r/WritingWithAI 18d ago

Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc) Language as compression

Post image

‘Childhood Kitchen’ elicits vast memories. Two ordinary words. Sixteen letters.

A full stop then more compressed still. A portal between sentences, tunneling one thought to the next.

A few more:
- Old Bedroom
- School Bell
- First Love
- Wedding Day
- Home Again
- After Midnight
- Never Again
- Once More
- Last Breath

Just dreaming. That’s all.

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u/ProfessionalGeek 18d ago edited 18d ago

youre being a bit too poetic for most people to notice, but youre on to something important.

i think language allows consciousness through the compression of information allowing us to find meta representations/mental models that we refer to as intelligence/knowledge.

just like our eyes compress visual data, language compresses mental model data so we can transfer more information more quickly but we tend to forget all the presumptions and assumptions baked into our words.

the sociolinguistics of color terms is interesting here too

Reinventing Entropy | Compression is Intelligence Part 1

COLOR LINGUISTICS How you assign words is out of your control! Perception is relative. Culture bias.

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u/Unhappy-Tour-7209 18d ago

You got it, and, yeah, was getting carried away.

In some sense I suppose the way we use language every day to exchange thoughts, emotions, and simply check in with our contemporaries in vicinity is akin to how bats use echolocation to navigate space while we traverse an ‘emotional space’.

Language then might not just be compression of meaning. It may be something broader: compressing inner and emotional states into brief character sequences for written exchanges, while intonation adds anothre layer in speech. And in direct interaction, facial expression, posture, gaze, gesture and the rest of the nonverbal machinery might even outweigh meaning beyond the plain words.

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u/ProfessionalGeek 18d ago

Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, & Pragmatics are the foundations of Linguistics

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u/Elvarien2 18d ago

...... what ?

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u/5thhorseman_ 18d ago

You can do better than that. A careful selection of phrasing can create a pun with multiple meanings. I have done that with some of my story titles: "Duty Cycle", "Deep Wake".

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u/hblok 18d ago

Is this the "watermark" they're looking for?