Language, Reality and Experience

By Wayne Brown

Today I had the unexpected pleasure of a long, detailed conversation with Ambre Singh, a brilliant and creative Second Life citizen. It related to her new (to me) installation at 

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Commune%20Utopia/9/248/27

(You need to be logged in to second life to use this link)

I really can't come close to describing all the ideas we touched upon. Only the ideas that grew out of it. 

We talked about the limitations of language. How we must never lose sight of the fact that "reality" or "experience of reality" is primary. Language is merely "about" reality. It is totally inadequate when we wish to share an experience that is unique to us.

There is much to unpack here. I'm thinking of two of Bertrand Russel's colleagues at Cambridge: Wittgenstein and Kauffman. Russel himself attempted to describe the human language (or at least the interesting subset that mathematicians use) in formal terms - almost like a computer language. This project was blown up by Goedel and his incompleteness theorem - another story.

Wittgenstein (as far as I can understand) thought that the purpose of language was to describe "what is the case". To him, language is a kind of game, in which the participants agree on what does and does make sense. Whether such statements are true seems to be beyond the reach of language and (therefore) philosophy. Certainly my experience.

Kauffman took a radically different approach. In "Laws of Form" (available as a PDF) he uses language in a different way - as instructions or commands. "Draw a distinction". Call the "inside" A and the "outside" B. From this approach, Kauffman claims (who knows?) to derive all of mathematics. His claim is way beyond my abilities to confirm or deny, but his use of language is compelling. One person is telling another to do something and "follow along". It's like when Galileo commanded, "look through this device. Do you see Jupiter has moons?"

In this way of seeing things language is not a free-floating statement of "what is the case". It stimulates us to share an experience. Experience, not language, is the primary source of "truth". Of course, it can be a terribly misleading source but it's the way that leads us to a shared understanding of the world we inhabit.  It is easy for those who think that "truth" is all about something going on in our brain (specifically the language centers of our brain) to entertain the idea that reality doesn't exist at all.

On this point, Ambre and I respectfully disagreed. Her installation seems to lead us to the view that "mind" and "stuff" are somehow ultimately different. That "mind" is somehow eternal and not an "epiphenomenon" of the body. I think we agreed that the image of the mind apart from the body is a metaphor - what is really happening is (at least at present) beyond our imagination. The metaphor ceases to be useful if we start to think that there is nothing but mind and what we experience as reality is nothing but an illusion.

It was a great pleasure for me to agree with Ambre that questions are more valuable than answers. It's a journey.






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