Hi Steven,
I very much enjoyed reading your ideas, and it triggered a cascade of thoughts in my mind about the nature of the project you seemed to have embarked upon. As a disclaimer, I am not current with the field, nor was I ever much of a programmer, but I have been thinking about this and related subjects for many decades. I am now writing a book on the interaction between human cognition and the evolution of human society.
What I wanted to start with here is to relate some natural language processing work I did in the mid to late 1990s. My background at that time was in quantitative finance, and among other things, I built market indexes. I had always been interested in what we then called the “qualitative-quantitative frontier.” I saw digitalization conquering knowledge problems in one field after another—first in economics and finance—and it made me wonder about law and politics.
At that time, I decided to work on a project for machine reading of newspapers—a tedious task I always had to do. This led me to consider what it meant to “understand” what was in a newspaper article and I learned the basics of natural language processing. My further goal was to be able to “read” an entire newspaper and compile some sort of summary meanings from that—what we now would call meta-data.
The question then became: what did it mean to understand what 100 articles meant? This is where it became a non-trivial problem. After constructing basic word frequency processes, including stemming and elimination of words unconnected to meaning, I started to develop what you now call lenses or specialized filters for specific subjects, as well as ways of assessing sentiment.
Jumping forward 20 years to the present, I am still thinking about language, specifically the thesis that population density increased social interaction (and social skills), which spurred the use of language. This catalyzed thought, which made human culture more complex and, among other things, spurred innovation—a virtuous cycle that has lasted for 10,000 years, though it is now likely coming to an end.
This thesis hypothesizes a link between language, thought, and population growth. Thought could be emergent from intensified communication, but it required population growth—unless AI can take its place. However, we cannot keep growing the population.
Further work made me try to separate the elements of thought from those of language. It is peculiar because they are largely two different things but have been intrinsically linked at a deep level due to human sensory preferences for auditory information and later for visual information—into writing. However, because they are different things, language causes inconsistencies in thought of many types, and many of them are profound.
I will try to stop here, focusing on the fact that language induces flaws in reasoning, which contributes to human reasoning being flawed—what we can call “non-objective” or not universal. It remains a cultural artifact though with some aspects that appear to give it universality, but that is likely to be of a bounded kind.
I apologize if this seems off-topic to you.