Ecohumanist Lab

The stories that help us understand “The invention of language as an ultimate culprit for the environmental and social crisis.”

I liked this essay, but my friends think it could be better. Some conclusions and assumptions were too hastily made. The text was too dry and not personal. My persona, apparently, was too pushy and annoying, as I would act as “the strident scientist who knows all.”

  The language was invented by humans very late, as a simple communication social tool. With the recent dominance of the left hemisphere, it crazily determines our reality.

   Danka was an incredible woman. The times must have been ready for a big, almost magical transformation in the living beings on Earth.

She lived about 50,000 years ago in the hunter-gatherer group somewhere in Eastern Turkey. During her single long life, she witnessed and participated in the invention of a new communication method.  As a toddler, she was saved from a tiger attack by possibly the last surviving Neanderthal, Adam. Later, Adam, recovering after the fight with the tiger, observed little Danka learning to communicate, pointing at objects trying to repeat the sounds. Adam was unusually motivated, loved The Beautiful, Danka’s big sister, and wanted to understand and belong.

The life of these people was simple and routine; it was about executing inborn instincts prompted by a changing environment. Sun was rising, and the men went hunting gazelles, which were plentiful there. The women did the rest- gather nuts, wild grain, and fruit.  Everybody helped with caring for the children, grooming, and making stone tools.

 The desires were simple: safety, warmth, belonging, food, mating, and social position. Algorithms and neurotransmitters determined the actions and planning, felt subjectively what we would call “wants, fears, and pleasures.”

  When I go for a morning walk with my dog, Tex, it is pretty much the same. The clouds moved away, and the sun is shining in Tennessee. I am breathing, walking, and enjoying the park around me. The dog is happy; he feels pretty much the same.

  No words. He sees me happy; I see him happy. We think about the breakfast we will have on return. I will cook eggs; Tex will have his pellets. I feel alive, slightly cold, though, and getting hungry. We both think about breakfast, and we both know what to do and what will happen: some vague images coming to mind: “inside the fridge’, “cutting tomatoes,” “Remember the toasts!” and such. You can imagine that these images and thoughts are the pieces of larger instinctual and learned sequences of instructions in my brain. The events in Tex’s mind are pretty much the same: happy on the walk, chilled, hungry, expecting to be fed on return, all parts of instinctual algorithms and learned routines.

   Deep in my “breakfast reverie’ I am startled by the sudden: “Hello, Tom!”. I bumped into Sam, an old friend of mine, with his dog.

“Hello, Sam, “I exclaimed, “what are you doing here?”.

Normal? Well, it looked normal, but it was a neural tsunami.

Until now, both I and my dog utilized our basal ganglia- like the amygdala, and brain stem, maybe some hippocampal memories.

Suddenly (without a second of hesitation), I started to use language. I jumped into a completely separated reality full of people, things, and ideas- all generated in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas while the previous animal system was still active. I was merging both of my realities seamlessly and effortlessly.

Tex was left utterly alone, now playing with Sam’s dog using still the same parts of the brain as before the meeting. (Animal communication uses completely different parts of the brain- chimps with damaged Broca’s area, unlike humans, communicate just fine.)

But neither I nor Sam nor the dogs were aware of the abyss dividing us. The humans couldn’t imagine how such friendly beings as dogs could be so different so suddenly. As we can not imagine it, our brain “explains’ it attaching anthropomorphic features to the dog’s behavior. ”Happy dog, playing with the friend’- we are denying the divide.

Explanations occur in our language-made reality, left hemisphere-dominated world. It is somehow analogous to nature’s “horror vacui”- the fear of void. It is how the famous “a rabbit or a duck’ picture is always explained- one way or another, but not “I don’t know” or “both.”

When we think about Danka’s people, living 50,000 years ago, we create, all of us; anthropologists included, accepted illusions describing humans (and animals) without language.

It is a strange thing; they had brains almost identical in every aspect to our brains, and yet their world before the invention of language was so, so different!

  Max Bennett, in his book “A Brief History of Intelligence,” describes this beautifully, step by step. And yet, he is so wrong. Talking about early vertebrates living on the young Earth half a billion years ago, he says, “brain decodes the pattern of activated neurons to recognize a specific thing” (the italics are mine). Things have specific semiotic (of meaning) boundaries delineated by human symbolic language. These animals recognized not things but choices of behavior, the only thing that could be conserved by the evolutionary pressure.

