December, 2007

Starting an artificial language has been a recurrent dream of mine. As a subscriber to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that the shape of our language is the shape of our thought), a believer in ending Babel through an auxlang, a pathological formist, and an admirer of the grace, elegance, and pleasure to be found in conlangs such as Esperanto and toki pona, I believe the enterprise worth a lifetime, worth my lifetime.

But of course, given my extremist bent, I want to start an artificial language that subsumes all languages. A language to make languages, like in John Varley’s beautiful Persistence of Vision. An extensible language to gobble up and be enriched by the thoughts and feelings of as many souls as the universe will ever have. A perfectly regular language that can be learned in a week but never mastered. The creation of a self-conscious, language-obsessed culture but learnable by the illiterate. A language so abstract and basic, it can be embodied inside any symbolic system, be it based on sounds, graphics, gestures, raised dots, or farts; be it English, Maori, or Farsi. A language of infinite expressibility, synthetic and analytic, vague and precise, formal and casual, exquisite and coarse. A language that will outlast the stars.

The key, I think, lies in internal flexibility. The ideal is to do for language what the Hindu-Arabic numeral system did for numbers. Not only will there be no arbitrary, capricious limits to word creation, it will be a language of pure word creation, able to convey books in a word, lifetimes in a sentence. It will be a language complete in itself yet always growing.

After years of frenzying about it late at night, the language finally got its first name, despite it not yet having a transliteration, let alone any words. It’s self-referentially called, among infinite names, the-language-this-word-belongs-to.

Vilayanur Ramachandran has a truly outstanding, enjoyable, and insightful TEDTalk, A journey to the center of your mind. Not only should you watch it for the content, pay attention also to the form—he is a master expositor. Besides, it contains one of the most convincing debunkings of Freudian bull ever (the first example).

(Fret not about having to decipher a strong accent. Aside from strong r’s, he’s extremely understandable and rather pleasant.)

podre = pus

incordio = tumor

chancro = ulcera sifilitica

bubon = ulcera sifilitica, particularmente en las ingles

What are you absolutely certain of? Of what are you sure without any conceivable doubt? What is true no matter what? What is necessarily true? Just one thing. Whatever. As long as you’re sure.

I’ve been playing the game for a while and I’ve been shocked to be unable to answer the question. Now, of course I’m familiar with Hume’s skepticism (you don’t really know an apple is going to fall, you’ve just seen all similar objects fall before at similar conditions but you don’t know) and I thought I knew how dear truth was but lately, slowly, I’ve started to realize that not even reason or logic are to be trusted.

Let’s start by quickly demolishing every statement about experience, like, say, that you are, well, you, that you broke your knee when you were fifteen, that your mother exists, that other people exist (solipsism). The usual shortcut is just to ask you how do you know it isn’t all a dream, but I prefer Russell’s more imaginative version, the extreme omphalos hypothesis: how do you know that the world wasn’t created five seconds ago, set in motion, and with fake memories? Clever, huh?

OK, that sweeps off a good big swath of possible answers. As for reason/logic, its problem is that it’s either redundant or not binding at all. But don’t 2 + 2 = 4 whatever fucking nightmare the world might turn out to be? How could time or space not exist? My gosh, can you look me in the eye, and tell me that numbers aren’t infinite? How demented do you need to be to doubt Aristotle’s syllogisms, the very rules of thought (if it’s true that humans are mortal and that Socrates is human, Socrates has to be mortal!)?

But it turns out these conceptual statements aren’t certainties either. When you probe them further, carefully, rigorously, you realize that to advance you have to start defining. If you do it conscientiously, defining or making explicit even the dumbest, most-taken-for-granted assumptions you start to realize that 2 + 2 = 4 because you said so, because you assumed your conclusion from the get-go, and your statements are true in the same empty way that a bachelor can’t be married or a car has to be an automobile too. Yes, it’s a kind of truth, but a rather measly one.

The other thing that usually happens when you probe concepts is one of the most wondrous experiences I know of, exhilarating and unnerving at the same time, dizzying. I call it sense of could. It means taking an entrenched concept and realizing it is not necessarily so, discovering your singularity is just an instance of something subtler, deeper, finding out your rose is one among thousands, seeing that what you thought fixed is just another degree of motion.

Like when Cantor found out there are many kinds of infinities, some bigger than others (!). Like when you realize logic isn’t the complete science Kant thought and open the gates to the non-classical logics. Like when you probe the very fabric of the universe by looking for primitives to space and time. More worldly, like when you question your ethics, your religion, your politics, and you find only possibility where you were looking for necessity.

Now, those two options, redundancy and non-necessity, are the ones I’ve always stumbled upon but I don’t really know that happens for every concept. Or neither do I know if you can dismiss all experience in one fell stroke. That is, I’m, of course, not even sure that you can’t be sure of anything. Would you care volunteering an answer? %(p)Or a question?)%

In this sense: In the physical world, perhaps one of the biggest, most basic hurdles to overcome for any creature (above plant) is navigating space. Whatever you may want (eat, talk, watch, mate..) you have to be there first. That’s the tyranny of space, a tyranny that lingers despite telecommunications easing it to a degree we can’t really imagine now.

