What is the meaning of life? What is the reason I continue to live? If I were to die right now — would I have any regrets?

In my philosophy class, I was introduced to a terrible human being but an interesting philosopher, Martin Heidegger. He too had similar [ideas](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/philosophy-of-heidegger/beingtowardsdeath/5CF034365109AF8C76EB420EDA563901). His idea for purpose of life was framed through the view that death gave meaning to life. Only staring at death would you see the true meaning of what it steals. [Dostoevsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dostoevsky) and [Viktor Frankl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl) too had similar themes in their work.

> *Looking back from your death bed, would you regret \[insert decision\]?*

A typical question that often gets asked when talking about purpose of life. If this is the instinctive question to ask then could we deduce that the purpose of life of is to minimize regret?

If we have the target variable `regret` and we wish to minimize it then we could in theory have a function where all the variables of life reach a certain value where the level of regret is as minimal as possible for given planes. Kind of like gradient descent for some ML model. Except we are seeking not the local minima but the global one.

In theory, a local minima could be the answer to YOUR life but might not answer everyone else’s. Or maybe the local and global minima change with the ever changing — time — is another philosophy topic we can discuss later.

While the variables in our lives will vastly differ, we can still figure out a rough model through [law of large numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers). Kind of like medication. We can try out a drug on one person, and it might not yield the outcome we wanted but try it out on maybe 1,000 people and you start seeing what you expected. While the medication might not work on a specific person but it may work for the majority.

Likewise, if we gather information about regret on a large enough scale, we could maybe start to hone down on specific points that will be applicable to the majority. When someone is looking back in life, what they are essentially doing is a regret calculation. Assuming alternate possibilities exist, they would have chosen otherwise. This is how I am viewing regret to be our metric. Hence, if we could gather up major regrets for majority of people we can start heading towards the right direction. Luckily, we do have some research on this topic.

As we go more general, the more accurate we get. Since, broader we go, it allows us to capture a more general sense of what people regret.

![Bar graph of most frequent regrets of americans](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/0*Hh7VUt6Rl2yekgw1.jpg)

I stole this graph from a meta-analysis done by [Neal J. Roese](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Roese+NJ%5BAuthor%5D) and [Amy Summerville](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Summerville+A%5BAuthor%5D) in this [study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2394712/).

Bear with me …

Theory #1:

The study used participants that are from US. As such it is quite apparent why the top two choices are what they are.

Most people regret not furthering their education or not pursuing their interest in school. As it impacts rest of their lives.

Why would someone make the wrong choice in education. Two options:

1. Lack of maturity

2. Placing value on the wrong thing

Generally speaking, these are the most common ways things can go awry. You are too young to figure out what is the best choice for you. So, maybe you follow your passion. Which ends up making you live a monetarily poor life.

Other option is the exact opposite, which is where I partly fall. Placing all your value on money only and not realizing to live a good life — other parts are required too.

Two of the top two regrets’ \[Education and Career\] central theme are same on a macro level:

Money.

Too afraid won’t make enough or not worried about making enough.

Theory #2:

As suggested by the paper, there is a far more sense control over outcome when it comes to education; what you pursued/ or didn’t pursue. Whether or not you like your career and you decide to do something about it falls solely under agent-in-question’s shoulder. That also goes for not asking that girl or guy out, wishing to have spent more time with lover or even calling one’s parents more often etc.

There is a sense of regret that gets generated by percieved scale of agency over ones’ actions. If you were convinced that you could have chosen and acted differently then you were more likely to reason that things could have gotten better than out things played out in your current choice of life.

Death by a thousand “what-ifs”

So rather than being an error by the agent when making said choice — it is an error of the mind. Placing value on a different choice simply because the item behind the curtain was never revealed.

