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The Tech Industry

The internet has always held a certain intrigue for me in the way websites both growing and abandoned exist side-by-side, allowing it to be instantly both a market and a museum. One click, and you are in center-stage; another, you're in a ghost-town. It has been so from the time of Geocities, up to the time of blogger. But Facebook is the first site that recolored that landscape for me - it does essentially the same, except what it does it to is not places, but people.

As Facebook plays a bigger part in our social lives, sooner or later we have messages that will never get replied, pokes that will not be returned, and friend requests that cannot be accepted, not because someone isn't approving of us, but because someone just isn't there anymore.

Just as the internet has abstracted physical distances but not excused us from the realities of energy consumption, I cannot say if Facebook has de-anthropomorphized death, or made it more personal.

MY VIEW OF THE WORLD Part II
The Frontline of the World

Language forms the basis for abstract thought. While I do not think that it is the only possibly way for abstract thought, it is the tool human beings have chosen.

We tend to say "the language of art" and "the language of science" - where do these meet?

Language provides two features - one to refer to concrete entities, and another to denote the intangible relationships between these entities. The former puts entities into our cognition, while the later gives form to the abstract. Let's call the former the "concrete" function of language and the later, the "abstract" function.

IMHO, "Art" tends to use the concrete to explain the abstract;
"science" tends to use the abstract to explain the concrete.

"Art" relies on experiences as proofs of the abstract. It is subjective and local. It keeps track of the material surroundings, in order for us to enrich our immaterial being.

"Science" relies on hypothesis and theories as proofs of the concrete. It is universal but removed. It builds not the world, but a representation of the world, in order for us to access our material world.

Which is to say, while "art" has always been depicted to dominate the "spiritual" realm, I would say that "art" is how we access the "spiritual" realm through the physical world, while "science" is how we access the physical world through the "spiritual" realm.

And I think some languages are better suited for science, while others are better suited for art.

Firstly because the vocabulary each language provides, limit what we can in the first place, perceive.

The cultural backdrop surrounding each language then builds up what we can reason.

Certain ideas are more difficult to explain in certain languages than others.

The same idea, may in some languages be expressed as a noun,and in others, as an adjective or a verb.

The form these ideas are expressed directly affect the complexity of the idea to the speaker, and that in turns limits the complexities of the acrobatics we can perform juggling it in our mind.

For me, Japanese is an art language. Nouns are preferred over verbs. There seems to be an obsession to noun-ify everything, and place it firmly into the perception. How the relationships between these nouns are expressed, on the other hand, is often ambiguous.

English, on the other hand, is a science language. Existing nouns are modified with adjectives, but these phrases do not always become an atomic idea in the mind. This makes it necessary for a lot of ideas to be explained, since something that cannot be represented as one single word is difficult to be treated as an endpoint in an argument.

For example "correct answer" is an atomic word 正解 in Japanese, and thus cannot be further broken down. In English, we can extend it into a new idea such as "correct non-answer", which might be used to describe an argument that is in itself correct, but does not address the key issue. Such a development would not arise from "正解".

In English, words like "shooting star" and "living room" are not handled the same way in the mind as "growing economy" and "dining experience". Partly it is because the former is used often enough that the mind groups them into atomic ideas, but also because the two words that form each of the former, mean something quite different from the phrases they form when put together. However, English as a language does not offer a grammatical construct to differentiate between the two.

Japanese however, does. A non-atomic idea would be "流れる星" (star which is shooting) while an atomic idea would be "流れ星" (shooting star). The former is an adjectival verb + noun, whereas the latter is one single noun. Noun-ifying ideas is a cultural obsession, and used in marketing and popular culture.

Chinese used to have this capability but, unfortunately, it is defunct in contemporary Chinese. For example, the atomic word "然" meaning "as it is" or "as so", is coupled with "自" meaning "self" to mean "natural" (自然=as it is itself), and paired with "必" meaning necessary to mean "inevitable" (必然=necessarily so). But a phrase such as "非然" which in classical Chinese means "not so" (非=not), no longer makes any sense in contemporary Chinese. This makes it necessary to rote-learn all the phrases that are acceptable in the Chinese language; the meaning of individual Chinese characters do not necessary have real applicative value to the speaker.

Which is to say that not all languages are equal, when judged in the light of specific applications. But I think their diversity represents the diversity of human thought, and that in turn, is a key to the resilience of the human species, in a snake-eat-rat world.