Superpowered Mind with Clare Dimond
Business
Language: listener question and Sunday book, 'Language vs Reality, why language is good for lawyers and bad for scientists by Nick Enfield
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
What do you think, does our language express or create the “I?”
The rules of our language identify a subject and a verb. For example, an I and something that is happening.
“I am doing this.”
Yet in this conversation it is seen that awareness is aware of the doing happening — I am not doing this. I am not the doer and there is no I.)
Does the world look this way in language because this is how we think or do we think this way because of our language?
It may ultimately be a chicken and an egg thing, or just a case of co-arising.
But I wonder are there cultures/languages with sentences that developed without a subject?
It feels like there is an intuitive sense of an I, but babies don’t seem to be born with it. Helen Keller, I’ve read, had no sense of an I or a self until she learned language. Or until language was learned by that localized body/mind system.
I don’t know the attribution, but I’ve recently heard “The I in I am happy is the same as the it in it is raining.”
How much does language shape our thinking? Or does our thinking shape our language?
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