Language
Language is the form of communication preferred by humans. Animals use a variety of sounds, gestures, and pheromones. Plants use mycorrhizal networks. Robots prefer binary.
Language encodes information into symbols that can be transmitted between brains.
Related pages: allegory, literalism, poetry, canon, scripture, religion.
Symbolism, Metaphor, and Allegory
All linguistic representations are abstract on some level. Unless you have an actual elephant nearby that you can point at, if you want to convey the concept of elephant you have to use symbols.
When there is a 1:1 correspondence between a word or phrase and the object it is describing, this can be considered literal. Science attempts to be as close to literal as possible in all of its descriptions. When it is able to describe things mathematically, it gets as close to objective truth as human language is capable of. But it is still a system of symbols that must be interpreted for communication to happen.
How do you convey complex natural systems that we are only now finding the language to describe mathematically? How do you describe subjective experiences in a way that evokes an empathetic emotional response in your audience? These have always been the domain of spiritual language, allegory, and poetry.
Complex systems are now able to be described with the precise language of science and mathematics. This means that many spiritual concepts meant to describe emergent properties of these systems can now be understood literally. Even if you don't understand all of the underlying math, you can know it exists and that its beauty is emergent and material, not supernatural.
Fractal Geometry of Language
Language, like most other things in the universe, is like a fractal.
Fractal Construction of Language
Language is a holonic, fractal construction, where each additional level of complexity is emergent from combining many elements of the one before.
The progression goes:
This can be visualized as as the iterations of a fractal, reflecting the increased complexity and nuance of the ideas that can be expressed at each new level.
Fractal Personality of Language
There have been many studies documenting the way that speaking different languages can alter your personality. [1][2][3][4]
This is due to the feedback loop caused by the interplay of language and cultural norms, where each alters the other, evolving over time to have stronger expressions of some traits and diminished expressions of others. Some languages are fast and anxious. Some are slow and relaxed. Some are suave, others are sharp and precise. Some are boisterous, others subdued. Some are conformist, others individualistic. These traits are reflected in the cultures and personalities of the people that speak those languages.
These expressions of cultural personality can be thought of as a unique fractal patterns, with language forming the generating equations. The pattern is encoded in the vocabulary, making certain concepts easy to express, and others impossible. It is also encoded in your personal vocabulary, with new infinite branching spiral arms unlocked by each new word you learn.
No Narcissistic Neologisms Needed
Many who attempt to create new theories in philosophy, psychology, and spirituality, often rely heavily on neologisms, or made-up words that they think convey some unique new idea that has never been thought of before. This is a narcissistic tendency that ignores the self-evident idiom from Ecclesiastes there is nothing new under the sun. This is especially true in the realm of psychology, since people have been doing metacognition since the emergence of consciousness.
Pseudoscience and pseudointellectualism tend to use a lot of neologisms, so this is something to be wary of if you are trying to tell if someone is a genius or a crank. Sorry, John Vervaeke you appear to be a kindred spirit, but you were also the inspiration for this section. He starts out by saying all the right things about the need to create rational, secular frameworks for providing meaning in a modern world, but then uses so many CogSci buzzwords and neologisms that it's impossible to derive anything meaningful from what he's saying.
That isn't to say that new words are never needed or useful, but these should come about organically from the culture or by naming new discovery or technology, not just creating your own personal newspeak. Changing the definition or usage of existing words can often be more effective at changing the way people think about things. This is covered in more detail in the following sections.
The metaculture wiki's integration with Wikipedia discourages the creation of neologisms, since made up words won't have a page on Wikipedia to reference. It uses an expansive vocabulary to tackle a variety of complex subjects, but links to definitions are always provided to avoid obfuscation. If someone intentionally uses a lot of neologisms and complex jargon without defining it, especially when simpler, commonly known terms would be just as accurate, this is a red flag for pseudoscience and grift.
Language Unites Us and Divides Us
Language is one of the biggest indicators of in-group and out-group status that people have. If we are unable to communicate with someone, it is also very hard to cooperate with them. When we meet someone who speaks our language in a foreign country, we feel an instant bond with them. When we hear someone speaking a foreign language, our primitive brain triggers fear and distrust. Speaking the same language distinguishes friend from foe on a primal level.
The Universal Language
English is the language of the Internet, and as a result is likely to become the de facto universal language of the future. Most education systems worldwide teach English as either a first or second language. In 1-2 generations you will rarely encounter someone who is unable to read and write in English, even if they rarely speak it.
