The Wisdom of Words

It's the last day of July. Instead of coding, I decided to blog, and I chose a new place to do so. So here I am at the Hom Coffee Express, comfortably settled down with my cup of hot Americano. I wanted to take my time to write today, instead of limiting myself to an hour, as I usually do.

In most religions of the world, you begin with something. You could call it God, or you could call it something else. The Neoplatonists call it the One; the Kabbalists, Ein Sof; the Advaita Vedantists, Brahman; the Taoists, the Tao or Dao. What more can be said about it, since we have now objectified it into a word?

The Taoists, through Lao Tze's first poem in the Tao Te Ching, already gave a disclaimer: "The Tao that can be spoken of, is not the real Tao".  That, of course, is my own paraphrasing of countless translations of those enigmatic first six Chinese characters of this much-studied text.  When we want to express our understanding of something, we always have to use words. And every time we do so, we face a conundrum: words always fall short. 

Words are created by humans for communication. They are tied to sound--vibrations of air--which emanate from voluntary movements of our vocal cords, shaped by our intent, so that they then convey the idea and information of what we think and feel to our recipients. 

When I say "chair", for instance, you would immediately know what I am referring to. You would say that you understand. Different languages would have different sounds to express the same idea of a chair. But they point to the same object: some solid object with a surface on which one could sit. So is there perfect concordance between what I have in my mind and what the word conjures up in yours? 

Certainly not. What you have in your mind could be some image of a chair that's familiar to you. It could be a wooden brown one, perhaps. The picture appears in your mind immediately. But what's in my mind is quite certainly different from yours, even though both of us happen, by coincidence, to be visualising a wooden brown chair. 

We understand words through our own individual experience of the world.  For material objects which we all can touch and feel, like chairs, the dissimilarities that might appear in each of our individual minds could be insignificant for most purposes.  Chairs are material man-made objects on which we can sit. Sometimes we might even stand on top of them to reach a higher object. But the objective meaning is clear. 

The same cannot be said for words that convey intangibles, like, for instance, love. Love is at once a concept, a feeling and an expression. We also learned the word through experience, from how it is used in books we have read, and when we were children, from how adults used the word through associations with the undeniable feelings we experience when we are the recipient of what they call 'love'.  We can claim that we know what love is, even though it is not as tangible as material things like chairs.

Words in themselves are just vibrations of sound, or black marks on a page. They acquire meaning through our shared agreement on what they refer to. They are symbols and models of something, not the thing in itself. Words are pointers to elsewhere.

Words are approximations of the real thing. We have to resort to using many different words, combined into sentences and paragraphs, to convey what we have in our minds. Even then, we still fall short. What we want to convey is often misinterpreted and misunderstood.  That is the limitation of words and our ability to convey thoughts through words.  There's always some kind of transmission loss. 

Why do we even want to express something called God or the One?  The Gospel of John begins with: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God".  'Logos' was the original Greek, that was translated as 'Word'. Christians interpret the Word as Jesus Christ. God made flesh, like how an intangible thought in the mind is turned into audible sound vibrations. 

I mentioned that words are essentially pointers, and they become pointers to pointers when they are used metaphorically. The use of metaphors helps us to expand our understanding of words by bridging one with another, so that the essence of what we are trying to convey is enhanced by forcing the mind to view a concept from a different angle. 

But ultimately, words are imperfect. They are merely stepping stones to something intuited within. Intuition in humans is nothing but a large context window of words and human experiences, sensed in our bodies and minds. The Large Language Models (LLM) used in our AI rely solely on relationships between words and look at how far they have come in approximating and even surpassing human intelligence. 

How do we truly grasp words? Look behind them: what is the intuition that prompted each word, and what are the associations that reverberate from each utterance? Then perhaps a glimpse of its intent and richness can be comprehended, no matter how imperfectly. And more importantly, what thoughts, feelings and actions do they prompt in you?