The power of limitations

Life, language, money all have a material nature. Proteins in the case of life, words in the case of language, gold or silver in the case of money. However the physical facts alone are insufficient to explain the essence and meaning they represent. Each system (like little universes each with its own laws and entities) has a logic without which it is useless. The logic of life lies in its genetic structure which operates in a similar way to grammar in language. Money has a logic too, as a unit of value so humans are able to exchange goods and labour efficiently. If the logic- the relationship of value to the standard represented by gold- is violated, then money dies, and so does a modern economy along with its elaborate arrangements devised for keeping accounts. It's not possible for money to be whatever we want it to be any more than it's possible for a flesh and blood creature to do whatever it wants. It isn't possible for a tuna to live on land. It isn't possible for a human to breathe underwater. Likewise, a word has to have a settled meaning. It would be absurd if I should define a tuna as a fish in one sentence and as a pound of butter in another. A word needs a meaning agreed upon by all the speakers of the language or else the language becomes useless.
Strangely enough these limitations aren't weaknesses but strengths. All of the adaptations that make it impossible to live on land endow a tuna with a superbly sublime ability to function in the sea. Almost all creatures vocalize, but only humans have learned how to transmute sound into a full-fledged language. In a sense, we decided we didn't need tooth and claw. The ability to speak made it possible to have a complex culture which has made it possible for us to swim as well as a tuna, fly as well as an albatross, and kill with an efficiency far exceeding T. Rex. We take in air to supply oxygen to our blood which delivers it to our individual cells, and also to remove the waste gas, CO2, which is produced as our mitochondrial organelles burn sugar. Speech utilizes this escaping gas through vibrations in our larynxes amplified by the echo chambers of our sinuses. A neat trick which no scientific theory based on a materialist set of assumptions could possibly predict. Most other animals use chemistry to communicate with one another, but we use sound, just like birds. Only we have developed that logic much further than any other creature.
I didn't use the trope of "little universes" lightly. Only when a limiting set of principles is established is it possible for one of these little universes to come into existence.
The universe of living things seems to be possible through limiting itself to the properties of the carbon molecule. Culture is possible by limiting itself to to the properties of language. By assigning to a unit of currency the role of measuring worth the enormous potential of human ingenuity has been unleashed.
It even seems as if the universe itself is a limiting set of principles, but I'll try to remember to get to that later. Science has gained great power by limiting itself to the study of the physical facts as we are able to perceive them and mathematics has gained its power by limiting itself to numbers.
Games provide a seemingly trivial illustration of how a set of limitations can create a new set of possibilities. There are fifty two cards in a standard deck, and by limiting the way those fifty two cards can be deployed an almost inexhaustible plethora of games has been invented. Random doesn't work in card games, just as random doesn't work in the construction of an organic creature. From the limitations structure is created. Structure is the opposite of random. Structure is limitation, definable as much by what it isn't as what it is. In order to create a card game, it is necessary to place limits on what a card may do. The rules of a game are those specifications. They are what makes poker different from gin rummy. How many players. How many cards to a hand. How dealt. How played. The cards are like vocalisms, the rules providing meanings to the vocalisms and a grammar. A given card has a certain meaning. There are certain things it is allowed to do. Card games can be classified according to species and class. Is the game a whist variant or does it belong to the genus rummy? Or poker?
This same rule can be applied to any game. Ball games. Baseball and football are both ball games requiring players with the ability to throw and catch but they could hardly be more different. The rules for each game are radically different and to do well a player must adapt himself to those rules. There is always a temptation to cheat, but if the boundaries are stretched than the whole game changes and it is no longer truly baseball or truly football. Therefore, a player is not allowed to put a hunk of lead in his bat or ride a motorcycle to steal second base. Just as in living things innovations are not allowed.
When a set of limitations is initially imposed it may not be at all clear to the originators exactly how things will play out. The true possibilities of the game only become clear as experience is gained. Even when experience is accumulated, especially obvious in a game like chess, no one person can know all the permutations. Each separate game is a new adventure… in effect a new universe. The players learn to navigate the universe by accepting the conditions imposed by the rules. One can say of an enthusiastic bridge player that he is a devotee of the game, appropriating a word from religious terminology.
This is all very peculiar when you think about it. Consider: a card game is an invention of the human imagination, and yet individual human beings are incapable of grasping the universe of possibilities the card game presents. Otherwise it would be possible for someone to play an absolutely perfect game. However the community of bridge players is a repository of bridge wisdom of which each player may partake. Bridge is even more interesting than most card games due to it being played by partners so that each player must take into account the expertise of his team mate. Some games are so well played they become famous. Devotees of the game study them. They become objects in the real world just as much as a chair or a theorem in geometry.
This is also true of language. No speaker of a language can know the entire range of possibilities of his language whether it's an advanced literary language like Latin or English or an oral language known only to a community of a few thousand. In other words, the language has an almost independent being. Individual speakers partake of it. Moreover, language constantly changes, just like genetic information constantly changes, so it not only has a community of living speakers, but a larger community of speakers who are no longer alive and who have yet to be born. When a master of language comes along whole communities of scholars arise to study his words. Think of Shakespeare and try to imagine what the English language would be like if he had never been born. It's impossible. The most unlettered speaker of English owes him his means of communication without even knowing it. Not confined to the enrichment of language, a great national poet shapes the very thought patterns of his culture. If it's difficult to imagine English without Shakespeare, it's impossible to imagine the Hebrews without the Bible. I think it's fair to say that without the Bible they would not exist. And so it is with language as a whole. Language is our invention, what makes it possible for us to be human. Without it we could not exist in our present form. All our other attainments are contained within the possibilities of language.
All of these cultural manifestations might be thought of by mathematicians as a subset of language. Would that include their own discipline? But can we really say culture is a material object as much as a chair? Well, obviously I can't look out the window and see a big cloud of English floating by. I can't smell or hear this abstract entity from which I draw the words on this page. Nevertheless the life of every human being is based on communing with it. I don't know if any other word will do. We are ready at birth to commune with the language of our people. The capability is inborn, but the specific language must be learned. We may not be able to see, hear, touch or smell it, but while we can function in society without one of those senses, we cannot function without the ability to perceive and interact with our language which is a thing exists independently from our individual selves. We create it, we use it, but it is not possible for any individual to contain the entirety of it.
If a language or a game or any sort of logical system could be any arbitrary thing we might imagine then we could conclude that it was just a mental artifact with no independent existence. It could be whatever we wanted it to be. But as soon as a vocabulary and a grammar are devised it declares its independence. From then on we become communicants with its mysteries and must puzzle out its nature.
Which brings us back to the question of how we know a thing, and if the senses we commonly use to perceive the external world are supplemented by another type of sense, another type of perception.
I think this was the central question Plato was trying to work out when he proposed another type of light, the light of pure reason. Of course this raises a number of other questions. He tried to answer the one about where the light came from by saying it came from the Good and he tried to answer the question of what it was that we saw through our sense of reason by saying that the objects of our everyday experience had a greater, more perfect being in a higher existence. These 'forms' have been the subject of debate ever since. They are a conjecture that quickly ran into trouble, but maybe there do exist structures in the universe that are only amenable to reason and maybe we can learn more about them and more about ourselves and the universe in the bargain. Maybe nothing is quite what we have come to believe.