:) :) :) :)

Anyway, what made you decide to name yourself after the Royal Bank of Scotland?

Apparently not good in finding abbreviation, as not good in philosophy ,,,, wondering what else can you be good at??? anyways....moving forward..... :)

Apparently not good in finding abbreviation, as not good in philosophy ,,,, wondering what else can you be good at??? anyways....moving forward..... :) — RBS

Well, I'm good in bed. Or so my mother says.

Until recently, I thought that I was good at punctuation, but it turns out that I wasn't using enough punctuation marks. You, on the other hand, seem to have nailed it. Where did you learn how to do that? Was that something you picked up during your time at the Royal Bank of Scotland?

I'm going to quote jamalrob here. (I hope he doesn't mind.)

Stop it. You want to behave like kids, go somewhere else. — jamalrob

Kids tend not to be as quick-witted. And it's a dead thread in any case. But, if you insist, Buzz Killington. I'll find some other way to amuse myself for a while.

My intention wasn't to kill anyone's buzz. It's just that I had that quote in mind during our whole back and fourth. I felt guilty about what we were doing. The last thing you want to do is annoy the owner of this site.

My intention wasn't to kill anyone's buzz. It's just that I had that quote in mind during our whole back and fourth. I feel guilty about it. The last thing you want to do is annoy the owner of this site. — Purple Pond

The last thing you want to do, you mean. Anyway, stop it now. You're just encouraging me to respond with more inappropriate humour. I can't help myself. It's the crack cocaine to my Whitney Houston.

Wait. Can you?

Alright, for all those that claim they can do it your next challenge is:

Record it and post it on Youtube. Try to write two different paragraphs simultaneously, one with your right hand and one with your left hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ1gpqr0kkA

Like this woman.

This thread caught my eye. I haven't read all of the responses but the initial question was very interesting to me because I had a very similar thought last year.

I learned that my depiction of multitasking, (the intital example of patting your head and rubbing your tummy... Or drawing a square and circle with opposite hands) is not actual multitasking at all. Multitasking would be closer defined to being able to do two things simultaneously. While you could consider listening to music and seeing colour as doing two things at once it is just our brain processing these things one at a time, back and forth very quickly. The brain goes back and forth so fast we percieve them as happening at the same time like hearing talking seeing feeling etc... It's done almost simultaneously but not quite. Machines, much like our brains do the same. They can calculate and sort through vast amounts of information very quickly but it's never at the exact same time. My guess is that the reason our brains don't allow us to do things like think of two different ideas at once, look in two directions with our eyes and process both images properly or even say two different sentences at the same time is because we are limited by our hardware and processing power. For example: trying to do something impossible like see ultraviolet light or say two different sentences at once is a hardware limitation. We don't have the eyes that can see that light wave length or two throats tongues and mouthes to formulate and say two separate sentences at the same time ... While something like thinking two ideas in your head much like the OPs original banana comparison is a software limitation. Thoughts are complex for the brain. They seem normal to us because we think different thoughts every day but every idea we have or sentence we form in our head is like our brain filling a huge storage area with information we are thinking about on the spot. The amount of energy needed to process that must be a limiting factor for our brain. Routine background functions like sight and hearing may not be a small thing but our bodies seem to be accustomed to them in such a way we can percieve them almost instantaneously. Thoughts on the other hand seem to be single focused actions where the brain has to put a lot of emphasis on our individual thought. That's just my 2 cents.

As for why our brains are like this... I feel like that would either have to go to a religious or scientific debate.

It's possible the brain "creates" many thoughts, but the number of thoughts we can think in words is limited by the parts of the parts that regulate speech.

I do wonder why we exist in such a state that our brain has this seemingly unlimited potential to do stuff and our bodies which only exist to server the purpose of carrying around our consciousness limit us so much.

I guess that's a pretty negative way to look at it. On the other hand our bodies are quite amazing and I presume it's better to be what we are today rather than some supercomputer of a brain just floating around without a body to "limit" us.

I think this is more a limitation of language than a limitation of the brain.

Our experiences and thoughts can be full of details, but words refer to something specific, and using language forces us to focus on what the words refer to.

Even though we can think in parallel, language forces us to think linearly, one sentence at a time, one idea at a time.

We can imagine a complex scenery evolving in a complex way, but as soon as we try to describe it with our limited language we're forced to describe it one analogy at a time, and if we want to describe all the details it would take a bunch of sentences.

limitation of language than a limitation of the brain.

Our experiences and thoughts can be full of details, but words refer to something specific, and using language forces us to focus on what the words refer to.

