TrueLife - A New Dimension of Language: AI, Consciousness & the Evolution of Meaning

Episode Date: October 26, 2020

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/In this episode we will tackle the printed word. McLuhan made the claim that linear print has brought about linear thinking. It has given us ideas such as the printing press, the assembly line, & the theory of interchangeable parts. All of which have had profound effects on the demise of our culture. Is there another dimension of language we can use to recreate our society? I think so.... One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins maze,

lights my war cry, born from the blaze. The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Kodak Serafini, check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Yeah. Aloha, everybody. How you guys doing today?

Welcome to Wednesday. Welcome to Wednesday, my friends. First off, I just want to say thank you to everybody who has become my friend lately and sent me some cool messages and just thank you to everybody. I'm super stoked to be out here and I'm super stoked to be communicating

to a bunch of like-minded people that, you know, want to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. So I put out a little teaser earlier. Brian, what's up, buddy? This one's about language, man. Let me know what you think. So I put out a little teaser on my page

and it was a, it's called a Tesseract. and it's actually a four-dimensional drawing. If you look at my post, you'll see what kind of looks like a cube, but it has an extra dimension in there. And the reason I put that up there is because I wanted to, what's up, Desiree? I wanted to get people thinking about our language. And there's so many different types of language, right?

There's like body language. You know, you ever like be somewhere and have someone give you one of these? Hey, little body language, you know, or there's different dimensions. of language like what about formal and informal? If you talk to your friend, you might be like, hey, what's up? But if you talk to a somebody else, like an authority figure or your mom or your dad or someone of respect, you might say, how are you doing today? Additionally, you may, you may address people with like, sir, you know, hey, excuse me, sir, if a cop pulls you over, you might be like, excuse me, sir, how you doing? You know, what's up, Jay? And if you see your

friend on the street, you might be like, hey, how's it going? You know, it kind of denotes closeness too that's another dimension like if that person's in your family you might have an inside joke you might be able to say one word to that person about an incident that happened five years ago and you start laughing you know you might be walking and be like hey tomato and all of a sudden you guys just start laughing because it references a joke about something you and your family had or you and a close friend had and uh so i just can't my mind has just been blowing up about the different kinds of language and the way we communicate and how does that relate to you relate to our situation today amidst the chaos.

You know, another, one of the dimension of our language is like the function, right? There's referential, which is the amount of data you have in a conversation. Like, oh, we had 25 bologna sandwiches or statistics. That's referential. Another dimension is the effective, and that talks about the different emotions you have in your language. And so I kind of want to just to give like a bit of a rough overview that. and just talk about the different dimensions and and then kind of dive a little bit deeper.

And basically what my goal is to, today my goal is to try to, is to try and kind of occupy some of your mind space. You know, I'm hopeful that I'll give you something interesting to think about an idea that will take your attention away from the chaos of these unanswered questions and then refocus it on potential answers. With that, you know, we're just going to, we're just going to strap on the snorkel and do a, you know, do a deep in-depth dive into the dimensions of language. You know, I believe that the appropriate use of language is like my wife. Beautiful, fascinating, dangerous, a divine poison that can be injected instantaneously causing one to see the other in divine radiance. I think when you speak in those terms and you do your best to

use some sort of poetic mindset or really think about what you say. I think you can have a more clear attempt at communicating with somebody. You know what we never do is when you sit down with somebody, even somebody you love, it's so easy to talk past people. Like you come in and you have all this stuff on your mind and you start thinking about things and then you just start flowing. But no one ever sits down with someone who says,

hey, let's define our terms. Let us sit down and talk about what we're going to talk about. right that's kind of one of the only ways you can really communicate you know i there's so many people in my life that i talk to and then i started thinking i don't i don't really know as much as i should know about this person i've known this person for 30 years but i don't even know their favorite color you know and when you start thinking like that you begin to understand how while our language is so vast and amazing and its its grasp is it's its reach is bigger than its grasp, right? There's so much words out there. There's so much vocabulary. And there's so many

ways to express yourself, yet it's very difficult to get a tight grasp on what that person is saying. So the appropriate use of language is the most powerful tool we have for transformation, whether it be personal, societal, or environmental. It allows us to bridge the gaps in geography, work together to achieve shared goals and shared values. Our language has given us empathy, the great equalizer. However, the misuse of language leads us down a path of destruction, the failure of language. It leads to barroom brawls, domestic disputes, and loss of life. Amidst the corruption, conformity, and chaos, I feel that we've kind of been imprisoned by our language, and that's what we see today. And let me try and be clear about what I mean about

being imprisoned by your language. Insurance company double speak, soul. social media guidelines, corporate contracts, these all present us with a promise to free ourselves of liability, yet they do just the opposite. Right? We've all, we've all seen the, we've all seen the contracts that people have to sign when you buy a house or we've all seen the the different social media contracts that, you know, you're supposed to read to, to know, what kind of liability you're going to be in. And it's overwhelming. You know, and that takes me to the dimension

of language that I want to talk about today, that I kind of want to go in depth about. And that's the dimension of the written word. You know, the written word has been powerful in transforming our society. I think it was Marshall McLuhan who made the argument the linear quality of print created linear thinking.

