You Can’t Understand a Single Word.
Read this sentence:
“Time flies like an arrow.”
How would you understand it?
There could be mainly three ways:
1. Time (noun) flies (verb) like an arrow = time passes very quickly
2. Time (imperative) flies (noun/object) like an arrow = Time the flies, as fast as an arrow!
3. Time flies (noun) like (verb) an arrow = flies of a particular species love an arrow
Of course, most people will likely choose the first option because it is the most commonly used idiom. However, the fact that all three of the choices make grammatical sense is quite concerning.
If language is so inconsistent, can we actually find some kind of universal Truth in it?
20th-century philosopher Jacques Derrida would say that we will never find and convey an incontrovertible Truth through writing.
He claims that words only make sense because there are other words that form their definition. For instance, the word “pen” would have no meaning if we didn’t know of other words like “writing,” “paper,” and “ink.” He then says that those other words like “writing,” “paper,” and “ink” are made up of other words like “literature,” “trees,” and “octopus,” which are made up of other words, which are made up of even more different words, over and over again. Derrida says that this phenomenon makes it impossible to have a true meaning behind a word.
Additionally, he says that people have different perceptions and images of all of these words in their minds, making it impossible to have a truly universal meaning in a sentence. Using the example above, the octopus that I would have thought of would look a bit different than the octopus that you would have a mental image of.
Derrida concludes that language is too subjective to create a true communication of thinking among people.
But could a supercomputer “truly” communicate with you?
Computer algorithms already have a lot of data about you. What if a powerful AI could use that data to make an accurate prediction of what perception you have about a particular word? For instance, your perception of the term “water bottle” would likely be your own water bottle, which the AI could predict by analyzing your Amazon previous purchases on Amazon.
If an AI could understand you perfectly by having your perception of an object’s word in its mind instead of other words to explain it, shouldn’t it be able to able achieve that “perfect communication?”
Takeaway
Whether computers can flawlessly talk to you or not, you have to still communicate with other people, which will inevitably lead to misunderstandings. Perhaps acknowledging the fact that people have a different understanding of each of the words that you have told them will help you relax a little bit after your coffee shop gives you an entirely different drink that you commanded and writes your name in the most horrendous spelling you have ever seen in your life.
