READING NOTES：Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang

 

If you’ve known the future, would you keep on living your life?

 

If you’ve known you would lose, would you want to own it?

 

If you’ve known you would leave, would you want to meet?

 

 

 

At the end of the novel, the narrator said:

From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?

Throughout the novel, the author not only wants to discuss aliens, sciences, and languages with the readers but also philosophy, Free Will & Knowledge of the future.

 

Heptapods 

The aliens that the narrator studies in the novel are called Heptapods.

Heptapods‘ bodies have seven long limbs and are symmetrical in the center. Any limb can function as a leg. At the same time, any limb can also function as an arm. Similarly, their seven eyes are symmetrically distributed. Therefore, for them, there is no direction. Any direction is straight ahead, and any direction can be the back.

They have orifices, lined with articulated bony ridges. They are probably served as the mouth for eating, respiration and speech, but also the anus at the same time.

Their body has no direction. So does their language.

Language

Unlike human language, heptapods’ writing constitutes a completely separate language from their speech.

As the narrator suggested, “Ease of learning isn’t the primary force in language evolution. For the heptapods, writing and speech may play such different cultural or cognitive roles that using separate languages makes more sense than using different forms of the same one. ”

• Written Language

Heptapods didn’t write a sentence one semagram at a time; they built it out of strokes irrespective of individual semagrams.  They didn’t write a sentence one semagram at a time; they built it out of strokes irrespective of individual semagrams.

The strokes in the sentence also traversed several clauses, making them so interconnected that none could be removed without redesigning the entire sentence.

Heptapods had to know how the entire sentence would be laid out before it could write the very first stroke.

It had no written punctuation. There was certainly no way to slice out subject-predicate pairings neatly to make sentences. The only difference between a sentence and a paragraph, or a page, was size.

• Oral Language

It is depicted as “a brief fluttering sound”(6) from a puckered orifice at the top of a heptapod’s body vibrate.

The speaking language of heptapods is free of word order. You could start almost anywhere in the writing, then follow the branching clauses until you’d read the whole thing. Since there is no sequence in their language, it doesn’t matter what to say first, which is totally different from any human spoken language.

The language of the heptapods is their action, and when they express the language and be understood by humans, it is complete. And even if they know the content of each sentence, they still choose to “waste their tongue” and let the incident happen.

Mindset

The writing language of Heptapods relies on small changes in the font to express information. For example, to express the meaning of “heard clearly”, some changes are made to the strokes of the verb “listen” to express adjectives and adverbs. There are precise and accurate grammatical rules for every subtle change.  

So “logic” to them is more like a sort of sorting out existing content before reporting. They know what to write first and then write what next, starting with “known results” and proceeding in the most efficient way. This is a bit like what Hegel said, “Anything that is reasonable is realistic, and everything that is realistic is reasonable”.  You know what it is like before you put it together, and what you have done is just the “spelling” or “drawing” process. This kind of afterthought thinking is difficult to define logic.

And human language doomed us to need logic and neglect logic-each link in the chain should be arranged logically; however, because the chain will become longer and longer, it will not take care of the front when it comes to the back, so we have to From time to time, I look back, tinker with it, and try to make myself logical. 

Personal Thoughts

The narrator stated that limited to the human mind, for human beings, it can only be collided by various events, drifting with the flow, and cannot go through the process wholeheartedly like a heptapod and understand the result.

Heptapods’ language seems to be a very efficient means of expression, saving a lot of trouble with words and sentences. However, to some extent, the freedom of “style” has also been eliminated. The “font” of our human writing style itself can carry a lot of personal information. The distinction of glyphs carries the meaning of “distinguish from other characters”, and the symbols themselves can have considerable flexibility for personal style. A highly developed symbol system that exactly corresponds to the signified, and is highly developed means eliminating all vitality. 

Therefore, I still want to be a human, having a sense of time and a sense of “cause and effect”.

However, what about the case when we have already known the results like heptapods, are we still free of will then?

Despite knowing the journey, and where it leads, I embrace it. And I welcome every moment of it.