The linear quality of print gave us the notion of the citizen, the assembly, and the theory of interchangeable parts. All these conceptions which we take for granted are in fact, adambrations of the shift of sensory ratios caused by an unexamined acceptance of the printed word. Right?

So it's kind of just like, if you think about a beautiful picture, how could you possibly translate a beautiful picture into words without depriving it of your level of emotion? Right? Because when you see something beautiful, be it a sunset, or be it someone you love, or you're a child, or the miracle of child. When you see that, how do you have, there's no words for that. There's no words for you to truly understand to tell someone, to clarify to them. You know, there's a, there's something way back in that, there's a, you guys familiar with Plato's, Plato's Republic?

I'm sure most of you are. If you're listening to this video, you probably are. but I wanted to read a little bit from this book right here. It's called Technopoly. And it talks about the judgment of famous. And so let me just go ahead and read this little excerpt right here. And I think it'll give you some ideas into the problem of the written word and the problem of our language. So I'll read a quick introduction and then a little bit about the actual Phaedrus. You will find in Plato's Phaedrus a story about famous.

the king of a great city of Upper Egypt. For people such as ourselves who are inclined in Thoreau's phase to be tools of our tools, few legends are more instructive than his. The story, as Socrates tells it to his friend Fadris, unfolds in the following way. Famous once entertained the god Thuth, who was the inventor of many things,

including number, calculation, geometry, astronomy, and writing. Thuth exhibited his inventions to King Famous, claiming that they should be made widely known and available to Egyptians. Socrates continues. Famous inquired into the use of each of them, and as Thuth went through them, expressed approval or disapproval. According, as he judged, Thuth's claims to be well or ill-founded. It would take too long to go through all that, Famous is reported to have said, for and against

each of Thuth's inventions. but when it came to writing the written word, Anjuli, Thuth declared here is an accomplishment, my lord, which will improve both the wisdom and the memory of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure receipt for memory and wisdom. To this famous replied, Thuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm

which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this, you who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your offspring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful. They will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality.

They will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction. And in consequence, be thought very knowledgeable when they are, for the most part, quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of the real wisdom, they will be a burden to society. You might have to play that part again because it's pretty deep. But you can find that. It's called the phaedrus.

And you can find it. And I suggest reading it because it's, it really kind of just digs down to the heart of the written word, which brings us full circle back to the different contracts that tie us up in life and won't really allow our society

to move forward there. So don't get me wrong. Our language is beautiful and it's fascinating. But I think we're, at a time where we need to find another dimension in language. And this is where I need your guys help. All right? First, I'll thank you for taking the time to listen to this. And I'm kind of working on this idea. And I'm sure some of you have some better ideas and some more interesting ideas. And I'm hopeful that what I'm about to tell you will inspire you to think of your own ideas

or maybe add on to this one. And so here we go. What our language, what our verbal language, word, the written word, in my opinion is lacking, is emotion. Right? You can, and it's kind of like that fourth dimension. You know the emotion's there, but you can't see it. It's like if you look at a square on a piece of paper, you could envision it being a cube. You can't see the cube, but you could envision the cube. And it's the same with our language. When you talk to somebody, you can envision their intent, but you can't see it. So we need to see a little bit more from our language, I think we could push the meaning of language. I think we could push the meaning of language and get more out of it.

You know, I tussled with the concept of maybe adding, what if we add a new words or add a new concept, and those are all good things. However, what if we could add a prefix or a suffix to the words that we already have? Maybe a prefix that denotes a positive intent and a suffix that denotes negative intent. you know would that give us another dimension of language would that change the way contracts are done

would it free us a little bit more from liability and wrong speak or would we still fall victim to the interpretation of speech i i don't know the answer i don't know the answer i had a pretty good discussion with my sister we were talking about the evolution of language and another dimension of language and something interesting you may want to do is if you look up a patent artists. Like look at the way they draw things. The pictures they paint, the pictures they draw are in fact a different type of language. And they're incredibly informative.

What if our language had another visual component to it? Now, you could argue, you could say, George, we already have that. We have memes. And what memes are is using two different languages together. You know, a meme can be a picture. So you have a visual cue. And then you also have some words giving you that verbal cue. Maybe that is the evolution of language.

Maybe that is another dimension of language. I think that we are in a time right now where if we can't evolve our language, we can move forward. We can get better. We can become the best we've ever been. The fact is we can't, we only evolve as fast as our language. If you don't have a linguistic pathway to get somewhere, you can't even come up with an idea. Does that kind of make sense? And so I'm going to be doing some more thinking about it.

I hope you guys do some thinking about it. I hope that you guys choose to do some comments below and we can have a little bit more of a discussion down there. But most of all, I want to say thank you to everybody for taking some time to listen to what I have to say. And I hope you guys have an amazing Wednesday. All right? I love you guys.

Aloha.