In a linguistic paradigm, even image-thoughts must be encoded on some abstract level in a language-like information system. Never mind that this would be incredibly inefficient and therefore taxing for the mind. I propose instead a sense-paradigm to thought. That is, the idea that we think through all of our available senses, often in accord with the degree to which they have been developed or honed.
Scent-memories are well known, and the association between odour and nostalgia is stronger than with any other scent. The human olfactory is a highly developed system, and fundamentally distinct from vision and language. With vision, an infinite array of possible images are built up from a handful of basic properties - we recognise lines, tone and shape as opposed to specific frames of view. But scent is contrasted to sound and vision by its need to be looked up, rather than yielding to a measurement scale (Lanier, 2011). The sense of smell has also entered the thinking game, as it has been proposed that the way we think and that language are fundamentally based on the olfactory (Lanier, 2011). I do not propose this but rather hold it as evidence for the sense-paradigm; for every sense studied in sufficient detail there arises a plausible argument for explaining thinking in terms of that sense. The notion that all thinking is explained by language, or by vision, etc. is borne out of ignorance: the insufficient study of the other senses and their corresponding thoughts.
In the sense-paradigm, there is no unified native language of thought, simply expressions that are individually known to the mind that may never be completely translated to different domains. Thought evolves and expands with our available senses and with their acuity1. Then we can have sound-thoughts, touch-thoughts and more2. Any project to control thinking through language is set for failure because the other free senses will continue to inform thinking and give rise to new language. A project such as the newspeak envisioned by the totalitarian state in George Orwell's 1984 is actually too limited to meet with much success, but our current project - that of incrementally replacing our senses with virtual ones - may well see us sleepwalking into such a catastrophe.
Our senses are not fixed nor are they limited to what we think of as our biological endowments. Technologies form extensions of our bodies; extensions of our senses. I suspect that well-practised musicians have thoughts of feeling the notes on their instrument as distinct from thoughts where they hear the notes being played or see the notes written on the page3. Training extensively with a given tool, technology, or instrument is a way of training our mind to think in that frame, or rather to think through the expressions permitted by it. But not all expansion is beneficial, and whatever colonises our time comes at the expense of other sense-faculties. How many people now think in terms of their phone’s notifications feed? Changes to our thinking change our sense of sense, redefining what the human is. And while this has always been an ongoing project, it is not necessarily a progression, and there is always the danger that we regress.
This is part of the real danger of virtual technologies. They seek to emulate human senses in artificial environments. Why the emulation? So as to replace. But digital is only a crude model for lived experience, crucial aspects are always left out so that the resulting virtual sense is shallower and narrower than the one it threatens to replace. Thinking through more limited expressions limits our thinking, and rather than expanding the domain of the human we contract it. Thinkers like Pinker might have us believe that there is nothing to fear from such projects, that there is an essential human that is immune to such influences, but the sense-paradigm rejects this premise, asserting instead that thinking is inseparable from the acts of sensing.
To replace one’s limbs is to replace one’s sense of touch, and to replace one’s sense of touch is to change the meaning of feeling itself. In the sense-paradigm, thinking is an intrinsically embodied act and is inseparable from the environment and the sensors used to uncover that environment.
The sense-paradigm alerts us to the importance of all senses, to the totality of human experience. It may also cause us to value oft-neglected or forgotten senses. While numeric, linguistic, and visual thinking developed to a high degree are frequently celebrated, tactile and aural thinking are not so much as acknowledged. Recognising our capacities in these places provides us with opportunities to enrich experience, to increase the perspectives with which we engage with the world and thereby improve the character of that engagement.
Importantly, the sense-paradigm values embodied experience, and regards human beings as situated entities. It guards against any impulse to decompose the human while regarding the discarded parts as 'unnecessary'. Frustratingly perhaps for machine-learning researchers, the sense-paradigm suggests that solutions to specific sense-domain problems may prove extraordinarily difficult to yield to transparency and that in some cases solving for an intelligible linguistic equivalent for the solution may prove intractable.
For those interested in developing a unified language of thought or simply in translating between sense-domains, the sense-paradigm is not very helpful. It suggests that some sense-thoughts will never translate across domains and crucially that thinking cannot be understood via abstraction, for it is abstraction which is understood through embodiment4.
1 That the body is the way we know the world is a very old notion, but in my conception of the sense-paradigm, the body is not only how we know the world, it is how we know ourselves. The sense-paradigm does not posit an abstract human centre and makes vividly clear that experience enriches our sense of self. ↩
2 Linguistic expressions routinely employ the body or parts of the body. Tracing the routes of words shows this especially to be the case, making clear the connection that we understand the world by relating it back to ourselves. We absorb the world into ourselves.↩
3 Similarly, people who are quite handy may have very well developed touch-thoughts, intuitively feeling their way through a problem once they have their hands on it but unable to draw a diagram or write a procedure of the correct steps in advance.↩
4 Virtual senses could give rise to virtual thinking, the character of which seems to me quite difficult to comprehend.↩
Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd.
Lanier, J. (2011) You Are Not a Gadget. London: Penguin Books.
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge & K. Paul.
Mitchell, W.J.T. (1986) Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Orwell, G. (1949) 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.
Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Are There Any Advantages to the Sense-Paradigm?
The sense-paradigm alerts us to the importance of all senses, to the totality of human experience. It may also cause us to value oft-neglected or forgotten senses. While numeric, linguistic, and visual thinking developed to a high degree are frequently celebrated, tactile and aural thinking are not so much as acknowledged. Recognising our capacities in these places provides us with opportunities to enrich experience, to increase the perspectives with which we engage with the world and thereby improve the character of that engagement.
Importantly, the sense-paradigm values embodied experience, and regards human beings as situated entities. It guards against any impulse to decompose the human while regarding the discarded parts as 'unnecessary'. Frustratingly perhaps for machine-learning researchers, the sense-paradigm suggests that solutions to specific sense-domain problems may prove extraordinarily difficult to yield to transparency and that in some cases solving for an intelligible linguistic equivalent for the solution may prove intractable.
For those interested in developing a unified language of thought or simply in translating between sense-domains, the sense-paradigm is not very helpful. It suggests that some sense-thoughts will never translate across domains and crucially that thinking cannot be understood via abstraction, for it is abstraction which is understood through embodiment4.
Footnotes
1 That the body is the way we know the world is a very old notion, but in my conception of the sense-paradigm, the body is not only how we know the world, it is how we know ourselves. The sense-paradigm does not posit an abstract human centre and makes vividly clear that experience enriches our sense of self. ↩
2 Linguistic expressions routinely employ the body or parts of the body. Tracing the routes of words shows this especially to be the case, making clear the connection that we understand the world by relating it back to ourselves. We absorb the world into ourselves.↩
3 Similarly, people who are quite handy may have very well developed touch-thoughts, intuitively feeling their way through a problem once they have their hands on it but unable to draw a diagram or write a procedure of the correct steps in advance.↩
4 Virtual senses could give rise to virtual thinking, the character of which seems to me quite difficult to comprehend.↩
References
Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. London: The University of Chicago Press, Ltd.
Lanier, J. (2011) You Are Not a Gadget. London: Penguin Books.
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge & K. Paul.
Mitchell, W.J.T. (1986) Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Orwell, G. (1949) 1984. London: Secker & Warburg.
Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
