Medical Does Language and Environment Shape Our Thinking?

[servelan]

Nobody seems to have mentioned it but certain psychedelics allow one to see what it's like not to have language.

Putting any pre-conceived ideas of these substances to one side I would say psilocybin (magic mushrooms) is one of the most reliable - I took quite a large dose the other day and entered this state where all my powers of language were completely wiped out. All self-generated meaning was cleared away too and I was literally an organism just looking out and experiencing the world. Words occasionally came into my head but they didn't mean anything.

It was a very interesting experience because I couldn't language anything but just experience the world in a really fresh and immediate way. Definitely an invaluable experience for me as I realized how much we replace reality with language and we don't even realize we're doing it. Instead of seeing things as they are we seem to replace primary experience with words. Here's an example for you - a baby is lying in it's cot and the most amazing creature comes in through the window. It's a kalaidoscopicly, dazzling fusion of light, sound and movement. The baby's mother comes into the room and says "baby, it's a bird, it's a bird". By the time the child is a few years old he sees a bird and says "it's a bird" and doesn't think twice about it. The amazing reality of this creature has been conveniently tiled over with a word. Do you see what I'm getting at?

 

[professor]

about the languagees may alter our thought process... I am very skeptical i can speak english quite well...spanish somewhere near fluent and enough of other languages liek french and italian to make my way from one place to the next in a forign county... though before learning more than just english, i beleve my thought process must have been much alike, considering my style of writing has not changed any more then the addition of a few new words prehaps...i doubt very seriously that these philosophers were bilingual, or if hey were... then what a strange question to ask... in addition, how could one learn a language at all shortly after being born withuot the ability to think. pause...they couldent. sorry to maim your post, but just an expression of my thoughts on the matter. (though i will admit there ifs certainly a change of the way people think when learning a language...ie the ability to communicate greatly spurred the advancement of human civilization many years ago, and so does it still allow ideas to be more easily transferred and advanced upon.

 

[dexed25]

Just a Dumb Guess

I've long thought that English is lacking a good word for the feeling you have when you witness somebody else getting blamed for doing something (or for failing to do something) that you actually did (or failed to do). I wouldn't be surprised if there are other languages which do have such a word.

ONE WORD: GUILT

 

[tardis]

Good thread and interesting response Servelan. Having grown up in the east (global) and then moved to the US, I recall that there were words in Asia that spoke to different shades of shame, pride and honor. Shades that are not found (at least to the average Joe) in English. The difference in world view stemming from this are real. However the question that I ponder is whether this means that the language one learns first shapes our operating system to use a puter term. Clearly the default OS can be expanded, but how much and how quickly? and even more importantly, is there something we are missing by virtue of our language driven OS?

 

[Mariko]

I was just watching this talk show with a woman who is audtistic and she says audtistic people like animals use sensory thinking... so how does this prove the theory wrong??

 

[Temporarily Blah]

Without reading anything within this topic, I will randomly post what I believe to be possible;

You can think in images, yes there will be differences based on language, and there MIGHT be changes in ways of thinking based on location.

Also, personality effects thinking quite a lot.

 

[Vossistarts]

the 19th century German Philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt claimed that language was directly connected to thinking

that people around the world should actually think differently due to their native language

the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf based his (Whorf-Hypothesis)
on the idea that thoughts are controlled or influenced by the language we speak.

perhaps we can take this one step further into the science of Chorology
which is the relationship between thought and native environment

is our thinking shaped by our native language and native environment?

does the average person in China experience the same thought processes as the average person in Sweden?

does the average person who has grown up in a city surrounded by water such as Stockholm think in the same way as a person who has grown up in a dessert such as Saudi Arabia?

Sure we can think, or at least process our experience of things without language. Langauge is used to recreate the things we experience symbolically. In a real way it cuts us off from the truth of the things we name and conceptualize over. At some point though, you get to know your way around well enough, so that when you see the item we call a tree, you don't have to comment to yourself, " there is a tree". You just know it. Its cognative. Cognative processing ultimately has little need for the language system. It brings us back to experiencing things directly, where perception in vehicle and everything we percieve we flow into and it into us, connected.

