Thoughts for food....

I had the most philosophical day yesterday. Summary; head explosion not due to math.



I'll explain:



After class I got on the topic of math and why - stereotypically - students of Asian heritage are better at math. Because this conversation happened with another science student we logically surmised that it could very well be due to the counting systems 'romantic languages' use as opposed to, for instance, Mandarin. Now since neither of us actually speak Mandarin we couldn't test this out, but our conclusions are as follows:



Counting in base ten (which is what most romantic languages do, IE. in English the number twenty-two has a two in the tens place and a two in the ones place vs french vingt-deux has a two in the tens place and a two in the ones place) leads to having to memorize 10! (ten factorial) simple arithmetic processes for addition. Does this make sense? Let's look at it another way....if you count in base ten you must memorize 0+1;0+2:0+3....0+9 and then 1+1;1+2....1+9 and then 2+2 etc.



This is a lot of combinations. Whereas, representing numbers in binary requires only three operations be memorized for addition; 0+0, 1+0, and 1+1. Therefore, (hopefully this is clear to you) using binary is a simpler number representation which results in faster arithmetic.



This logically led us to discussing what the best language is and, more importantly, what is the 'best' (best is arbitrarily defined here) language to teach your children. Obviously there are languages that are spoken by a larger percentage of the population but these numbers don't necessarily mean a language is the 'best'.

I try to avoid the ethnocentric point of view that English is best and postulate that perhaps there is no language that is best and further, perhaps there really isn't language at all....

This statement has puzzled me for around a month now. Language is symbols and symbols are derived from language. But which came first. If it was symbols then maybe there isn't any language. Maybe we all communicate in abstractions representing the same thing. If you could jump into someones head the symbols they saw would hold the same meaning for you. But may language came first. Maybe the symbols we associate with things are biased based on our upbringing. If you jumped into my head you wouldn't necessarily be able to make sense of anything.

Or maybe you take it on faith. Thinking is a complicated process. And thinking about how we think isn't an easy question. And in thinking about how we think what thoughts are biased based on our upbringing. This is clearly a transitive way (circular) to look at the problem and there is no clear solution. So take it on faith and take it however you want to.