Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.
In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our intelligence – grammatically, at least.
The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.
By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.
Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software. The landmark event that launched what is now broadly called ‘cognitive science’ was the publication of Language and Communication (1951) by the psychologist George Miller. Miller proposed that the mental world could be studied rigorously using concepts from information theory, computation and linguistics.
the ‘$1000 to go to Hawaii’ bride, the ‘I bought a $99 polygraph on amazon’ lady, or the ‘why was $200 so huge’ birthday girl
a lot of people seem to be confused and think the hawaii bride and the polygraph lady are the same but they’re actually 2 separate people so here’s all 3 in one go
the “$1500 to go to hawaii” bride
Ms Polygraph Test
$200 birthday
bask in the unfiltered nonsense of it all
since someone mentioned this and I had forgotten, a last minute entry fighter: “Squire Sebastian” lady
New to the arena, Kristie and her surprise wedding
Y'all really gonna pass up childless millennial Disney Mom?
my FAVORITE angry facebook post of all time
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE “CHANGE YOUR DOG’S NAME” PREGNANT LADY
That surprise wedding situation sounds like a murder-suicide waiting to happen
language is literally so beautiful like in english “i miss you” comes from being unable to locate someone in the field after battle, it’s “i look for you but i can’t find you” but the french “tu me manques” is also about absence but it’s not something i do, it’s something that happens to me, as in “you are something essential lacking inside me”, in portuguese it’s either “sinto a tua falta” as in “i feel your absence” or, from solitude you get “saudade de você” as in “i am lonely [of] you”, and in spanish the word comes from stranger and it’s something one does, “te extraño” as in “i am making a stranger out of you”, and, and, and
i wish so fucking bad that schools would teach even the most basic nature and wildlife literacy. bc what they teach now is how we get these godawful lawns and monocultures and an endlessly growing list of extinct animal species. like i can’t even count how many times i’ve been trying to explain to people why mosquitoes/moths/bats/flies/wasps/etc are so important and people have gone “but that’s what bees are for (pollination)” or “birds can just eat other things” or “things decompose on their own”. it has to be in the dozens. nothing makes me as upset as when people simply cannot wrap their heads around the fact (fact, fact, fact) that every single organism has its purpose in nature and there is *nothing* that is “pointless”. ignorance like this is what leads to barren monoculture lawns and deforestation and “pest control” and devastating invasive species and expanding extinction/endangerment lists. i just wish schools would teach that every animal and plant has its place, and *nothing* needs to be exterminated as a whole, *especially* native wildlife. but of course capitalism can’t thrive on proper environmentalism so i guess we’ll just have to deal with this.
humans aren’t pointless actually we’re here for a reason. we’re here to make art and bake bread and tell stories and see ourselves in each other and to notice that our tears and the ocean taste the same. that and ecosystems like forests do best when we’re there to forage and use the resources there because humans are a part of nature too and like i said each and every species has its place and its role in the ecosystem. go look up some cave paintings or whatever
I cannot stress enough that humans were meant to live.
I don’t mean survive, I mean fucking live.
We were born for love, art, baking, sure, but we were born to goddamn live.
I wasn’t put on this earth because of some incomprehensible reason via eldritch space deity or whathaveyou, I was born from a biological process called two humans fucking, and that’s the goddamn story. I was born, and now I’m alive, that’s the shtick. I have a purpose here, and the goddamn purpose is to eat, live and then die one day just like every lifeform on earth. I have a part to play, a cog in nature’s machine, a piece on the puzzle. As humans, we are not pointless or fucking meaningless and I hear one more goddamn person say that I’m punching them in the goddamn MOUTH.
I was born to live. To wander the grass, keep a bloody garden, eat, drink, make merry and art and to fucking LIVE! And by god & devil alike, come the oceans of roiling blood and storming hells, I’ll keep fucking living because that’s my purpose!
Actually life is beautiful because the sound I make while trying to breathe around hot food sounds like my dog trying to eat an apple. When I yawn my cat tries to put his face in my mouth like a little dentist man and when he yawns I put my finger in his obligate-carnivore trapzone and we both know he will not hurt me. When I do not fold my clothes, they do not hold it against me.
I am demonstrably sad, and lonely, and full of fear. But there are other people who will hold my hand, who will point out the hawk overhead, who will give you That Look in a public place. The other day at a coffee shop a child said “look! It’s snowing!” so all of us strangers went to go look out the windows. It wasn’t the first snow and it won’t be the last but wasn’t it lovely, like that?
How wonderful to live in a world where birds and frogs both say beep! How wonderful to have an ocean of beautiful sharks with their dinosaur teeth! How wonderful the moon and her changing face, how wonderful the bees and their dancing to communicate, how wonderful shrimp and their forbidden layers of vision! How wonderful, you, and what you will give the world! The way we love things enough to spend entire blogs devoted to them? How people will let me explain my Pokemon team to them? How we will both jump at the scare in the movie, how we laugh so loudly, how it feels to give someone your baking? How wonderful to be alive. I am sorry for forgetting.
