No, language is trying to sort the water.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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While qualia are not directly communicable, even they are labelable. All that can be differentiated can be labeled, if only by reference to its differences from other things (or other relations to other things). And if something cannot be differentiated, then there’s no need to have a word/label for it.
We don’t have separate words for red-green and yellow because we perceive them the same way. If we ran into aliens that didn’t, then it’d be relevant to create a word for it, and I just did by calling it “red-green”
When we need a word for something new we create one. And sure sometimes it takes science a while to refine definitions, and yeah, in natural languages words have really blurry definitions which obscures communication, but that’s not a property of the universe or a fundamental flaw in all languages, just our limited experiences and non-formal languages.
Point is: all that is relevant to be communicated via language could be communicated via some language.
The universe is eminently describable with language - thats the whole point of mathematics.
Okay. Describe a flower using mathematics. It better entail every detail of the flower and all of its virtues.
Oh you seem fun. The vast body of mathematics describes flowers, from growth patterns to genetic structure to the effect it has on human neurology when observing the colorful patterns made by them. However I am curious; please explain what a virtue is!
It's not: see Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.
I am at a loss as to what they have to do with this, do you mean to say that the universe is not exhaustively describable?
And then there's people thinking if we feed computers enough language, they will be able to solve everything
If we can simply train these machines on all the writings of straight white first-world men, then they'll be free of all bias and produce only objective facts!
Wittgenstein: die Grenzen meiner Sprache sind die Grenzen meiner Welt.
>Using words to undermine using words
Yuuup. And then we turn the words into numbers and run a few bajillion matrix multiplications on em to produce some sentences that bear a similarity to the sentences we make, and go “omg! It can navigate the nature of the universe the same way a human does!”
Also, MFs in the comments relitigating privacy of consciousness and Mary the color scientist lmao