Words and Brains

I can choose to look, but once I see I have no more choice.

I have no choice about how I percieve what I see. The meaning is there, unbidden. I see the letter form “f” or the word “fox”. I have no choice but to see a letter or recall that creature to mind.

It’s then quite remarkable that I can choose to think of other animals whose names begin with the letter “f”. I can switch to any letter or any other object category with fluency and the words come to mind, again unbidden. It takes mental effort, this active reflexive thinking. And I have absolutely no understanding of how I do it; my ability to describe how I think up a list of animals is missing as completely as my ability to describe how I know what “fox” means.

Whether you call this ability “language” or as Changeux in The Physiology of Truth would have it at the mechanistic level, “stabilization of common neural networks across brains”, meaning itself is an abstract idea, made real by the activity of brains, needing to be embodied in the flesh. Between brains, language is an arbitrary but common pattern of sounds or ink on paper. Within each brain its own individual pattern of neural activity. Amazing that the word is the same, but patterned differently in each brain; every word that is hear is a unique human experience.

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