The Problem with Overunity. A different approach.

[hansvonlieven]

G'day all,

Just to let you all know that I am alive and well. There still seem to be some of you worried about me. And, no Gustav, the MIB did not get to me. I think I better explain a little what I am doing and why and why I am very busy at the moment. I have not deserted the cause, you can be sure of this.

Like many of you I have been trying for years to crack the overunity mystery. We all know instinctively that there are untold amounts of energy surrounding us and yet after centuries of trying by thousands of honest and clever researchers we seem to be no closer. There appears to be something fundamentally wrong here.

After another bout of experiments that looked promising I found myself staring once more at my own rectal orifice. Again I had come full circle. It was then that I had the feeling that the whole thing might NOT be a technical problem.

I started to examine the mechanics of invention. What makes the invention of anything possible? How does it work?

Obviously everything starts with an observation of one kind or another. This is followed by a speculation that this observation might lead to the creation of something useful or desirable. In other words we start thinking what, if anything, we can do with it. We are now in the realm of pure thought, examining the possibilities that could conceivably come from our discovery.

In turn this leads to experimentation and further thought, as we find out new things from gathering related data. Eventually it might lead to something tangible or to the recognition that we were chasing a pipe dream. We all know this, having been on this particular merry go round many times before.

The key ingredient in all this is our ability to manipulate mental imagery. This all sounds trite, until you take a closer look.

Evidently our ability to create something new depends on how well we manipulate such mental imagery and how good the database (knowledge) is from which we proceed.

But lack of knowledge is not the only thing that constrains our ability to think. It occurred to me that our inability to come up with valid solutions to the overunity problem might have its origin in our inability to create a suitable mental construct. With this I do not mean a new theory! Theories are a dime a dozen, most of them are useless for all practical purposes.

I remembered chaos theory. You know Julia and Mandelbrot sets, that sort of thing. It does not matter how many iterations you use, somehow all these random integers you create fall eventually into some sort of pattern, which led to the thought that there is some underlying order to chaos. When I first looked at this I was very excited, until I recognised that the underlying order was simply a reflection of the rigid rules of the mathematics that was used to calculate the values.

It was then that it occurred to me that the same thing might be true of language. And that it might well be that the rules of language is the barrier that prevents us from thinking in certain directions.

I needed to learn more about the role of language in relation to thought.

I did two things. I enrolled in a philosophy course at Sydney university As luck would have it there was just a lecture series starting on Wittgenstein, a 20th century Austrian philosopher who had done a lot of work on this. I was very fortunate as the lectures were given by Professor Goldfarb from Harvard, an acknowledged world authority on Wittgenstein.

I had two months before the lectures started. I spent this time in the Australian outback far away from civilisation, much of this in the company of Australian aborigines that still live in their traditional tribal cultures and still speak their tribal languages.

For those of you that don?t know this, these people had lived for over fifty thousand years in isolation from the rest of the world. Apart from a few hunting implements these people in all that time never invented anything. In spite of the harsh climate they never invented clothing, they had no pottery, no houses or tents, no agriculture, in fact they had no civilisation at all. And yet, these people are not stupid, far from it. You only have to look at some of their artwork to see this.

It occurred to me that it was the structure of their language that prevented them thinking along those lines. My research to date indicates that there might well be some truth to that assumption.

Before we can think about something we must have words that describe things. We have no problem with this. The moment we come across something we haven?t yet seen we name it. Now we can think and talk about it. It is after this where the problem seems to lie, namely in the way we assemble these words into concepts. This is where grammar comes into the picture.

Wittgenstein, Frege, Moore and to some extent Bertrand Russel look at this in detail. Especially Wittgenstein sees grammar as some sort of mental groove we are forced to follow that prevents us straying too far from the centre line into more adventurous areas of thought. He offers no solutions.

The big question I am wrestling with is: Is it possible to create a language structure, perhaps as an addendum to our existing language, that allows us to delve into areas as yet unthought of? And as a corollary, how would you go about doing this?

I have no answers to date, yet the prospect is exciting. At the moment all I can do is study.

Perhaps even at this stage some of my ideas may be of use to someone.

Hans von Lieven.

[helmut]

Hello Hans
Nice to see you here again and still working on importand things.
Thank you for the report about the journey in to unknown experiences.
One can see in this Forum,that as long, as we use the same language,we are able
to work together and share ideas.As better as the vocabular is,as better one can share
the news. These migt be the age,that the greatest punishment to humankind will get slowly lost.
"Babylon"
helmut

[jeanna]

Hi Hans,

How wonderful to hear from you.

My ideas usually always come first as pictures. I let them move around for a while then when it all gets too exciting, I put them into words. Well rather, I try to put them into words. Many times the ideas need to become constricted once I am relying on words.

If there is not the concept of this thing already in the language or the society, how can I apply the right words? What words? As Helmut said,  better vocabulary.

But sometimes there are no words. If we don't have the words that apply to something totally new, what can we use to describe that even if we have seen it?

A related question would be, "how do we make the same image appear in another person's mind?"

This is a wonderful thought.

I am going to think about this more.

thank you for bringing it up.

jeanna

[hansvonlieven]

G'day Jeanna,

I don't have any real worry about words as such, even though their meaning is open to several interpretations at times. Wittgenstein goes to great lengths to examine what he calls fixity of meaning. My main area of concern is what we do with the words once we have defined them. I can show you a flower, we both know then with a great degree of certainty what object we are talking about. No real problem here. But, what if you showed the flower to someone who has no idea what that is, and whose language has no concept of flower, could he think about it in a meaningful way, even though he has seen one now. This is where I perceive the barrier.

Hans

[Feynman]

Hey Hans,

You should check out a book called "A brief history of the human race".  It talks about the emergence of farming around the world after the opening of the Holocene window.  Anyway, the book talks about language and marriage customs of the Australian aborigines, you may find it interesting.



Cheers,
Feynman