Here's a weird thought. Human language was invented in an environment where max scale was say a few hundred. Written language, for maybe a few 1000. Yet here we are, using language casually at scales of potentially 7 billion with thousands of tricky translations, and it works.
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I have two word for you "the wheel"
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The modern wheel with bearings, spokes, tires etc. is nothing like the bronze-age wheel
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Or maybe Burroughs was right, language is not a technology, it's a virus. Or, if you prefer, s symbiote. We're just the hosts.
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What ?? Can I need to read this
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Why? Some ideas: Its small size increases adaptability (Eg creolization, translation) thus scalability. It isn’t directly ideological but transmits it. Its utility follows a power law as it’s adopted. It’s rooted in our cognition & it proliferates via symbiosis w/ memes?
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Is it fair to claim that "language" was the same thing then as now? As has our thinking itself, language seems like a large suite of tools that had been growing and evolving for millennia.
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You’ve got the causation backwards. We didn’t scale up and just keep using language. We invented language, and that is *why* we scaled up.
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There are distinctions in there about the development of alphabets and writing tech v spoken language but maybe terracotta roof tiles. Metal coinage is contemporary-ish with written vowels in Greeks, also big
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Asking what the next level of language looked like consumed me from 2014-2015. I stopped talking about it because nobody else seemed to think public trust, or lying in public, was an issue.
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Next level language probably requires neural interfaces. Our Paleolithic appendages are just too damn slow!
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