Studying language reveals the structure of mind!

Language is the strongest tool to put forth your thoughts and I feel it does reveal a lot about the speaker. In intra-language communication, when one has exact words to express our thought, the body language radically changes & so does the confidence level. It is seen people with a command on a language, on vocabulary and delivery, are not only able to speak better but also comprehend better because they have a language to assist their thoughts.

Language does shape the way we see the world, the way we think. So not only it helps in expressing our thoughts, it many a times constraints them too. This is where we need to observe people who are bilingual/ multilingual. When speaking of inter-language interaction, people who speak more than one language can generally articulate better. This might be because they have more words and tones for expression. For example, my Nepali friend uses different words for exclaiming in different situation like “achu” on touching something too hot, “attu” when she’s too cold. In Hindi belt, generally the expression is “ahh” for exclaiming. Using such words also form the part of the language you speak. One might conclude, Nepalese is more expressive than Hindi, and so might be the people. Japanese speaker would be more sound oriented, English speaker more tone oriented.

If we compare the use of language to say a working of a computer, language requires real time mapping between words and meanings. It’s like you hear a sentence, nerves take it to the brain, then looks for meaning of the word, then the formulation of sentence, tries to draw inference from its stored knowledge and then accordingly creates a picture in the mind. The process is too quick and shows the structure of the mind. People who know more than one language have thus a larger data to retrieve information and to picture it.

Language does tell us a lot about the mechanism of mind and seen that our ability to think both emotionally and logically is very much dependent on the kind of language we use.

There is no specific domain for the expression of language. Two person can speak the very same expression with a much distinct representation. The way one expresses the thought, often reveals the way, s/he is thinking. Even the same sentence spoken by a person can actually differ in the way it is expressed. However, at times, we often find some people to be over-expressive and certain people to be monotonous. This can be justified by taking his or her attitude towards the subject under conversation. This leads us to visualize language as the complex mixture of thinking and emotions. Thus considering all the three major functions viz. cognition, feeling and volition. This provides the tick to checkpoint for a way to understand, how a mind is structured.

If one inquiries into the reading habits of a person, one finds, a certain type of people, reads the sentence and then hear it and thereby recognize the meaning. Another set of faster reader, reads the sentence in mind and then captures the meaning of the sentence. But, there also exist a much faster reader, who out of vision of looking at the sentence phrases, recognizes its meaning. This trend shows that our mind is trained to look at a particular sound or symbol and relate it to particular image in the mind. A person who is impaired to do such a matching suffers from dyslexia. It’s more like developing an understanding of dependent variable based on the knowledge of independent variable. Now, suppose a person has matched a particular set of symbols to an image in mind and now that he articulates what s/he is thinking, s/he is basically converting is image of thought in mind to this set of predefined symbols. Thus, in a way we are able to capture the structure of flow of thought in mind. However, a strong critique of it could be that, due to language, a particular person is trained to think in those directions. Given the free will of mind, one may choose to think differently, but due to conformity problems, one has to give up his/her own way of thinking. This is quite observed when an amateur SVO person, trained in SOV, is asked to converse in SVO. S/he often end up distorting the SVO into SOV. This is because, s/he is not initially coming up with his/her own mother tongue and then translating it to the foreign language; rather s/he is directly converting his thinking into the words of foreign language and that s/he is trained to think in SOV lines. Still, we can bit by bit generalize some universal grammar; which is quite an insightful in providing a major way in which one’s mind is structured, leaving aside the free will freedom.

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform” - An objection by Lady Lovelace

Lady Lovelace in her memoirs (1942) states that how so ever a learning machine evolves with technological advancement; its execution would always be restricted to its programming (set of instructions), fed to it by humans. A machine can never produce original thoughts & ideas. Turning defying the argument said that the kind of machines Lady Lovelace saw lacked such properties. She couldn't witness sufficient evidence to prove that when speed and storage capacity of the machine will increase, machine might “surprise” you. Further he adds that even humans are trained specie. The thoughts they generate are either results of the genetic information they inherit at birth or due to their nurturing by various social institutions. I beg to differ with Turing’s arguments.

