Navigating Your Reality -- Deixis, Part 1

Where does the self begin, and how do you communicate within the context of your own existence? Time to expand human deixis to 6 dimensions and then go further to explore the perception of reality of hypothetical beings.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro to Deixis
02:50 Part One: X, Y, Z
11:02 Part Two: The Limits of Time and Memory
14:29 Part Three: Higher Metaphysical Directions
18:54 Part Four: Egos of Speculative Beings
29:38 Thank You + Ending Part
#worldbuilding #linguistics #philosophy #conlang
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[@protondium_8927]

When I was younger I believed that the number of dimensions one could travel through was the number of eyes a being had + 1. So spiders would appear out of nowhere because they could travel through seven spacial dimensions. I'm going to use this video and this concept from when I was younger to do some worldbuilding!!!!

[@zanly5039]

i wish i was smart enough to think about more than 3 spatial dimensions when i was that young

[@protondium_8927]

@@zanly5039 If I'm being honest my parents just showed me that "how to imagine the tenth dimension" video because they knew I liked math and I barely paid attention I also liked spiders

[@electra_]

@@protondium_8927 lmao i remember watching that video

[@omatic_opulis9876]

8+1=7

[@protondium_8927]

@@omatic_opulis9876 yeah I don't know what my younger self was thinking

[@borisk201]

I love comprehending things beyond human comprehension!

[@KarolOfGutovo]

More like, I love having my human comprehension expanded... Having someone pull a thought pattern out of nonexistence and defining it and adding that concept to my brain. Not really related, but this has similar vibe to japanese 30 hours-in-a-day system. Japanese uses 24 hour time for the normal 24 hours, but if you stay up the hours go 23, 24, 25 instead of 23, 0, 1. It goes up to 6, so you get some programs marketed as airing "Friday 26:30" which is imo more practical, because if you watch it you are staying up late on the Friday night, not waking up very early on a Saturday.

[@sponge1234ify]

@@KarolOfGutovo what do you mean, waking up at 4 am is normal

[@KarolOfGutovo]

@@sponge1234ify If you wake up at four, that's 4 for you. But your roommate who didn't go to sleep yet would say it's 28 and he should probably tuck into his bed soon.

[@Caffeinepirate-oc2hc]

I have an idea. If fluid had consciousness and some way to sense or "see" objects outside and inside, there could distinction between inside the self and outside the self. In fact inside the self deixis would likely be much easier to perceive from the fluid's point of view. Inner positional deixis could also be reliant on the shape of container in which the fluid is kept. If there isn't any central nervous system and the thoughts of the fluid are manifested in some sort of field, it would retain awareness of all it's portions even when they become separated. Then there could be distinction between objects in self-A, self-B, self-C, etc... These portions of the self could be sorted by size, time separated, shape of container. Maybe there could be a portion, which the fluid would declare it's main self and others would be sorted by distance from the main self. It's not really about axis anymore but I thought the idea sounded cool.

[@stephenweigel]

No idea what this will be about; that makes me excited

[@kaiserinjacky]

Some more ideas for dimensions: 1: How much you like something; things you like are 'close', things you dislike are 'far'. I like the toki pona words 'pona' and 'ike' for these concepts. 2: Are Japanese Honorifics Deitic? If not, could something like them be? 3: While not super relevant in a truly non-fiction world, how about deixis on a fiction-real axis? Perhaps in a world where you can enter and leave stories or books. This last one makes the least amount of sense.

[@EchoLog]

It certainly could be deixis or something similar that they function on or come from, but I am no Japanese linguist. I like a deitic honorifics system. If you wanna brainstorm those ideas let's fnnnGO

[@feanorofsunspear2320]

1. I read this how much you are like something. I suppose that would kind of combine status, gender and animacy into one relative category. relational gender? 2. the linguistics handbook im consulting acknowledges honorifics as akin to deixis (in some way all personal pronouns are, as agma says). you could think of them as a societal dimension, that is partially egocentric. 3. there's the idea of endophoric deixis that references only other parts of the text itself (as said before, written above, general anaphora). only partially related to your point. but you could have a gradation, like "the thing mentioned in this sentence" "/in this utterance" "/in this conversation/story" "/in this epic cycle" "/in this genre"

[@henrybyrd8381]

Have you heard of “story thieves”? It’s a book about entering books.

