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Julius Hamilton (Apr 01 2024 at 11:46):This is a really vague train of thought, but I find sharing these ideas in this group is what helps me formulate what I need to study or pursue more clearly.
My friend is designing a conlang (constructed language). Arguably, this has become a common enough activity that something of a “routine” has emerged. There is even software that helps you do it, breaking it up into stages.
A lot of people start with and focus on things like grammar, and phonology. Some people go a bit deeper into semantics.
I like to try to zoom way out and look at the big picture, when I can.
In general, a language is some kind of phenomenological pattern or structure that corresponds to structures in a world. I call it phenomenological because it has to be expressed in an experiential domain. That is, human language is commonly transmitted through sound (speech) and through sight (writing). But actually, the ontological domain does not matter - just that there is a correspondence from one domain to another. I believe this is the same core idea in model theory. The language corresponds via rules to actual things.
So… what actually is a “language”? People tend to start with grammar rules, but they often assume the language will roughly translate the same concepts they are used to, like “sun”, “big”, “small”, “time”, etc. They invents lexicon to directly translate a lot of concepts pre-existing in their language (like English).
So, if you want to construct a language, you could go one level deeper and invent your own compositional semantic system. This is commonly done with “semantic primitives”.
It occurred to me that you could probably go one layer deeper. The grammar relays information about the concepts. The concepts relay information about the world. If you wanted to, you could even devise the mechanics of the world, the language arises / is embedded in.
This was the super general question that I came to. With further thought, it seems like you could choose a few core features that you think delineate what a “language” is, before sub-classifying different structural possibilities.
But what could you say about a “world”? Are there any structural constraints on what a hypothetical world can be like?
I tend to think in terms of the Von Neumann cumulative hierarchy, it’s the concept I’m most familiar with for “enumerating everything”. Amongst all such sets, which of them have sufficient structure for us to consider them a model of a “world”?
Perhaps we could accept any pure set at all. It’s sort of like information theory. The information in some very basic sets might be minimal, but we can still treat it as some kind of structurally existing thing. Then the task of the language is to map to that thing in some way, to describe it.
But when do we come to structures that have more fundamental properties we want, for a world? Should a world at minimum have something akin to “time”? Or, is there a way to express that the world has some kind of “object differentiation”, that it’s not just a statistical morass of pure noise and randomness?
The idea is, to show some kind of hierarchy of world-structures, and then show how each class of worlds maps to a variety of possible semantic systems on that world (e.g., a semantics mirrors substructures in that world, but it’s quite common that a semantics is not capable of fully describing everything in that world), and then finally to return to the original goal, to show how an entire category of possible semantic systems would map to possible syntaxes on those semantic elements.
Kevin Carlson (aka Arlin) (Apr 01 2024 at 18:00): Julius Hamilton (Apr 01 2024 at 19:14):There are some cool thoughts there for sure, I’ll get back to you. Thank you.
Julius Hamilton (Apr 03 2024 at 16:35):I wanted to respond to #1, for now.
If our sets were impure, we would have to decide what ontological elements they contain. I personally consider there to be overlap between ontology and phenomenology, in the sense that, if I establish that my world has something like “color”, I basically am emphasizing the experiential aspect of color. If I wasn’t, then I would be talking about a fully “informational” world. It is difficult to define it precisely, but I mean a purely logical world without anything unexplainable without qualia, essentially. You could call it a purely structural world, if you wanted.
That is why I prefer a pure set theory - because I want to generate a universe of “all possible structures”. Only further down the line do you need to think about the phenomenological character of a world, after assigning structures and substructures to actual phenomenological elements.
So, there is some set representing the structure of a particular world - and I can use that structure without worrying about how it maps to a qualic phenomenology. Even though it corresponds to one, I can factor the qualia themselves (almost as an ingredient of the language of the theory) out (for now).
I consider pure set theories more “minimal” than a theory of abstract elements, more ex nihilo, because it basically starts with the metaphysical requirement (I think) that i) there exists something ii) you can use that thing to generate more things.
If, which I assume, a set theory of “abstract elements” can be embedded inside of a pure set theory (i.e. defined within it), and vice versa, then it does not matter logically which we begin with, but it matters conceptually, in that it may guide one’s thinking in their investigation.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Apr 04 2024 at 09:15):I think the point Kevin was making is that you are presuming the answer to problems of identity that apply even to the pre-experiential description of the world. Why should the elements of the world be cleanly distinct from one another, especially if you're saying that you want to avoid the kind of experiential features that would distinguish them?
Noah Chrein (Apr 04 2024 at 15:58):@Julius Hamilton
I tend to draw the line between ontology (as a total existentialism) and the intersection of ontology and phenomena exactly at the outer boundary of our neural representations. I believe phenomena is a proper substructure of ontology. "the mind is purely physical"
I hesitate to say anything "is" a certain structure and favor instead to say some thing "is modeled by" a certain structure.
In the context of, say, the particle-wave duality, saying a things "are" both particles and waves is a logical paradox and leads to confusion. To say things "are modeled" by waves and particles is fine. Regardless its probably not entirely true, perhaps what we see as particles and waves can be modeled more accurately by some much higher concept structure(s).
To your point, I think one could construct the abstract "space" of all human derivable-structures. Each point (a structure) would be a model of some thing. I resist saying that "a structure is the thing". We create structures that model the things, but we don't have access to the reality of that thing, if "things" even exist.
The brain seems to have evolved to construct objects (things) supported by neural representations. I consider morphisms as objects, but also probability distributions and really any math structure we could ever describe, including the hierarchies of meta-theories that contain them. IMO if the brain or any extension of the brain can model a "thing", that thing is an object.
We can construct models for what we think exists, but inevitably, those models are all stored in our neural representations and extensions. In this way I hold the strong opinion that makes many people upset: we will not have a deep understanding of quantum mechanics until we connect our brains to quantum computers. I.e. after we absorb the quantum "ontology" into our "phenomenology".