The Ogres of Folktales Are Bears

There is a Japanese folktale called “Tanishi Musuko” (The Snail Son). An elderly couple who long for a child pray to Kannon, the goddess of mercy, and are granted a pond snail. Pond snails are the little spiral-shelled creatures commonly found in rice paddies, and the story tells how the couple lovingly raise the snail because it was a gift from heaven. The snail can whisper into a horse’s ear and handle horses skillfully, so he takes up work hauling loads by packhorse. Many things happen along the way, but in the end he turns back into a young man and they all live happily ever after.

Folktales Are Supernatural

As in “The Snail Son,” folktales stay remarkably close to nature. They vividly reveal how people in the past thought about the natural world. A human, a snail and a horse chatting away as if it were perfectly ordinary: that is supernatural through and through.

Folktales faithfully reflect how the people of each region saw the world. Because folktales were passed down orally, they were the lightest and yet the strongest medium, one that the authorities could neither censor nor suppress. In that sense, they can be called the true memory of humankind, handed down regardless of the wishes of any government.

Folktales are a supernatural literary art. They are a geometry that contains time twice over, in the context of the story and in the memory of humankind, and they are also a tensegrity structure in language. Through the energy of the teller and the energy of the listener, the system called a folktale becomes stronger than it was before it was told. Since folktales arose naturally, perhaps it is only to be expected that they have such a cosmic structure. Personally, I find it fascinating that something man-made can have the properties of a natural object like this. The same is true of “children.”

Language Ability Is Both Sensory and Motor

Language ability is one of the components of the ability to think. We become able to use language by integrating our sensory abilities with our motor abilities. Hearing, the one of the five senses that amplifies vibrations in the air and interprets them as sound, lets us listen; precise control of the vibration of the vocal cords, the movements of the mouth including the throat, tongue, lips and jaw, and our breathing lets us speak and sing. Vision, including the reception of light stimuli by the retina, together with eye movements lets us read, and adding precise control of the fingers, hands and arms lets us write. As this shows, human language ability is not something that can be acquired, the way an AI does, simply by deep-learning an enormous dataset like those behind LLMs (large language models).

Humans do not build language the way today’s AI does, by statistical induction, stringing together the most probable “continuation.” Text written by ChatGPT tends to be made up of stock phrases, like an essay by an elementary school pupil with a limited vocabulary. Because it merely processes what has been written in the past statistically and keeps cutting and pasting so as to maximize probabilistic “plausibility,” the result is unoriginal prose that sounds as if someone, somewhere, has already written it.

Human Language Ability Is Symbolic and Embodied

Human language ability is symbolic. Symbolic means that we build language by deductively combining symbols that are tied to sensation and movement. In that sense, human language ability can be called an embodied intellectual ability that requires sensation and movement. Understanding the meaning of words depends on interpreting past experiences of the five senses and of movement. That dependency remains the same when we construct meaning. For the generation of language, the two abilities with which animals are endowed, sensation and movement, are indispensable.

Personally, I think that whether it is an AI or a human, manipulating language symbolically is not the same as understanding meaning and using language. With the arrival of AI optimized for plausibility, it seems to me that within the diversity of the “natural languages” humans possess, there lies hidden, like magma beneath an undersea volcano, a richness of expression rooted in “the subtleties of biological sensation and biological movement” that cannot be mechanically quantified.

Intelligence Is Fluid and Fleeting

Because “feeling” and “moving” are dynamic, language is something like a fluid. If so, intelligence too is a fluid, constantly being updated. In every instant, a great deal is fleetingly learned and forgotten.

Suppose that, as with generative AI, we regularly run a cycle of making the training dataset even larger, retraining on it and updating the inference model: is that really fluid? The brain, with a single architecture, makes split-second decisions such as driving a car or playing sports, makes holistic judgments combining sensation and planning such as cooking, and carries out deep revision of a piece of writing, all with almost unbelievable energy efficiency. Even if we could integrate hyper-specialized AIs for language generation, image processing and so on, is there any prospect that the result would be as energy-efficient and as general-purpose as the brain?

The recent advances in chat technology may be wonderfully convenient as tools and may bear much fruit if used well, but I believe they are essentially something other than intelligence. Personally, I find the direction pursued by Rodney Brooks, the inventor of the Roomba, more natural and more intelligent: subsumption architecture, behavior-driven through the integrated control of sensation and movement. In this bottom-up design, integration necessarily leads to energy savings and expanded capabilities. In robots built this way, I can sense the natural intelligence I sense in insects and birds. I hope humankind does not misuse it.