[@lipamanka]

oh fun fact about toki pona, I often find that using the words "poka" and "weka" work just as well for that.

[@asherl5902]

3. Probably not what you're meaning, but... Things that are real to you, and things that aren't so real to you, like for opinions (?)

[@LinguaPhiliax]

Are you going to do another cursed conlang circus? I have an idea for a time-travel language - no stealing.

[@AgmaSchwa]

I would love to, just need to make sure my real life is stable enough to have that much free time again, haha.

[@theidioticbgilson1466]

why just one derivative? you can have second and nth derivatives relative acceleration, relative jerk, relative jolt, relative snap, relative crackle and relative pop or integrating relative absment, abvelosity abceleration, abjerk absnap abscrackle and abspop

[@theidioticbgilson1466]

relative angular acceleration, etc

[@theidioticbgilson1466]

heck every symmetry of the universe

[@AgmaSchwa]

yesss, love me some jerk

[@theidioticbgilson1466]

@@AgmaSchwa 😳

[@winkydinky1436]

@@AgmaSchwa haha. lmao

[@Hwelhos]

why r we here... just to suffer

[@rossjennings4755]

That KSP navball behind you makes me think: what about beings that live in space, usually in orbit around some larger body? Would they have deixis centered around the "prograde/retrograde", "normal/anti-normal", and "radial in/out" directions familiar from the navball?

[@hithere833]

Love agma's jojo cosplay

[@realenzelad]

This video made me eerily aware of my senses in a way I never was before, and idk if I like this. Excelent video, 11/10 will show to my friends to curse them with this feeling as well

[@dangswan]

A further dimension I've considered but never actually implemented which would be applicable to humans would involve separating one's own subjective experience of time from the overall passage of the reference timeline. That is, a time traveler can refer to "local yesterday" (he has experienced 24 hours since that point) which is the same as "global tomorrow" (that point would be listed on a calendar as succeeding the current point). For further insanity, consider that time travel could be conceived of as producing a "before" and "after" for the state of the timeline itself, which I have occasionally referred to as "meta-time". Thus in Star Trek the Kelvin Timeline is "meta-after" the Prime Timeline.

[@dangswan]

And if you have a fictional character who is somehow aware of the author's editing process and said editing process jumps around, you could add a fourth axis to describe that difference. ... at which point we've gone from "humans experience 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time" to "I actually need 4 time dimensions just to describe the plot of the novel Redshirts".

[@azplantreviews2199]

I wonder how talking plants would define their deixes

[@volvagianintendo6465]

Actually, let's flesh out the Seedrians's speech from Sonic X. They're actually plant folk!

[@Lizard-813]

I've actually tried thinking a lot about plant perception and language before, for some reason. As well as plant religion and how they would have that. I'll definitely add the question of deixes and how that fits into everything else to the list of things to think about next time I'm on a walk!

[@volvagianintendo6465]

@@Lizard-813, I would like their language to sound like a Polynesian Austronesian tongue. Why do I link that way of sounding to plants? Heh heh That's interesting!

[@Lizard-813]

@@volvagianintendo6465 Usually I think of it more abstractly than that. I don't really think of any actual sounds that they'd make, more just communicating ideas via chemical signals through their root networks. It's kinda almost realistic that way, but obviously in the real world it's not much of a language

[@volvagianintendo6465]

@@Lizard-813 I agree

[@piguyalamode164]

Interesting thought about the concept of "here". "here" can actually include fairly arbitrary grouping of things, including abstract ones, in a context dependent way. For example, spaces on the internet and whole countries can become "here". Also, "here" can be quite vague. For example, if an astronaut says "It's lonely up here" what is here? Their space station? The entire vacuum of space? The orbit of [insert gravitational source here]? Basically, this seems to be a result of humans being good at context switching. We can change the focal "area" to be anything from our own body to entire worlds if the context demands

[@Gamesaucer]

