Once Upon a time, I had an idea for an invention. 25 years ago, webcams just became inexpensive. I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a few thin screens behind the steering wheel and cameras on the front and back of the vehicle along with radar to gauge distances to any object on the front, back and sides? I looked through the US patent website and I could find nothing like it. I worked on it a little for a few months in my off time, not knowing what I’m doing and I didn’t invest any money thankfully. Six months later, I was ready to jump in and take seriously my first patent idea and invest money and time into it. So, I took one last look to see if I could find anything like the device I wanted to patent. I found it. Five months beforehand. One month after I had my bright idea there was a patent filed by a person in a corporation in California for a car camera system EXACTLY like I envisioned! I could find nothing different about it. (I’ve looked since and yes it was the basis of lots of future patents going by citations from all the big companies) I was heartbroken. How was it possible that someone else came up with EXACTLY the same idea at EXACTLY the same time as me? It felt stolen. I felt cheated. It took a few weeks of soul searching and having a private pity party before it dawned on me: It WAS STILL my original idea. It was ALSO his original idea. It was probably the original idea of 1,000 other people too. I can feel proud of it. He was simply faster/better at getting it patented.. Ibn Tufayl’s protagonist resonates strongly with me in many ways but particularly in this one: He reasoned, without a language we know, truths about nature and the cosmos by following reasonable connections between things. The results of his reasoning matched with the neighbor who had language and arrived there from being taught through schools and I don’t find that concept to be the least bit strange. While I don’t believe there is a “Language organ”, nevertheless the CAPACITY of language learning and the capacity of reasoning and the capacity of all of these things we get for free by simply being human beings. How different cultures fill that up may differ and I see it perfectly possible to achieve much of the results outlaid in the text. That said, we are also the products of culture from birth onwards and if his socialization was from the animals, I don’t believe that would limit his human cognitive capacity at all but it would mean his internal language would be based upon whatever language was around him that he could extract meaning from. But just as you can build a house with bricks or wood, involving totally different construction techniques, you can construct a rational being out of any sufficiently descriptive language. There’s still a culture. It may be made up of animals and plants and the seasons instead of pop stars but it deserves a round of applause just the same.

Once Upon a time, I had an idea for an invention. 25 years ago, webcams just became inexpensive. I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a few thin screens behind the steering wheel and cameras on the front and back of the vehicle along with radar to gauge distances to any object on the front, back and sides?

I looked through the US patent website and I could find nothing like it. I worked on it a little for a few months in my off time, not knowing what I’m doing and I didn’t invest any money thankfully.

Six months later, I was ready to jump in and take seriously my first patent idea and invest money and time into it. So, I took one last look to see if I could find anything like the device I wanted to patent.

I found it. Five months beforehand. One month after I had my bright idea there was a patent filed by a person in a corporation in California for a car camera system EXACTLY like I envisioned! I could find nothing different about it. (I’ve looked since and yes it was the basis of lots of future patents going by citations from all the big companies)

I was heartbroken. How was it possible that someone else came up with EXACTLY the same idea at EXACTLY the same time as me? It felt stolen. I felt cheated.

It took a few weeks of soul searching and having a private pity party before it dawned on me:

It WAS STILL my original idea. It was ALSO his original idea. It was probably the original idea of 1,000 other people too. I can feel proud of it. He was simply faster/better at getting it patented..

Ibn Tufayl’s protagonist resonates strongly with me in many ways but particularly in this one:

He reasoned, without a language we know, truths about nature and the cosmos by following reasonable connections between things.

The results of his reasoning matched with the neighbor who had language and arrived there from being taught through schools and I don’t find that concept to be the least bit strange.

While I don’t believe there is a “Language organ”, nevertheless the CAPACITY of language learning and the capacity of reasoning and the capacity of all of these things we get for free by simply being human beings. How different cultures fill that up may differ and I see it perfectly possible to achieve much of the results outlaid in the text.

That said, we are also the products of culture from birth onwards and if his socialization was from the animals, I don’t believe that would limit his human cognitive capacity at all but it would mean his internal language would be based upon whatever language was around him that he could extract meaning from. But just as you can build a house with bricks or wood, involving totally different construction techniques, you can construct a rational being out of any sufficiently descriptive language.

There’s still a culture. It may be made up of animals and plants and the seasons instead of pop stars but it deserves a round of applause just the same.

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