People can’t understand my theories because they can’t imagine the world without things.

  Max Bennett is an artificial intelligence guru with incredible knowledge of evolutionary biology. He will show you how we are learning to make machines following the evolutionary development of nervous systems from bacteria to humans. For him, like most of us, ingrained since the cradle, the things are the most certain and “beyond question” features of our reality, more than ideas, spirits, and gods. Despite the author’s intention and understanding, Bennett’s book moving along the evolutionary tree and relating the stages to AI advances can help in making in our mind the picture of little Danka’s community. These people grew up with a firmly established system of daily routines, activities, pleasures, and terrors. They did not know things, did not need them, and they did not have them. They did not want them; things were not “on the list of their desires,” not on their vocabulary, they did not have vocabulary!

We can imagine that the things “lay dormant” embedded inside instinctual instruction codes describing, for example, things to buy online.  Can you imagine the Internet site describing the needs or pleasures that can be satisfied instead of describing what to buy?  Or going to the restaurant and talking to the waiter about your thirst, hunger, and anxiety instead of ordering from the menu? (unless the menu would be called “What’s your problem?”).

  It reminds me of my uncle “teaching” me how to swim. He threw me to the lake from the boat. There were no objects and no things, only survival instinct and trusting my beloved uncle’s good intentions.

Remember my encounter with Sam and language reality mixed with non-language (non-things) reality from before our meeting?

Now, watch with me the mother playing with her happy 6-month-old.

Back and forth, taking turns starts this loving play. The smile, the coo, then pause, the response, the sing-song, the pointing and playing with objects around them. The duo engages and slowly accelerates the sophistication and richness of play. Mom knows that the baby will be like her, a person. She listens to it in the crescendo of exchanges and happiness.

Now, stop. We are going to split this scene in two. We’ll separate it into two generations distance, not “any” generations but the generations when the magic happened.

First, Danka’s older sister plays with her, second, Danka’s daughter Ada plays with her baby. Between them is the mysterious “invention of the language.” Were these two baby plays different?

I wondered if they would be. Which sounds are the words, which just play-sounds, sing sounds, being together, touching toys, maybe naming them, learning about myself together with learning about the outside world, learning about being the mother and the child and the self?

And maybe there was the third person. Early humans were under pressure, maybe on the run, they had a lot of alloparenting (parenting by many different members of the group, rather than exclusively by the mother, like in chimpanzees), and everybody was constantly together, maybe the third person observed the scene and translated that into adult communication? Maybe it was Adam, the Last Neanderthal, desperately trying to belong and to understand the exchange. And the parts of the baby’s babbling become the first Adam’s words uttered in homo sapiens language.

  There would be a crucial difference between the two scenarios (a mere 40 years apart, as the generations were short then). I think that in the first case, before the language, when 2-year-old Danka was playing with her sister, the presence and role of the third person, a motivated observer, is essential. The play of name,  the “namer” and the object, had to be experienced by the person, human, being outside the triangle of agreement.

  The origins of the triangle of agreement (no things yet)

              Agency, or You/I, or Reflecting on the World

                             /.                                          `

        Naming (There is no symbol                  See, feel,

without an agency naming it).                              Hear

                        /                                                          `

Symbol/ Declarative label  < > merge <   >     Perception (a piece  

   Translating                                              of code, program, algorithm)

                           Triangle of agreement

Forgotten side.                                                 Right side, used side

                                 A human (“namer”)

                            /.                             `

             Naming.                            See, feel, hear

              /                                                       `

A name.   >  >        >       same.   >   >   >   A thing

So, the agreement is made. And then? Then, the agreement is used for communication, manipulated, “grammarized”, preserved and conserved like a sacred flame. Where? In things!

The left part of the triangle is forgotten and we use the right side.

The things with their names and shreds of perception, (instruction codes) are the bricks with which our reality was built for every human baby, including  Ada’s daughter.  The objectivity, (like DNA in every living organism), is the way to carry and build upon it.

Ada playing with her daughter doesn’t need any observer. The “outside World” is in objects, food, toys, crib, and Mum. For them, like for us now, each of these objects/names has boundaries worked out by humans and preserved in the language. The system, the game, the agreement, really, the charades with names instead of gestures, once in place, was carried and multiplied endlessly, effortlessly. How simple.