This is the process of getting better. With wonderful people and wonderful strangers and wonderful friends: I am getting better, slowly. Thank you, whoever you are. In some way, you’ve been wonderful, and left a wonderful place in the world to ripple out to me. In some small way - isn’t it beautiful - I promise, you’ve been helping.
“How wonderful to be alive. I am sorry for forgetting.”
I love this because like 99% of this kind of paleoart is patriarchal Man
the Hunter type fantasies but these guys are just like “fuck it we’re
outta here”
for chinese new year they get all these famous actors and comedians together and they do a lil show and one of the comedians was like “i was in a hotel in america once and there was a mouse in my room so i called reception except i forgot the english word for mouse so instead i said ‘you know tom and jerry? jerry is here’
jerry is here
my chinese teacher once shared this story in class about someone who went to the grocery to buy chicken, but they forgot the english word for it, so they grabbed an egg, went to the nearest sales lady and said “where’s the mother”
When I was a teenager, we went to Italy for the summer holidays. We are German, neither of us speaks more than a few words of Italian. That didn’t keep my family from always referring to me when they wanted something translated because “You’re so good with languages and you took Latin”. (I told them a hundred times I couldn’t order ice cream in Latin, they ignored that.) Anyway, my dad really loved a certain cheese there, made from sheep’s milk. He knew the Italian word for ‘cheese’ – formaggio – and he knew how to say ‘please’. And he had already spotted a little shop that sold the cheese. He asked me what ‘sheep’ was in Italian, and of course, I had no idea. So he just shrugged and said “I’ll manage” and went into the shop. 5 mins later, he comes out with a little bag, obviously very pleased with himself. How did he manage it? He had gone in and said “'Baaaah’ formaggio, prego.”
I was done for the day.
This makes me feel better about every conversation I had in both Rome and Ghent.
I once lost my husband in the ruins of a French castle on a mountain, and trotted around looking for him in increasing desperation. “Have you seen my husband?” I asked some French people, having forgotten all descriptive words. “He is small, and English. His hair is the color of bread.”
I did not find my husband in this way.
In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”
“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.
The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)
Of course. A fucking sack. And so I did get a sack.
I once was at a German-American Church youth camp for two weeks and predictably, we spoke a whole lot of English.
When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.
“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”
“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”
Which is LITERALLY Sleeping sac … The German word is a basically a one on one translation of the English word and I just… I failed it. At my mother tongue. BIG
My former boss is Italian and she ended up working in a lab where the common language was English. She once saw an insect running through the lab and she went to tell her colleagues. She remembered it was the name of a famous English band so she barged in the office yelling there was a rolling stone in the lab…
I’m Spanish and have been living in the UK for a while now. I recently changed jobs and moved to a new office which is lost somewhere in the Midlands’ countryside. It’s a pretty quaint location, surrounded by forest on pretty much all sides, and with nice grounds… full of pheasants. I was pretty shocked when I drove in and saw a fucking pheasant strolling across the road. Calm as you please.
That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.
Best thing is, everyone understood what I meant.
I love those stories so much…
Picture a Jewish American girl whose grasp of the Hebrew language comes from 10+ years of immersion in Biblical and liturgical Hebrew, not the modern language. Some words are identical, while others have significantly evolved.
She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.
American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)
Bus Driver: שתי זוזים. (”Two zuzim” – a currency that’s been out of circulation for millenia)
that’s hilarious
I am officially screamlaughing at my desk from that last one OH MY
Does everyone know the prime minister who promised to fuck the country?
So in Biblical Hebrew the word for penis and weapon are the same. There is a verb meaning to arm, which modern Hebrew semanticly drifted into “fuck”: i.e. give someone your dick.
The minister was making a speech while a candidate, bemoning the state of the world. “The Soviet Union is fucking Egypt. Germany is fucking Syria. The Americans are fucking everyone. But who is fucking us? When I am prime minister, I will ensure we are fucked!”
What the hell Biblical Hebrew.
Just guessing: The path from something like “give someone a blade” to “give someone a blade, if you know what I mean ;)” is probably not that difficult or unlikely.
^Given that the Latin word for sheath (like, for a sword) is literally “vagina”, I can verify that this metaphor is a time-honored one.
Oh yeah and one time my Latin professor was at this conference in Greece and his flight was canceled, so he needed to extend his hotel stay by one more night.
Except he doesn’t speak a lick of modern Greek, and the receptionist couldn’t speak English. Or French. Or German. Or Italian. (He tried all of them.)
Finally, in a fit of inspiration, he went upstairs and got his copy of Medea in the original Greek (you know, the stuff separated from modern Greek by two and a half thousand years). He found the passage where Medea begs Jason to let her stay for one more day, went downstairs, and read it to the receptionist.
She laughed her head off, but she gave him the extra night.
All of these *chef’s kiss* but the Medea one is hands down the best
s/o to my classics professor who managed to get a tire changed on his rental car while doing research in Greece by telling them his chariot had broken down
