Just-language, without any irl stuff, probably doesn't really achieve communication. Because the words don't carry their definition. And they definitely don't carry any real experience-stuff (sight, sound etc) either.

It's just assumed that you're connecting the word to the definition/experience, in your head, in a way that makes communication happen.

And that's a big assumption. It might be only 80% congruent. Or 50%. Or 5%. We could be a race of Chinese boxes for all we know.

IRL there is a verification to the process. If I order a pizza and I get a pizza then that's a pretty good sign that the communication is working.

But on the Internet, where it's just-language? Forget it. Howling solipsists all the way down.

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[–] 8 points 9 hours ago*

I think you'd do well to take a college communications class. You'd get exposed to diagrams like this that examine and explain what communication is, and how language works to facilitate communication:

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  • [–] 8 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

    I think Ferdinand de Saussure’s intuition is closer to the truth than the idea that words have a 1:1 congruence to objective reality, or that they’re truly defined by their dictionary “definitions”. Rather, all the words in a language mutually define each other via their correlations in usage, and the resulting network of correlations forms a unified structure we then match to the similar structure we recognize in reality.

    Because this structure is entirely contained within the usage patterns of the language itself, it doesn’t need to be communicated via any extra-linguistic channel.

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  • [–] 7 points 12 hours ago (1 child)
  • [–] 3 points 11 hours ago (1 child)

    You might be interested in reading about the knowledge argument aka Mary's Room, a thought experiment about knowledge. See also: qualia

    Basically this: Mary is a brilliant scientist who spends all day every day in her room. She has no color of any kind in her room. But, being a brilliant scientist, she has learned everything there is to know about color. She knows about frequencies and wavelengths, she knows all about the eye and the brain and how they interpret light to form the sensation of color. She has studied art from all of human history and knows how artists use color and understand all of their cultural associations.

    But she has never seen red herself. So in all of her learning, does she really understand what red is? She's missing the qualia, the subjective experience of a thing. No amount of language and communication can bridge that gap.

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  • [–] 3 points 12 hours ago

    Language is inherently imprecise, I would say actually that it depends on that imprecision as 1:1 communication of an idea is impossible. It certainly couldn't be any more precise than our already incorrect experience of reality. Sometimes I think its pretty incredible that our emotional and physical experiences are similar enough at all for communication to be possible.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 hours ago

    It's shit, but it's the best we've got.

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  • [–] 2 points 12 hours ago (5 children)
  • [–] [S] 1 point 12 hours ago (4 children)

    If it's good enough, and it's all howling solipsists, then that suggests that people are very similar. Because that's how talking to yourself and talking to other people overlaps.

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  • [–] 1 point 12 hours ago (3 children)
  • [–] [S] 1 point 12 hours ago (2 children)

    The similarity and the communication-success are directly proportional. I mean, it follows. So you get a kind of 90% social solipsism. Is that the same as an echo chamber? A 90% echo chamber?

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  • [–] 2 points 11 hours ago (1 child)

    Linguistic communication is shown to be effective enough to coordinate action of individuals and groups of various size, not just repeat sounds to each other as a chattering of animals. This would indicate that the communication is more than just an echo chamber of call and response, even if the individuals don't use their words in perfect alignment.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 hours ago (2 children)

    All forms of communication have advantages and disadvantages. I'm old enough to still have written actual letters to lovers and friends. There's something to be said for collecting your thoughts - sometimes for days - and putting them on paper in concentrated form.

    All in all I think the dangers of misunderstanding each other are just as big as with any other form.
    Unless you had some other type of effectiveness in mind.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 9 hours ago (1 child)

    The ability to refer directly to a shared experience definitely sets that form of communication above other types. Definitely moves it in the direction opposite solipsistic howling. Wouldn't you agree?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

    Chomsky was big on the idea that we innately have a certain bunch of ideas wired into our minds at birth, and then we learn words that are connected with some of those ideas, and other words are related to the initial words. One of his examples iirc was the word "climb" being connected to an innate concept. We can imagine all kinds of species possessing this concept even without having language. Humans later evolved a language faculty that allowed associating words with the concept and the sensations of climbing. IDK how current that idea is among linguists nowadays.

    I would say LLM's trained on internet text manage to communicate verbally to some extent, despite not having such biological priors. Their style ranges from annoying to sometimes hilariously wrong, but plenty of humans are the same way.

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