I'm moving towards Language Maximalism again after the last few months of LLM-induced anxiety. My position for a long time that language is fundamental, perhaps even the rails of cognition, to a specifically human kind of intelligence was stress-tested severely as I started exploring LLMs a little more seriously. Obviously the next step was to either concede human exceptionalism and say we're llms after all or take the mystical route and propose that we're not just LLMs but what unidentifiable elan vital we possess we don't know yet (aka reminder humanism)- but whatever it is language is not the way to get to it. I am disappointed with the former and reluctant to accept the latter- So I'm still searching, still experimenting.

However, I had a pretty cool insight last night. Thanks to my newfound interest in the Maths of ML, I've been working hard to get through material I normally would abandon as too hard - Anil Ananthaswamy's Why Machines Learn, Prof. Kilian Weinberger's Machine Learning course, Grant Sanderson's Linear Algebra, George Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines, and, most challengingly, Mathematics for Machine Learning Textbook. Which means I'm spending a lot of time either trying to untangle the threads/find the sculpture hidden within the stone by turning it around in my head, or discussing with an LLM and asking it to break it down/ explain it from another angle so that I get it- and usually that means asking the sociocultural milieu of the inventor, intellectual history and evolution of the subject, out-of-the-box analogies etc. And the effect is twofold: One is that it is giving me new concepts (mental vocabulary?) to draw on, analyse, and communicate with- there is atleast some truth to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. More interestingly, perhaps owing to the fact that I'm reading more stuff from historical eras rather different to our own, I'm sensing a thread of connection that spans across time. And that thread is made of language. Making the effort to learn both the meaning of those words and the cadence of those paragraphs is allowing me to see the spirits of the past in the present - the factors that have shaped and continue to animate our current (seemingly) contingent constructs - thereby not just helping me understand the present better but also giving me a family of intellectual grandparents, making me feel less lonely in my pursuits.

In that sense language is a superpower. I once wondered if going deeper into one's own idiosyncratic mind voice language makes one more solipsistic. My candidate answer now is that while it may cut you off from your immediate spacetime neighbours, that particular language too has not sprung out of nowhere. It is something you've learnt while talking to these people through their writings, and makes you particularly suited to converse with these intellectual and artistic companions- what if no one else can see them?

The rather unfortunate realisation has been that most of us, on a daily basis, use language less for its enlargening capability and more for its rhetorical, signalling virtues. On insisting that what we have been told or experienced in specific contexts is now generally applicable across a wide range of scenarios into the future. Instead of acquiring more language/ creating new forms to (self-)describe new stuff we see in reality better, we prescribe our pre-existing notions onto what we see- choosing Variety Attenuation over Variety Amplification as Dan Davies might have put it. At its most atomic it is not having a rich enough suite of different-sized symbols/ concepts (And here I want to expand the word language to mean most formal systems- institutions, protocols, technologies); And at its most pernicious it is refusing a new poetics to emerge, on never learning to speak a different idiom. The prizing of the established interior over the novel exterior is understandable, even rational, but you can go too long without updating your mental models and end up becoming irrelevant, unsure, cut out from the conversation. "But you still have your internal set of voices.", a thought pops up, "Didn't you just say they were infact more desired?". True, that's a fair point. But knowledge of/ from the past is to illuminate the present better, not as an escapist refuge from the indecipherable present. And I think this is what happens to many of us as we start to grow older.

I think many of us get trapped within the particulars and peculiarities of our individual experiences without realising that they are quite commonplace and there are rather large historical currents that sweep a large number of people to the same shores. When we forget that, we condemn ourselves to solitude. On the other hand, when we open ourselves up to others and teach ourselves to look outward, we realise that we are part of grand narratives that span millennia (if not the entirety of history itself) and our actions do change the story of the world. We do that by continuing a particular chain of thought from our chosen ancestors to those of our descendants who may choose us. The indigenous peoples are right- the best we can do is be good custodians.

So language is not necessarily a prison castle surrounded by a moat; It can also be a drawbridge if you keep adapting it to allow for different people and ideas to come in. Most amazingly, perhaps it can also be a beacon that can illuminate the castle and the world around it. Ultimately though its value is in where it leads us to, where it can lead us to, if we only allow it to guide us instead of using it for our petty needs.