Psychedelics and linguistic relativity

[dromedary]

Linguistic relativity is a study of the role of language in thought. It is best captured by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, of which there are several versions, but the strongest and most interesting of them goes something like this:

The limits of our thought are determined by the limits of our language. We can only comprehend what we can express in words.

Some of the evidence that has been presented consists of small tribal languages which don't have any words for numbers, the native speakers of which have trouble grasping the concept of quantity and measure; of the artistic and scholarly developments after the eastern Roman empire converted from speaking Latin to Greek in barely a single generation; of the expressive capacity of spatial concepts in different languages being related to the performance of experimental subjects in tests involving the positions of objects in relation to themselves, other objects or absolute direction. Some artificial languages like Lojban have even been developed in order to enable higher reasoning and thought than is possible in contemporary languages.

My point is not to convince you that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is correct or that learning Lojban is a good idea. Bear with me for a moment and let's assume that the hypothesis is true.

We have all had profound realisations on psychedelics that blow our minds with their complexity and sophistication and yet somehow still seem elegant, parsimonious - even simple - and as soon as we try to explain it all the subtle nuance that made the idea so profound trickles away like fine particles through a coarse sieve. It can be tempting later on to tell ourselves that there was never really any amazing new wisdom. I was just tripping, that's all. My suggestion is that maybe it's more than that. Maybe our language is the coarse sieve in which the depth and detail of our psychedelic epiphany fails to be captured.

Do psychedelics temporarily release us from the hold of linguistic relativity? Would it make a difference to how you approach a psychedelic experience? Could we learn to capture some of the realisations we experience on psychedelics by developing and practising new vocabulary for describing complex and abstract relationships between people, objects and ideas - and between the relationships themselves? I think it's worth a shot.

If we can lift the limits of expression we can unlock a greater capacity for wisdom - and maybe (hopefully) we can bring it back from hyperspace. What do you think?

 

[polytrip]

I don´t think language limit´s our thought. It limit´s our abilities to expres or communicate thought.

There are many things we can all understand, while words are totally falling short to expres them.

A good example of this is a recent thread on this site about what 'letting go' means. Everyone knows what it means, and not just in the context of psychedelic experiences. But how to put it in words?

I think we mostly have words for things that we can see and share with others. Things that are very individual are often harder to put into words.

 

[Aetherius Rimor]

Do words limit thoughts, or enable more complex thoughts. That's really the debate.

I believe they limit in the aspect of what we normally think about. However we are still perfectly capable of thinking about concepts without a language equivalent. My belief is the language equivalent helps in retrieval of memories related to that concept, communication of that concept (which still suffers from subjective interpretations of the word), and aids in the ability to build more complex concepts easily.

The reason I think this, is because I'm sure everyone has had situations where they forgot the word for something, but know what they're thinking about. A set of actions, a feeling, or belief set. Without knowing the word though, or creating some language based label for it, it might be harder to associate memories with it however, and is extremely difficult to communicate the idea properly.

The hardest thing for me being a self-taught software developer, is not knowing the proper terminology for the things I was doing. I ended up learning how and implementing very well known concepts, without realizing what they were called. This had no effect on me, until I started trying to communicate what I was trying to do, and the fact that I didn't even realize it was a specific concept.

I remember the first time I discovered what Object Relational Mapping was. The concept, is a framework/set of code utilties where you can easily write database driven applications, because it abstracts the database and handles the translations of objects in memory and the action desired to the database's format/command structure.

I remember writing a library for personal use, that allowed me to inherit a class, and all Saving/Loading from the database would require is .Save() or .Load(someId) without having to write any more database code.

Had I known the concept was ORM... I could have simply googled ORM, found a pre-existing library, learn it and use it, instead of writing my own code.

However at that time... I did not know how to look for it. I still knew what the idea was though.

 

[dromedary]

A good example of this is a recent thread on this site about what 'letting go' means. Everyone knows what it means, and not just in the context of psychedelic experiences. But how to put it in words?

Ah, but it is in words! We call it 'letting go', and we all seem to share an understanding of what it means. That's all that's necessary to say that our language is capable of expressing it.

 

[polytrip]

A good example of this is a recent thread on this site about what 'letting go' means. Everyone knows what it means, and not just in the context of psychedelic experiences. But how to put it in words?

