker automatically associate with?
Pain, sadness, breakup, bad luck, bad days
This is the semantic attractive force field of the word bitter in Chinese
But the word that the Buddha said
Pali is dukkha.
It's duhkha in Sanskrit.
The etymology of the word has several interpretations in academic circles
One of the most popular ones is particularly picturesque
Du means bad or difficult, kha
It means hole in ancient Sanskrit
Especially the shaft hole in the center of the wheel
The word duhkha refers to the axle hole of the wheel
And the bearings are not installed properly.
The wheels were thudding, thudding, swaying, bumpy, fraying.
Imagine that picture
An ox cart is walking down a dirt road
Wheels and axles are not aligned
Every step is rubbing
Every step wears away
This image doesn't convey pain.
It's not aligned.
There is a gap between your expectations and reality
It's what you think the world should be like
And the way the world actually works
The Buddha said suffering
I'm not telling you that life is miserable
To live is to suffer
What he did was a sophisticated diagnosis
There is a systematic misalignment between your cognitive system and the real world
It's like the wheel and axle aren't aligned.
Aimed
The car runs smoothly
This is an engineer's accurate description.
Not the catharsis of a pessimist
But the moment the word bitter was translated into Chinese
The meaning collapses
The word suffering is too emotional
It has allowed Chinese readers for two thousand years
Before I have a deep understanding of Buddhism
He was led into a pessimistic emotional channel
How many people are suffering because of the word suffering?
Stopped at the gate of Buddhism and said something
Buddhism is too negative
Then he turned and walked away.
It's not the translator's problem.
Kumarashi is also good
Xuanzang is also good
They are the greatest translators in the history of human civilization
But language is so domineering
Every word has an attractive force
You throw foreign concepts into this attractive force field
It must be distorted
Translation is not transportation
It was recast with a mold of a different shape.
The shape of the mold
It's the structure of the host language.
Think of another example.
In English, it's used all over the world now.
One word, mindfulness
Chinese translation into mindfulness
But the Pali word for mindfulness
Is sati
The original intention is to remember, remember
And the central message is can you not be distracted in every single moment?
Remember what you are doing
Remember the teachings of the law
It's closer to continuous awareness and memory.
But the Chinese translation of mindfulness
Added a orthography
It subtly implies that there is a right thought that you need to maintain
A specific state of mind is called positive
The English translation of mindfulness
With a mind ful
And it suggests that this is a state of mental preoccupation.
Transforms a dynamic process in the practice into a static spiritual filling
After every translation
Every time you pass through a language
Original concepts are being reshaped by the semantic attractive force field of the host language
So you think you're studying Buddhism?
In fact, what you study is
From Pali to Sanskrit to Chinese
Or from Pali to English to Chinese.
Every node in this translation chain is left
Dharma after Transfiguration
It's not that what you've learned is false
It means you need to have this awareness
What you are receiving is not the original signal
It is a signal that has been encoded and decoded many times
Know this
You can consciously restore those dimensions lost in translation
So let me take this finding a step further.
If language shapes how individuals perceive
Do different languages shape the collective consciousness of different civilizations?
Chinese is a highly context-dependent language
The same word can have completely different meanings in different contexts
What is the way of thinking trained in Chinese?
It's relational. It's holistic. It's contextual.
You don't look at the context.
Just look at one word.
I often don't know what I'm talking about.
English is a relatively low-context language
Grammar rules are more explicit
The subject-verb-object structure is more rigid
The way of thinking trained in English is more analytical
Linear, emphasizing the causal chain between subject and action
Please pay attention to the sentence pattern of English news.
It's always who did what that led to.
The subject is particularly clear
Responsibilities are particularly clear
What about Chinese news?
It can often be written as something happened
subject obscured
It doesn't matter who did it
What happens is important
Look at Japanese again
How complex is the Japanese honorific system?
You talk to your superiors and you talk to your subordinates.