> *In a world both vast and wide,\
> Your purpose isn’t one to hide.\
> To shape, to solve, to create with might,\
> A future where there is no sight.*
>
> *In justice, care, and balance true,\
> Your life’s work finds a path to pursue.\
> With wisdom deep and passions bold,\
> Your purpose is to shape, to mold.*
>
> *To better the world with every deed,\
> And plant the seeds of hope, indeed.\
> So walk the path both brave and kind,\
> Your purpose, friend, is in your mind.*
>
> *— Chat GPT 3.5*

To be continued…

Part One: Meaning of Life

Ideas conceived in a certain language may have nuances that get lost when translated into another. On the surface level, there might not be a direct mapping of words in the target language. Whilst it is a problem that is often faced, it can be easily tackled. By drawing in other fundamental concepts to recreate the same effect into the target language. However, a harder problem awaits. As the parties on either side are attuned to their own way of thinking, when the ideas are being transmitted, the subtleties might go unappreciated, intonations might go unheard, historical context and relevance might go unacknowledged, and the focus could be shifted elsewhere. As we take in ideas as stories, the subtleties could shift the narrative. Causing a gap between what was intended and what was received. In this paper, I will be analyzing this very problem of ideas being lost in translation. With a particular focus on one to one mapping of words and perception of events taken in by native speakers of different languages. Postulating and expanding on the idea of weak Whorfianism and suggesting that the ideas across language are not being lost in translation rather in reception. Our human experiences recreating stories in different ways.

While communicating in the same language, ideas uttered by the senders and then received by the receiver could sometimes result in misunderstanding. In our daily conversations, misunderstanding is a quite common phenomenon. Reasons could vary anywhere from unaware or lack of context to missed or misheard emphasis. While we may have a notion or a general concept of what misunderstanding is, conception of it can get very epistemological. As such, for the sake of this paper we can assume understanding to be an invocation of a similar enough concept that the sender intended for the brain of the receiver. Any deviation large enough where the sender is not satisfied by the receiver’s grasp of its meaning can be accepted as misunderstanding. Thus, creating a game-like scenario where the parties involved have objectives to accomplish. As a receiver of ideas, you are tasked with predicting the sender’s intent. While as a sender, your objective is to utilize the mediums at your disposal to guide the receiver’s thought the way you intend to. This intention and actualization could vary drastically depending on the parties involved. For example, asking an exterminator, a present-day computer scientist, and a computer scientist from Harvard in 1947 to “crush a bug”, may invoke a variety of meanings in their heads. All of the parties in this scenario have their own human experiences that drive them to their creation of meaning from the same utterance.

Bringing out meanings through things of utterance is quite difficult. Even in an English to English dictionary, trying to find the meaning of a concept like “light” could lead to a handful of different ideas, with applications in various different contexts. Those who have felt heaviness in objects or in themselves or have seen darkness, can start to connect these concepts together to realize the sender’s intentions. This often requires that both the sender and receiver have some type of human experience that they can both draw from. When one of the parties is unable to empathize to a certain degree with the other, whether it is due to lack of human experience or neurological abilities, the meaning gets lost in this gap of unaligned human experiences.

For the purposes of this paper, human experiences is a catch all term that includes the story that is being taken in by the sender and the receiver. The subtleties they are picking up, the nuances of perception that are dictated by their culture and language. Hence, the human experience of the exterminator has to do with exterminating bugs via chemicals, the 1947 computer scientists’ bug is a literal bug hauling the giant room sized computer and the now computer scientists’ bug being an unintended “feature” of the code. We can start to see how the same idea could be represented differently in each of the person’s mental models.

This problem is exacerbated when we are importing ideas from a foreign land, especially with the medium of transmission being a foreign language. This phenomenon is particularly apparent when discussing Japanese ideas. As many of these ideas were conceived in Japanese, are foreign and strange to many Anglophones. Strange to the point that some parties will claim that such ideas are forever locked out for anyone who does not speak Japanese or rather not a “native speaker” of Japanese. This line of argument coincides with the Whorfian hypothesis. The Whorfian hypothesis, in its stronger form, claims that the native language of the speaker not only influences but controls both thoughts and perception. In its weaker form, which is widely accepted by many linguists, our native tongue simply influences how we think and perceive. While the weaker form is more widely accepted, it is still imperative to understand to what extent this could be true.

Regier & Kay’s “Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right” sheds light into how deep one can claim the Whorfian runs through our minds and perception. Their study finds two different ways the Whorfian hypothesis is “half right” (play of words, also indicating half of the cerebra compartmentalization). First being how language influences color perception primarily in half the visual field. The second being how color naming across languages shaped by both universal and language specific forces. Focusing on the first part, the study finds that there is a categorical perception (CP: a faster or more accurate discrimination of stimuli that straddle a category boundary) for color, and it differs on color category boundaries set by different languages.