I am creating a language where deictic axes can rotate through time, so you could say that something is "to my left", and _mean_ that I had it a while ago. It can also be _partially_ rotated through time, so that "left" could perhaps mean "a little into the future and upward of my location" or something like that. (Yes, the speakers can also rotate through time, it's not just the directions. It certainly complicates the phonology somewhat.) It's interesting that generally, when we rotate, only "left", "right", "forward" and "backward" ever change; "up" and "down" stay the same. Not sure if that's true for all natural languages, though. But I imagine it has to do with gravity. The first four are always perpendicular to gravity, the latter two are always parallel. Naturally, if you can rotate through time, gravity can also change. There's no need for up and down to always be the same, so they're treated the like the other directions, allowing for 4D rotation. By the way, a fun side effect of 4D rotation is that things become 3-dimensionally achiral. That is, something can become its own mirror image just through rotation alone. So suddenly, you might not know whether someone's left is really their left, unless you can also tell whether they're temporally inverted or not.

[@feanorofsunspear2320]

rotating on the z axis is called laying down

[@decare696]

In the actual physics of special relativity, spacetime has a certain geometry that makes "rotations" in it just either 3d rotations (of course) or what we call "boosts", ie. acceration / changing from one frame of reference to another. So yeah, I can rotate through time and so can you (just start walking lol)

[@Gamesaucer]

@@decare696 Well, I'm talking about entirely treating time as an extra spatial dimension, not a slight change in perception caused by a change in speed. Unless you're going at a significant fraction of the speed of light, it barely matters. Plus, in practice it's really more like compression or skewing than it is rotation, because of the way our future light cone restricts how our frame of reference is allowed to change.

[@thezipcreator]

I think something you might be interested in is the book Dichronauts. It takes place in a universe with 2 spacial dimensions and 2 temporal ones, and one of the temporal axes basically acts as a sort of weird-ass spatial dimension (due to fact that temporal dimensions are fundamentally physically different from spatial ones). Characters and objects can "rotate" through it, but as they do they get stretched out more and more, eventually breaking due to friction. Also, rotating more than 45 degrees is no more impossible than going faster than the speed of light, for the same reasons too.

[@Clover298]

oh cool, manmade creations beyond my comprehension

[@t3rv1n]

Lets wait then

[@the_multus]

IMO e axis should be different. You could safely say, that tomorrow is an opposite of yesterday, but indirect causality doesn't look like an opposite to acausality. And I'm not really sure, how to fix this properly. I'd argue, that adding a new radial metric (such as here/there distance metric) is better (direct-indirect-unrelated)

[@ZetaPrime77]

Magnum Schlang wildin' as per usual

[@feanorofsunspear2320]

gestural 4th dimensional demonstrative: "then" points to a time in the past (with my pointing into the past limb)

[@Somebodyherefornow]

sounds fun! metaphysics!

[@novaace2474]

Bro my brain died after half way through

[@SheikahMapping]

Oooooo a new Agma Schwa video!

[@TurnerXei]

dig it

[@BryanLu0]

For the e axis, wouldn't it make more sense to rank one side as it was caused by you and the other side as it causes you to do something? And then how far can represent how intentional it was? I guess that doesn't quite work because the null would mean that it doesn't affect you in any way which is the complete opposite of the ego.

[@JerusalemStrayCat]

I agree, but I think of it this way. Things directly related to the ego would be close on this axis, while things indirectly related are farther away. The positive direction should be things caused by the ego, the negative direction should be things causing the ego (or at least the ego's experience). The ego itself, which of course is the thing that is most related to itself, and both causes and is caused by itself, would be at the center. However, that also means that positive and negative infinity are the same, what you said in your comment is the null, because things that are neither causing or caused by the ego are equally unrelated. I guess this axis would be a circle.

[@stumpybumpo]

Why not use deictic rotations? Since you have egocentric axes, you could even represent such rotations as bivectors, which are already a confusing mathematical construction.

[@alsatusmd1A13]

It’s rather strange, but I think I already predicted that the deixis would go into motion to get beyond the limit of the four physical dimensions.