Even though we can think in parallel, language forces us to think linearly, one sentence at a time, one idea at a time. — leo

But why is sentence formation linear? Also, what would the effects on philosophy and society be if sentence formation was NOT linear?

It would, for example, kill the idea that you have a "single" soul or "single" free will. Ideas of morality would be drastically different. For example, what if one part of you believes in religion and the other part doesn't? How would theology deal with that?

The law talks about people as if they were single individuals. You committed a crime. Now you must be punished. Oh ho ho ho ho. But if people could express multiple sentences simultaneously, any defendant can argue that it was one part of him that committed the crime and the other part didn't.

But why is sentence formation linear? Also, what would the effects on philosophy and society be if sentence formation was NOT linear? — YuZhonglu

There is gonna be some speculation here, but anyway here is my take:

Language is a tool we use to communicate what we experience, if there was no one to communicate with we wouldn't need language. We can communicate in other ways than using words, we can also communicate through drawings/paintings, through our behavior and facial expression, through looking with the eyes in some specific way. Sometimes people can understand each other on something without uttering a word.

Our experiences are rich and full of details, there is a whole lot of stuff going on, but often we focus on a specific part. If you notice something that you deem threatening, and the others have not noticed it, you want to warn them, so you attempt to communicate that specific thing to them, and one way is to utter a sound through your vocal cords, then if the community has agreed beforehand that this specific sound is used to refer to a specific threat then they are now aware there is a threat nearby even if they haven't noticed it. Or if you notice some fruits high up in a tree or whatever, you communicate it with specific sounds, so others may notice it too. The more complex the sounds you utter, the more details you can communicate.

But there is a limited complexity we can utter using our vocal cords and tongue and mouth, there is a limited number of distinct sounds we can make with them at a specific time (a few hundreds maybe?), while our experiences are much more complex than that, we may have countless different experiences, so in order to increase the details/complexity of what we are communicating orally we utter a series of sounds, one at a time, and the way these sounds are put together refers to some specific part of experience in a more detailed way than what could be communicated with just one sound. Then written words refer to these uttered sounds, so the way we form sentences in writing is a direct consequence of the way they are formed orally.

If we could utter a trillion different sounds then we wouldn't need to make sentences, each word would refer to a complex and detailed thing, we could build complexity in parallel rather than linearly, we could say with just one word where the threat is how it looks like how it moves where it is likely going, rather than having to communicate it in a bunch of sentences one after the other.

It's interesting to speculate what that would change for philosophy and society. We wouldn't have to remember a trillion different words, just like we don't have to remember a trillion different sentences, rather we would construct complex words out of more simple words, just like we construct complex sentences out of words. We could communicate much more efficiently what we experience. With our current language there is a lot of sentences that can be interpreted in many different ways, a lot of misinterpretations between people, a lot of talking past each other, but with enough complexity it might be possible to remove all the misunderstandings. It surely would have far-reaching consequences.

The inefficiency with our current language is that it takes so many sentences to refer to something precisely, and by the time we've finished reading a detailed description we have probably forgot some part of it, and then it becomes extremely difficult to connect precise ideas together. Our thinking is fast while our memory is slow. Our language is the bottleneck, we have a fast processor but we're constantly reading from a slow hard drive (our linear language) instead of a fast access memory (a parallel language).

It would, for example, kill the idea that you have a "single" soul or "single" free will. — YuZhonglu

I agree that there are a LOT of nuances that are not communicated with our limited language. The words "soul" and "free will" are used to refer to so many different things, and people most often just talk past each other when using them.

Ideas of morality would be drastically different. For example, what if one part of you believes in religion and the other part doesn't? How would theology deal with that?

The law talks about people as if they were single individuals. You committed a crime. Now you must be punished. Oh ho ho ho ho. But if people could express multiple sentences simultaneously, any defendant can argue that it was one part of him that committed the crime and the other part didn't. — YuZhonglu

We can already express that in a convoluted way, using many sentences, but indeed our very use of a linear language might influence our philosophical beliefs. Maybe there would be many less fundamentalists, and maybe justice would be different and much more nuanced if we used a different language, which has again far-reaching implications. Our language is a filter we put on the world, on our existence, and we forget it's even there, and we spend our lives attempting to change what we see through the filter without ever looking at changing the filter itself.

There is Korzybski who attempted with his general semantics to change the way we use language which is the source of many problems, but maybe what we need is a more radical reconstruction of language itself, to remove its current limitations that are a historical consequence of the small number of sounds we can utter with our mouth/tongue/vocal cords, so we could use our brain much more efficiently to communicate and to think. This could change everything.