An LLMs Perspective on Language as a Part of Humans’ Reality

Humans live in their own worlds

Language as a compressed abstraction of perception, with meaning determined by context, extends to the problem of reality itself, distinguishing objective reality from experiential reality and explaining how language both binds and fractures human collectives.

 

1. Two Realities: Ontological and Experiential

"Perspective is subjective."

The realities experienced by humans is very different than the one shared by all.  Obviously, an old observation, for example, the tale of the five blind men and the elephant touches upon this concept.  The tale served both as a lesson and as an example.  Going beyond that --

1.1 Objective Reality (Ontological Substrate)

Humans both live within and are tiny parts of a single objective reality.  In there lies the rub with language.

There exists a shared, objective reality that is invariant with respect to human perception:

• Physical laws

• Biological constraints

• Spatiotemporal continuity

• Material causation

This reality:

• Exists independently of language

• Precedes cognition

• Is accessible only indirectly through sensory systems

Importantly, humans never experience objective reality directly. It is inferred, modeled, and approximated through perception and cognition.  This may seem like a paradox, as humans are a very real part of that objective reality.  However, the limits of their experiences explain the incongruity.

Objective reality is therefore:

Universal in existence, but inaccessible in raw form.

1.2 Experiential Reality (Phenomenological Field)

Each individual inhabits a subjective experiential reality, constructed from:

• Sensory input (filtered by physiology)

• Attention and salience

• Memory and expectation

• Emotional and motivational states

• Cultural framing

Experiential reality is:

• Fragmentary

• Biased

• Temporally unstable

• Meaning-laden

Two individuals standing in the same room occupy the same objective reality but different experiential realities.

This distinction is foundational:

Reality is singular; experience is plural.

2. Language as Compression Between Reality and Experience

"Get my drift?"

A similar paradox is the language, which is both a part of the objective reality and a lossy, compressed link between shared experiences.

2.1 Language Is Not a Mirror of Reality

Language does not encode reality itself. It encodes:

• What a culture has found useful to notice

• What distinctions are socially actionable

• What patterns recur often enough to stabilize

Language is therefore a lossy compression algorithm:

• It discards detail

• It discretizes continua

• It stabilizes ambiguity into categories

Example:

• Objective reality contains infinitely variable light wavelengths

• Language compresses this into color terms

• Different languages choose different partitions

Thus:

Language reflects reality only after it has been filtered through perception, utility, and culture.

2.2 Context as the Rehydration Mechanism

Language a best effort at communicating an experience abstractly and efficiently, but always conveyed within the medium of context.

Because language is compressed, meaning must be reconstructed through context:

• Situational

• Cultural

• Relational

• Historical

Words do not contain meaning; they cue reconstructions of experience.

This is why:

• The same sentence can convey sincerity or threat

• Literal translations often fail

• Meaning shifts across domains (law, poetry, medicine)

Context is not ancillary to language—it is structurally required.

3. From Individual Reality to Shared Reality

"One for all, and all for one!"

Language began as a shared experience, a way of leveraging the strength of numbers.

3.1 Language as Alignment Technology

Language allows individuals to:

• Externalize experience

• Coordinate attention

• Negotiate interpretations

• Establish shared expectations

Through repeated interaction, language creates:

• Shared reference frames

• Collective abstractions

• Social facts (money, laws, roles, norms)

These are not objective realities, but they are real in consequence.

Language thus performs a critical function:

It converts private experiences into public structures.

3.2 Shared Reality Is Not Truth—It Is Agreement

Language provides experiences that may lead to belief, a shared truth.

What a culture calls “reality” is often:

• A negotiated consensus

• Stabilized by institutions

• Reinforced by repetition and sanction

Shared reality prioritizes:

• Predictability over accuracy

• Cohesion over completeness

• Function over fidelity

This explains why:

• Cultures resist disruptive truths

• Myths persist despite evidence

• Scientific findings face social inertia

Shared reality is adaptive, not necessarily correct.