This phenomenon is present within certain languages, including Japanese, where the speaker will recognize and distinguish visually green and blue objects and yet call out both of them as blue. In Japanese, this phenomenon is particularly present when describing everyday life items. For example, traffic lights:

In Japanese, Hikari (光) means light. If we look at the Green Light row, we can see what follows before 光 (light) is 青色 (Blue) rather than 緑 (Green). However, when a Japanese speaker is confronted about their ability to distinguish Blue from Green, they pass with flying colors. While the observer perceptually can distinguish the colors, expression of their cognition is being filtered by their language. Another example would be Green Apple. As the English diction suggests, they are green. While Japanese speakers sees Green, knows Green, they express Green Apples in Japanese as 「青りんご」(Ao Ringo). Here りんご (Ringo) means Apple and if we look what precedes りんご (Ringo — Apple) is 青 (Ao) — meaning Blue. To put it simply, language affects how well one can verbally distinguish color based on what language we speak. We can testify this by making the subjects do concurrent verbal interfering tasks and the CP disappears.

As to why this the case in Japan is often attributed to the idea that the word “Green” did not appear in Japanese educational literature until World War II. Assuming that they lacked it prior to being introduced by the west. As well as industrialization and globalization allowing for consumers goods to spread across to the East. This proves the point that there is indeed substance to the claim that our minds are working differently not just to process the language itself but to crunch the data we gather from our perception and spit it back out when we speak one language versus another. However, the question of “to what extent” still lingers. According to Regier & Kay, one may assume it is about moderation extent or in Whorfianism — the weaker form. As they claim:

“Language might affect half of perception. Specifically, language might be expected to shape perception primarily in the right visual field (RVF), and much less if at all in the left visual field (LVF). This expectation follows from the observations that the left hemisphere (LH) of the brain is dominant for language, and that the visual fields project contralaterally to the brain. On this view, half of our perceptual world might be viewed through the lens of our native language, and half viewed without such a linguistic filter.” (p.439)

This brings about the idea that we could be locked out from certain parties’ ideas. Especially, if their native tongue does not have the same exhaustive or distinctive list of vocabularies as the others’. As we have seen in our previous explanation of Green being opted for Blue due to lack of availability of the word in the culture’s history. We can recreate this instance in a more simpler and general (non-color related) fashion. Let’s think about the following:

You and your friends meet up in your house on weekends and order from the same store that is nearby, like clockwork. When you are hungry you simply communicate, “let’s order from the store”. As your friend group grows and everyone starts to associate that specific phrase “the store” with that specific store where you all order from. Over time, when amongst this group, “the store” conjures that specific store. However, when the same diction is used with an outside party, they may not have the same conjuration. Due to not being conditioned to pick up the subtleties and lacking the historical context. The out-group will need clarification as to what “the store” means. While the in-group have a clear sense of “the store” in general form and “the store” in specific form indicates to. In that sense, they might be locked out of the idea — “the store”.

Likewise, when a Japanese speaker says 「青色光」- (Aoiro Hikari) (Blue light)- it can be possibly claimed, all the Japanese speakers conjures up what is to us — Green — rather than what is being said — Blue. This layering of what is being said and what is being meant or conjured can easily go N levels deep, creating a gap in our understanding. Especially, when translating ideas from in-group to out-group.

While this does pose a problem, it can be viewed as more of a “soft-lock” rather than a “hard-lock” of ideas. As with proper explanation and borrowing of words, this soft-lock on ideas can be easily lifted. As we can simply borrow terms, invent and give proper explanation of things through more fundamental concepts that both languages share. Some of these ideas could be those very eccentric Japanese terms that English doesn’t have a one to one mapping of. For example:

過労死 — (Karōshi): As Japan tries to play catch up with rest of the western world, in terms of being an economical and industrial powerhouse, around 1960s; the “kaishain” or office work culture started become very brutal. Working till the point of falling to sudden death from overwork and stress. Unfortunately, this falling to death from overworking was such a common phenomenon that it was given its own name — Karōshi. As you can tell, office working life in Japan differs quite a bit compared to the west. Once someone joins a certain company, they stay there for the rest of their career. Promotion happens often through death rather than performance. Having face time in the office is often more valued than actually productivity. Requiring office workers to pour in hours in the office whether it is an effective use of their time or not. With the expectation of excellence in every corner, workers often fall short of it. Especially during the Japanese stock market boom, incentive to pour in more hours seemed necessary not only for personal benefit but for Japan as a whole. Playing catch up with the western world after World War II was a motivation to win a war against the west, this time in a different battlefield. Concurrently, due to how Japanese culture values resilience, workers are intrinsically motivated to push themselves as far as possible. Until they drop dead or take their own lives. As stories of many office workers dying from Karōshi came to light, academic research on such phenomena were presented to European and North American academia. Even amongst such academic audiences this idea was lost. However, now, this idea is not only accepted but also further research is being done by WHO (World Health Organization). As, unfortunately, most of the world is being transformed into a cesspool of stressed workers — working day and night with stress building up on their shoulders and their graves. Death from work is no longer a unique phenomenon in the world. Nowadays almost anyone can understand this pressure. Many offices have nets to catch the falling man from the roof and to put them back to work.