Ah, but it is in words! We call it 'letting go', and we all seem to share an understanding of what it means. That's all that's necessary to say that our language is capable of expressing it.

Yes. But besides that, we all know how to let go as well. And i think no-one has managed to clearly express how you do that..'letting go'.

I think that is because it´s an internal proces.

 

[DoctorMantus]

A little off what is being discussed now but i can agree that language limits our thought.

I know that children born in foreign countries, that are brought to America, are that much smarter that most, because they have to learn English, to speak in their new country. and now instead of speaking one language they now speak two.

I Believe that knowing one language is one thing, but once other languages are added it is like other things are opened in the brain, if anyone gets what i mean by that.

 

[polytrip]

Yes, but any extra ability you learn makes you smarter. Doesn´t have to be an intellectual thing even. Playing tennis or football will do. It´s creating more neural connections in the brain.

 

[Aetherius Rimor]

A little off what is being discussed now but i can agree that language limits our thought.

I know that children born in foreign countries, that are brought to America, are that much smarter that most, because they have to learn English, to speak in their new country. and now instead of speaking one language they now speak two.

I Believe that knowing one language is one thing, but once other languages are added it is like other things are opened in the brain, if anyone gets what i mean by that.

Knowing more than one language I believe adds more to the ability in using new ways of thinking about something. That 's not an example of language limiting thought, more an example of language enabling thought (and lack of language limiting thought).

Also, regardless of whether it's 1 language or 2 languages, an increased vocabular always makes thinking about concepts/communicating them easier. It's the reason we use foreign phrases, despite there being an acceptable translation. C'est la vie, an example. "Such is life" doesn't carry the exact same connotation as "C'est la vie" to English speakers, and in fact an English speaker may not even associate the same meaning if they don't know that's the translation.

I for instance use mundane phrases in other languages rather than the English equivalent when I'm feeling socially playful. "Hola" instead of "Hello", or "Was ist los" instead of "What's up?".

 

[dromedary]

Just to be clear: the idea is that language enables more complex thought, that limitations in existing languages limit the scope for thought.

Yes. But besides that, we all know how to let go as well. And i think no-one has managed to clearly express how you do that..'letting go'.

I think that is because it´s an internal proces.

With respect I think you are missing the point. I agree that it's difficult to explicitly define 'letting go' - but that doesn't weaken the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it strengthens it. It's difficult to explicitly define lots of things: "truth", "love", being "cool"; but we have words for them anyway, hence we can and do build more abstract concepts on top of them that we would never have considered otherwise. If you've ever taken a course on statistics you may remember first struggling to develop an intuitive understanding of new concepts like 'standard deviation', 'normal distribution', 'degrees of freedom' and so forth; once those terms have become part of your intuition and vocabulary you find yourself using them as building blocks for higher concepts like 'confidence interval', 'chi-square test', 't-distribution' that would have been quite beyond comprehension without the language of the simpler concepts before them.

Aetherius' programming example is right on, except I would take it a step further (warning: technical language ahead ). I went through exactly the same process of independently 'inventing' an ORM before I knew it was an already extensively worked on problem. Before I knew the word for it, I would have explained it by its behaviour from the perspective of the way I use it - adequate for definition, but clumsy and verbose. Once I learned (and appreciated the full meaning of) the word I was able to build on the concept naturally, eg: understanding the potential problems ORMs introduce by abstracting away the 'impedance mismatch' between an object hierarchy and a relational datastore. I would not have appreciated this kind of high-level general criticism of ORMs before I knew what an ORM was, while I was still looking at my own ORM-like code through the lens of the particular use-case I had designed it for. You can track this kind of language-driven awakening through the whole programming community - check out The Third Manifesto, which is a proposal to extend relational syntax to programming languages, to eliminate the aforementioned 'impedance mismatch' of ORMs.

It's about more than just communication, and more than being 'smarter'. It's about the capacity for holding more abstract ideas by carrying more information in every word.

 

[polytrip]

I see the point you´re trying to make, but how do you know that without language you wouldn´t sort of fluidly understand the very same things? What is understanding something? With every new word you know, your ability to EXPRES all kind of things grows. Just like with mathematic´s or programming.

