#insufficient language

Sometimes you say something to a person, and you're actually consciously, deliberately saying words that have different meanings in the different possibilities... words that would mean different possible things or invoke different associations or feelings, depending on which of the different possibilities is true of who they are, where they're at, what mood they're in.

Because sometimes that's better than just flinging the same intended meaning at all possibilities of who they are in that moment. In fact sometimes meaning one thing is impossible. Sometimes within the possibilities you see, you can't see any statement you could make that would get taken the same way in all possibilities and which also fits all your relevant values.

But like, some people don't get that - they don't think like that, so they can't really put themselves in those shoes, or maybe they have never even consciously conceived of the experience, or of it being practically doable by humans in the real world.

If you want to have conversations above that level, not quite the lowest common denominator but close, you need to define new words and phrases and meanings. If you think you don't, you are either not actually operating above that level, or don't have enough conversations or sensitivity to problems to notice.

After you've pulled people up, plain language for those ideas can survive among them - among just those people, not newcomers and newborns. You will never be able to just leave plain language out unattended and have uninitiated people understand what you meant.

If you make the language more accessible than the idea, you do not make the idea more accessible, you just make it easier for people to learn or speak a worse idea. That worse idea often looks just enough like the original to cloud things worse than inaccessible language does.

I currently have sufficiently built up cognition to use flight and other "at will" "magic" effects in my dreams.

I think if I spend enough time really simulating what it would be like to split into separate parallel flows of cognition and re-merge into one, I would start being able to have cool experiences in my sleep like splitting into multiple bodies and being aware as both at once, etc.

I also suspect this practice might help me have better conscious introspection and maybe deliberate participation in or even control over some of the natural parallelism that constantly goes on in the brain.

That way the ambiguity and strongly ingrained meanings of the pre-existing number words like "ten" never even come up.

If you are willing to go that far, I recommend learning the Lojban number words instead, because you probably have no prior mental association with them, and they go up to sixteen.

Written English-like, they are something like: noh (0), pa (1), reh (2), shee (3), voh (4), mu (5), ha (6), zeh (7), bee (8), soh (9), dau (A), fei (B), guy (C), zhau (D), rei (E), and vai (F).

(You can learn how to read and pronounce Lojban letters and the "native" Lojban spellings in like an hour, but the above are more English-friendly.)

Or just make up your own, but this reveals the problems more vividly: standards, even defacto ones, matter. Make up a new thing that is too far removed from any old thing and it doesn't scale.

How we say our numbers - including all the little subtle patterns that add up to what sounds "number-like" to us, is one such defacto standard.

It's a standard encoded into every English speaking mind, give or take some variation in dialect and education.

I guarantee you, you could take a motivated person - one who has just vividly personally experienced the insufficient language for talking or thinking about or in hexadecimal - and give them a crash course in "speaking hexadecimal" with the material I just gave you within a few minutes.

A minute to map "alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxo" to the unnamed hexits (that's like digits, but in hex) and then another couple minutes of just organically using the numbers while moving on with the problem.

By the time you've had occasion to say "so alphty-one plus nineteen is bravty-alph", their brain will have started picking up on the vague feel, and noticing all the ways that it pattern-matches the vague feel of normal numbers, and having little mini epiphany blips as it noticing how these superficially arbitrary inconsistencies in in each variant of these new base words are actually helping the word fit in the bigger established pattern of spoken numbers.

Or not I could be totally wrong - I might be overestimating people again, and I just came up with this thing and haven't had any occasion to field-test it because I'm the only person I know who cares to train their mind in ways that makes this matter.

Nuanced ideas and terminology consistently degrade over time.

This is part of the insufficient language problem: If people don’t fully understand a new thing as it spreads, it will lose the nuance that made it distinctly useful or meaningful in the first place.

Relevant selective pressures:

Simpler and easier cognition takes less mental energy than complex or difficult cognition.

Long and nuanced explanations take more attention and time than short and intuitive ones.

People want to talk about common and obvious things more than uncommon or obscure things.

It is easier to co-opt an existing, related, nuanced word than it is to popularize a new one.

Gated truths cannot be taught by any form short enough to be usable in conversation.

Meaning is learned by context, but nuance that is not yet understood is invisible context.

Seriously. You might think being smart and capable is all that, with achievements and recognition. It does have advantages, and helps protect and heal and strengthen self-esteem. But beyond a certain point...

Beyond a certain point, growing as a mind means entering a personal hell. It is growing too big for the cage that is this life. The cage doesn't loosen. The cage can't loosen. The mental growth that I have experienced has had these fun results:

My thoughts are too "wide", too many angles and associations active at once, to the point that speech linearity is a constant problem.

I have such large chains of inferences and bodies of evidence and knowledge forming my conclusions that now trying to convince or explain my ideas causes me to experience working gridlock most of the time.

My understanding exceeds my thinking limits to the point that I often can't make progress because I'm aware that I'm not able to hold all of my relevant ideas, knowledge, and heuristics at once: like trying to carry too many things in my hands, in the dark. I know I am not holding something important, but reaching for it usually causes another thing to "slip" out of it. The brain gets better and the grasp widens just a little bit if I constantly push, but it's exhausting, but to do anything less is to know I'm wrong.

A lot of the conclusions of my reasoning that I could once readily explain have been wired into automatic and often not-quite-as-conscious thinking, so sometimes I have a cognitive habit or intuition that I remember was hard-earned through much evidence and thought, but I have to basically re-discover, re-prove, and re-articulate from scratch the justifications for things that I've been building on top of for years.

I have grown the skills for reshaping my own mind so much that my entire perspective on that is basically alien to the average person, impossible to word without several gated truths most are still "outside the gate" on; I can so often clearly see, once I know a person well enough, what cognition they could train and how, the way they could benefit themselves and the world by habituating certain ways of thinking, but it is inaccessible to many, in ways that make trying to convey it directly counter-productive.

As it concerns empathy and compassion - actually caring about the world and other people/minds, I have only exposed myself to ever greater levels of profound distress over the predicaments that we all find ourselves in.

Existential crisis. Already had one? That's okay, there are many different, unique ways to reach existential dread and despair, and in my experience exploring one rarely prepared me for the others, except in so far as it forced me into opportunities to train deeper coping skills.

Insufficient language.

The horizon of what I know I can't or don't know, or can't think, has for a few years now grown faster than my knowledge and thinking limits. I think they're intrinsically connected, such that any growth of the latter grows the former more.

I've had to start learning to be certain on-demand as a psychological tool, because in most issues that involve accounting for people, from my vantage point certainly as a genuine intellectual position is indefensible to the point of being unethical.

Understand, this is my unique experience. I don't know if yours will be the same. Maybe the problem isn't even mental growth, but my psychology which just wasn't prepared for growth that normal people handle just fine. I don't know. I probably can't know, not ever really with certainty, per point 10.

Don't get me wrong, it's fulfilling, and I think given the choice I would eventually push further. But I cannot stress this enough:

Were it not for my growing skills at not being emotionally distressed over genuinely bad things, at maintaining positive cognition in the face of genuinely real and immediate problems, I would be rendered non-functional by what I've built my mind up to do. As is I seem to experience nearly daily frustrations and distress that most people don't ever seem to, if I don't steer my mind correctly.

But who knows, maybe everything I experience is common and normal. Then again, if you can idea-fit anything sensical and relatable to you onto my words, that's the conclusion you'd be tempted to draw.

Doesn't matter. See, I don't actually care if I'm special or unique in mental growth. Or rather, I'd really like to believe that I'm not above average at all. If you really get it, then I think you'll understand this the most. Because the alternative, the possibility of really, genuinely being somehow qualitatively better that most other people, is not a pleasant thing. It is terrifying, lonely, and dreadful.

I’ve been mulling this over a lot.

I still stand by my assessment in my post about this that the key meaning of these terms is orthogonal, but in practice, my most common use is "this might be a gated truth", which is functionally similar to saying "this might be too many inferential steps away".

I suppose it boils down to the semantics of “inferential step”.

If there is insufficient language available to the speaker to articulate something, thus no straightforward way to use language to introduce the right cognemes into another mind, then should that be considered to be more than one inferential step?

Or is it reasonable to define inferential steps based on the amount of cognition needed rather than the amount of language needed? If you only need a tiny amount of language-free thought over a language hole or one sensory/emotional experience to reach an idea, is that one inferential step away, or is that many inferential steps?