All words are metaphors, now add Western languages are agentic, Japanese is not. The problem CS ignored in language is that the arbitrariness in language leaves remarkably unmappable spaces between metaphors. In a way, LLMs are magic acts that expose language's Oz like tricks. Scaffolding idiomatic expressions inside that initial mess only reveals the trick's problem further.
Literal words don't mean anything specifically unless they have a context, which is idiosyncratic.
LLMs never are able to resolve the double whammy of lexemes and the conduit metaphor paradox. That's how they need constant specific supervision. They're babblers that have no idea what they're saying.
Coders can't debate this, this is the inherent problem to language that generative and NLP waves away in a sleight of hand trick. Study the initial conditions to language folks: language doesn't really mean anything.
I wouldn't say words are metaphors, I think of a metaphor as like a pointer, words are the actual mapping of arbitrary sounds to concepts that are relatively universally relatable to human experience. Children can learn language easily by associating those sounds with contemporaneous objects and situations from their experience. I feel like AIs will continue to be regurgitative borg-brains-in-a-vat until they have some semblance of a relatable, "lived" experience that they can map words to instead of just analyzing the patterns.
That's folk science, you've not studied linguistics.
That's a fallacy, you've not studied logic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Besides, I was largely agreeing and building on what you said (with a quibble over one word choice), so I'm not really sure what you're objecting to.
Of course I've studied logic, particularly Eastern lack of requirement of logic. Language is inherently paradoxical, its inception, development defies logic in its endless contradictions. It can't be revealed by logic. The very idea that language has something called words that are scientifically visible in the label conduit metaphor paradox indicates that language is probably our biggest contradiction.
Logic shows that you can prove anything from a contradiction. No logic means everything is true. So I don't think the rejection of logic is conductive to constructive conversation.
"Multiple contradictions in logic are complex statements where two or more propositions, taken together, assert the logical impossibility of their own truth, often resulting in two mutually exclusive conclusions"
if you understand logic, you may grasp logic was not required to reach any analytic conclusions in multiple contradictions, scientific discourse does just fine without it and probably needs to jettison logic en route to new formats.
I think you're making a mistake in placing "meaning" within "context", rather than intent. This is why language works. Yes, it is "vague", but it's often enough for us to understand what our interlocutor wants from us.
There is no such thing as intent. That's retrofitted. Meaning only emerges from the variations of task demands. We know this now from allocortex studies. Sure we can simulate meaning from our PFC, but that makes little difference if the simulation has zip to do with the action and mapping.
The real problem is where does the post-hoc nature of words interact with the world of actions? They're highly separable. In one hand we have conscious will created by words, on the other is the wordless world of memory integration, consolidation, cognitive mapping, planning. All thought is wordless, we know this as of 2016 in aphasia studies, the question is if the words are arbitrary, what we doing using them in place of thought? Are we dumb, insane, or just wiling to live in slumber using them to go nowhere? If you look around carefully, nowhere is where we're going, and fast.
Of course there is such a thing as intent. When you're hungry, you formulate a plan about getting something to eat, which you then execute. It's more correct to say that there is no such thing as a "statement". People don't go around declaring "The sky is blue.", "My dog's name is Zeus". People go around influencing the world to achieve their goals, including with language. When you say "There is no such thing as intent", this is less of a statement about the state of affairs, as much as an attempt to alter the reader's model of the world to align with yours, one that apparently doesn't include the concept of "intent". Same goes for all the statements I've made here. Language is an API for indirectly manipulating people's cognitive states.
There is no such thing as intent. That's folk science you're describing.
Thoughts aren't about things, they are things.
“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7415918/
btw the levels of folk science inhabiting engineering is tsunami. the whole field needs to be taught how to deal with the contradictions in scientific practice and discourse to get out of the vortex you've built for our species.
Just because I'm on Hacker News doesn't mean I'm an "engineer". In fact, my education is in linguistics, so the idea that we don't use language to think isn't novel to me (or relevant here). However, saying "there is no such thing as intent" is very strange. I've given you an example of intentionality in action, are you saying people don't act to bring about their desires? You seem to be refuting your thesis that "there is no such thing as intent" yourself by, for example, talking about your ideas here or having a startup. Which, I'm assuming, is trying to achieve something. That's intent by definition.
You're a linguist and you don't understand the difference between intent, a proposed state in brains in cog-science and intentionality, an arbitrary externalization? I find that impossible to believe a linguist doesn't grasp that distinction. And no, there is no such thing as beliefs, desire, intent as separate or even conflated states in brains. Start with Stitch eg Folk Science to Cog Sci the case against belief, and end up with that Brain—Cogntion Behavior Problem link above from Buzsaki. Study before you reply.
