“Actually, the story about the Inuit is something of an urban legend. The number of words that they apparently have for ‘snow’ seems to increase every time the story’s told. When Boas first reported his findings it was four, Whorf spoke of seven in his hypothesis, and the seven became ‘almost ten,’ ‘over ten,’ and so on and so forth, until you get ‘the Eskimos have a hundred different words for snow!’ being reported as fact in National Geographic. Scratch a little deeper, though, and you’ll see that they really just have a handful. Not that different from English, when you think about it: ‘snow,’ ‘sleet,’ ‘slush,’ ‘hail,’ and so on.”
This I didn’t know. I’d put up with plenty of dinner party snobs in my time, idly jibber-jabbering about how the Inuits have such different realities from us, don’t you know, and how their lives must be so much more real, y’know, being centered around snow and all that. And so I guess it was these idle gossips who were the carriers of the Eskimo meme from one middle-class dinner party to another.
I wondered how many words the Inuits would allegedly have for snow by the time the meme finally ran its course. A hundred? Two hundred? More?
“Sadly, real life tends to be a little less exciting than all that,” Lucia continued. “And contrary to popular belief, there seems to be very little correlation between language and people’s perception of reality. No matter where you’re born or where you grow up, reality is just that little bit too resilient to be buffeted about by language. The thought always comes before the language used to express the thought.”
“And yet I’m thinking in English right now.”
“Well, it might seem like that, because your reality is one that incorporates the English language into itself. But actually your thought process consists of a number of different factors, and language is just one of the tools at its disposal. Language is a subset of thought, if you will, not the other way around. Trying to argue that people think with language just because we have a keenly developed linguistic sensibility is a bit like saying that beavers have evolved to think with their teeth.”
“That’s an … interesting analogy.” I wasn’t being sarcastic. I had to acknowledge that there was a certain attractiveness to the idea that reality was determined by words and that it was the meanings that people attached to words that acted as a filter to construct their own versions of reality. But at the same time, something had always struck a false chord with me about this theory. I remembered back in high school our English teacher proudly relating the story of Eskimos having many different words for snow (twenty, was it, in that telling?) and feeling profoundly uncomfortable about this. After all, words were real, they were bundles of reality that existed in the outside world, independent from me. I remembered wondering how they could possibly influence my thought in that way when they weren’t really part of me.
“What sort of units do you imagine a mathematician or a theoretical physicist thinks in? When they first conceptualize their ideas?” Lucia asked me.
I answered that I supposed they would use more numbers and numerical formulae.
Lucia shook her head. “You would have thought so—but Einstein’s actually on record saying that it was always a visual image that came to his mind in the first instance. Other so-called geniuses have said similar things. That it’s actually a sort of diagram that comes to mind first, and it’s only by manipulating that diagram in their minds that they’re able to come up with formulae as the output.”
“That’s hard to believe. To understand, I mean. How do you visualize an imaginary number, or infinity for that matter?” I asked.
“Hard to believe for you or me. That’s because our realities are different from those genius scientists. So, you see, it’s probably more accurate to speak of different realities as being determined by thought processes, not language as such.”
“May I ask you a question?” I decided to press the point. “What are words to you? If they’re not objects that determine our realities, then what are they there for?”
“Tools for communication, of course. Or … organs, maybe, I guess?”
It was at this moment that I realized that Lucia’s language had shifted in register—slightly, subtly, but definitely. At the start of our conversation, she had been talking to me as a prospective student and customer—and that was supposed to have set the boundaries of the conversation.
But here she was now, enjoying her conversation with me.
“Organs?” I said. “You mean, as in body parts? Kidneys and bowels and arms and eyes?”
“Exactly.”
“But isn’t language a human abstraction?”
“So are you saying that abstractions can never be real? Do you believe that there’s no way the human soul could be contained in a pitiful little organ such as the brain, maybe?” Then Lucia appeared to stop herself. “Oh, forgive me if I’ve overstepped the mark. You are, perhaps, a religious man?”
I thought of Alex.
Hell is here.
Alex pointing at his own forehead.
“No, I’m an atheist,” I said.
Alex had been a religious man. He had believed in God.
And that same Alex had said that hell was inside our minds. Hidden among the folds and creases of our brains.
“That’s a relief. I know this sort of conversation can be offensive to some people.”
I laughed. “Lucky escape for you, I guess. Besides,” I pointed out, “if I were the Bible-thumping type, you would have already offended me earlier with your talk of souls and whatnot.”
“You’re right. I guess I’m the sort of person that has to rely on having lucky escapes.” Lucia laughed. “Anyway, what I was saying was that language is one of the fruits of evolution, of humanity’s natural tendency to adapt to the environment. Humans had to acquire the ability to somehow compare themselves with other things; that way they could run crude mental simulations to try and forecast the outcome of a particular action or interaction. Human thought processes—or maybe you could call it raw emotion—came up with a way of differentiating our selves from the other: the ego, they call it in psychology. After all, without having an idea of the self, you have no way of comparing yourself with the outside world, no way of making any sort of comparisons or judgment calls. But with a sense of self, man was able to avoid all sorts of danger through his ‘forecasts.’ You could say that language developed as a way of trading these ‘forecasts’ with other similar beings. This allowed us to build up a mental database of information without necessarily having to experience it firsthand, and this in turn further reduced our exposure to danger and allowed us to adapt even more perfectly to a wide variety of environments.”
“So you’re saying that language is basically just a product of evolutionary adaptation?”
“Yes. Just like our other organs.”
So the very fact that I was here now, talking to Lucia, was nothing more than an incidental byproduct of evolutionary adaptation of the brain? Was language really no more than an organ, like an elephant’s trunk or a giraffe’s neck?
Language was indeed a precise and delicate instrument, I supposed. It occurred to me that even though we now had technology such as giant artificial flesh Meatplanes and the like, we still didn’t have a way of fully replicating the complex filtration systems of human kidneys and livers on a miniature scale. Those organs were, in their own way, just as precise and delicate, as exquisite, as language. For medical science, the perfect artificial organ was still some way over the horizon. When even our internal organs still contained countless mysteries hidden to us, what right did we have to think of language as being this unique, divine gift?
I needed to know who I was. I needed to use words to communicate with other people. Surely then, language was just another inevitable evolutionary process. Language was part of my flesh. An organ called the self. An organ called language.
“If that’s the case, isn’t it a particularly human conceit, this idea that living things will necessarily develop language once they’ve evolved past a certain point?”
“You’re thinking that another species might have other ‘organs’ develop instead, you mean?” Lucia said. “So in a super-advanced civilization of crows, they’d all have incredibly sharp beaks rather than language?”
Language, and my own sense of self—both mere adaptive mechanisms. That much I got and was prepared to accept. Having said that, if language really was nothing more than an adaptive organ—well, there were examples, weren’t there, of species that became extinct through over-adaptation?
Wasn’t the saber-toothed tiger eventually driven to extinction by the weight of its own canines?
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