TITLE: Language, and What It's Like To Be A Bat
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 28, 2016  3:16 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2016-09.html#e2016-09-25T09_40_25.htm">
   My recent post</A>
 about the two languages resonated in my mind with an article
 I finished reading the day I wrote the post:
<A HREF="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/12/two-heads">
   Two Heads</A>,
 about the philosophers Paul and Pat Churchland.  The Churchlands
 have been on a forty-year quest to change the language we use to
 describe our minds, from popular terms based in intuition and
 introspection to terms based in the language of neuroscience.
 Changing language is hard under any circumstances, and it is
 made harder when the science they need is still in its infancy.
 Besides, maybe more traditional philosophers are right and we
 need our traditional vocabulary to make sense of what it feels
 like to be human?

 The <EM>New Yorker</EM> article closes with these paragraphs,
 which sounds as if they are part of a proposal for a science
 fiction novel:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Sometimes Paul likes to imagine a world in which language has
 disappeared altogether.  We know that the two hemispheres of
 the brain can function separately but communicate silently
 through the corpus callosum, he reasons.  Presumably, it will
 be possible, someday, for two separate brains to be linked
 artificially in a similar way and to exchange thoughts
 infinitely faster and more clearly than they can now through
 the muddled, custom-clotted, serially processed medium of
 speech.  He already talks about himself and Pat as two
 hemispheres of the same brain.  Who knows, he thinks, maybe
 in his children's lifetime this sort of talk will not be just
 a metaphor.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 If, someday, two brains could be joined, what would be the
 result?  A two-selved mutant like Joe-Jim, really just a
 drastic version of Siamese twins, or something subtler, like
 one brain only more so, the pathways from one set of neurons
 to another fusing over time into complex and unprecedented
 arrangements?  Would it work only with similar brains,
 already sympathetic, or, at least, both human?  Or might a
 human someday be joined to an animal, blending together two
 forms of thinking as well as two heads?  If so, a philosopher
 might after all come to know what it is like to be a bat,
 although, since bats can't speak, perhaps he would be able
 only to sense its batness without being able to describe it.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

(Joe-Jim <EM>is</EM> a character from a science fiction novel,
Robert Heinlein's
<A HREF="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky">
   Orphans of the Sky</A>.)

 What a fascinating bit of speculation!  Can anyone really
 wonder why kids are drawn to science fiction?

 Let me add my own speculation to the mix:  If we do ever find
 a way to figure out what it's like to be a bat, people will
 find a way to i<EM>describe</EM> what it's like to be a bat.
 They will create the language they need.  Making language is
 what we do.
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