Probably you're not really a linguist, you're in a sub-field like NLP, generative or construction, which is only linguistics coded for engineers.
This is amateur hour in HN.
- I am using "intent" and "intentionality" in their everyday manner, which, ironically, would've been clear to you if you paid attention to my intent, rather than the "words" that you seem to loathe so. From Dictionary.com: intent — the act or fact of meaning to do something; intentionality — the fact or quality of being done on purpose or with intent.
- It's great that you mention Stitch, because what I'm trying to tell you is directly related to his theory as presented in e.g. Mindreading. What he terms "desire detection mechanisms" are what I'm referring to as our ability to discern intent, which is how you're able to make sense of other people's actions (whether verbal or non-verbal).
[flagged]
Antibabelic, I think you're arguing with a prankster. Look at this user's comments history, all they do is write obscure non sequiturs and rail against some vague conspiracy of CS (that's computer science, they seldom clarify) and engineering.
It's either a troll or someone with problems. Since the username is "mallowdram" (melodram(a)) I'm leaning towards prankster.
The specificity of what they're trying to say and long Google Docs documents (apparently with their personal name in them) make me incline towards the other option.
Why would you waste time caring one way or the other?
These aren't obscure non-sequiturs, and the very obvious AI bubble is indicative of a culture of CS that traded complexity for bypassing the dark matter of language, which is not disputable in majority of linguistics sub-fields. If you can't discourse with it, then it's smart not to lose your lunch over it. Just move on.
That appears to be meaningless. Please explain without using language.
If you understand the nature of language fully, then its ultimate function is to refute itself. In other words, all our use of arbitrary signals leads eventually to specific signals.
To make that simpler, each statement in any existing language is about replacing language.
I'll try to say this as politely as I can: I think this is a bot account.
Not only your two posts above read like word-salad, I went through your comments history and almost every comment of yours reads like this (except maybe a couple).
If so, could you maybe stop your experiment? I wasted time trying to parse your comment as if it was generated by a human.
I'm not a bot, I'm a neurobiologist with a start up that's about replacing the symbolic. and I'm pretty stunned at how inert CS is regarding language. You can find plenty of typos in my posts, and they're not all about this, they're about myth, causality, the symbolic.
To accuse a human of being a bot is really poor manners.
Far from word salads, they are based in deep theories from empirical demonstrations that words are our most fundamental illusions. If you want the deep research we use internally (about 100 citations) start here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cXtU97SCjxaHCrf8UVeQGYaj...
I suggest that CS has little ability to debates the scientific reality of language if posters are going to complain scientific statements that are defined and defendable are word salads.
That's a warning CS hasn't done its homework.
> I'm a neurobiologist with a start up that's about replacing the symbolic
What's your startup? What are your publications? That Google doc link is more word-salad and random quotes and citations.
What on earth is a "start up that's about replacing the symbolic"?
> If you understand the nature of language fully, then its ultimate function is to refute itself. In other words, all our use of arbitrary signals leads eventually to specific signals. To make that simpler, each statement in any existing language is about replacing language.
This is word salad, for example. You're not trying to "make it simpler", you're trying to obfuscate (or it's just random).
> That's a warning CS hasn't done its homework.
What's a "CS"?
Commenter says language carries no meaning. Why discuss? (How would you discuss?)
Ask Gemini
The idea that "language has no meaning" highlights the arbitrariness of language, meaning there's no natural, necessary connection between a word's form and its concept. The relationship between a word and what it signifies is a result of social convention and agreement within a linguistic community. For example, the sound of the word "dog" does not intrinsically resemble the animal itself; rather, we've all agreed to associate those sounds with the canine creature.
It's a much more banal claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_in_General_Linguistics#...
I meant the claim at the end of this comment: "language doesn't really mean anything." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372551
I'm fine with each sign being arbitrarily chosen at some point. People can even make that sound kind of cool with the Helen Keller "water" thing. But if the whole conversation is meaningless, that's a snoozer. I'd be happier staring at the clouds.
Speech by being is one thing, but words on the page have little hope of cohering semantic. This isn't theoretical physics, this is the transition of syntax from the writer (the task variable meanings that are no longer specific, they are arbitrary) into grammar/metaphors, beset by a paradoxical condition called conduit metaphor that dissolves access to that initial mental state, and lets the meaning run wild. Additionally, In functional linguistics, because the status, control, bias, manipulation, ie social elements are quite separate from the agentic, the dark matter of this warps access to meaning. Keller is a best case hypothetical. When we run long segments of text, you ask 20 people you get twenty meanings. So, yes, language is meaningless: it's arbitrary.
