A Writer's Notebook, Day Nine-Hundred-And-Fifty-Seven

A few years ago I took a workshop with Gregory Pardlo who presented a number of ideas connected to the question of language's role in cognition.  One particular question which I find myself fascinated with is about whether the experience of consciousness, the mind we inhabit as humans, is fundamentally linguistic.  That is to say, is the "I" dependent on language.  That may seem strange, but there is research to indicate this is the case.  For me, this has many other layers and implications, since I recognize that dyslexia is connected to the processing of language.  If language provides the underpinnings of self, what does a difference in the cognition of language itself mean about my experience of being a person?

To me, this question is also one that connects with my attempt to create a computer that is proficient in poetry.  While the initial aspects of such a challenge are rather superficial, I am thinking in a longer sense.  The key issue in understanding language is that words are symbols, but in a computer, the symbols do not have a real analogies.  A computer's "experience", if we are to call it that, is all symbolic, represented through data.  If anything us directly experienced by a computer, it would be binary numbers.  I can, though, imagine ways of putting other forms of symbols into play, using forms of data that are not linguistic in order to offer a richer context for the language.  Some of this is obvious, such as using images to represent the meanings of certain words, but I also wonder about creating other kinds of connections, encoding sentiment through color or sound, for example.  This would require creating other contexts for those encodings, of course, but the question underneath is about that ability to connect symbols into a deeper map of meaning.  It is a ridiculous idea, especially when I have so little experience, but I see a clear connection to the these other questions, and a way to explore them that does not otherwise exist.  If language is under the mind, there wpuld have to be some level at which the understanding of language produces a sufficient substrate for thought in a human sense.  That is, I think it is only a matter of enriching the linguistic map, and connecting that with aspects of the world.  It is rather silly, I know, and it may be completely wrong, but it is still worth asking the question and trying to find the answer.  

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