I have often had simmilar kind of 'revelations' like you, but i cannot say for sure that i wouldn´t have been able to visualise simmilar concepts if i wouldn´t have known certain technical terms. I think many of the things words allow us to expres are already intuitively with us.
Most people don´t understand complex mathematical formula´s, but they often do understand what these formula´s expres.

The fact that the words exist show that people knew the things before they knew the words for them...they had to invent the words.

I don´t reject the hypothesis, though. But i suspect that in reality, it´s much more complex. I think that thoughts and intellectual processes may indeed be 'atomic'. You´d have to extent the theory to beyond what we tend to call 'language' ofcourse, because many things besides words may function as a building block.

But what i think is that language as well as other skills force us to reflect on our fluid-thinking abilities..that by having to put things into words, we have to make a fluid thought precipitate, crystalise...we have to 'store' it for a while to be able to translate it, and that this capacity to temporary store information of a certain kind increases when our linguistic abilities increase, so that we can store larger chunks of information at a time, before transferring it to the 'language terminal'.

I have two totally different example´s to explain what i mean.
One is that all of us already have an intuition for newtonian laws, but that by playing a certain sport, you learn to translate your intuition about the position of a ball, to certain body-movements. By doing this often, you learn to do this faster.
Therefore you not only increase your skills within this particular discipline, but also your ability to anticipate where a moving object is going to be, because by translating this knowledge to certain movements, you´d have to store this knowledge in your working memory and by doing this often you´ll learn to store more information quicker.

The other is that people who play instruments are more easily touched emotionally by music and the more often you play an instrument, the more this will be so. Apparently your ability to understand music, to feel what the composer wanted to expres, grows by playing music. It´s an ability we all already poses, from the moment we´re born. But by translating musical concepts to certain handmovements, we have to store these concepts for a while, etc.

 

[dromedary]

Right, I see where you are coming from now. I think you're quite right, but I'm not sure what consequence that has for the theory. I suspect they are compatible.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a philosophically positivist proposition, meaning that it assumes the only worthwhile knowledge is that which can be tested and independently verified (and hence must be expressible). If you believe that any other kind of knowledge is worthwhile then it is outside the scope of positivism to evaluate. Since an important point of my OP was to say that psychedelics give us access to meaningful thoughts which our language is inadequate to express, I do not subscribe to this cold positivist perspective myself.

So I guess I need to amend my proposition. The updated version: we already have ideas beyond our language capabilities, and psychedelics stimulate ideas even further beyond.

I still say that we could retain more of the knowledge felt on psychedelics by developing better language tools for expressing it.

 

[Felnik]

I've contemplated this idea of the limits of human language as related to the psychedelic experience.
Specifically the DMT experience seems to defy clear linguistic description, alot of the time.
It seems that our human language system is very limited at making real sense of the realms encountered.
I've noticed that there seems to be a different kind of communication going on.
Hyperspace seems to communicate with feelings. I've often wondered how hyperdimensional beings would even understand
us in the first place. What could universal forms of communication consist of anyway?
How could we learn to project intention and meaning to other beings using our minds and feelings?

How are many of us able to unanimously feel this strong sense of love in many of our journeys?

I feel limited at times in my ability to understand and interact with certain levels of hyperspace.
There are moments where it feels so overwhelming to comprehend that i am right up against my true human
limitations in language and everything else for that matter.

sorry for the tangents trying to get my thoughts down its a bit random.

TM talks about meaning in language quite a bit

 

[hixidom]

I think that we could take a single idea from hyperspace, that we've all experienced, and give a name to it, but that wouldn't help us communicate the experience, which I think is the point of language. If I say the word "bitter taste", then somebody who knows what "bitter taste" feels like will be able to imagine the experience in their mind, but only because they've experienced it. I could never describe what it is actually like to taste something bitter. It's just a collective experience that we've ascribed a word to, but it still doesn't translate the nature of the experience to somebody who has never experienced it before. Therefore, words like hyperspace might be useful for us to communicate that experience, but it by no means helps non-DMT users know what hyperspace actually is. You can only know what a particular experience is actually like by experiencing it yourself. Language attempts to allow us to communicate novel experiences to one another, but you just can't do it. It's like describing colors to a blind person. The Mary's Room thought experiment comes to mind.

