>I think that Wittgenstein had it right when he said: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him."

Why would we not? We live in the same physical world and encounter the same problems.

adamzwasserman 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

You're actually proving Wittgenstein's point. We share the same physical world, but we don't encounter the same problems. A lion's concerns - territory, hunting, pride hierarchy - are fundamentally different from ours: mortgages, meaning, relationships.

And here's the kicker: you don't even fully understand me, and I'm human. What makes you think you'd understand a lion?

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beeflet 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Humans also have territory, hunting and hierarchy. Everything that a lion does, humans also do but more complicated. So I think we would be able to understand the new creature.

But the problem is really that the lion that speaks is not the same creature as the lion we know. Everything the lion we know wants to say can already be said through its body language or current faculties. The goldfish grows to the size of its container.

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adamzwasserman 3 days ago | parent [-]

You've completely missed Wittgenstein's point. It's not about whether lions and humans share some behaviors - it's about whether they share the form of life that grounds linguistic meaning.

	▲	zeroonetwothree 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think humans would be intelligent enough to understand the lion's linguistic meaning (after some training). Probably not the other way around. But it's a speculative argument, there's no real evidence one way or another.

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andoando 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Thats only a minor subset of our thoughts. If you were going hiking what kind of thoughts would you have? "There are trees there", "Its raining I should get cover", "I can hide in the bushes", "Im not sure if I cna climb over this or not". "There is x on the left and y on the right", "the wind went away" etc etc etc etc.

The origins of human language were no doubt communicating such simple thoughts and not about your deep inner psyche and the complexities of the 21st century.

There's actually quite a bit of evidence that all language, even complex words, are rooted in spatial relationships.

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adamzwasserman 2 days ago | parent [-]

You're describing perception, not the lived experience that gives those perceptions meaning. Yes, a lion sees trees and rain. But a lion doesn't have 'hiking', it has territory patrol. It doesn't 'hide in bushes', it stalks prey. These aren't just different words for the same thing; they're fundamentally different frameworks for interpreting raw sensory data. That's Wittgenstein's point about form of life.

	▲	andoando 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Why do you assume they're fundamentally different frameworks? Just because wittgenstein said it?

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goatlover 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

We haven't been able to decode what whales and dolphins are communicating. Are they using language? A problem SETI faces is whether we would be able to decode an alien signal. They may be too different in their biology, culture and technology. The book & movie Contact propose that math is a universal language. This assumes they're motivated to use the same basic mathematical structures we do. Maybe they don't care about prime numbers.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem explores an alien ocean that so different humans utterly fail to communicate with it, leading to the ocean creating humans from memories in brain scans broadcast over the ocean, but it's never understood why the ocean did this. The recreated humans don't know either.

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adamzwasserman 3 days ago | parent [-]

The whole "math is a universal" language is particularly laughable to me considering it is a formal system and the universe is observably irregular.

As I am wont to say: regularity is only ever achieved at the price of generality.

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zeroonetwothree 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Many mathematical structures are 'irregular'. That's not a very strong argument against math as a universal descriptor.

	▲	adamzwasserman 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		see reply above

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andoando 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Think about what math is trying to formalize

	▲	adamzwasserman 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Math formalizes regularities by abstracting away irregularities - that's precisely my point. Any formal system achieves its regularity by limiting its scope. Math can describe aspects of reality with precision, but it cannot capture reality's full complexity. A 'universal language' that can only express what fits into formal systems isn't universal at all: it's a specialized tool that works within constrained domains.