Science is a universal language because its evidence-based concepts are culturally independent, allowing anyone to understand them regardless of their native language, culture or belief systems. Science doesn't depend on any particular set of cultural symbols or allegories to convey concepts accurately from one person to another. Mathematics is the common set of symbols, and 1+1=2 is true no matter what part of the world you come from.
Rebuilding the Tower of Babel
The inability of our ancestors to maintain continuous communications with tribes that split off and settled faraway lands is the reason languages diverged and we stopped being able to understand each other.
Modern communications networks are reversing this trend. Obscure local dialects are going extinct as more people have access to the common tongue and prefer its superior ability to be understood when traveling more than 100 kilometers from your birthplace. English is becoming a global second language, allowing anyone in the world to communicate with anyone else.
Many in the Abrahamic traditions view this in terms of the Tower of Babel allegory, where the creation of a universal language and the unification of humanity represents the hubris and challenge to god's authority that led to the destruction of the original tower. It's unclear what they're going to do about it since you can't stop people from wanting to learn a common language that lets them speak with anyone in the world. But, they complain a lot about the impending apocalypse, which is annoying.
It should be apparent that the Tower of Babel allegory is meant to justify the obvious shortcoming that everyone speaks different languages and can't understand each other. This is the cause of so much misunderstanding and conflict. Why would the universe be created in such a way? Because god says y'all suck that's why. It's not a warning against linguistic unity, it's an explanation as to why a omnipotent, omnibenevolent being would make things this way.
Authoritarian Language
Orwell's 1984 is the seminal work on the authoritarian use of language to subvert freedom. Maintaining freedom means educating each generation on the ways authoritarian leaders use language and the media to control the possibilities of thought, so they can reinforce social norms to reject authoritarianism every time it rears its ugly head. The Newspeak page details the fictional language and how its construction functions to control and limit the range of possible thoughts. Doublethink and doublespeak are related concepts dealing with the cognitive dissonance of holding one truth internally while only speaking the truth that is politically acceptable.
The concept of kayfabe in wrestling is actually a better framework for understanding modern authoritarian doublespeak, since that's where several modern major authoritarians got their training. 1984 is fictional, but kayfabe is a phenomenon that can be studied directly.
Change the Definition, Change the World
Words and definitions are encoded separately by our brains, similar to the way pointers and data are stored in computer memory. It provides a similar advantage, in that the pointer (word/concept) can be referenced in place of the data, so none of those references need to be updated when the data (definition/knowledge) changes. Changing the definition of a word changes how we see every concept that is associated with it.
This means that it is much easier to redefine existing terms in order to promote a new understanding of the related concepts than it is to introduce a new term, especially if it is something deeply embedded in the culture like god.
Let's say you're responsible for refactoring the codebase of western culture to make it compatible with scientific materialism. You have billions of references to the god variable throughout the canon of books, music, and art that all point to a supernatural definition. Are you going to go combing through trillions of lines of code to pull out all those references? What are you going to replace them with? How are you even going to do that with legacy systems where the last person to work on it died centuries ago?
It's much easier to update a single reference to point to a new definition that is compatible with science (Pantheism). Now you can run all of that legacy code as-is without hitting any supernatural infinite loops, pseudoscientific stack overflows, or the dreaded Blue Screen of Dogma.
Those that call this Orwellian probably didn't watch the video from the previous section that addresses this. In case you didn't, Orwellian redefinitions are designed to limit the range of possible thought and preserve entrenched power structures. The metaculture wiki has the opposite goal.
References: [5]
Language is the TCP/IP of Brain Networking
TCP/IP is the networking protocol behind the Internet. It facilitates structured communications between the different computers that make up the network.
Language does the same thing for brains, facilitating the creation of organic communication networks.
Using this metaphor to map the elements of language to the RFC 1122 architecture seemed like a good idea during meditation but may or may not be worthy of execution.
Any Discussion of Language is Meta
You can't use talk about language without using language, so you won't be avoiding the concept of self-reference here.
The Language of Mind channel has some great videos on the science of linguistics.
Arrival is an excellent examination of the relationship between language, worldview, and the subjective experience of consciousness.
Music is the Language of Our Souls
Dylan's use of language and symbolism in Desolation Row is one of the best examples in all of music history.
Weird Al's analysis of the rules of grammar in Word Crimes is one of the best examples in all of music history.
Tool wrote this song about the "Rosetta Stone"