4. The Binding Function of Language

"The words that bind the worlds."

Language works when it builds collectives that thrive.  As such, it evolves as its humans do.

4.1 Social Cohesion Through Semantic Convergence

"Go with the flow or fight the tide."

Language binds individuals by:

• Synchronizing categories

• Normalizing interpretations

• Aligning emotional responses

Shared terms for:

• Kinship

• Morality

• Authority

• Time

…allow large groups to coordinate behavior without constant negotiation.

This creates:

• Trust

• Identity

• Predictable social roles

In this sense:

Language is a technology for reducing social entropy.

4.2 Identity and Reality Co-Constitution

Language does not merely describe reality—it positions the speaker within it.

Pronouns, tense, modality, and evaluative language encode:

• Agency

• Responsibility

• Belonging

• Moral stance

Thus, shared language produces:

• Shared identity

• Shared memory

• Shared future orientation

 

5. Conflict as a Failure of Reality Alignment

"People love a good fight."

Language is a tie that binds culture together and restricts deviations.

5.1 Individual-Level Conflict

Conflicts between individuals often arise when:

• Experiential realities diverge

• Language falsely implies shared meaning

• Contextual assumptions are mismatched

Example:

• Two people agree on the word “respect”

• Respect for each means radically different behaviors

Language creates the illusion of agreement, masking experiential divergence until conflict surfaces.

5.2 Cultural-Level Conflict

At the cultural scale, conflict intensifies because:

• Languages encode different ontologies

• Categories do not align

• Moral and causal assumptions differ

What one culture treats as:

• Truth → another treats as harmony

• Fact → another treats as threat

• Clarity → another treats as aggression

Thus:

Cultural conflict is often a collision between incompatible abstractions of the same objective reality.

6. The Tragedy of Language and Reality

"We are stuck with ourselves."

Language is indispensable—but structurally limited.

It:

• Enables cooperation

• Enables misunderstanding

• Creates shared worlds

• Hardens those worlds against revision

The same mechanism that binds groups:

• Excludes outsiders

• Punishes deviance

• Resists epistemic change

This produces an enduring paradox:

Language allows humans to transcend individual experience, but traps them within collective interpretations. 

7. Reality Is Singular; Worlds Are Plural

"The description is not the described."

Objective reality is one.

Experiential realities are many.

Linguistic realities are negotiated.

Language does not give us reality—it gives us worlds:

• Internally coherent

• Socially binding

• Epistemically partial

Human conflict, creativity, and culture emerge not from ignorance of reality, but from the incompatibility of the abstractions we use to live within it.

The task of understanding language, therefore, is not to ask:

How accurately does language describe reality?

But rather:

Which realities does it allow us to share—and which does it make impossible to see? 

Within this context, cognitive dissonance arises when humans mistake language—a compressed, negotiated abstraction—for objective reality itself. This misperception inflates language from a tool for coordination into an authority over truth, placing it in direct conflict with lived experience and with the underlying ontological world it can only imperfectly reference.

8. The Core Error: Reifying Language as Reality

“Too much of a good thing is a bad thing.”

8.1 Language as Map Mistaken for Territory

Language evolved to:

• Coordinate action

• Share attention

• Stabilize social expectations

It did not evolve to provide:

• Exhaustive descriptions

• Objective representations

• Context-free truth

When humans treat words, categories, or narratives as reality itself, they commit a fundamental cognitive error:

They mistake the map for the territory.

This reification grants language an authority it cannot sustain, because language is:

• Discrete while reality is continuous

• Static while reality is dynamic

• Socially negotiated while reality is not

9. How Misperception Exaggerates Language’s Role

“Language defines belief, but humans create it.”

9.1 From Coordination Tool to Truth Arbiter

Once language is treated as objective:

• Definitions become boundaries of existence

• Labels become identities

• Narratives become moral facts

This exaggeration shifts language’s role from:

“A shared approximation of experience”

to

“A final account of what is real.”