In the case of "hyperspace", or even "bitter taste" for that matter, we are sacrificing the subjectively indescribable complexity of the experience for the ability to relate to others. We use words like "bitter" so that we can get through our daily lives with modest communication, but it is insulting to any experience to believe that it's essence can be wrapped up in a word. In fact, I'd say that it's when we ascribe words to experiences that we begin to distance ourselves from the nature of the experiences themselves. It's when you delve into psychedelics that you start to think more about what bitter taste is actually like, and that's because you've been trained to wrap up the experience in a word instead of taking the experience at face value every time you experience it. And when we get deep into psychedelic experience, we realize that we structure our reality in terms of the words we've been trained to use, and we suddenly see the obvious lack of objective structure/meaning that makes any type of distinction absurd. We're then forced to conclude that there is no objective difference between anything else, and that's when we realize that all is one, etc, etc, (for some people at least).

So I think that the ultimate effect of language is that we are better able to distinguish between things, and psychedelics break down that ability to distinguish between warm and cold, good and bad, sights and sounds and, eventually, you and not-you.

 

[onethousandk]

This episode of Radiolab is fairly relevant to the topic:

Podcast | Radiolab | WNYC Studios

Investigating a strange world.

www.radiolab.org

Great discussion on how a group of deaf people gain the ability to express more of their experience as their language expanded.

 

[dromedary]

hixidom: Fair point - I hadn't considered the dissociative aspect of the experience, the sense that nothing can really be distinguished from anything else, which may culminate in 'ego death' - when you can no longer distinguish self from other, internal from external.

However - I think it's one extreme of a spectrum of psychedelic experiences diverging from sobriety at the midpoint. I find myself more often closer to the opposite extreme, where for a few moments I feel like I have discovered incredible insight some highly abstract structure of interrelated circumstances that I could benefit from in real life. Topics usually include art, religion, politics, relationships, business and science.

Rather than being (as you say) "forced to conclude that there is no objective difference between anything else" I feel forced to the opposite conclusion, that I've found something amazing in the small differences I had not paid attention to before. I am not troubled by the arbitrariness of the structure of language, but by its insufficiencies.

 

[Aetherius Rimor]

If I say the word "bitter taste", then somebody who knows what "bitter taste" feels like will be able to imagine the experience in their mind, but only because they've experienced it. I could never describe what it is actually like to taste something bitter.

When I was young, and learning to raise one eyebrow, I remember thinking about the impossibility of communicating how to move a specific muscle.

You simply keep trying until the nerves fire correctly. Good luck telling someone how to do that.

 

[hixidom]

Dromedary, I agree that we can realize increased levels of complexity in reality (as opposed to decreased). Even so, I feel like using words to represent experiences can only result in approximate communication of such experiences because of the subjective nature of the experiences themselves and the abstraction that is a word. That's fine for the most part, and even for synthesizing more complex ideas from words, but eventually we are forced to confront the fact that every word is only an abstraction/approximation of a more fundamental experience.

I'm not saying that we can't realize more complex dimensions of experience, I'm just speculating that we can never adequately express them in terms of words because, in the end, they are not words; they are experiences. Whoever brought up the map-territory distinction earlier had the right idea. I think our best hope is that, one day, a technology will be created that will allow us to directly (telepathically) share experiences with each other. Then there really will be no difference between the map and the territory. We will communicate our experiences by handing them directly to others, as they are, without any abstraction or approximation.

Actually, we can do that now for the most part. You can share the experience of bitter with someone else by putting something bitter in their mouth, and you can give them the DMT experience by giving them DMT. I feel like that is how entities sometimes communicate with me in hyperspace: in a language consisting of the experiences themselves.

 

[dromedary]

Sounds like we're on the same page then!

I will add one thing though: not every idea corresponds to any sort of physical experience, except in the reductionist sense that we experience our own neural activity. Logic, math and a lot of philosophy are purely constructions of thought. We do not distil these ideas in the physical universe by deductive reasoning, instead we develop them separately to explain the universe by inductive reasoning. The best example here would be that mathematicians developed the concept of complex numbers long before there were any observed phenomena that could be explained with them.