The Illusion of the First Voice: On Language, Thought, and Expression

This blog is an adventure I have been plotting for a long time. More than once I told friends that I wanted to write a blog, and more than once I tried to begin something like it. Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, a public account I registered and never posted to: after all these scattered attempts, I have returned to the beginning again.

There seem to be few places left for blogs to live on the Chinese internet. What remains is a restless sea: positions before views, display before expression, social traffic before sharing. As the internet grows more agitated, videos and image-text posts grow shorter. When we try to compress the time needed to transmit information to the extreme, thought has already lost its room to breathe. What remains is only dense emotion and hallucination.

I am not qualified to judge this environment. On the contrary, I am part of that density too. Over the past year, I found it increasingly hard to sit still and think. I got used to using noisy music in my headphones to cover up a noisy world, to sliding through short videos, to sinking into decaying time and venting emotion without purpose. I often felt powerless, tense, anxious, and irritable.

I decided to do something in the new year.

I realized that conversations with friends and teachers have always been when my mind is most alive. A strange thing often happens: only after I say a sentence does my thought arrive at the point. My own words suddenly make something clear to me. This also happens in writing. As this piece pours from my awareness onto the screen, I admit that I sometimes cannot keep up with it. I seem to have separated myself from “it”. What an interesting discovery. It feels as if, somewhere in my subconscious, I am guarding a generative intelligence that needs to be activated in an instruction-bearing environment. This calls to mind Libet’s classic experiment on free will: a decision appears in the brain before conscious awareness makes it. Our experience of decision and thought is an after-the-fact hallucination.

So I changed the title from “First Voice” to “The Illusion of the First Voice”. The first voice I write down is also the illusion of writing down the first voice.

Still, the voice was made. It carries language, and it is language itself: once the signifier forms a network, it takes on a life of its own and thought rushes outward. This is also why I respect large language models as much as I do. We sometimes care too much about the subject or the rules above symbols, and too little about symbols themselves. I do not intend to cast my insignificant vote in the Chomsky-Hinton debate, nor to choose a side between Wittgenstein and Lacan. I only want to talk about language: this small thing that fascinates me, this strange magic that may sometimes come before consciousness.

There is no doubt that, as a computer science student, I have barely entered the vast field of linguistics. But I will never forget the moment I encountered it. Not long after I entered Tsinghua, Professor Dun Deng wrote on the blackboard: “the morning star is the evening star”. In that instant, a flow state pushed open a heavy door. I love language, poetry, fiction, and all the great thoughts and brilliant lights of human civilization built on language. I also love language as language. I cannot fully describe the excitement I felt when I read that “metonymy is the diachronic sliding of concepts, while metaphor is the synchronic mapping of concepts”. I felt I was touching history, the present, and the future. I thought I possessed the whole world.

To fall in love with language today, amid the rapid rise of large language models, is fortunate. Overnight, language became a prominent discipline around the world. From California to Wudaokou, from computer science departments to humanities and social sciences, everyone has “language”, “computation”, and a few other words on their lips.

To fall in love with language today is also unfortunate. Countless people have already declared the death of computational linguistics. Fast-iterating models have planted flags of victory across language tasks. In the dust raised by their gallop, no one cares about the hills left conquered behind them.

When I found my way back to language, it felt as if everything had already ended. Yet I still felt unprecedented luck and happiness. I cannot see the distant mountains clearly. I cannot finish the books and papers. I only half understand long strings of models and formulas. I do not know where these roads lead, or whether all of this has enough meaning. But I do not want to drift with the current, and I do not want to deceive myself. I do not want to remain numb, dull, and wrapped in density. I want to pick language back up, write something, say something, speak with myself, speak with magic, and speak with that constructed reader: the unique you. I want to begin doing something, with enough motivation to learn and do research while I am still young.

I discovered that blogs were originally born on personal websites. I discovered that language appears when lived experience needs to be shared. I discovered that it is never too late to love something. I discovered that the last sunset of 2024 was unlike every day before it. I believe none of this is a hallucination.

To everyone who reads this far, I wish you courage, freedom, and fidelity to what you love.

Happy New Year.