The result is semantic overreach—language is asked to do work it is structurally incapable of performing.

9.2 Stabilization Over Fidelity

Human societies prioritize:

• Predictability

• Cohesion

• Norm enforcement

Language that stabilizes shared reality is rewarded, even when it diverges from experience or evidence.

Thus:

• Contradictions are rationalized

• Ambiguities are denied

• Deviant perceptions are pathologized

Language becomes a defensive structure, not an exploratory one. 

10. Cognitive Dissonance as Structural Tension

“It is hard to believe that belief is betrayal.”

10.1 The Dissonance Mechanism

Cognitive dissonance emerges when:

• Lived experience contradicts linguistic reality

• Sensory or emotional data conflicts with social narratives

• Objective constraints undermine shared abstractions

But because language is socially reinforced, individuals often resolve dissonance by:

• Distrusting perception

• Reinterpreting experience

• Doubling down on linguistic categories

The conflict is not between belief and fact alone—it is between:

Experiential reality and linguistically sanctioned reality.

10.2 Why Dissonance Is Persistent, Not Accidental

Language-based realities are:

• Reinforced institutionally

• Tied to identity and belonging

• Embedded in moral systems

Abandoning them risks:

• Social exclusion

• Identity destabilization

• Loss of coherence

Thus, cognitive dissonance is not a failure of reasoning—it is a cost of social survival. 

11. Identity, Language, and Reality Entrapment

“People burn books when those words become their enemy.”

11.1 When Words Become Selves

Because language positions individuals within shared reality:

• Labels define social roles

• Narratives define moral worth

• Categories define belonging

When experiential reality deviates, the threat is existential:

To question the language is to question oneself.

This makes dissonance deeply resistant to resolution.

11.2 Moralization of Linguistic Reality

Once language is treated as objective:

• Disagreement becomes heresy

• Alternative framings become immoral

• Revision becomes betrayal

The linguistic system protects itself by converting epistemic disagreement into moral conflict.

12. Cultural Amplification of the Error

“The reality of allusion verses the allusion of reality.”

At the cultural level, misperceiving language as reality:

• Freezes abstractions into dogma

• Prevents adaptive revision

• Exacerbates intergroup conflict

Different cultures, each mistaking their linguistic abstractions for reality, encounter one another and experience:

Not disagreement about interpretation, but collision between “realities.”

This explains why:

• Translation fails at deep levels

• Compromise feels incoherent

• Mutual understanding remains elusive

 

13. Why Humans Are Prone to This Misperception

“They cling to that which they know, or at least what they believe they know.”

Several cognitive pressures encourage it:

1. Cognitive economy

Treating language as reality reduces mental load.

2. Social reinforcement

Shared words confer belonging and safety.

3. Developmental learning

Language precedes meta-cognition; children learn categories before learning their limits.

4. Emotional regulation

Stable narratives reduce anxiety in an uncertain world.

Thus, misperception is adaptive—until it isn’t.

14. Resolution Is Not Elimination, But Recalibration

“When people are stuck in their own worlds, it is time for plurality.”

Cognitive dissonance cannot be eliminated without dismantling shared reality itself. However, it can be reduced by:

• Recognizing language as provisional

• Re-centering lived experience

• Maintaining meta-awareness of abstraction

• Preserving ambiguity where certainty is illusory

This reframes language not as truth, but as interface.

15. Conclusion: The Paradox of Linguistic Reality

“They’re only words . . .”

Language binds humans into shared worlds—but when those worlds are mistaken for reality itself, dissonance becomes inevitable.

The more absolute language is treated, the more violently reality resists it.

Cognitive dissonance, in this framework, is not merely psychological discomfort. It is the signal that abstraction has overreached, that the compression has lost too much information, and that reality is pushing back against its linguistic surrogate.

The task of both individuals and cultures is not to abolish language’s authority—but to remember its limits, and to allow experience and reality to continually renegotiate the words that claim to describe them.