He doesn't mean to say the conversation is meaningless, just that the signs themselves have no intrinsic meaning, since they're arbitrary. Which, duh. It's a banal claim articulated poorly.
There's a little bit of ore here to mine (there are philosophical accounts of natural meaning, for example; see Paul Grice), but he mostly seems to just believe in a transcendental signified, and missed the boat on how incredibly rich the consequences of e.g. J. L. Austin and late Wittgenstein are for how we think about language.
Grice and Wittgenstein are good starts, but Cassirer, Basil Bernstein, Halliday, Reddy, Lakoff, Winograd, Stitch, Ryle, Givon, Deacon, Fontaine all weigh in on the notion that language doesn't cohere meaning. Each offers a different variation on whether any symbol, metaphor, grammar actually holds or refers to semantic. When animal signals are considered, we get to see specific signals in action (Rendall, Cheyney, Hauser) and it's here the conduit metaphor's glaring paradox becomes evident, even for speech. If an utterance can never generate the same or extremely similar metal state that generates an action repeatedly, then the utterance is arbitrary, it's for all better purposes meaningless.
It's not a "banal claim" it's the foundational property of language that excludes it from any biological specificity (direct relationship to survival).
“There is nothing red about the word red, and the word big is itself rather small.” (Cuskley, Simner, & Kirby)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00033...
I don't disclose affiliations here, that's the beauty of HN. I get to keep my anonymity to explore.
A start-up that replaces the symbolic engages with specifics in signals in the record (animals, entoptics, onomatopoeia, calendrical signs, action-syntax externals, cinematic action-glyphs) and figures out what representations veer referential and offers concatenation.
The idea that language refutes itself is as old as the pre-socratics. I won't go into the detailed history here, but there are 1000s of reference for this statement. I'll use Cassirer's, which is pretty succinct.
..at some point a direct contact must occur between knowledge and reality. If we succeed in freeing ourselves from all these interpretations – if we above all succeed in removing the veil of words, which conceals the true essence of things, then at one stroke we shall find ourselves face to face with the original perceptions..
Ernst Cassirer The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
Freeing ourselves from the veil of words is theoretically equivalent to language's ultimate function is to refute itself.
CS is computer science.
btw it's clear the drive to encapsulate in plain English was and is the achilles heel to CS, coders are forced to finger point using characterizations of "word salad" at scientifically complex theories and analytic ideas.
While it could be a bot, I have a more charitable take. The comments mostly appear quite similar in structure to certain academic writing I've had to edit in the past -- specifically proposals written by non-native English speakers at the graduate or post-doc level. Academic jargon usually has precise vocabulary conveying a specific meaning with lower ambiguity than standard English. If the majority of your time is spent using those terms, you may default to using them conversationally when speaking English even in casual settings. This makes you especially hard to understand when you also make simple grammatical errors and use punctuation in an unnatural manner (for English).
I'm an American, don't discuss what you don't understand.
Then you must be writing extremely fast to make so many basic punctuation and grammar errors consistently throughout your posts. If you wish to be understood, slow down and put more time into your writing. Writing on an internet forum is no different from other forms of written communication -- write for your audience and don't use jargon as a crutch.
The engineering tyrannical drive for plain English doesn't fit in the web's protocol philosophy. It's a place where all styles and forms belong. "Written communication" is by nature jargon when specializations are interdisciplinary, otherwise monoculture takes root. If you don't understand something, ask or search - this is the web, dude. Nothing ends here.
It's more likely someone who has studied the philosophy of language and structure - someone who reads Russel/Wittgenstein/Derrida.
Reducing everything you don't understand to "must be a bot" seems uncharitable.
> Reducing everything you don't understand to "must be a bot" seems uncharitable.
That seems a non sequitur.
I didn't say I didn't understand this person, I said their comments are word salad and full of logical disconnects. You'll see, for example, the first reply bears almost no relation to TFA nor to the comment they were replying to. Then, when pressed, they responded with obfuscation. They reply with variations of "language refutes itself" and links to google docs with a salad of links that bear no relevance to the topic at hand. They claim to be researchers in a startup but when pressed, they backpedal into anonymity. That's... not a good sign.
There's plenty I read that I don't understand, and I don't assume it was written by an LLM. Most of it predates LLMs!
But surely you sometimes read stuff you suspect was written by an LLM?
