1
Language merely as a means, an act. Distinguish language acts from other acts by the intention to change the beliefs of another mind and the fact that the listening mind knows that the speaker intends this. The second condition is to exclude, for example, bait on a hook from being language.
Distinguish successful language acts from acts on mindless objects by the long chain of behavior that changing a belief can cause. Examples: Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Mohamed. What other acts chase their desired effects millennia later?
Neurons, at the level of signaling each other, as blind machines, do not literally communicate. They merely effect. When the listening thing lacks a mind, or at least one with the right ears, you have only causality, not communication.
To communicate well, a mind must have a model, a set of inferences, about the listening mind to predict the effect of that mind having a belief. A mind's best model is likely to be of itself, so like minds will communicate most easily. Heterogeneous sets of minds will have higher overhead.
As usual, the fog over a subject, here language, and its extent evaporate when we use a precise definition of mind.
2
Homonym, sarcasm, lie. A word isolated as a sequence of letters without its endless context—tone, speaker, place, time—can mean anything. It will have a past spread of meanings but rarely with any one meaning so common that you can ignore the rest. But this isn't really a problem with language. Language's indirection merely doubles the original problem.
There isn't a language problem. There is a reality problem. The features of a mind that interpret reality—turning patterns of color, sound and shape, in context, into things—can do the same for language—turning patterns of lines or sounds into things.
Words are so slim. They rely on context to carry any information at all. Nothing is anything in itself. The conclusions from any sensation in a non-trivial mind are also inferred, in part, from other sensations, the context. The pause-unpause button on your DVD remote is only an unpause button when paused. A drop of falling water is only rain when you believe it fell from the sky.
3
A sheep's myth: mind is impossible without language, without a society of minds and a shared culture. In other words, no mind could appear without other minds?
Do at least self-aware minds depend on the presence of other like minds for their self-awareness? Or is this another human bias? Self-awareness occurs by degrees. Average human self-awareness is an arbitrary measure. You can make a mind, though mute, that usefully senses what you would consider parts of its self. You may use language to build that mind, but the point is that the mind itself doesn't talk.
Self-awareness at the level of a mind knowing that it is a mind does presume language, but here language means more than sounds and scratches. It means how a mind can uniquely influence an intelligent thing.
Put simply, to see that you have a mind, you must have a model of mind and see that it fits your self. How could a mind discover mind? Is it easier to first see minds in things outside your self?
4
Better to predict than talk. The only word never misunderstood is the one you never say. At the least, weak predictions from context can seed a search for the best interpretation.
5
Many formal languages are equally powerful in the sense that in any one you can build an interpreter of any other. Yet the languages differ in their use. Each isn't merely a layer for the construction of the next higher language. In what language can you most easily write a mind?
A mindless thing can, in principle, yield the same final behavior as any intelligent thing. It is just impractical to expect human engineers to build the mindless version in all but the most modest cases. Any work advances by seeing the largest patterns and easing them. Mind is the deepest pattern.
6
Language is a hint. Grammar included. No one follows or even knows all the rules, consciously or not. Man bit dog. Man dog bit. With common sense you can understand both without knowing subject-verb-object syntax.
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How does language—speak, read, listen—differ from other kinds of acts? Is language really distinct? Isn't it only more abstract? Consider single words without syntax. Do the effects of the sight of a word really differ from the sight of anything?
Is at least syntax special? It is merely the meaning that comes from the arrangement of signs. A lion is the meaning of certain arrangements of shapes and color. Language seems to differ little from the usual inferences and acts of mind.
8
Context and priming. Things are a mind's useful presumptions. Words are hints at these imaginary things. How then do we use words at all?
A: There is a new episode of x.
B: Play it.
A's finite means ease guessing what B meant for it:
A means to a meaning of “play x” needs a meaning of x, in this case it, as media.
A means to a meaning of it takes any belief of the needed kind.
To serve that means, A's mind initially favors the most recently used or sensed belief of that kind, the x it just told B of.
9
Meaning as a goal. Understanding as an act. Interpretations of subexpressions as subgoals. (Subexpression: a subsequence of the words in an expression. Some examples from the previous sentence: the words and expression.) The words around a word as another kind of context no different from speaker or tone.
A mind shouldn't receive meaning from an opaque isolated mindless parser region or subroutine. A powerful mind opens the work of interpreting every statement, expression, word and letter to the whole power of its intelligence and all its means.
Example benefit: in this design, asking for the meaning of a word follows automatically from having a subgoal to the meaning of every word and from believing in a means to having anything by asking for it.
10
The meaning of a sign depends on the meaning of adjacent signs. The meanings of those depend on the meanings of the signs adjacent to them, including the original sign. There is no bottom. A mind only iterates over a pattern of words, converging on a stable solution.
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Why define a word? The use when speaking to yourself? The use when you tell the definition to other minds? Most practical definitions build on other less consciously defined terms, but even shallow definitions are better than none.
The word bound to a meaning, the sign from which a mind infers a deeper belief, is an empirical problem. What associations does the word have for you? For the minds you want to influence? Tricky for us because we have better access to the word than its semi-conscious definitions.
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What does it mean to understand a statement? There is the speaking mind's intention, which may be nonexistent or uncertain. The listening mind may understand the speaker's subconscious intent.
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Cases of communication:
The speaking mind desires g. The listening mind is believed to have an inference from x to g. The speaking mind can cause g by causing the listening mind to believe x. A mind's senses could directly cause sensation of g, instead of merely sensing x and depending on an inference in the mind from x to g, but that's a poor way to design a mind, with the inference opaque and frozen inside the sense.
The listening mind already believes in a goal to g. The speaking mind causes the other mind to believe that g is unreached.
Same context but instead the speaking mind causes the other mind to know of another more effective means to g.
Technically, a mind that doesn't understand mind can influence a mind with signs. But since the speaking mind doesn't see the deep effect, its act isn't worth calling communication.
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How does a mind know that another mind heard it? How does a mind know that another, opaque mind believes what the speaker wanted it to believe?
15
Language as a means vs. language as a game. A mind can use words without definition, inferring the next from the last and from the surface of context, like a parrot. Language only becomes a meaningless game when the words aren't grounded in extra-verbal ends.
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Kinds of statements.
Imperative: cause belief in a goal.
Declarative: cause belief in anything but a goal.
Interrogative: cause belief in a goal to telling the speaker of anything.
In a sense, all language only declares. To command is a kind of statement of fact and to question is a kind of command.
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Are there limits to the ideas that minds can share in language? Minds often can't speak of a means itself. I can't tell you about a motor neuron. Compiled code may be useless to another computer.
18
We're accustomed to things having a purpose, a goal, a use as a means, a mean-ing. This habit leads us to expect that the greatest things, or at least the highest ranked words—I, Universe—must have purpose. The errors: over-generalizing and faith in grammar. Language merely suggests thoughts. A statement that seems to obey syntax can lack all logic.
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