encoded notions

Does language shape thought or does thought shape language? I think both are true. Language and thought feedback upon one another.

A fresh, new brain is a raw sea of possibility, with only the most basic initial instinctual wirings. Each new sensation creates a collection of inflowing signals. But if one wishes to access this “memory,” each component of that memory must be activated individually.

Language gives the brain a set of shortcuts to bootstrap higher-order thought. For simplicity’s sake, consider a noun. This noun is a word, a single memory token, but it signifies and is connected to a whole slew of other memories. Activating the noun memory activates all of the memories that compose it. With the act of associating one memory—a word—to represent other collections of memories, one can begin to more easily think about more complex things. Strings of words can be placed together and whole vistas of the brain are stimulated as the imagination goes to work. The individual is freed from having to recall each little stimulus that goes into making every concept in memory and can think more about the object as a whole.

Similarly, in functional computer programming, collections of lower order operations and data manipulations are often stored away as functions, and then accessed through their names in the main body of the code. Whereas in a low-level assembly code it might take four different operations to multiply two numbers together in memory, in a higher-level language like Perl may take only one operation. The programmer is relieved from the burden of caring about the nitty gritty details and can focus more on abstract data manipulations.

Language is a mental shortcut reflecting how we use our brain. It’s nothing more than an interface to our memory. As our needs change, so does our language, much like how programming languages shift to provide both utility and succinctness to the programmer. But as it is our default way to access our memories, the structure of the language affects the way we think. It’s a nice little feedback loop that causes language to dance across the landscape of the mind as time elapses.

Where am I going? Do I want to end up forever locked within the doors of the great Ivory Tower of Academia? Do I necessarily want a Doctorate? Sure, it would be useful for a resumé, but is it a goal worth spending another 5-6 years working towards?

All I want to do is keep learning about the fundamental nature of everything until I am sated. I want to learn the hard maths and physics like QED, QCD, quantum gravity, general relativity, the geometry of manifolds, linear algebra, complex analysis, time-dependent hamiltonians, and eventually grapple with things like unified field theory. It seems like the only way to realistically acquire this knowledge is by subjecting myself to graduate school.

I’m still not sure that I even like physics enough to keep plowing through it forever. What I really want to pursue is the time evolution of complex interacting systems, but I have no clue how to start.

Farscape is a damn good love story set in space.

Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars is like a huge frelling exclamation point at the end of the story.

Need I say more?

While studying for my optics midterm I find that I do not feel comfortable with the material. I do understand it all and I could do all of the problems given enough time and access to my textbook, but I still don’t feel secure in my ability to do the problems with only an equation sheet to assist.

I’ve felt similarly about the following classes:

• history
• psychology
• political science
• discrete math
• physics classes such as:
  • lab techniques
  • modern physics 2
  • thermal physics

The one thing that these classes all seem to have in common is that there is no clear overarching organizational structure linking all of the material together. In some cases, the structural maps may be weakly connected or fuzzy with approximate relationships, but nothing concrete and fixed.

I like to learn by grasping quantitative relationships. It’s like an initial value problem in classical mechanics. If you know the state of the system at one time, and how that system evolves in time, you can know the state of the system at all future and past points in time. By having a fundamental understanding of the most basic constituents of a system and the processes by which this system of information evolves, the whole field of information becomes easy to grasp.

For example, the programming aspect of computer science becomes nearly trivial once you realize that it is all about representing and manipulating data. The programming languages are completely arbitrary and are inconsequential—they’re simply different ways of solving the same problem.

In most of my other physics courses, the quantities we derive are interrelated by things like energy, forces, fields, and time. The structural map is clustered around these more basic physical concepts with a web of connections surrounding them. Leaves of this tree are often connected via a substitution involving the basic quantities.

The problem I run into in optics is that the entire course is about light, what it can do, and the rest of the book is spent deriving relationships and approximations between the many optical quantities in several different experimental setups. The quantities are all completely calculatable, but derivationally they are dead-ends. It feels as if the information hierarchy for optics is a star pattern with light in the middle all of the other concepts and quantities are directly connected to it, but not to each other.

My preferred method of learning and condensing information fails horribly on an organizational structure like that.