Folktales Are Entertainment That Delights in the Structure of Language

No amount of training in a foreign language changes your personality. However many conversational patterns you memorize, they basically have no effect on who you are. Because you are following the same old route of thought, you feel you can count just as well whether you say “hi, fu, mi, yo” (the traditional Japanese way of counting) or “wan, tsū, surī” (English numbers in Japanese pronunciation). Even if you imitate a “native speaker” more closely and pronounce it “one, two, three,” the way you feel does not change. Unless you switch your entire living environment and change every language pattern of your daily life, memorizing lots of conversational phrases rarely goes so far as to change the way you see things. This is true whether the language is English, Chinese or Arabic.

But when you grasp the structure of a language rather than its conversational patterns, the way the world looks to you changes at once. Your circuits of thought get rewired. You succeed in breaking free of a fixed way of seeing.

Once you notice that the world you see differs subtly depending on the language you use, you begin to feel that a language is like a plant growing in a particular land. Something that, like a plant, takes root in the land and is used every day in ordinary life. Something that reflects the local climate and culture. Many people seem to notice this only after living in that place, but I believe that if you focus on the structure of things rather than their patterns, you can actually discover it wherever you are.

When you begin to think about the structure of language itself, you become capable of meta-level thinking. Thinking about the structure of language by means of language is a recursive intellectual exploration, so you become able to see things from one dimension higher. That said, it is not all that difficult. “Recursive” is something like “thinking about thinking,” and if you listen to many folktales, it comes about naturally. Folktales can even be called entertainment that delights in the structure of language.

Every Language Has a Structure That Contains Time

Basically, every language contains time. Its geometric patterns change over time.

“It is like a sprout emerging from a plant’s seed and unfolding its folded leaves. Or like roots, stems and branches stretching out. Or like a flower opening and then wilting. Or like fruit eventually forming, swelling and turning red. Or like ripe fruit falling and its seeds landing on the ground.”

If you speak like this, for example, listeners will imagine what comes next on their own. Through this sequence, images rise up in their minds. What each person feels from it differs, but some idea gets across.

Because folktales are abstract, when you feel that a story was fun, it is because what you yourself imagined was fun. What is more, because folktales are simple and unadorned, they let you naturally discover that “every language has a structure that contains time.” They unfold with a logic anyone can follow: “Once upon a time, in a certain place, there lived an old man and an old woman. Then this happened, and that happened, and then something else happened, but in the end, it all turned out like this.”

Folktales Are Indigenous Folk Music

That unfolding takes on many variations owing to the local, rooted character of each language. The basic flow is shared, but the parts that are emphasized differ. The rhythm differs too. It starts to seem almost like a difference in music. A slight difference in phrasing leads to a difference in perception, a difference in perception leads to a difference in thinking, and a difference in thinking leads to a difference in culture. Watching this is fascinating, like witnessing the butterfly effect.

Although the vocabulary and the logic of folktales are clear and simple, they are extremely difficult to translate into other languages. Translating them literally is easy, but the fun is lost. For a folktale, losing its fun is the same as losing information. I believe that this very impossibility of word-for-word translation reveals the differences in the structures that languages have. Just as a regular tetrahedron cannot be directly converted into a cube, structure cannot be translated.

The Ogres of Folktales Are Bears

Folktales are based on things that really happened, retold with comic exaggeration. Some stories must have begun with “They say a baby was abandoned in the river over there, and someone who happened to be passing by picked up the child as it floated downstream and raised it.” Others must have begun with “They say there was a person in the village over there who loved scattering all kinds of seeds everywhere and covering the land with flowers.” As these were told through many people, only the plot remained and was handed down: that is what a folktale is.

If you look at folktales this way, as stories people told based on things that actually happened, then folktales can be called a casebook of past events. Or rather, I cannot see them any other way.

The oni (ogres) of folktales are bears. Try replacing the ogres that appear in folktales with bears. You might also compare the characteristics of ogres and bears. You may be surprised to find them “similar.” And what is even more surprising is how few people point out that “ogre = bear.” Why do so few people point it out? I suspect it is a similarity that people of the past, and people living close to nature, would sense as a matter of course.

Real Folktales for Children

Is it because so many folktales in circulation are fantasy stories altered to suit publishers and authors? Or is it because we have drifted away from nature? Have we lost our familiarity with ogres, or with bears? Either way, we need to pass on to the people of the future the real folktales that people of the past handed down, told in their real voice.

As a place for passing on to the next generation what has been passed down to us, Polymath Research is planning to create a Folktale Museum. We are moving the project forward with the goal of collecting not only Japanese folktales but folktales from around the world, and making them available as close as possible to the form in which they have been handed down. So that “happily ever after” can go on forever, and so that we can gain more companions who feel free to share their own view of the world, saying “No, the ogres aren’t bears, they’re…,” we believe children need a place where real folktales are told to them.

---