Anuraag.xyz

Tag: Language

  • Beyond words

    What is the meaning of putting these words down? Is it an attempt to find some internal core, a feeling that must be rendered into language to be understood? Why can’t moods clarify themselves and reveal their deeper meaning without this intermediary? Language comes up short so many times.

    I suspect that with large language models, we will have a new type of language and communication—and hence, a new type of human experience. What I’m about to say may sound like dystopian sci-fi, but if we extend current AI with mass surveillance and some form of continual learning, it will create a personalized warden, marketer, guru, coach, parent, and perhaps even a god for each one of us. In such a world, maybe the only truly free human expression will be a silence that can only be deciphered by the soul in its midst. It would be a secret form of communicating with yourself, first and foremost, before we discover what a new language of shared human experience beyond words might be.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is that LLMs, taken to their computational and logical extremis, will be the end of this era of language. What may emerge naturally from this mix of societal and political upheaval, as AI becomes omnipresent, is a new dimension of communication and connection between humans—one that would make the current era seem like the telegraph era feels to us today. It will not be about the efficiency and robustness of the channel, the medium, or the message. It might just be about how it remains, always, a few major steps away from being figured out computationally.

    If Roger Penrose is right that consciousness is not computational, then the very means by which we connect as seemingly separate instances of this larger, unified consciousness must eventually evolve to a dimension that computation cannot ever catch.

    And yet, we live in a time when AlphaFold has deciphered protein folding, which seems like precisely the kind of natural phenomenon that lies at the very limit of what is computationally possible to recreate in silicon.

    AI will force humanity to urgently redefine almost every aspect of what makes us unique—our very identity as a species. The greatest irony is that our god-like ability to create new technological and scientific breakthroughs is the very thing leading to a deeper existential crisis about our own nature. It turns out that when Nature or God gives you the ability to be almost anything and everything, you risk feeling like nothing specific. It leads to a crisis of both collective and individual identity.

    Across the ages, the deepest thinkers of the human condition have returned, again and again, to a similar conclusion: only one thing can be said with confidence about human nature. We seem cursed to always hang in the middle—too aware to be simply animal, but too impotent, unsure, and mortal to be God.

    (P.S. I keep returning to Ernest Becker and The Denial of Death so organically that I think it’s high time I re-read it and write about him.)

  • Beginning, again

    Today marks the resumption of my daily meditation practice.

    It is important for a simple reason: to re-engage with, to remember, the conceptual, symbolic web of interconnections we are all caught within—indeed, what we largely are at that fundamental level. Our very being seems woven from language. ‘Me’ is defined by language and symbol. There appears to be no true ‘escape’.

    This remembrance brings a sense of okayness, a fragile peace that lasts until the forgetting inevitably returns. And we forget because the experience of language is now so all-encompassing. It is the ocean we float in each moment, the clothes we wear, the very air we breathe. It has even infiltrated the realm of sleep. Meditation on pure sensation offers the only remaining glimpse, a way to see through this pervasive medium. Ironically, I find myself crafting this reminder using the very ‘stuff’ I’m trying not to lose myself within.

    Language, it seems, has also claimed sovereignty over our emotional landscape. Our feelings often arise from how deeply we immerse ourselves in its narratives and structures. While a ‘pure’, non-symbolic emotional state might theoretically exist, I suspect it’s now so thoroughly intermingled with language that differentiating it becomes nearly impossible—at least, until one grows accustomed to extended periods of being ‘language-free’ (a state one might also call ‘thoughtlessness’).

    During those brief moments when the language of words pauses or diminishes, a visual symbolic language often takes its place. Interpretation then feels automatic, instantaneous—much like the sounds we hear without conscious effort.

    The idea behind the Vipassana-style abandonment of symbolic processing isn’t to kill the mind. Rather, it’s to generate a sense of utter freedom from the cages of symbolic orientation—a system which, knowingly and unknowingly, operates as the most complex, interconnected mechanism for the control and management of human beings.

    Yet, this glimpse of how utterly free we truly are does not shatter the symbolic order once and for all. It cannot, because our very identity is composed of the same building blocks that function as crucibles of power dynamics and control within the larger, interconnected symbolic fabric. As one might ask: “Can a part of the set, whose whole definition is that it is part of that set, escape the set?”

    And so, this potential for freedom is often framed as destruction—as the death of the idea of self.

    I feel the only way forward is to play with it—to engage in an infinite game that never reaches a final closure, but instead enables a dance that makes one feel profoundly alive. This isn’t about subjugation, but about an acceptance of this symbolic Other, and a realization that we all possess the means to rehash and redefine the language and symbols. Through this play, we can spark countless rebirths of our idea of self, our identities, the very stories that shape who we think we are, how we feel, and how we interact with our fellow symbolic meat puppets.

