Review of 'Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought'

Thinking vs. Parroting

We use words and sentences of ordinary languages to communicate our ideas and thoughts. It's particularly pleasing to see this layperson understanding brought into figural salience for all to see in: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought. However, this appears to me as a beginning, calling for a proper study of thought and understanding, especially in light of the advances in mathematics and artificial intelligence.

Let us begin with mathematics. Not unlike the ordinary concepts expressed as words for the purpose of communication, mathematical theories are presented symbolically (axioms / equations) for the purpose of calculations. The utilitarian value of calculations, over time, relegated the objective concepts and theories to a distant indiscernible background to the point of mathematics being considered as yet another language and being identified with calculations. Thankfully, in a mathematical revolution, on par with that of Newtonian mechanism of physics and of Darwinian evolution of biology, Professor F. William Lawvere showed that a mathematical theory is a mathematical object. For example, a theory of the category of graphs is subcategory of the category of graphs (see Figure 5). Cutting to chase, the meaning of words is mediated by concepts.

The scientific breakthrough that is functorial semantics embodying a definitive mathematical account of concept formation, along with its kinship with everyday concepts, is bristling with content needed to fuel advances in our understanding of reality, if only we value concepts and explicate thinking beyond the subjective logic of going from statements to statements. I'd have gone on and on outlining a scientific program of triangulating reality in terms of unity, change, and reflection. In brief, thanks to calculus, physics has had more than enough to work in terms of calculating changes, while being blissfully oblivious of the unity characterizing things (e.g., tables, chairs, and beer bottles). The unity of things (populating the reflective part of reality that is our consciousness) is an objectification of change, which is what we are given (cf. contrast). The objectification of change is made possible thanks to Dharma: Becoming consistent with Being (p. 152) or Naturality: Unity-respecting Change, which may be considered the Zeroth Law of Change (that Newton failed to abstract when that proverbial apple hit his head). While I was busy compounding epistemology and ontology into which reality is resolved in terms categories of reflexive graphs, dynamical systems, and monads (objectifying unity, change, and reflection, respectively), OpenAI ChatGPT arrived unannounced.

There is no denying the success of mimicking and parroting, as is evident, if not in the performance of ChatGPT per se, but undeniably in the anxious palpitations that are the editorials of Nature, Science, et al. all against ChatGPT. The academia that warmly welcomed Google with "google it" in the late 1990s is not so welcoming of the ChatGPT or AI; I wonder why? Those of us who made fun of spoken language courses emphasizing accent (especially in India) over grammar find to our chagrin rethinking the value of understanding. Those of us who belittled statistics as mere surface to be contrasted with deep underlying structure that is mathematics find ourselves reminded of Oscar Wilde. Statistical abstraction of the architecture of mathematics, beginning with the good for (pp. 26-31) / universal mapping property definition of SUM (e.g., 1 + 1 = 2), appears all but inevitable.

In the grand dialectic of language vs. thought, more than anything else, the success of parroting (language; words, sentences, narratives, descriptions, and interpretations, albeit look-up tables) calls for a reaffirmation of the point of thinking (assuming there is), which is beyond my paygrade.