Sumit Sen

Of Indian and European parentage, Sumit Sen was born in Samoa in 1971, spent his early childhood in West Africa, East Germany and India, and at the age of ten settled in Holland, where he acquired Dutch nationality. He was raised in German, English and Dutch. After aborting law studies at Leiden and aerospace technology studies in Delft and completing a year of military service, Sumit studied Japanese language and culture at Leiden. He majored in Japanese anthropology and Buddhist art history and minored in Sinology and Indology. Sumit also spent a year living in Japan under the Huis ten Bosch programme. After taking his M.A. in 2003, Sumit travelled to Bhutan to study temple geomancy and Thailand to study Buddhist iconography. He resides in Denmark, where he conducts research on the linguistic construction of religious memeplexes. Sen works within the Symbiosist theoretical framework that grew out of the Leiden school of linguistics and language evolution.

The linguistic construction of religious memeplexes

How do language and religion relate to one another? Is it possible to identify a unifying concept with respects to the relationship of language and religion? According to Kortlandt, meanings act as non-constructible sets in the Brouwerian mathematical sense. As such, linguistic meanings do not abide by traditional logic. Words were identified as living units of cultural selection in the 19th century. In the 1960s and 1970s, many scholars sought for a more precise definition of this unit, and many neologisms were coined. In 1975, Dawkins came up with the robust coinage meme, but his less lucid conceptualisation of the replicator was a step backward. The meme was redefined in semiotic terms by the Leiden school in 1999. Based on the Leiden definition of the meme, van Driem argues that language is a symbiotic organism residing in the human host brain, and he has identified religions to be ‘a disease of language’.

Is there such a thing as logical and rational language? How can we explain the concept of numbers in language and religion? How does higher mathematical thought relate to language and religion? What do religious memeplexes consist of, and how do they relate to language, numbers and mathematical thought? How can religious ritual be fit into the equation? Operating within a Symbiosist theoretical framework, Sumit Sen aims to understand the dynamics of the relationship between the cultural giants of language, religion and mathematics.