The Tower of Babble

Language as an Index of Experiences

So I've been toying with this idea of language as an index of sensory experiences. Index as in a database or physical library, a typically hierarchical map showing how to quickly find what you're looking for.

Because I've noticed that when I experience something, there's some sort of decision I can make to remember it. I may or may not remember any given experience clearly, but I have memories going back to 3 years old where something happened and I think "I'm going to remember this forever" and I do. And sometimes the memory is there but it takes a while to find it. Or some bodily sensation will suddenly reveal a memory-complex that was previously forgotten.

And this process of indexing takes energy, but it's also an investment because it can save energy later, by enabling anticipating and avoidance of energy-negative outcomes. So in some sense, it’s actually a lower energy state, but only if we take the 4d view over a stretch of time instead of 3d snapshots at a moment in time.

And it’s also somehow similar to digestion. There's a decomposition of the experience into simpler constituent parts via generalization, the representation of the memory in terms of a pyramid of abstractions, each of which simultaneously describes or references many things at once, at the expense of detail.

So, we have all these 3d films that are unique, then we turn the resolution down and they start to cluster together and we turn it down further and some of them become identical and at each stage of this process we assign a symbol, a name to these clusters that can then be transmitted to other beings with similar abstraction pyramids.

And building this pyramid, either alone or in concert is essentially the process of sensemaking. A tower of babbling brooks in the stomach of God, digesting memories into memes, math into myth, life into poetry.

Sat Chit Ananda