Experience as Language

The world is a function of your language.

Mathematics and Reality

Philip Goff argues something like this here.

Recapitulating below for permanence:

1. Pain exists.

2. If the world were just mathematical structure, pain would not exist.

3. Therefore the world is not just mathematical structure.

The controversial premise is the second one. The claim is that pain has a quality beyond mathematics. That mathematics can describe structures and relations, but not the felt quality of experience itself.

But I think there is a deeper issue underneath this debate.

What exactly is mathematics? Is mathematics reality itself? Or is mathematics a language we invented to describe reality?

We often say mathematics was discovered, not invented. But mathematics consists of symbols and structures. Every symbol depends on another symbol for its meaning. Ultimately, every language reaches a point where it cannot define itself any further.

Take the number 1. We intuitively understand it. But can we define it without using another word or symbol? And if we use another symbol, that symbol too must be defined. Every language is an interconnected graph of symbols referring to other symbols.

So what connects language to reality?

Languages depend on unstated assumptions. Mathematics is no exception. English is no exception. Logic is no exception.

The world exists, and then we build representations of it.

Language as Representation

We observe patterns in the world. We encode those patterns into language. We manipulate the language using grammar and logic. Then we compare our predictions back against experience.

There is always a movement back and forth between experience and language.

We downsample reality into symbols.
Then we upsample symbols back into interpretations of reality.

This process is imperfect. Sometimes our abstractions are insufficient. Sometimes we hallucinate patterns. Sometimes we miss them. Sometimes the language itself lacks the vocabulary.

Pain as Language

This is why I think pain is interesting.

Pain is a signal. It is a language.

If I touch a hot pan, pain occurs. My body generates this experience to communicate something important. Pain has a structure. It has intensity. It appears under certain conditions. It disappears under others. It carries information.

Then another language takes over.

English says:
“Ouch.”

Mathematics says:
“Pain intensity: 8 on the NPRS scale.”

The same event is translated across different languages.

The world was:
“A hot pan touched my hand.”

Pain translated it into experience.
English translated the experience into words.
Mathematics translated it into quantities.

All of these are interfaces.

Experience Itself

This made me think about experience itself.

Can we truly remember pain? I do not think we can. We remember the event. We remember reactions. We remember descriptions. But the actual experience of pain only exists in the present.

Similarly, can we imagine pain itself? We can imagine its consequences. We can imagine ourselves reacting. But the actual experience seems tied to immediacy.

So what is experience?

I think experience itself may be a language.

Not verbal language, but a representational system.

Pain is one dialect of experience.
Vision is another.
Hunger is another.
Emotion is another.

Mathematics and English are later symbolic layers built on top of these more primitive languages.

Embedded and Learned Languages

Some languages are learned.
Others are embedded into us from birth.

A newborn child does not know English or mathematics. Yet the child already understands hunger, discomfort, warmth, fear and pain.

How?

The body already contains certain built-in languages.

When a newborn cries after birth, it has not learned this behavior conceptually. Something deeper is already responding to the world. The child reacts instinctively. Which language is enabling that?

Layered Consciousness

This made me think that consciousness itself may be layered.

There is a more primitive layer of consciousness which continuously monitors and regulates the body. It responds to danger. It generates pain. It controls breathing, reflexes and survival behavior.

When we sleep, this layer remains active.

If something hot touches our hand during sleep, we wake up. Something was still monitoring the world. Something decided the signal was important enough to activate the waking mind.

Maybe we all become like infants when we sleep.

The symbolic self fades. Planning disappears. Identity weakens. Yet something continues to monitor and regulate the body.

I do not mean a little observer or homunculus inside the brain. I mean that consciousness may have layers of processing.

The primitive layer is immediate and reactive.
The waking symbolic self is reflective and strategic.

The Emergence of Self

The infant mostly lives in this primitive layer. Perhaps this is why infants sleep so much. There is consciousness, but not yet a strong symbolic self.

As the self emerges, we become able to plan, think, compare, remember and strategize. We learn new symbolic languages like English and mathematics. We begin to construct continuity and identity.

Then the self appears.

The self says:
“I am hungry.”
“I am in pain.”
“I want knowledge.”
“I want success.”

As the self develops, so do symbolic desires:
the urge to know,
to accumulate,
to compare,
to become.

The infant seeks regulation and comfort.
The symbolic self seeks identity and continuity.

But perhaps the self is not the root of consciousness. Perhaps it is a later symbolic structure built on top of more primitive experiential systems.

Consciousness and Abstraction

This is why I think mind always works through languages or representational structures. Consciousness samples the world through abstractions.

Pain is one language.
English is another.
Mathematics is another.

Different layers of consciousness operate through different representational systems.

Reality itself may exist outside all of them.

We never access reality directly.
We only interface with it through these layered languages of experience, sensation, logic, mathematics and thought.