Turing hoped that in the new millennium, with increased speed and storage capacity a machine might be able to imitate human mind. But as we can see, Machines till now are only capable of deduction and induction mechanism. They cannot produce original ideas. E.g. Let us take the invention of Submarine. A human mind observed the motion of a fish in water, how its stream lined body facilitated its movement. It thus made a mental representation and imagined a watercraft designed on similar lines to travel water bodies. I doubt that a machine fed with similar information could generate the idea of a submarine. Moreover, can a machine think of using paper towels to wipe liquids by observing the capillary action in a tree? Can a machine perform ‘jugaad’, innovation? Answer till now is a NO.

Humans, undoubtedly are nurtured under various institutions, be it family, school etc. But there they are educated and not trained. They are imparted knowledge, yet have the power to execute their choice. It is not the case with machines. Their outputs are restricted to the set of instructions given to them by humans. Many AI theorists propose that if machine’s table is included with some kind of probabilistic calculations, it might produce original, unexpected results. Arguably the results would be unexpected and ‘by chance’, not by ideas and innovation which only human mind is capable of. Machines are thus not empowered but bound by programming which leaves them inefficient to generate new ideas.

Turing Test

The essence of the Turing Test revolves around whether a computer can successfully impersonate or imitate a human given the subjects communicate solely via messaging system. To pass the test, a computer would have to be capable of communicating, at least as competently as a person. As there is no restriction on the subject matter, anything within the scope of an average human being can be asked by the interrogator. This comes out to be having possibilities of discussion in different fields like art, science, personal history, social relationships etc.

I believe the scope of the communication between the interrogator and the machine being so vast and diverse, it is highly unlikely to imprint all the various possibilities into any system, with which it can behave in same way as a men do. Moreover the machines do not understand what they are doing. They just process imprinted information present within them. They also lack instinct behaviour and common sense which can be observed differently in different human beings.

I believe that no machine can replace /imitate a human perfectly. The ‘free will’ that men have is absent in machines. Decades of artificial intelligence have made machines better but could not provide ‘free will’ to them. This would mean that while two identical men in the same situation might respond differently, two similar machines under same situation would respond the same way. Along with the time, we tend to evolve which makes us highly unpredictable. Even the most advanced AI (Artificial intelligence) systems or machines just uses some specific or predefined symbols for pattern matching there by producing an output .They actually don’t understand the meaning of the symbols. To a machine, all the symbols are similar. If the meaning of a specific symbol is changed then they would never be able to give a correct output. I believe that machines can be used to facilitate human interaction than to replace them.

Are there ways that AI can have thinking power, going forward?

Turing felt that within 50 years of his paper, that is by 2000, computers would’ve been designed which could pass his ‘test’. Why do you think it did not happen? Turing believed in constantly evolving embedded intelligence in a machine. But if we see the present trend, it’s more of a complexity question. People are into developing a faster computing device, given that time has gain paramount importance, equivalent to money! Turing nine arguments to object the question of intelligence in machine, attacks the prevalent notion and itself justifies that speed and ample memory is just the prerequisites, but not the end.

The foundation of AI lies with the neural networks, fuzzy logics and genetic algorithm. These networks are trained with specific domain values in order to produce the results. This delimits space under test to a restricted function. After a machine is trained with the set of rules and functions, it only thinks on these lines and predicts the probability of a set of possible outcomes. Moreover, the idea of making a choice is so deterministic and guided that it lacks self-evolution. Now suppose, we have a system which is self-evolving, it will be able to generate its own intelligence. For example, a simple AI machine, by touching a hot water will make sure, it will not be touching it any further; but if this machine has self-evolutionary power, it will be able to generate its own gloves that will protect it in future.