The conjugations of verbs are different
You haven't said anything yet
Your choice of grammatical form is already declaring
The social hierarchy between you and the other person
So some people say
The Japanese don't think before they speak
It's about making relationships and then organizing language.
The social perception radar of Japanese speakers
Much more sensitive than English speakers
It's not natural
Language is trained from an early age
It's not about which is more advanced.
It's saying that every language is like a lens.
It allows you to see something clearly
But at the same time, it must make something else deform or disappear
You just stack polygonal lenses together
It is possible to approach the reality beyond the lens
That's why I've been doing interdisciplinary, intercivilizational dialogue.
Not because you can't chew more
But because behind every language tradition
Has a complete set of cognitive operating systems
The Pali tradition of Buddhism opens a window
The English tradition of modern cognitive science opens another window
The ancient Chinese tradition of Chinese Taoism has opened another window
Every window sees a different side of the same world
You're standing in front of one window.
And you would think that that slice in the window would be the whole world.
The Buddha himself was well aware of this trap of language
He repeatedly emphasized
Fa is a raft
For crossing the river
When you get to the other side, you have to let go
Language refers to the fingers of the moon
Not the moon itself
He saw it clearly 2,500 years ago
Language is a tool with insurmountable systematic biases.
Wittgenstein independently reached almost the same conclusion more than 2,000 years later
But he only told one side of the coin.
Anything unspeakable
We have to keep quiet.
The other side should be
Anything that can be said
It's been shaped by words.
Your silence is limited by words
Your expression is also limited by language
You don't see the world through a clean window.
You see the world through a colored glass.
Your mother tongue.
That's the color of the glass.
I'll leave you with one last thought that makes me shiver late at night.
If human consciousness is shaped by language
What about AI?
The large language model is trained primarily in English
The way it thinks, the way it classifies the world.
The way it deals with causality
Has it been deeply shaped by the English operating system?
When you speak to an AI in Chinese that has been trained primarily in English
How much of your answer is a projection of English thinking?
Further down, AI.
The trained corpus covers dozens of major human languages
But they represent a tiny fraction of the total human language.
Humans have more than 7,000 languages
Each encodes a unique cognitive model
Languages that are dying
Cognitive approaches encoded in languages that have never been digitized
Is it lost forever?
The world of AI
Will it be from the beginning
Just one.
A world severely distorted by survivorship bias
I have no answers to these questions.
But they point to a more fundamental truth
We tend to think that consciousness comes first.
Language was a later tool for expressing consciousness.
But the truth may just be the other way around
Language is not a servant of consciousness
Language is the architect of consciousness
A large part of human consciousness
It's built brick by brick by language.
Have you ever had that experience?
A vague feeling in my heart
You can't tell what it is.
But the moment you finally find a word to describe it
The feeling suddenly became clear
As if it were just a fog before it was named
Named by a language, it solidifies into a concrete thing.
This is not an illusion.
Naming itself shapes your inner experience
Areas of consciousness not illuminated by language
May stay in chaos forever
So the relationship between language and consciousness
It's not a relationship between who comes first and who comes after, who is master and who is servant
It is a co-evolutionary relationship that shapes and achieves each other
Consciousness provides the raw material for language to express
Language provides a structured framework for consciousness.
The two have co-evolved over hundreds of thousands of years
Has been entangled to the point where it cannot be separated
What does that mean?
It suggests the relationship between language and consciousness.
Much deeper than we usually imagine
Language is not a container for thinking.
Language is the shape of thought.
So the next time you come across a passage of scripture, a paper, a piece of news
When you feel you already understand
Stop for a second
Ask yourself a question
You understand
That's what it's really about.
Or is it the version rendered by your language operating system for you?
There is no standard answer to this question
But just asking this question
Your cognition has been upgraded by a small version
Do you think language has a significant impact on your thinking?
Have you ever learned a foreign language?
Suddenly discovered some concepts that the mother tongue could not express at all
The comment area is waiting for you.
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.