Language

I've come up with the idea of a language which uses symbols that are interpreted inside a person's head for their full meaning. This way, language could evolve in order to express ideas that couldn't be expressed before. You see, symbols would be designed so that you modified them inside of your head in order to pictorially express a concept. There could be a series of dots inside of a circle and you'd reposition the place of the dots inside of your head. These pictorial symbols would allow for many complex ideas to be expressed in a much shorter amount of time.

I suppose I should start by addressing an issue facing current langauge.

Definitions are tricky because they can only be defined in other words. What if there were a pictorial language or part of a language which allowed for the knower to understand a definition, resorting to an image to express the idea?

We start by taking a symbol. Rather than only communicating an idea, this symbol is used to be directly examined in order to provide the context for many ideas. In order to be useful, this symbol would need to be combined with other symbols. You can't indicate a lack of understanding by the use of such a symbol, which makes it impossible to ask a question. Laying out information is much the same as stating it. Commands could not be given with such symbols either, nor could exclamations. I'm not sure whether I even agree with the concept of the exclamation, maybe in writing, but real speech carries so many emotions that the concept of particularly emphasized speech is a bit absurd.

When I think about it, the whole idea that words themselves convey most of their meaning with minimal punctuation doesn't sit with me. There isn't enough focus on and exploration of sentence purpose. However, perhaps it's simply difficult to distinguish between purpose and speech inflection, inflection and breath.

I've noticed that it's not wholly possible to distinguish speech correcting your quotation of somebody else from the quotation itself. In order to do that, you could have a special form of pronunciation reserved for that purpose alone. Unfortunately though, if somebody quoted you correcting your quotation of somebody else, the pronunciation would still be used like they were the one making the correction. There would have to be a special pronunciation for quoting the special pronunciation and so on ad infinitum.

Stanislaw Lem had an idea in Imaginary Magnitude where you can use language that foreshortens complex thoughts that would otherwise take more than an entire lifetime to say. I recommend that book to anybody who'd like to read it.

This post isn't really finished, but I realized that I can edit posts continually and have the blog be a continuous work in progress. That seems better for my purposes because otherwise I'll just wait forever hoping to come up with better ideas.

Questioning the Bill of Rights

I'm going to challenge in a strictly idealistic sense the US constitutional amendments that I think need to be challenged.

Here is a link to the bill of rights: http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/BillOfRights.html

1. I challenge the right of any individual to believe something that isn't true or in defiance with all known evidence and be able to act on that regardless of circumstance. I can't push it too far, however, because there's always the possibility of an unpopular view being right. I consider it a moral obligation to eliminate as much as humanly possible all the views which are incorrect and that the knowledge of a well versed minority should, generally, hold stead over that of the less well versed majority.

2. I completely disagree that every person has the right to bear arms. Violence begets violence and I think that the principle is entirely foolish. Furthermore, I question the ethics of those who insist on their right to bear arms without first deliberating over which is most ethical. I respect the right to have dangerous items which in the wrong hands could be considered arms. The issues of violence and mortality are tricky indeed, however, and I don't have all the needed answers.

3. I don't think that there should be in any soldiers. I think that being a soldier is itself unethical and I'm trying to reconcile the duty to end a person's soldierhood with the responsibility to remain nonviolent.

4. I wonder. This one has me divided. On the one hand, I respect a person's privacy and realize that changing this could have severe consequences. On the other, it makes prosecution difficult. If I were to go against this one, I'd say that there would have to be a non disruptive way to access the needed information. That would mean searching but not seizure. There's not much I can change here that wouldn't have dangerous consequences. It may be that in the most extreme of emergencies that this would have to be violated, but that's about it.

5 and 7. I question the good that a jury does, but not anything else. I don't have a very good reason for questioning the good of a jury except the general notion that there's almost always room for improvement. The one thing I do question, thanks to a discussion at IEET.org is whether or not there ought to be professional jurors.

Those are all the amendments which I wish to question.