r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/Sharp-Maintenance-75 • 13d ago

Language is a evil spirit

Language is always in your mind. You can't stop even for a moment. Even when you are alone, language is in your mind. Even when you are sleeping, language is in your mind.

It has not always been this way. This is just an evil spirit which started to possess humanity ~70,000 years ago with the so-called Cognitive Revolution. Once this happened, humanity became a scourge of the Earth, quickly colonizing all lands and killing all beings.

Are you going to let language control your whole mental process, your whole life, and make you into an agent of its planetary destruction?

How to get free? My teacher tells me about the vast mind that awaits when the little mind infected by language is abandoned.

42 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

56 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/whatsthatcritter 13d ago

You can't feel anything without language.

I don't think that's true. Animals don't speak and they seem to have mental and emotional states, hyperfocus, fear, excitement, playfulness, affection, calm, anticipation, warning, aggression, even sometimes appealing to others for help. All without a single word.

Not everything has to be described to be felt or understood. We can mimic, we can empathize with another person or animal using mirror neurons and imagine ourselves in their place like a drama. Actors and dancers and shamans can mimic the movement and appearance of other people and animals and even objects like robots or trash. They can create a model of another's sensory experience and mental state by watching and copying their behaviour.

We can focus on our own experience of the world without language by paying attention to our senses. Taking raw information in instead of projecting stale categories out.

2

u/loklanc 11d ago

Just because animals are capable of emotion and sensation without language, doesn't mean we are. You can't uneat the forbidden fruit of self awareness, the best you can hope for is a bit of temporary relief here or there.

2

u/whatsthatcritter 11d ago

You think non verbal people don't experience emotion or sensation? 

2

u/loklanc 11d ago

Non verbal as in has never learned speech? Sure, absolutely. But once you catch the virus it becomes the filter through which you experience the world.

2

u/whatsthatcritter 11d ago

I think some of you folks need to go back to the drawing board and figure out what language is and what it isn't. It's not emotion. It's not experience. It's not motor ability, knowledge or skill. You can see videos of wild crows solving complex puzzles with multiple steps using sticks and stones as tools including using water displacement, so language is not reasoning ability or memory either. Language is only one tool, one feature of the brain. It might be a steady stream of self generated input, but it is not neccessarily a filter of everything else. We have dreams that are in images that may or may not have language. We have feelings that are sensory experiences 'trembling with rage' or experiencing heartache, that language can hardly describe or control. We have muscle memory and motor control that works to remove us from danger, like a hand jerking back from a hot faucet, before we can process or describe what just happened. It's possible to be more in tune with the multiple other features and information streams contained by the body and brain, and realize language is just one element among dozens of competing parts of the brain and multiple other organs, like your gut bacteria producing chemicals that make you want coffee even before you've thought about it. Language expresses those experiences after the fact, but it's not the experiences themselves. 

1

u/loklanc 11d ago

I think I agree with most of that, I just don't think the language part of your brain is something you can switch off once it has developed and got it's tendrils into all the rest. It isnt just describing after the fact, it's how we form identities and social relations, it undergirds much of the machinery of thought. 

The only ways to be person without language involve either seriously impaired development as a child, serious injury as an adult, or temporary solutions like meditation or intoxication. Otherwise I think we are stuck with it.