*"The Language Organism"*

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Thinking about language as an organism; see my posts on page 1 of the thread "Meme" in General Autism Discussion, at:

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt61907.html

and the paper "The Language Organism" by Prof Dr. van Driem, at Leiden Uni , which I linked on that thread at:
http://www.wiedenhof.nl/ul/cil17le.pdf

And am thinking that perhaps the most important, in fact the only real, purpose and function of most schools of thought/study has been to grow/produce/manufacture language/linguistic meaning. Lots of it, as much as possible.

The most efficient language-factory for a long time, both at production and at dissemination, used to be religion. Economics, philosophy, psychology and sociology, amongst others, have also had some very productive periods, but I think science is the most successful producer just now,( and has been for a few hundred years).

It is astonishing how much dedicated and devoted work humans have put into the multiplication of language, into farming it, fertilising it, cross pollinating it, finding new strains. Humans have kept coming up with new and ingenious ways to make more language.

Or have we just been a very fertile valley in which language has been able to proliferate, reproducing at will, exhibiting an incredible "creativity", a fertility of invention equalling ( or surpassing) that of protein molecules?

Language has been very fruitful in the "green pastures" of our brains.

Science, and technology, have been making huge amounts of it. Now it is taking on a life of its own, separate even from our brains. For how much longer will it need us

It has found a substitute/replacement substrate for our brains. What will we do without it? Except follow it into the machine?

Last edited by ouinon on 05 Apr 2008, 11:27 am, edited 3 times in total.

I didn't read the article, but it is an interesting idea. I've pondered something similar myself: Perhaps life is merely information propagating through genes. So maybe information *is* life...

On a similar vein, perhaps our minds are mini-universes unto themselves. Maybe the act of thinking about, say, a fictional character, creates a sub-reality in which they really do exist. In which case "God" would be the entity in a "parent" universe that is imagining us ... or is it the other way around?

This is all idle daydreaming of course, but it is fun. And maybe speculating about it makes it real- AARGH ... here I go again...

With ref: fictional universes/sub-realities; I knew there was some reason the first Matrix movie made an impression on me! ........

We have been grow-bags for language for thousands of years.

This is not "idle speculation"... what happens when language, for which our brains have been grow-bags, finds a better, independent base for operations? Computers, the internet, etc. What will our role be if language stops using us to reproduce? Perhaps we are already seeing the first signs of this transfer of energies?

Those of us who love language, live through language, revere and adore language, may find the machine a better place to live than a world in which symbol is being replaced by icon.

Symbolic thought being the next development stage in children after that involving icon use. But if language, symbolic thought/process, is transferred to the machine, there will be less and less reason for it in the wide world.

More and more people "using" the computer can, and do, use it as if were manipulating objects, but without even the traditional set of symbols ( words) to designate those objects. They are "effects". "Almost"-sensory impressions without any symbolic thought whatsoever. Like return to the stone age, as language loses interest in us!

Have you heard the hypothesis that we're already in the Matrix?

Basically the argument goes that if it ever becomes possible to run simulated worlds containing "strong AI" entities, the simulated entities will soon outnumber "real" people by orders of magnitude. And they probably won't know that their worlds are simulations. Which makes it statistically more likely that *we* are AIs than "real" people.

But then again, maybe there are no "real" people ... maybe there's just simulations nested within simulations. And maybe you don't need a computer to create them, just a brain. Consciousnesses giving birth to universes, which give birth to more consciousnesses, and so on...



That's one potential route to Singularity. There are many others.

Yes, but I think that though it is an amusing notion it is unnecessarily complicated and not very useful. Whereas the idea that we live very deeply inside a matrix consisting of language, and that language is an organism "growing", evolving, and reproducing on the substrate of our brains, is simple and also very real, immediate.

Various mechanisms exist/have been invented ( by certain relatively non-theist spiritualities in particular) which detect/expose our dependence on/immersion in language, and show just how much our entire experience is formed/controlled by language.

Only people who have never stepped outside it, or only in ways which language considers unimportant, believe that language plays little or no role in their experience of the world. Or those whose brain "substrate" is for one reason or another different from the majority, and to whom the language matrix is more visible/violent/alien.

Last edited by ouinon on 06 Apr 2008, 10:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

Thank you very much for that link. It was very interesting. I had heard the term "singularity" before but not really understood what it referred to. It was weird and gratifying to find that I had arrived at similar conclusions from another direction independently!

I particularly enjoyed/appreciated the article by Bill Joy, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us", originally published in Wire at:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html

One paragraph I found particularly thought provoking...


I thought that this was interesting for several reasons.

One is that it practically replicates the Old Testament injunction not to eat of the tree of knowledge. I don't know whether this is because the bible is so integrated in western culture that images/formations from it crop up automatically about certain issues, or whether it is because the bible records, from orally conserved tradition, the first disaster(s) which came from early use of language/search for knowledge, with the belief that it cost us our previous " animally happy" state, irretrievably.

The first time "a signal was split and someone used syntax" for instance. Was it a choice?

Another is that I suddenly realised that the search for knowledge/truth, on the part of some humans at least, could in fact be seen as a compulsion/obsession/addiction, and as such a dangerous one, or as the action of a symbiotic organism on our brains driving us. And also made me think how much it is taken for granted that search for knowledge is inherently good in our society. How little this is questioned.

And three is that the prospect of our species' extinction only need seem like a disaster if we take the part/eyeview of the species instead of the language organism. After all to language we might just seem like a seed pod/chrysalis to be discarded for the next stage. For example, someone, i forget who, quoted in the article, said that they thought that "nature was on the side of the machine". Who are we to protest in that case?