  • Things that I have not said

    “Time’s a circumference

    Whereof the segment of our station seems

    A long straight line from nothing into naught.

    Therefore we say “progress,” “infinity”

    Dull words whose object

    Hangs in the air of error and delights

    Our boyish minds ahunt for butterflies.

    For aspiration studies not the sky

    But looks for stars; the victories of faith

    Are soldiered none the less with certainties,

    And all the multitudinous armies decked

    With banners blown ahead and flute before

    March not to the desert or th’ Elysian fields,

    But in the track of some discovery,

    The grip and cognizance of something true,

    Which won resolves a better distribution

    Between the dreaming mind and real truth.

    I cannot understand you.

    ‘Tis because

    You lean over my meaning’s edge and feel

    A dizziness of the things I have not said.”

    – Trumbull Stickney’s ‘The Soul of Time’

    I discovered this poem around four years ago, and it did make me feel dizzy from the lack of complete understanding that eluded me. I re-read it recently and let my intuition lean over the edge once again.

    Here is how my mind deconstructed the poem initially:

    • The mind perceives time due to the constantly changing contents of our consciousness. Everything is seemingly changing into something else as seen via this arrow of time, which only points in one direction. This is what Stickney calls the ‘segment of our station’.
    • Based on our conditionings, we classify a certain category of change as ‘progress’. Progress can be only be defined on a finite time scale, as we traverse our segment of time. At an infinite time scale (or a time scale that is beyond our mind’s imagination), life starts from nothing and goes back to ‘naught’.
    • The discrimination of our mind makes us look only at the bright stars of progress, against a sky of ever changing things. Our mind’s ‘aspirations’ make us forget the sky in which these stars shine forth and grab our attention.
    • Certainties declared and promised by various belief systems (logic positivism, science, mathematics, religions, spiritual practices and methodologies) are what champions their faith. All believers are inherently seeking something true, and these belief systems help them march on this journey. All seekers are driven by this deep desire to ‘discover’ the eternal Truth. A Truth that nihilates all their seeking and desires. This final and ultimate desire is the desire to be desire-less.

    ****

    This particular poem reads a lot like an English translation of Upanishads that I’m currently reading. One of the passages that I particularly liked, which is relevant to this poem:

    “You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.”

    [Brinhdaranyaka Upanishad]

    Stickney was a student of Hindu scriptures and studied Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads in details. From his Wikipedia page:

    He wrote there two dissertations, a Latin one on the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro, and the other on Les Sentences dans la Poésie Grecque d’Homère à Euripide. The latter is openly indebted to The Birth of Tragedy and to Stickney’s study of the Bhagavad Gita under the tutelage of Sylvain Lévi.[

    The core structure via which he reaches the final line of the first stanza is quite remarkable. Starting with the passage of time as the root illusion in which we seem to be trapped, he catches hold of other key illusions such as progress, aspirations, victories, certainties and ends by pointing out to the reader that the real ‘grip’ that we are under is our deep, driving desire to realize the ultimate Truth.

    The line about ‘better distribution’ between dreaming mind and real truth is worth lingering on. The reign of mind that human civilization is currently under conjures up all the illusions mentioned above. Most of that reign is concerned with phantom goals and desires that will turn out to be nothing but distractions that mind threw up for you to keep you ignorant of the Truth. But a small set of those same goals will lead to paths such as ‘seeking enlightenment’, where the seeker rejects almost all the distractions, to surrender to this final distraction. This can be called a better distribution from a practical sense of how to lead one’s life, a sort of a truce between your mind and your True nature.

    Stickney knew that a lot of readers will utter in their minds – “I can’t understand you”. In some sense the poem ends with the first stanza. But is it possible to take one last crack at trying to explain what can never be explained with words?

    ****

    Poetry is a great vehicle for spiritual musing, because it can create a negative space from the explicit meaning of the words as they flow together. The juxtaposition teases a range of interpretations and the reader’s creativity fills this negative space. The reader becomes entangled with the poem, and intertwined with the author’s creativity.

    Stickney is trying to point out to the reader that the so called meaning of his words have a natural limit. The medium cannot truly describe the medium in which and out of which it emerges in the first place. A part cannot show you the whole that it is a part of (unless you see the part as a fractal). Language cannot ever describe the place it comes from. One has to go beyond this edge of meaning and feel the Truth experientially, rather than understanding intellectually.

    The negative space of the ‘things I have not said’ is yet another pointer, just like language. It points to the Truth that is beyond words. Once you touch this Truth , albeit for a brief moment, it will leave you feeling dizzy. And once you get comfortable with this dizziness, you will be truly ready to take the leap into the abyss of Truth.

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    [This post originally appeared on my substack]