 

[Vossistarts]

Nobody seems to have mentioned it but certain psychedelics allow one to see what it's like not to have language.

Putting any pre-conceived ideas of these substances to one side I would say psilocybin (magic mushrooms) is one of the most reliable - I took quite a large dose the other day and entered this state where all my powers of language were completely wiped out. All self-generated meaning was cleared away too and I was literally an organism just looking out and experiencing the world. Words occasionally came into my head but they didn't mean anything.

It was a very interesting experience because I couldn't language anything but just experience the world in a really fresh and immediate way. Definitely an invaluable experience for me as I realized how much we replace reality with language and we don't even realize we're doing it. Instead of seeing things as they are we seem to replace primary experience with words. Here's an example for you - a baby is lying in it's cot and the most amazing creature comes in through the window. It's a kalaidoscopicly, dazzling fusion of light, sound and movement. The baby's mother comes into the room and says "baby, it's a bird, it's a bird". By the time the child is a few years old he sees a bird and says "it's a bird" and doesn't think twice about it. The amazing reality of this creature has been conveniently tiled over with a word. Do you see what I'm getting at?

I surely do see what youre getting at, and its right., Cognative processing is the next step, but drugs arent needed to get there. I've been practicing and observing zen for almost 20 years and have made great progress with letting go of language based processing. Thats essentially what zen is about. As I've made steps towards independance from thinking in words and concepts my creative abilities and intelligence has blossomed in a way i never imagined. we start out learning all the names for things. IN the beginning especially but in many case always, we check our names against the memory of where we learned the name. as we get older we are able to start adding definitions and concepts to the names wever learned for things. definitions are often learned and concepts can be created but however you do your thing, your always tied to points in the past with the system. AS we go further along, we collect more word labels for the new things we learn and concepts seem to interrelate. So we can sit down and quietly consider many things, thing that have become words and our concepts of the things, but what were considering are only subjective ghosts or placeholders of what it IS. What were considering is our idea of what really is. Its rolling a globe over and over in our hands saying we've traveled the whole world.
As long as we use language to process, we call what is called a tree, a tree. Maybe we think some things about a tree, about its roots and trunk and leaves and circulatory system, and to whatever end that is all a tree is to us. But a tree is not a tree . It just is. Our ideas of a tree are dwarfed by what it really is. so you say," well, i can tell you this and this and this about a tree, and you don't call it anything, you just recognize it and all you can say about it is
"it is". So whos way is better?>"

I am connected to what it is in truth its substance. youre carrying around a model in your head that is fabricated out of thoughts that have no substance. Ask me to show something of merit to my way of percieving a tree, I might take what you can leaf home with me for an example. The leaf youll take home as an example of your way of processing is a ghost.

Dont get me completely wrong . I still process a lot of my world with language. Personally i think learning the world symbolically with language is very necessary, but it is not absolute. I can't really describe to you what it is like to experience the world entirely without thought and its only happened to me once for a short time. I can tell you, that the first thought i had after those few minutes was, " this is the next vantage to seeing the world around me exactly or at least more exactly as it is, this is the new frontier of my mind."

 

[co.rinne]

The point is that you can never convey the actual content of the feeling. Langauge is based on assumptions of mutual understanding. When a person describes the exhilieration of riding a roller coaster to me, that person cannot give his or her experiences to me. I have to rely upon inferences by correlating words with experiences, assuming that what someone else experiences is similar to what I experience in the same situation.

I absolutely agree, and i find it intriguing how this assumption can never be proven. What I observe to be green can never be verified as what everyone else observes as green, depending on my eye sight compared to everyone else's eyesight. Green is the only adjective there is for that particular colour. Abit irrelevant, but very interesting to me.

 

[Sriram.S]

I think most people think in their native language(i.e when you are thinking about something inside your head you sort of speak to yourself mostly in your native language).

Sriram

 

[Integral]

This thread has been dead for over 3 years, let it rest in peace.