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Feel the Meaning — LessWrong

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When I hear someone say, "Oh, look, a butterfly," the spoken phonemes "butterfly" enter my ear and vibrate on my ear drum, being transmitted to the cochlea, tickling auditory nerves that transmit activation spikes to the auditory cortex, where phoneme processing begins, along with recognition of words, and reconstruction of syntax (a by no means serial process), and all manner of other complications. But at the end of the day, or rather, at the end of the second, I am primed to look where my friend is pointing and see a visual pattern that I will recognize as a butterfly; and I would be quite surprised to see a wolf instead. My friend looks at a butterfly, his throat vibrates and lips move, the pressure waves travel invisibly through the air, my ear hears and my nerves transduce and my brain reconstructs, and lo and behold, I know what my friend is looking at. Isn't that marvelous? If we didn't know about the pressure waves in the air, it would be a tremendous discovery in all the ne

x Feel the Meaning — LessWrong A Human's Guide to Words Philosophy of Language Personal Blog 69 Feel the Meaning by Eliezer Yudkowsky 13th Feb 2008 4 min read 12 69 When I hear someone say, "Oh, look, a butterfly," the spoken phonemes "butterfly" enter my ear and vibrate on my ear drum, being transmitted to the cochlea, tickling auditory nerves that transmit activation spikes to the auditory cortex, where phoneme processing begins, along with recognition of words, and reconstruction of syntax (a by no means serial process), and all manner of other complications. But at the end of the day, or r

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