Our Host: Hey, how you doing today?

Language: Great, good to be here.

Our Host: So, tell us something about yourself.

Language: Why?

Our Host: Because that’s what we do here.

Language: Why?

Our Host: Because a long time ago we decided that we’re gonna do this in 18+ Maths.

Language: Why?

F.A.L(Fake Audience Laugh)

Our Host: I see where you are going with this.

Language: Why? (F.A.L) Well, this can go on for a while, but the point is this can go on with ‘What’ too. Like What is Why?

Our Host: What?

Language: Yes, What is Why? Put it into words.

Our Host: I mean I don’t know, something related to logic or something?

Language: I’m just asking you a simple question. What is Why? You just answered a lot of Why’s so you must know What is Why when you answered above Whys. So, this is all on you. Not my fault.

Our Host: Come on, Is this one of your pranks?

Language: Are you able to experience the thoughts that you are having, which you obviously can’t put into words, when thinking about Why? That is the same thought which you used while answering above Whys. Same goes with What, How, When… and millions of other words. There are so many complex-words in every language that you can’t express in other words, coz the words that describe the complex-words perfectly are just words themselves which are associated with just other thoughts, feelings, and expressions. These words, even though completely abstract, are the foundational building blocks of every language.

Our Host: And here I was thinking you were gonna talk about Nouns and verbs and stuff. Coz that’s what we are taught in the school in the Language class.

Language: Please don’t get me started on schools.

F. A. L.

…because here’s the thing about schools: have you ever imagined where all of those stupid people come from? All of them attended schools and as most of the school education hasn’t evolved in a long time, there they were taught Language before they were taught Thinking. Now imagine if it was the other way round, which would have required a couple of more years, which can be sucked out of any bachelor’s degree, and then they would have known that Language is just a way to express those thoughts. But then people grow up and then started doing things so frequently that they didn’t even notice what are they doing wrong.

Our Host: No, I can’t believe that my dumb brain is doing that. Can you prove it?

Language: No, but I can give you a very interesting analogy. Think about the most hated subject – Mathematics also as a language. Now, here’s the journey of a mind who unlike others choose to study Mathematics in a long-run:

Learn 1 to 100.

Learn how to do add, subtract, multiply and divide. (At this stage there’s just a little effort required to remember 1 to 100)

Learn more sophisticated Maths(And Above two becomes obvious)

Learn more and more sophisticated Maths(And Above three become more and more obvious)

Similarly, here’s the journey of a mind while learning any language:

Learn Alphabets.

Learn how to make words from them and widely accepted meaning of them. (At this stage you hardly require any energy to remember how an ‘S’ looks like)

Learn how to combine those words into more sophisticated thoughts and ideas (And above two become more and more obvious)

Learn more and more sophisticated thoughts and ideas (And above three become more and more obvious)

Our Host: Okay, who started this thing. What was the first word ever said?

Language: Booooh.

F.A.L

Language: Yeah, first word ever associated with a thought was Booooh. It was used to call others’ attention to yourself.

Our Host: How about the more sophisticated form of words and dictionary?

Language: Once upon a time, a good word, a bad word and a Meme walked into a bar, good one ordered a scotch on the Rocks and got one, Bad one ordered Ethanol and waited forever for his order, Meme just stayed there, didn’t do anything.

F.A.L.

Now:

The good word is the one which has the same thought associated with it no matter what, as it is mostly associated with some physical object.

The bad word is the one which has some abstract concept behind it.

The meme is the others, etc.

And once upon another time, you must have heard about that experiment where they take like 10-12 kids and teacher tells a story to the first kid and he/she has to tell the same story to next student and so on. What’s the result of that experiment?

Our Host: The story is totally different when it gets to the other side, even though everyone was trying their very best to convey the same thing.

Language: Have you ever tried to find exactly where story changed, because here is what happened:

Teacher converted her thoughts to words. She said those words to the first student. The first student understood those words, And based on his previous knowledge, tried to make sense of the thought behind it. The first student memorized that thought. And based on his previous experience, converted that thought into his own words. The first student said those words to the second student.

Now shit happened in the steps 1,4,6 or in short whenever someone tried to convert words into thoughts or vice-versa.

Now imagine the above thing happening with a Good word; for instance, Sun, and compare it to a bad word; for instance, Love.

