astro picture for the day/ Terrence Deacon's "The Symbolic Species"

Image Credit: VIMS Team, U. Arizona, U. Nantes, ESA, NASA - These are pictures stitched together over a period of years of Titan. Titan is a moon of Saturn.  It's atmosphere prevented us from seeing its surface.  We sent a space probe all the way out there, and got enough data to put these pictures together!


"Though the analysis of brain organization and function in modern species can tell us a great deal about the human/non-human difference with respect to language, it leaves open questions concerning the evolutionary transition from nonlanguage to language communication." - Terrence W. Deacon, in his "The Symbolic Species."

Terrence Deacon's main finding about human language is that kids learn how to speak without learning the grammar and rules of language.  Human language seems to be quite different from the language of other animals.  But, human language must evolve from non-Human language. As the quote above indicates, he does not know of or offer exactly how this Human language could have evolved out of non-Human language. 

Terrence mentions many things like brain/body ratios. He suggests that life body plans are different based on size, and likewise, the brain and nervous system evolves differently based on the body itself. Well, maybe.

Terrence suggests many times that language must be based on some Mnemonic like affects. He says "how else can we spit out such a large vocabulary all in some grammar harmony?"(that's a paraphrase). 

What's interesting to me about his Mnemonic language suggestion is that he argues against talking about mathematics.  He says that stuff comes later. Also, the Mnemonic basis for human language is similar to the "Metaphors we live by" by George Lakoff.

The Metaphors we live by book suggests that the words we use is often based on some central metaphor. George Lakoff gives an example of argument is war,

"ARGUMENT IS WAR  -

Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every weak point in my argument. His criticisms were right on target. I demolished his argument. I've never won an argument with him. You disagree? Okay, shoot! If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out. He shot down all of my arguments."

Keeping my posts short and to the point, as usual, Terrence touches on the idea of there being some kind of mnemonic at the core of human language, which would allow Humans to pick out the right word out of tens of thousands of words vocabulary. And, the one example I quote above from George Lakoff's "Metaphors we live by" would further suggest a kind of Mnemonic nature to human language. This idea further relates to Jacob Bronowski's "Origins of Knowledge and Imagination."

Terrence mostly talks about language studies with Chimpanzees.  And, there's some good stuff there. For instance, there was a Kanzi.  Researchers were trying to teach Kanzi's mother language; but, she never quite picked it up.  But Kanzi, who was just hanging around while they were working with his mother picked up on  language!  This reminds me of the feral children I posted before. Only, this is a little bit in reverse. Instead of a human becoming say chimpanzee, the chimpanzee becomes human just by being raised in a human environment.

Anyways, Jacob Bronowski is coming from learning about the nature of all knowledge - poetry, mathematics, science, and seeing the analogies. Terrence doesn't see this, and suggests there is no way to understand how Human language can evolve from non-Human language - which it must have.

As Jacob says in chapter two, mankind could generalize and specialize to decode words out of the instruction language that life started out with. For instance, there can be hawk danger in the air, and leopard danger on the ground. Non-Human language often has separate noises for danger in each case.  But, humans have generalised and abstracted away the concept of danger from the concrete particulars.

I'd like to further note that for any living thing to survive in the world, it must have some kind of understanding of the outside world. It must no when, for instance a food is a poison or not. But, most life is adapted to a particular environment.  It doesn't stray from the ecosystems life-cycle. You won't see a polar bear decide to go live in the Sahara desert for the summer for instance. Homo Erectus, we know for sure, was the first Human species, anyways, that was general, that could live in different environments and survive.

- Terrence for the most part finishes up with suggesting that Homo Habilis at least could have relied on marriage as a symbolic solution to a biological problem.  Before then, as far as mankind has been able to find, no life had made a symbolic solution to a problem. It was always a biological adaptation that locked us into some ecological niche.

He points out that Human male/female relationships is unique in the natural world.  The rest of the natural world doesn't have wife/husband relationships. 

He suggests that meat eating presented a problem. This meat economy is like the Knight/Horse economy in the second half of the dark ages. Like the way the whole social hierarchy of surfs and lords and Kings were organised around the raising horses and the metallurgy to make the Knights armor, the evolution from vegetation to eating meat presented a problem between the males and the females.  I'm keeping his whole argument short.  But, he's saying that Homo Habilis, at least, must have invented, ritually, marriage for the females and the males to make sure that everyone knew that when the male hunts and brings back the meat, that hunters wife will get fed.

Well, maybe - But, I can't help noting a more contemporary example.  Terrence notes a peace festival in the South Americas. The Yanomamo indians of Venezuela and northern Brazil would have a peace festival.  They allow a warring faction to come to their festival.  If the other tribe doesn't kill anyone, after circling around them, then they sit down and have a feast.

- I was intrigued by Terrence's marriage symbol idea.  It seems plausible just because other life doesn't have the Human male/female relationships. The other reason why I was intrigued was that I've been thinking of knowledge as the missing feedback loop that keeps us alive.

There's transhumanists who want to upload themselves to a nano-crystal computer.  They think a nanocomputer can get their pattern, and therefore, by uploading, they can attain eternal life. My idea is to keep the biological life going.

I suppose I could put a video I made a few months back. I describe my ideas of Transhumanism there. I put some stuff that I didn't get around to integrating in the video, in the replies section. But, the Terrence W. Deacon's "The Symbolic Species" marriage idea, if correct, leads to my more biological Transhumanism,

As I describe in the video, the first life was autopoietic.  It's a cyle of chemicals that makes each other. So long as the energy and materials keep flowing into the cell, the cell can live forever. Multi-cellular life breaks this pattern.  Biologists often say themselves that multi-cellular life invents death. 

I'm saying mankind is the science/technologically dependent species, and that knowledge is how we survive, and soon perhaps, the missing feedback loop to keep our biological selves going.