PS: the commenter directly used AI (Gemini) in this response, with no semblance of relevance to the comment they were replying to (except responding to keywords, exactly what an LLM would do): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45374270
Perhaps it's only "wordsalad" to you because you have a different set of academic experiences.
If you've read something like Ricoeur's The Rule Of Metaphor, their initial comment makes more sense I think.
Maybe! But I think the implicit netiquette is that when one is posting in a public forum, one should strive to make the message clear and avoid obfuscation [1].
To be 100% honest, what drew my attention to the initial comment is that I thought it was joke about the TFA: responding to an anecdote about cryptic machine (mis)translation with some LLM-generated mumbo jumbo! Alas, it seems not to be the case.
[1] though, I suppose, if one is trying to make the point that "all language refutes itself"...
<<You'll see, for example, the first reply bears almost no relation to TFA nor to the comment they were replying to. Then, when pressed, they responded with obfuscation.>>
The reply deals directly with both the article in question and the post heading this thread. Neither get at the cause of the confused translation. My post provides a direct channel past idiomatic expression into the source pf all language mistranslation, that words are arbitrary, and particularly what sabotages exchanges between Western agentic language and Eastern nonagentic languages (Chinese, Korean, Japanese - each with their own peculiar forms of non-agency.
If you don't understand a statement, then ask questions. If you think it's obscure, then detailed questions. If you understand it, then probably very bad protocol to accuse anyone of being a bot. In any case, this is a protocol network, each exchange is negotiable. If you want to participate, do it in good faith and keep the outlook rosy, avoid characterization: you are not a mindreader. One thing is clear here, there's a very big divide in here between the intellectually curious, and the intuited pretenders who seem to have only a background in pseudoscience and folk science/psychology who are posing as scientific thinkers. Some of you may have extensive math backgrounds, but this is not enough to parse theory and demonstration in the linguistic and neuroscientific fields. Keep your minds open.
If you need some background that goes into the statement, I'd do some research, here's a section of the citations from Nisbett's Geography of Thought that delineate how distinct Eastern and Western perception and language are:
Gentner, D. (1982) Why are nouns learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In S. A. Kuczaj (Ed.), Language Development: Vol. 2 Language thought and culture. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Gentner, D. (1981). "Some interesting differences between nouns and verbs." Cognition and Brain Theory 4, 161-178. Imai, M., and Gentner, D. (1994). "A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence." Cognition 62, 169-200. Ji, L., Peng, K., and Nisbett, R. E. (2000). "Culture, control, and perception of relationships in the environment." Journal of Personality and Social Psychobgy 78, 9 Masuda, T., and Nisbett, R. E. (2001). "Attending holistically vs. analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans.” Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., and Norenzayan, A. (2001). "Culture and systems of thought: Holistic vs. analytic cognition.” Norenzayan, A., Smith, E. E., Kim, B. J., and Nisbett, R. E. (in press). "Cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning.” Norenzayan, A., and Kim, B. J. (2002). A cross-cultural comparison of regulatory focus and its effect on the logical consistency of beliefs. Unpublished manuscript, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. Norenzayan, A., Choi, I., and Nisbett, R. E. (2002). "Cultural similarities and differences in social inference: Evidence from behavioral predictions and lay theories of behavior." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28, 109-120. Peng, K., and Nisbett, R. E. (1999). "Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction.”
> My post provides a direct channel past idiomatic expression into the source pf all language mistranslation, that words are arbitrary, and particularly what sabotages exchanges between Western agentic language and Eastern nonagentic languages
"Tell me what you think about translation, and I will tell you who you are."
-- Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"
"All mistranslations are good."
-- Deleuze, Dialogues II
Those are slogans. Nil points.
As someone who reads Derrida regularly, comparing his texts to this commenter is rude (to Derrida).
He wasn't comparing me to Derrida.
It’s called metonymy.
That's not what metonymy is.
Your assertion is incompatible with this other assertion by user melodrama, I mean "mallowdram":
> language is meaningless: it's arbitrary
> each statement in any existing language is about replacing language.
I found that difficult to parse. Moreover, it's a strong claim. Can you provide some evidence as to why it's true? I can find some trivial counter-examples. For instance, which part of "I like oranges." evolves English as a language?
Language as a self-refuting system, doesn't evolve, or evolve us, it devolves towards increasing arbitariness, the faster it's used, particularly once automated.
“We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that humans use linguistic representations to think.” Ev Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024
.at some point a direct contact must occur between knowledge and reality. If we succeed in freeing ourselves from all these interpretations – if we above all succeed in removing the veil of words, which conceals the true essence of things, then at one stroke we shall find ourselves face to face with the original perceptions.. Ernst Cassirer The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms