Before Words

About human thought, language and the limits of artificial intelligence

We often find such beautiful words to describe feelings and situations that we would like to communicate to others. Sometimes, however, we lack exactly those words to describe certain moments, and no matter how hard we try, we cannot find them. Nevertheless, we do not need words for this. We carry the situation, the thought, the description within us, through feelings, emotions, sensations and images. Words could even destroy this, forcing it into predefined boxes, into places where we have to follow the syntax and semantics of language, where we are subject to rules.

Rules often limit us, and this also applies to the process through which our thoughts come into being. Before anything receives the label of a word, it already exists in a form of its own, never describable as something, never something we can pass on to another person on a one-to-one basis. Every contact with it through communication inevitably involves a transformation that changes it and, and turns something unique into a mass produced commodity. Words impose conformity on our thoughts.

And this is exactly what we have become so good at: following what we have learned, transforming our thoughts into language and imposing them on ourselves in this way. And surrendering ourselves to this limitation.

AI systems are built precisely on this foundation, on language, on millions upon millions of texts that are supposed to reflect us. Yet they are only fragments of ourselves, altered parts of us, instruction manuals for human beings in a world shaped and controlled by language. These systems are now good at finding arguments, substantiating them and arguing with increasing sophistication. Nevertheless they lack the primary and secondary effects within the process, the presence in both a physical and psychological sense, the awareness of being in situations and finding ones way through them, of knowing that one may not be certain, of finding the words to reach a destination one can feel. Being human.

And now we should ask ourselves the question, the one about intelligence. Are we not risking precisely what we consider intelligent? The ability to skilfully overcome barriers to thinking (here understood as barriers cast in language), to create something new, to experience sensations in the process, to share these beyond language as well, making them tangible and experiential. And perhaps then, in the long run, to bring them back into a suitable framework of language in order to make them available to others as well.

If we continue down this path and allow our future to be built solely through letters, words and texts that we once conceived, then we leave behind the path that challenges us and gives us that wonderful fulfilment of thinking and creating, and thereby of moving beyond what has already been thought and described.