Humans have languages. A spoken language is a sequence of verbalized sounds with a rule — one-dimensional information. The time is the dimension for this. This sequence, not the sounds, allows us to make complex communications possible. With languages, we have names for objects, verbs for actions and linking and adjectives for explanations. The language allows us to share narrative stories of our experiences with others. The personal history can be shared. ‘Cause and consequence’ logic is not necessary. A narrative story tells what event happened with other things before and after the event—the one-dimensional time series. Therefore, narrative stories and languages have a good affinity.
None of the events in our real world is one dimension. All events we experience have four dimensions. If you like, you can add multiple points of view, although each person can only experience an event from one point of view. When we try to tell an event to others as a story, the four-dimensional information of the event is extracted and compressed into a one-dimensional narrative story. Of course, not all information can be captured, even from a single point of view. From chaos to order. There should be variation in extracting the original information—several versions of extraction from a single event. Then, on the receiver side, the one-dimensional narrative story is decoded to reconstruct the original four-dimensional information with imagination. At least two people must understand the same language to make this system work. In addition, they need to share a similar way of extraction and imagination. Otherwise, something in and something out will be completely different.
Imagination is potentially infinite but also constrained by one’s physical and intellectual experience: education and training. Without priming by education and training, imagination would stay primitive. It never goes beyond one’s direct experience. Listening to stories and reading books is the best training for imagination—reconstruction from one-dimensional information to four-dimensional events. The experience of imagination sometimes works for further priming deeper imagination, similar to what one’s physical experience can do.
Languages are a necessity for communication, but more is needed. On the other hand, if imagination is shared, communication would hold without languages. Respect and suspect. Both assume the other’s intention based on one’s imagination without language. Ultimately, we cannot come out of our brains and share our consciousness. All communication with or without language is based on individuals’ imagination. If you refuse to imagine, a conversation is not a communication anymore, even speaking the same language. Those words will be an order or statement—one-directional.
When we speak a narrative story, we weave one-dimensional information from random, chaotic, fragmented dots of a four-dimensional event. You, as a storyteller, are the one making the selection and connection of dots. Which dots you take as a part of your story is solely your intentional or nonintentional decision. Reasoning would help make logic within a story. Whether the reasoning was real or only retrospective speculation is not the matter. Reasoning and logic create biases in selecting the dots as related/unrelated, relevant/irrelevant and necessary/unnecessary. An order (one-dimensional sequence of information) is built from the original four-dimensional chaotic information. Although all dots have no difference in the initial chaos, after this extraction, there are the dots necessary for making sense of the story, the dots irrelevant to it, and the dots that confuse the audience because of disrupting its logical flow.
Reasoning sets a goal. Logic is a path to reach the goal. Logic sets the value within originally equivalent dots. Logic separates the original chaos into two, such as correct/wrong, good/bad, in/out, self/non-self, etc. All others will be outside of logic - irrelevant. Very interestingly, logic itself demands a goal. You must have a goal if you want to speak something logically.
Scientific statements are also inevitably one-dimensional because of the use of languages. The essence of modern science is reproducibility. Simply, reproducibility. An event reproducible whoever, whenever, and wherever performs at a defined condition, we consider it to be the scientific truth. But this does not mean that the scientific statements describing it are also true.
Think about our historical understanding of the universe. The sun rises from the east every morning and sets to the west every evening. Before Galileo, people explained that the sun was moving around the earth. But we now know the earth is rotating and moving around the sun. Nothing was wrong in reproducible observations. Everything was perfectly logically explained as Geocentrism before Galileo. Just complicated. There was no conflicting evidence against Geocentrism. Copernicus came up with a crazy idea as the earth is moving, explaining everything in a simple way. No one could take it. Galileo was the first one to observe with his telescope to support Heliocentrism. Still, no one could take it. He wrote his observations in Italian, not Latin, the academic language at that time. The experts at that time could not handle Copernicus and Galileo’s perspectives. Reproductive observations have never been wrong. The way we extract one-dimensional information could be wrong.
All events are four-dimensional. Even if we try to control everything and observe all small changes, there are always limits to predefining and detection. In the history of science, scientists have made a tremendous effort to visualize the invisible and measure the inconceivable. However, there is no way to capture ‘all’. In the end, ‘all’ means infinite. When another way of making a one-dimensional path (i.e. logic) is discovered, it will be recognized as a paradigm shift, such as Galileo, Einstein and Darwin. They provided a new way to interpret our world. After all, all scientific statements are tentative interpretations of reproducible observations in well-defined (in other words, highly limited) conditions. Interestingly, mathematics looks different.
Telling one’s experience is making a story. This is a process of converting chaotic information to one-dimensional verbal word order. We humans are constantly extracting order from chaos in daily conversations. Languages are an excellent tool for this. Without languages, chaos stays as chaos. Literature. Music. Arts like painting and sculptures. All of them are extracting something from chaos to order. Humans seem emotionally reacting when presented with new ways of extracting order from the world.
I have a strong concern about kids growing up with screens. They do not need to speak. There is no training for extraction from chaos to order. They do not need to read. There is no training for using imagination to reconstitute the speaker’s chaos from one dimension of spoken words. They are simply reacting to visual stimulation on a screen. All attention (i.e. alertness) is sucked up. Full of stimulation without outputs and imagination. That is the animal life. They are living at present. Languages built human society, despite languages being troublesome and not an efficient communication tool —a lot of miscommunication. Creativity is making a new order from chaos. The present is always chaos. Order is required to capture the past and future. Languages are a great tool to create order. How you make an order from chaos defines who you are.