So, if the thought associated with Sun, is to be transmitted through a set of people it would end up being almost the same thought, whereas in the case of Love it would be a completely different story, coz everyone feels the love in a different way. Now imagine all the words being transmitted at the same time in different places by different people. Hence, the uncertainty around the abstract thoughts associated with the bad words in the world.

The best example of this is the word with which we started, ‘Why this, Why that?’

So, when you are saying ‘Why Money?’ what you are actually looking for is the starting of that; to find out the reason, for which, that thing was started. Money started as a way as a medium of exchanging goods, and see what it has become now.

F.A.A. (Fake Audience Applause)

Our Host: Okay next we have a fan who’d like to ask a question if it’s alright with you?

Language: Yeah, sure.

Fan: It’s the age old-philosophical cliché, that if you could collect a set of words from any language that can satisfy this question ‘What is the most meaningful pattern, you can find in all chaos, to understand everything around us, a.k.a. The Universe.’ What would that set of words be?

F.A.L.

Language: Do you know any maths?

Fan: Nothing fancy. I don’t like it that much, ‘coz I wasn’t that good at it.

Language: Okay here’s a not-so-fancy mathematical analogy for you to think about. You know, how in Maths, everything is based on logic, arithmetic and axioms and stuff like, one means one no matter what. Everything is either True or False, which we all very well know can be very monotonous when studied for longer times.

F.A.L.

…and in Language, it’s the same way, we treat the words, and their meaning as axioms. In mathematics, we follow logic and operate on those numbers, Similar things goes on for language, but to a little lesser extent on the logic part.

But still in mathematics, even after the presence of 1000% well-placed proper rules to follow, there’s something known as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems which, in layman terms, says that in any language expressive enough to describe the properties of numbers 1..2…3…and so on, there are true statements or questions, that are undecidable in the sense that they have no proof within the theory.

Now, coming back to your age old-philosophical question of ‘What is the meaning of life?’ You just cannot start by defining a dictionary of words and then try to find a set of words from them which define exactly whatever abstract concept you are thinking about.

Fan: Still, if you had to, what would they be?

Language: Okay, if I had to then I’ll tell you about this movie The Bucket List I was watching a while ago and it said something interesting that even if you accumulate all the wisdom from the whole world, “It’s difficult to understand the sum of a person’s life. Some people would tell you it’s measured by the ones left behind, some believe it can be measured in faith, some say by love, other folks say life has no meaning at all… Me, I believe you measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you…”

So, that got me thinking, what would my answer be, if someone asked me?

I’d have said, “Me, I believe life is just as meaningful as you fool yourself into thinking it is. So, if you really wanted to fool yourself into calculating the sum of someone’s life, you’ll find a long continuum of choices, with choice always of the form, ‘This is what I want to do’ vs ‘This is what I should do.’ All these chosen choices, when written together, can tell an awful lot about the person, and thus a lot about everything else too.”

Our Host: Any last-minute advice for everyone because we are still gonna keep using language and have meaningless conversations because you are all that we’ve got.

Language: Think before you speak. Think after you listen. And many people have said many great things, listen to them, figure out which are good and then out of them figure out which are good for you. My favorite one is from this guy named Confucius who said something really meaningful “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name” and that right and wrong are just what majority vs what minority believe in.

Our Host: So in that regard what would be your proper name?

Language: It would seem like a self-appreciation but I think that I proved to be a very huge, maybe even first Singularity for Humankind, giving the ability to construct organized thought and communicate them as well.

Our Host: Any other interesting concept to share these thoughts?

Language: A minority breed of people believe the answer is Poetry. Exhibit A:

I know.

I know what I know,

but there’s nothing that I know

which I knew before.

then comes something new,

I don’t know

I know, I don’t know.

Maybe I’m just fooling myself.

There’s one thing that doesn’t know,

another one that knows.

I don’t know, I know,

I know, I don’t know.

But still,

I don’t know, ‘how I know?’

And for the guy who was looking to understand everything around us, a.k.a. The Universe; there’s an another minority breed of people who think that there’s more to Maths than what meets the eye and have even gone as far as to say, “Mathematics might be the language you are looking, if one was so inclined, to make sense out of the universe. It makes invisible, visible.”