As per Charles Darwin, living being embodies the survival for the fittest. It is this nature that makes living being evolve over time and handle the problem likewise. Now suppose, a machine is developed on these lines, it will surely evolve its own assets and understanding of its environment, just like what humans do, and so will be able to write a sonnet. This in-turn implies that they will possess a certain feeling of its own as experienced by the surroundings. Human emotions are guided by the hormonal levels. There exist certain biomedical chips, which are based on the similar principles. It processes the data based on level of chemical (an analogue signal). This can be viewed as a certain kind of feeling that the machine had towards the input – a case similar to desire. If we see human body, we in-fact are surviving due to the digesting action of E. coli bacteria present in our intestine, on our food. This show that humans alone in itself, can’t work the way they are working, in isolation. What I feel is that, we mislead in the direction towards the development of a machine that can pass the Turing test, as we are grossly ignoring the two major aspects of intelligence, i.e. evolution and mutual-existence. If we try to incorporate these two into the AI development, we will be able to embody the free-will into the machine.

Why are we ignoring animal communication?

One of the reasons to study cognitive science is to understand how information is represented, processed and transformed within nervous system of humans and animals. Such understanding necessarily requires comparison  of communication within and outside different species. This might help us support the idea that human communication is actually different if not over and above other species' communication process.

If we look at how humans communicate, both verbally and nonverbally, it is only a set of people who understand a single language (both sign & verbal). For example, a European with English as his only known language would find it difficult to express his idea to say only Hindi Indian. Even the signs he'll use to describe his thoughts would be way different from the understanding of the Indian. Here both the language and the place people belong to play a significant role. Even on the level of perception, here, even if the reader and I know the same language and even are from same place, what he infers from this write-up might be completely different from what I am trying to put across.

Now if we see animal communication, and for that matter even human- animal interaction, we see a smoother understanding being generated between the two. I'm no expert in animal  communication, but what I have seen and observed is that theirs is a Universal language. A cow from Delhi might not find it difficult to communicate with another cow in Tamil Nadu whereas for  a Delhite it would be really difficult to communicate in the state of Tamil Nadu.

Not only place or language but the sense perception, previous knowledge through education, reason, imagination, faith, emotion etc play equally important role in communication. This extra baggage is not carried by animals per se. Thus the purpose of attending this question as a part of this inquiry would help in deeper understanding of human mind.

Programmatic question under inquiry: Why are we ignoring animal communication?

The inquiry about the animal communication should not be left out of the present inquiry space. Speech is one of the most perceived and identified stimulus free activity seen amongst the animate objects! It represents the free will and plays the most important role in determining the instant as well as future behavior. Many animal such as parrot seemed to have the faculty of sounds needed as present in human as they are able to reproduce it, but still they are not developing the skill! Don’t they want to develop this skill or they have their own ways to communicate? A bat emits sounds in inaudible range and so we don’t know if they are actually saying some word or not.

If we talk about our other senses like our sight, only a part of light frequency spectrum is visible to us, whereas if we talk about the bees, their visible range for frequency is far more. Scientist even conclude this by saying that probably bees are able to conceive more colors that humans do! Or probably as I think, the light spectrum the human see is spread across their visible frequency spectrum. If so, the object we see as orange might be still red for them. So, we don’t actually know, if the animal are communicating or not. It’s definite that they don’t use human kind of faculty for the same but they might be communicating via their own hidden ways!

Humans are constrained by their perception five senses. Even these senses are not complete in itself. It’s very well possible that we don’t have any ability to perceive them at all, but with the progress in technology, people have gone beyond their sense capabilities. Keeping the argument under the inquiry will enable the research in the field of communication. We are often bound by the linguistic constraints as many a time one witness in our day to day life! Probably, keeping an eye open to this inquiry will enable humans to be able to communicate more and with a higher frequency.

Further, communication doesn't mean only the verbal part of it. It can also relay via some other senses, like we all do when we fight or get angry. Certain signs can represent a scenario so effectively, that it can’t happen verbally. All these lumps together to form a free will part of the world’s society. Study of the animal communication, once incorporated to human lives, can enhance the degree of freedom for the free will. This will, in turn, help in understanding the philosophy of science underneath communication.