I have devoted a lot of time to thinking about language and how humans came to develop it. I had another blog on the topic before this one. The older blog died because of my health problems. This one languished because I became to shy to write something that would be shared on social media — and, to me, social media means Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. So today I cut the links that automatically shared what I write … elsewhere. Most bloggers want their material read, while I find it stresses me out.
It has been about nine months since I have written here. I’ve had some new breakthroughs in the past few months, so it is time to summarize. A few years ago I realized that we humans invented language twice, once for communication and once for symbolic reasoning. Communication has been part of our evolving skill set since the time of the first little fishes, as coordination among members of a species helps that species survive. Communication makes use of a variety of media, including gestures, postures, chemical clues. noises, and synchronous behavior, such as all of one species producing eggs and sperm at the same time each year, often at the full moon. Attempts to communicate are ancient, hundreds of millions of years old, and verbal communication is just one more technique added to an ancient repertoire.
Symbolic reasoning is much more recent. Thinking uses a lot of energy, which is reflected in our large heads expanding each time we developed new food technology, such as when we started scavenging meat or when we began systematically using fire to cook foods to make them easier to digest. Bigger brains and heads had a price: a more difficult birth process, particularly the need to be born at an earlier stage of development, which led to prolonged childhoods.
Symbolic reasoning repurposed communications tools, specifically language, to aid in thinking. It required an increased ability to abstract information but it decreased the amount of energy required while expanding the scope of our ideas. Language for communication may date back a few hundreds of thousands of years but symbolic reasoning is much more recent, a few tens of thousands of years, a very short period for evolutionary effects to appear.
We did evolve, though, because having two purposes for language created a conflict. We could devise stories. We had the option to blindly accept our stories as true, belief, or to examine them in detail, doubt. Belief used small amounts of energy in ancient parts of the brain; doubt uses massive amounts of energy all through the brain, particularly in new regions that are more flexible, more prone to change and evolve.
Doubt is learned. Like exercise, it becomes easier the more you do it. But it takes a certain amount of stress to provoke us into the kind of reasoning necessary for doubt. Not everybody is capable of the kind of reasoning necessary to doubt. Some simply fake it, mimicking the doubters. Their mimicry has been successful because few deep thinkers have been required for race survival so far, despite our producing an ever more complex world to live in. Mimicry is an ancient skill, involved in racial survival since before the tiny fishes evolved. As such, it is powerful, energy efficient and difficult to see or consider. In particular, our leaders, who need Alpha and Beta charisma, rarely have the energy to spare for rational thought or behavior, getting by better by mimicking those skills.
I started investigating psychology, the behavior and illnesses of human brains, while in high school. I took a brief look at sociology, the dynamics of human groups that considers the individual less, my first year in college. Then I discovered anthropology, the science of everything human, with a particular focus on linguistics. I have been doing anthropological studies ever since, as a hobby, not professionally. I tend to think in terms of long periods of time and am a meliorist, a believer that things tend to improve over time. I have worked and played with computers since leaving high school. I have always written stories, most now lost, and have completed several novels, never published, that may also have been lost.
When I am healthy, it frustrates me to not write. When I have an idea, it takes hold of my brain, depriving me of restful sleep, giving me nightmares and other vivid dreams unless I capture it in writing. I am gradually becoming healthy again and being driven to write.
Word Wine 