Processes & Objects

There are two fundamentally different ways of picturing the world around us. One is as a collection of objects – and we learn from our earliest moments that we are surrounded by things that we pick up or bump into.

But an alternative approach is to see the world as formed out of processes – actions and experiences. We switch focus from the food we pick up to the process of eating, from the chairs we bump into to the process of exploring the room.

In our modern material Western world, objects are to the fore, and we look to the world to be solid and stable and as unchanging as possible.  For older societies, who live by hunting and gathering, change is an integral part of life. The world is a continuous flux, and the picture of it is in terms of processes.

So for a situation in which we might say, 'It is a dripping spring' – the Apache language would take a word for 'being white', a word for 'moving downwards' and a word for 'to', to get something like 'whiteness moves downward'.

We can see that this is a fresher and more vivid description, coming from a time when people lived much more in the flux of the natural world than we do.

We, by contrast, turn the abstract processes of our mind into things. We ask if a friend 'grasps' an idea, as if it were a bottle of beer that we pass across the table. We say that we have a 'point of view' – like a place where we sit to watch the sun go down. We even see someone else's point of view, just as we see a picture on the wall.

We speak of Time in the same way. It is a highly abstract concept, so abstract that debate has continued for several thousand years as to its nature. But that doesn't prevent us from 'saving' it like money in the bank, or 'giving' it to people like sweets from a bag.

Verbs and nouns

We have a fundamental grammatical difference in our Western languages between objects and processes. Objects are nouns and processes are verbs. These grammatical structures have been with us for a long time, and people have been writing about them since the Greek philosopher Plato first highlighted them 2500 years ago.

The rigidity of our language contrasts with the fluidity with which we develop science, and sometimes the two can be out of step. For instance, we regard light as a thing. We say that 'it' flashes. That's not very good physics, since we currently understand light to be a process, a dynamic  interaction of electric and magnetic fields that spreads rapidly through space.

The Hopi people do it better than us. In their language, the word 'light' is a verb – as is 'wave', 'flame', and indeed also 'meteor'.

The Nootka people of Vancouver Island go even further. In their language, all words seem to have verb-nature. They would say that 'a house occurs' rather than speak of a thing called a house. And if we think over a long enough timescale, we can see that a house is indeed a process, one that starts with building and ends with demolition. In fact, we can see ourselves as a process from birth tod eath, a process of change in which any single photograph is not the totality of 'me' but simply a single frozen slice of the flow.

The Celtic languages

Now when we come to the Celitc languages, there are nouns and verbs, as in English – but their relative importance is different. The verb comes at the start of the sentence. Gaelic would say:

Tha an cat mor
(Is the cat big)
The cat is big

Tha mi a' dol
(Am I a-coming)
I am coming, I come

Tha mi a' tighinn
(Am I a-going)
I am going, I go

We of course in English turn the word-order round and start with the verb when we have a question to ask, but this Gaelic form is for the basic structure of a statement.

The same pattern is there in Welsh:

Yr wyf i yn mynd
(There be I a-going)
I am going, I go

Yr wyf i yn canu
(There be I a-singing)
I am singing, I sing

So while physics has been moving to a process-based picture of the world about us – a picture which is built in to various older languages – Western languages have been moving away from it. We like to think and speak in terms of a world of solid objects. Could this mindset be at the root of our conceptual difficulties with areas of modern physics like quantum theory which picture the world in terms of processes rather than things?