While it took 357 words to give a surface level translation of what Karōshi means, it can be done to a finer detail with more cultural and historical context. Proving the point, such ideas are simply soft locked; which requires a more exhaustive detail to get across. Likewise, there are tons of borrowed English words present in Japanese. An entire writing system, Katakana, exists for such loan words. Therefore, simply not having a 1:1 mapping of words is not necessarily an issue and ideas don’t necessarily get lost in translation because of it. Rather, I propose that the Whorfian idea of being locked into your own world due to your language happens in a different layer, that being lost in the realm of reception.

This interlayer: the reception, could be understood by the story through which we take-in a given translation. Avoiding the epistemological nature of it, I will utilize a study done by Niyekawa H. (University of Hawaii) and Agnes M.(M.I.T). The study, “A Psycholinguistic Study of The Whorfian Hypothesis Based on the Japanese Passive”, focuses on how translation of a handful of passages were received by speakers of English, German and Japanese language.

“In the translation part of this study, 22 Japanese short stories were translated into English by native speakers of English and 20 English short stories were translated into Japanese by Japanese. The passive passages in the Japanese version were classified into either adversative or non-adversative passive … They were then compared with the corresponding passages in English to determine equivalence of translation. Distortion in translation was found to be in the direction of the translator’s way of perceiving things in terms of his first language. The perception study compared the perception of Japanese with that of Americans by using stick figure cartoons depicting interpersonal conflict situations with negative outcomes. As hypothesized, Japanese were found to have greater tendency than Americans to attribute responsibility to others. In order to separate the role of language from other crucial cultural factors in the perception of interpersonal events, 20 monolingual (English-speaking) Americans of Japanese ancestry and 90 Germans in Berlin were also tested. No significant differences were found between the Americans and Germans; but the English-speaking Japanese-Americans fell in between the Americans and the Japanese, closer to the Japanese.” (p. Abstract)

Before connecting the findings of this study into the larger idea of this paper, I’d like to point out some key points to be aware of. This study was sponsored by the “Washington, D.C. Bureau of Research” and was conducted around 1967–1969. A 22 year gap from WWII. The “greater tendency … to attribute responsibility to others” could be a subversive message to the Japanese which is why I will not focus on the message itself but the idea it holds. Events as they happen are perceived differently depending on the language you speak. It leads to this idea that there are subtleties that go unnoticed as they happen, certain actions by others might go unappreciated or ignored and overall intake of events as they happen could significantly differ. Leading to ideas not being aligned from what was sent and what was received. This not only ties in with the idea of language but also the culture that the language creates or vice versa. If you live on a hard to live island with 1,500 earthquakes per year, with various natural disasters continuously wiping out progress, maybe you will start to appreciate the subtle temporary beauty of things and start to incorporate that within your language, ie. 「物の哀れ」(Mono no Aware). It may lead you to appreciate the simpler beauties of life rather than the extravagant ones, ie. 「渋い」(Shibui). While holding a sense of undertone of Memento Mori (connection to other human experiences namely the Socreterian world of Classics).

While there is a ton more to analyze, I believe the idea that loss in translation should be accepted more as a loss in reception. Of course, one can make terrible translations but the greater bottleneck is not translation across languages but our capability to receive. This idea requires further research. As through exploration of how ideas get received across cultures and language, we could possibly work to understand each other better. Share ideas without degradation across both space and time. So that we could continue our philosophizing till global warming or rather the human race wipes us out. As “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” — Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Lost in Reception

A paper written during my final year of undergrad. Philosophy of Language - taught by Professor David Neely and Japanese Philosophy by Cory A. Evans. Here I explore how ideas get mangled as we pass them through enough noggin from various cultures (Japanese for this corpus).

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