The Clash of One Way Clocks

Hey,

Why do we write in one direction? Why do we speak in one direction? Are these byproducts of physical reality, a biological coping mechanism, or some form of societal decision to keep our minds and actions orderly? ^ftmvri

The great work of linguists in the 20th century taught us that language has an inherent computation to it.^[1]

This raises an interesting set of questions about the computation of language: is audio itself linear (random universe noises)? Or is only language linear? Is perception due to how creatures experience time? If time followed different rules, would our command of language?

Tongue Twisters

Tongue Twisters^[2] are a toy example of separate linear systems causing chaos in parallel.^[3] The eye reads the tongue twister on the page (peter piper picked…), the brain shapes the lips and tongue to make the required shapes, and the ears listen to the sounds the mouth is producing (what am i saying?).

Each step requires a discrete amount of time. There is time required for sound waves to travel from your vocal chords and back into your ear feedback loop. There is time required to think a thought and activate the required neurons. There is time required for the eye to read characters and decipher them with the occipital complex and the fusiform gyrus.

The "distance" between the physical mouth shapes is longer than it takes for the brain to send the command to form the next syllable.

A tongue twister is a fun (and safe) way to have all of these different timers run into each other at high speed and crash.

So it would seem we're not just dealing with one linear perceiver, in fact, we're dealing with multiple, all of which operate at different speeds.^[4]

Prediction and Bets

This raises a more impactful question than if Peter Piper did in fact pick those peppers. If our ability to predict has a "speed limit", and if it only predicts in one direction -- how can we be "sure" of anything? Are guesses and predictions simply the act of examining an external "line"^[5] and using previous experience to determine where it might head?

In reality this line never goes backwards but may at any moment twist or turn.^[6] How can we be sure that the line will move as we hope this time? How can we know that this time won't be different?^[7]

In addition, we add the complication of multiple lines of reasoning happening concurrently. If one clock of reasoning is far behind another, do we get thread locked in the boxes of our own minds?

Do habits^[8] simply mean that we have seen something before multiple times and expect a similar outcome? Is there any way to trust another person without past credential signaling on their part?^[9]

Wouldn't you rather invest with a billionaire than a librarian at your local library?^[10] But what if the billionaire made all their money from thievery and the line that reveals this fact lags behind another 5 years after you met the billionaire? Would that disqualify them as a business partner five years ago?

Is pattern matching a panacea for truth?

I'll leave you with this:

Turing also went further, showing that there were certain things that even the most powerful machine could not compute. In particular, he pointed out, no computer could predict its own behavior. Say you feed the machine a tape and come back to find that it’s been chugging along for twenty-four hours. Say it’s been chugging along for a week, or a year, or even ten years: read, write, left, right. There’s still an infinite supply of tape remaining, but is this thing ever going to write down, say, a O? Is it ever going to finish? There’s no way to tell, Turing showed, not in general. The “halting problem,” as it’s known, is hopeless. (Location 1269)