[@pananaOwO]

That's interesting idea

[@julientorres4459]

What if we used complex-number-arithmetic and incorporated it into the syntax?

[@Denneth_D.]

28:34 Agma is a Na’Vi confirmed

[@nerd8502]

This video is really cool and interesting, definitely helped about how beings very different to humans could comunicate. Only thing that bugged me a bit was a small detail: at 26:34 you said the starlings' language could use the center of the universe as a point of reference, but there isn't really a center of the universe. Any point in space could be explained as the center of the universe as reasonably as any other point. I'm not a Scientist, so I can't explain it better, just wanted to point it out. But that's not really a big deal, since it was a small part of a single example. Overall, I really liked the video :)

[@LordSatoh]

Maybe it's too late to comment, but an idea for one (or more) dimention(s) is to imagine a multiverse where the many universes exist in a plane, with each time axis of each universe parallel to the others. Therefore, one could refer to their "distance" not only in a now-then way, but also in an "in-this-universe/in-another" way, maybe with more acurate terms

[@onionero]

lapis bodypillow goes hard

[@TiagoTiagoT]

I'm not quite sure what would be the best way to map it spatially, but causality has an additional parameter. If it were to be thought of as 2 dimensional, you would have one axis for correlation and another for causation. In the correlation axis you measure how related something is, how relevant it is, how dependent/independent it is. And in the causation axis you have you acting on yourself in the center, you acting on the subject on one direction and the subject acting on you in the opposite. But that doesn't quite map to full 2 dimensions since something unrelated would neither be affected nor affect you, so the space would be more triangle-like, with the unrelated extreme having no dimension of causation. The asymmetry does bother me though. But then, what would be past the center line in correlation axis, what would be the corner opposite to unrelated if self-affecting is located at the center of the line connecting the other two specified corners? If you pull out self-affecting into it's own corner turning the shape into a 45-degree rotated square, would the center of the square have any notable meaning?

[@vftdan]

If there is an axis for derivative of space by time, there can be derivative axes for all pairs of existing axes, like leaning more rightward/leftward, looking to a more clockwise/counterclockwise cardinal direction, and for second derivatives like rotating faster slower to lean/straighten up or around the vertical axis

[@brax__]

A lapis body pillow is crazy

[@nyuh]

nyuh

[@daxx3232]

5 minutes in i already feel like i inhaled some kind of hallucination inducing gas

[@iamdigory]

The fifth dimension should be things that could be or could have been.

[@RVM451]

Friend, I may be missing something-but I am hung-up on your Causality Axis. There doesn't SEEM to be a place for things that EGO acted upon in the PAST but will never have the opportunity to influence again in the FUTURE.

[@protondium_8927]

We need two more dimensions to do linguistic octernions, so what about a species that "sees" in 2 dimensional areas that can be shifted interdimensionally. An extra two "vision" axes (vx and vy) would allow for some funky 8-dimensional rotation words (I don't understand octernions so I could be totally wrong)

[@joannasthings]

oh no o h n o

[@Denneth_D.]

Well then

[@EchoLog]

Is CE - BCE a temporal deitic axis that our time is strung along but our language is pro drop for temporal axisisesesies? That feels like a thing an English or Mandarin speaker would think up. funky time systems, not too out there, but very funky.

[@Collette8968]

what about rotational directions?

[@alexilonopoulos3165]

🤓

[@myanovak675]

U just went n landed

[@leave-a-comment-at-the-door]

before/after the fire nation attacked tense but no before/after unix timestamp tense? I'm disappointed

[@georgia-qy9ve]

Da blushmallet lapis body pillow

[@Denneth_D.]

TFW Agma mention’s causality Me as a Berserk fan: kzbin.info/www/bejne/gXuuXpeZicaSqMk

[@Garfield_Minecraft]

toki li kama pona ala tawa kepeken la mi toki e toki pona ._. language become not easy to use and i'mma speak toki pona instead ._. ni = ni

[@markenangel1813]

the fact that you kept mispronouncing deixis as deexis really bothered me throughout the video, but otherwise a really neat set of thoughts and experiments

[@EchoLog]

No. (Okay, yes, but:) No.