But technology has uncovered a new hurdle, even more basic in some ways, that we hadn’t even glimpsed some decades ago (you don’t much care about space when you live in a pen). The new hurdle is interface—a device’s how, its ways of interaction, what you have to wrestle with to get things done through it. Whatever you may want to do through technology (moving, watching, writing, browsing, talking, killing,...) you have to overcome the interface first. The need is more acutely felt the more plastic and dynamic the technology. The web ranks right up there. The information superhighway delivered its promise of abolishing space but the freedom has shifted the load from our legs to our brains, from space to interface. The challenge is no longer motive, it’s cognitive.

Consider malls. Besides modern comforts and breathtaking opulence, the single main thing they have going for them, their reason for being, is that they get stuff closer. They ease space. That’s also why similar stores cluster together, closeness is so valuable for customers that they force owners to set shop right next to the competition. Big box stores are the climax of contiguity.

A very similar thing happens in the web under interface constraints. Beyond critical-mass, Amazon, eBay, and the myriad vertical marketplaces (etsy is a good one) thrive because there’s a nontrivial number of interface details you have to tiresomely learn, divine, or settle if you go somewhere else. And these details are particularly painful in shopping because the whole process is staggeringly complex: it involves a lot of searching, browsing, foraging, comparing, digesting, authenticating, etc.

But in other areas the reality of the tyranny of interface is just as real. Wikipedia, we’ve now come to realize, is useful chiefly because it provides a single unified interface to knowledge. The blog is one of the most significant web innovations in recent years and at bottom it’s just a genre for the efficient exploitation of interface, uniforming it, streamlining it, adapting content interfaces to the new realities of the web, kind of what convenience stores did for space and cars. Heck, even search engines, interface-saving devices in a way (the search engine is the modern steam engine, directories are human-powered transport), have nontrivial interfaces all their own, as I’ve attested recently trying out torrent engines (mininova, torrentSpy, and isoHunt are my favorites).

You could have once said that downloading was the web’s equivalent of moving but broadband quickly made that friction negligible. In our current web, figuring out interface is the new moving. Interface is the new space.

Our trusted old friend very, I just found out, comes straight from the Latin VERus, truth! It’s the same root that gives us VERitable, VERacity, VERism, VERdict, (“truth-speaking”), or the Spanish VERdad. Every single very you’ve gushed has been a truly in disguise. When you say, say, “Damn Ivonne, you’re very hot!”, what you’re really saying across millennia to Yvonne is that she’s truly hot. Which she is. Now aren’t you glad you read this blog religiously?

Hoy, en la fila para ordenar de Il Tavolo, que siempre es exquisito, habia un grupo de amigas que siendo su primera vez pidieron una enumeracion de lo que ofrecia el bistro. Ya para terminar la retahila menciona el cajero que tenian “tes de raspberry y naranja”. “Naranja y que?”, pregunta confundida una de las amigas (la mas bella, de cejas oscuras y cabellos claros, a la Kate Winslet). “Naranja y raspberry”, responde inmutable el cajero y sigue impasible durante la larga pausa en que la amiga evidencia seguir en ayunas. “Uno de naranja,” acaba respondiendo atolondrada.

Siguieron el resto de las amigas y ya para cuando toco mi turno habia encontrado en mi Blackberry (!) la traduccion de raspberry, que me evadio en ese momento. “Frambuesa!” Es lo primero que le digo al cajero. “Es raspberry en epanhol”. “Es lo mismo”, me responde enfadado. Pero no, no lo es. Porque con frambuesa te hubieras comunicado, con raspberry confundiste.

Lejos, muy lejos, estoy de ser un purista del espanhol o un paranoico anticolonialista (si acaso soy el colonialista…). Como cualquier amigo puede atestiguar y al igual que muchos de ellos, mi lengua materna es el spanglish y hoy en dia escribo (blogs, correos, messenger) casi siempre en ingles siempre que mi interlocutor lo hable aunque sea como segunda lengua. Pero trato siempre que hablo con alguien que solo habla espanhol de anotar mi spanglish natural con sinonimos o parafraseos en espanhol. No hacerlo, no intentarlo siquiera, es lo que me espanto de este cajero. Si no te preocupa que te entiendan, para que hablar?

Ahora que siguiendo esta logica del entendimiento la verdad es que no hay mas que reconocer que sino fuera por flojera, condicionamiento, y, si, pedanteria tendria todo el sentido del mundo sustituir blog por bitacora, messenger por mensajeria instantanea, marketing por mercadeo (la otra vez vi marquetin!), link por enlace y asi (en vez de etcetera, que es nomas latin para “y el resto…”). Hasta ahi todo va bien para los academicos pero porque parar ahi? Por que no es medico de ninhos el pediatra, medico de la piel el dermatologo, musculo del corazon el miocardio, aprendiz por si mismo el autodidacta, inflamacion del estomago la gastritis y asi?

Y bueno, ya siguiendo esta logica de entendimiento hasta sus ultimas consecuencias, por que no aprender Esperanto, “el buen lenguaje”?

I’ve seen the future. Or rather, I’ve walked on it.

After days of shopping around town (after which I can attest there is no point in shopping around, particularly not around downtown—limit yourself to your local warehouse clubs and you’ll be fine), my family finally bought a much needed treadmill.

Of course the first thing I did when we finally lugged it upstairs was build myself a walkstation. After learning about the concept,

how could someone chained to his books and computer resist?

The best makeshift base ended up being the old ironing board, which is long, surprisingly stable, and cushiony. It’s nothing short of amazing to read and browse on it and realize for yourself that it actually works, that there’s barely any tremor, and that the walking soon becomes unconscious. Slow though the walking may be, it’s strangely invigorating.


This was long coming. We will all be walking the web one day.