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Epistemologies of modes of signal production Classical music: musico-logical epistemology Pop non-lyrical music: emotional ep Lyrical pop: sentimental ep Lyrical poetry, no music: narrative ep Free verse: phenomenological ep Prose: legibilist Math: musico-logical again
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Theory: ancient modes did not have this discretized spectrum. It was all one. Even today’s most integrated form (say the historical ballad set to music) is degenerate relative to ancient humansong (like birdsong or whalesong)
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Theories of language origin seem to be loosely of 3 types (my typology, not academic standard afaik). In increasing order of plausibility: representational, instrumental, generative.
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1. Representational: Invented to represent and “contain” symbolic knowledge. This is only a meh description even of how language operates *today* but is ridiculous as an explanation of how it came to be.
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2. Instrumental: Evolved via gradual overload of self/other stimulus/response conditioning, with some pointing/referencing turning into representation. This accounts for some things more plausibly, but is actually worse than representation-based accounts on things like art
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3. Generative: our minds naturally produce low entropy signals with surplus energy. Think children choosing to skip instead of walk. So we basically produce carrier waves to blow off excess life energy. And then we accidentally discover we can modulate it with meaning.
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Emotion, especially acute emotion (distress, lust) is easiest. Bird brains can do it. Just get louder or higher pitched. Competition/differentiation arms races explain the explosive variety that emerges soon. EEG studies show songbirds actually rehearse their songs in REM sleep.
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Add mammalian long memories of place and social relationships and long-term “sentiment signal” language can emerge. Like happiness at recognizing another, signaling youself with a unique individual call sign “signature song” (catchphrases are a musical idea originally I suspect)
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I have a parallel theory of how writing emerged via generative visual projection and eventually converged with oral branch. Writing was not oral language entering a second more advanced phase. It was convergence with a previously parallel behavior.
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