A Laboratory for Thoughts

I've been writing a lot about Artificial Intelligence lately, and I'm thinking of not touching upon the subject today, even though I still have a couple of topics which I haven't fully explored. Today's topic did not germinate from my thinking and use of AI but from an interview I watched on YouTube with poet and author Ocean Vuong. I have not read any of his works before but I thoroughly enjoyed the interview because I completely agree with his views on writing. He said that "poetry is a laboratory for words".  

That idea certainly resonates with mine about language and poetry, which I've also written about more than 20 years ago. In A Way with Words, I wrote: 

Poets understand the limitation and potential inherent in words. So they seek to experiment with fresh combinations of words and sounds to trigger the desired effect in the reader's mind. Poetry helps to extend the possibilities of our language.

In another blog article (The Poetry of Spittle), I compared words to electrons, which, according to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the particle's position and momentum can only be expressed probabilistically:

In poetry, poets attempt to explore the edges of the word cloud--to expand the possibilities of words. If a poet veers too far away from the centre of the word cloud, he could risk alienating the reader, and his writing would be considered incomprehensible, or worse, he could be misunderstood. A good poet stretches and teases but never alienates the reader.

I used to write a lot of poetry as a teenager. Many were published in the local entertainment tabloids, popular then. If I had grown up in the internet and social media era, I probably would have been a wanna-be Insta-poet like Lang Leav or Rupi Kaur. My heroes then were the Romantic poets like Byron, Shelley and Keats. Later, during my university years, I developed a liking for Dylan Thomas. 

Sadly, as one grows older, the poetic instinct diminishes. It'll take a lot to inspire me to write another poem. I suppose I'll just fulfil my literary expressive needs through my writings on this blog, which is also kind of a laboratory for me. 

I see this blog as my personal thinking lab, where I conduct various thought experiments. I know my writings sometimes veer into pseudo-mystical ramblings, but that's alright, as this is (again I've articulated in another blog article), a buku conteng-conteng, an exercise book. To write is to think, and when we think, we are exploring the universe of the mind.

The important relationship between language and intelligence is brought to the fore by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), which accounts for the great leap forward in AI today. LLMs are built on the probabilistic relationships between words. Many still dismiss our AI as not real intelligence, as LLMs don't really understand anything. Let me tell those AI sceptics to read poetry. I would even contend that AI understands poetry much more than the average person. But I will leave that for another AI-related blog article in the future.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote in his Tractatus: "The limits of language mean the limit of my world".  I've always believed that language shapes the way we think. Writing is thinking, as I've expressed in many other blog articles before. I would even go further to say that stringing words together into sentences is a way to process life experiences to the fullest. 

Whether through poetry or prose, we are all experimenting in the laboratory of language. Each sentence is a hypothesis, each metaphor a test, each paragraph a discovery. This blog, like poetry itself, is my quest for meaning—sometimes precise, sometimes uncertain, but it is always an honest attempt.