Somewhere in the internet a couple of months ago - maybe it was here, might have been in a science video, not quite sure - an Aboriginal language was mentioned in which, instead of ever describing something like “the mountain to the east (or west, or north, etc)”, it is always more like “the mountain to MY east” (meaning to the left of the speaker), even while talking to someone facing in a different direction, yet the listener always understands and makes the internal conversion to HIS own personal, subjective orientation. All the time, even while talking in a group, everybody facing in different directions.
This is quite the mental exercise, a peculiar, finely-tuned subjective orientational awareness, everybody communicating their personal orientation grid with each individual at the center, each making the conversion in their minds in real time while talking.
While all Aboriginal people seem to possess a powerful sense of orientation, can navigate the unforgiving Outback on foot indefinitely knowing where all the water holes are with no map nor compass, this specific group seems to have taken that ability further, are able to physically sense fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field.
So the current speculation goes that this is a striking example of how powerful language can be as a neuro-plasticity tool, how certain sensibilities can be developed.
Maybe any language carries with it enhanced sensibilities of certain types, while neglecting many potential others. Like there is always a tradeoff, a certain balance must be kept with the resources available to the mind.
Maybe a single language can keep on developing and/or adopting traits that can enhance more and more sensibilities and abilities, the best of all worlds, so to speak. And that is a fascinating thought - some sort of future “superlanguage”.
As language evolves, so does consciousness, and viceversa.
This is known as the Whorfian Hypothesis, aka Sapir-Whorf theory. In generalized-to-the-point-of-inaccuracy terms, the idea is that language constrains thought. It’s one of those ideas that we can perceive as intuitively correct but that does not stand up to experiment.
There are, for example, languages that don’t have words differentiating green and blue, and others whose counting numbers don’t include specific words for numbers larger than two. Some languages have no words for cardinal directions but use terms like “mountain-way” and “ocean-way.”
Experiments do seem to support a weak version of Whorf - people from cultures with “missing” words can differentiate between green and blue for instance, but it seems to take a bit longer. There’s also a paper indicating that people who don’t use cardinal coordinates have a better innate sense of orientation when, eg, walking corridors in an enclosed building.
I’d personally fall between the weak and strong position because I do not believe in free will and do believe that semantics are a significant driver of behavior, but that’s a step beyond where most of the current research is. There’s research into free will, but none that I’m aware of that pulls in cognitive semantics as a driver.
Probabilistic curves are pretty much the opposite of what we normally mean when we say “free will.” If the assumptions were correct, we’d tend to use the term “non-deterministic.”
I tend to lean in the direction of Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky who believes that it is deterministic but not predictable due to the complexity of the parts and their interactions.
I think free will is an illusion that a brain creates to aid in human perception. This illusion is an evolutionary adaptation so that a human acts to preserve its body and its genes by perceiving its person as distinct from other persons and the environment.
Plus it was based on a complete misunderstanding of how the Hopi language works. He basically declared that they don’t have the concept of time, which later linguists pretty succinctly debunked with some basic experimenting.
What that showed out was that speakers of a language will rarely lack a concept altogether that would affect their way of understanding the world around them, but they will have different linguistic tools that reframe their understanding of that concept specifically, so for example a lot of languages that don’t distinguish blue from green or see other groups of colors under the same word, will have those basic color words, but then also have some differentiation via modifying the word for specificity. So it’s not that they don’t understand the difference, they just don’t see the difference as significant enough to warrant them being labelled distinctly.
Orange as a distinct color is relatively new for example, they’re called red heads because at that time orange was seen as just a shade of red.
It’s an interesting problem. If you don’t have the language to articulate what you’re feeling, how well can you understand it? I don’t mean that you wouldn’t feel it otherwise, just how effectively can you process it without going into a rage and bonking your peers.
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