Walking on the streets, we can see nothing but our own creations. Skyscrapers are towering, neons are flashing, cars and aircraft are dashing, glass curtain walls are reflecting sunlight so bright that one cannot watch directly. Whatever the word “street” means did not even come into being until humans set foot on the planet. What is it that enabled us, empowered us, distinguished us, human beings, from the other 8.7 million species that share the Earth? There might be an answer. We have languages.
In his seminal book The Language Instinct, Professor Pinker led us through a marvellous and inspiring journey. From the children who invented Hawaiian Creole, to the deaf students in Nicaragua who improved LSN to create ISN, we saw how children couldn’t help but make their language expressive and comprehensive. We explored how language is different from thought and how language is structured. We learned basic morphology and phonology. We appreciated how language is masterly received and construed. We witnessed how languages departed from their ancestors, how children learn to speak in such a talented way and how Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area might be associated with language. We also mocked the pedantic rules and pretentious style guidelines proposed by language mavens and finally, imagined what a universal mind might look like.
What interests me the most is how mentalese is strikingly similar to the programming language we learn and use every day. As a university student majoring in Computer Science and Technology, I was attracted instantly by the notion of a Turing Machine inside people’s minds. As we all know, computers are good at limited things, mainly repetitive things. Once strictly defined, the computer can carry out onerous work tirelessly. Thus we invented programming languages to talk to computers. One job is usually defined as a “program”. The instructions in the program are executed by the computer, so they have to be precise and unambiguous. Computers are simply Turing Machines. They have a certain set of states, they read instruction and data from memory and change states accordingly until they reach a particular state called the “end state”. For example, when executing the instruction “ADD [40000000], 1”, the computer will locate the value stored in the 40000000th block in memory, and increase its value by one. When it encounters the instruction “INT”, which is short for “interrupt”, the computer will change to the “kernel state”, which is used to print characters to the screen and accept inputs from the keyboard. The brackets are used to instruct the computer to “locate”, and the space and comma are to separate the instruction name and the parameters. Computers know to find these symbols for instructions exactly like human brains know to find role players and modifiers for phrases.
There are also higher-level programming languages that are designed to make programming easier and more intuitive. For example in a program written in C, “int x” will tell the computer to associate an integer x with a block in memory. “x = 1” will tell the computer to change the value in the block associated with x to 1. “x = x + 1” will tell the computer to increase the value in the block associated with x by 1. The computer will keep track of the association between the names and the indices of their blocks (called their addresses), freeing us programmers from doing it manually. When executing programs written in C, the computer will do find-and-replace just like the example mentioned in the book. Whenever it finds a name like “x”, it looks it up in the table and replaces it with the address of the x stored in the table.
Unfortunately, I have to disagree with Professor Pinker here. No matter how a human brain might be similar to a Turing Machine, it is much better than that. Turing Machines are capable of deducing new information from old information, but it might be a little premature to treat intelligence as merely that. One ability is so essential to intelligence that anything lacking this ability cannot possibly be treated as intelligent. As the old saying goes, to err is human. All intelligent things must make mistakes.
Haven’t we all made mistakes? As we all know, penicillin was discovered precisely because Dr. Fleming did not clean his Petri dishes properly. Haven’t we all been struck by some totally whimsical ideas? Giving it another thought is such valuable advice because it is precisely those ideas that we can work on. No one thought Steve Jobs was being rational when he wanted a smartphone with only one button, but that is where the iPhone came from. Humans are better than computers precisely because they are, at least sometimes, illogical.
Some scientists are trying to make sense of this phenomenon. A new theory called Quantum Consciousness was put forward. It suggests that there is a random factor in human beings’ minds, just like in a quantum system. A quantum system can be in several different states at the same time, each of which has a probability. When being observed, it will “collapse” into one of those states randomly. We randomly forget things, randomly make mistakes because each neuron acts randomly, just like quanta. That opens the door to creativity and imagination.
Despite this trivial disagreement, I am thoroughly amazed by how intricate and powerful language has turned out to be. It is more than a way of exchanging information, more than a way of amusing and attracting each other. It is profound that we can form a community and establish a state. It is profound that we can express and negotiate. It is profound that we can compromise and contribute. It is profound that our brains are connected by languages. Languages enabled us. Languages empowered us. Languages distinguished us. Having language is the reason why we built not only houses but also streets to connect our houses. We are united, thus we stand.
That is how we are humans.