Ask Lemmy

27843 readers

1792 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

6) No US Politics.

Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

How much of this conversation is just hallucination? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 17 hours ago by [email protected] to c/asklemmy

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Language works when we think the same, connecting the words to the same meanings and such. But that never actually happens 100%. It might be closer to 80%. (or if it's a strange subject, 15%)

So this "conversation" that we're having here is, to some degree, not actually happening.

But we pretend that it is.

So how much are we pretending? How much of the conversation is hallucinatory conversation?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Apathy 3 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Words are a sequence of sounds, that’s why we learn those sequences from a young age because it is easier to adapt to these new sounds and take key elements to try and create a relational? Dataset / database. That’s one of the beauty of different languages in life.

Because you are conveying this “illusionary” convo in the stated database that is familiar to some, we are able to convey those same sounds back to you to form a conversation.

To an individual who has not learnt the “English” language all our words sounds gibberish.

This is my opinion

[–] [email protected] 1 points 19 minutes ago

I understand your viewpoint, and that you see words as a database that maps sequences of sounds to meaning.

However, as a funny side note, i'd like to point out that that's not what i'm doing when i'm trying to decipher the meaning of a word. If i'm unsure, i will extract the root of the word (only look at the consonants in the core part of the word), and then try to reconstruct the meaning from there. In that way, i have more of a "root of sequence of sounds" <--> meaning mapping in my language processing part of the nervous system.