posted
It's a dreary early morning here at Ft. Scum. The song birds are singing, and the sun is poking it's savage head over the horizen, and the hustle and hum of the city is becoming evident after the long, silent night. Coffee makers are coming alive, perkulating generic ground black beans all over the metro. Children are being awoken, Fathers are reading the paper, Mothers are making the Jimmy Dean microwavable sausage breakfast burritos...
The Small City of Sprawl is awake for another day of Same.
Me? I'm sitting here in front of a dirty monitor that has a homoerotic Pac-man sticker on it, and I'm half listening to the morning news. I'm buzzing off enough coffee to kill a small zebra, and the snap of caffiene overload is putting a manic crackle into my fingers. Words and thoughts are screaming past, a jumble of images and flavors, a war of Memetic engineering fought in the dendrites of my brain...
My cat--Shady Nine Lives--is watching the television, as she is sometimes want to do. I wonder briefly if she ever comprehends what she is seeing, or if she's just watching for a cat food commercial. It makes me remember something I saw a long time ago, when my cousin was two or three years old, and his baby brother was just that: a baby.
It was at a birthday party for one of the kids. In my family I am the old cousin, born ten years before the rest of them. When the others came, they slid from their momma's thighs so close together chronologically that you'd think none of my aunts and uncles discovered fucking until that year...but I digress. I was the Big Kid at the party, being there most unwillingly, but, being yet a kid myself, I decided to make the most of it, and I hung out with the babies. Wrestled with them, played peekaboo, that type of shit. (The same kind of shit I do with my cats, now that I think about it...except I don't say "peekaboo". I'm not THAT crazy.)
We went to some park here in Sprawl, one that had the best playground money can buy. Time passed. After we had been there for a couple of hours, the "adults" decided it would be okay for me to watch the babies for a few minutes while they went over to the picnic tables to smoke and drink whiskey sours. I had nothing better to do, so I watched them, sitting on a swing a few feet away while the babies and toddlers played in the sand...
For awhile, nothing happened that was unexpected. Babies babbling, Toddlers toddling, sand castles of poor design being built... Five kids sitting in a circle jabbering and giggling at each other...
But then, something strange happened.
My cousin Cory was the oldest of the bunch, wise enough to know how to talk fairly coherently to adults. Except for me, he was likely the only human on that playground that knew any english beyond "momma" or "dada"...
As the children babbled at each other, Cory would turn and talk to me. It was pretty random sounding stuff, but after a moment I realized what was happening. Cory was translating what the babies were saying so that I could enter the conversation if I wished.
They were talking to each other in some unknown way. I assure you. They were actually discussing the sand they were sitting on. The feel of it. The textures...Cory translated it as well as he could, I think...But his knowledge of english was rather limited.
I never told anybody what I saw that day. But I've thought about it from time to time over the years, and this morning seems like a good enough time to tell you what I have finally decided:
Humans have a deep structure language, inherient to all of us. It's there before we learn the Alpha languages of adults...it's hardwired into us by our genes. It's there, and it has a purpose. Or you could say that it has Many Purposes.
Now, I'm not the first person to think of this. Several Sci-fi authors already have. But I may be the first person to actually believe it.
If I decide to post anything further about this, I'll go further into what I think about it.
Registered: Jan 2001
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
Fascinating thought... and one that makes a lot of sense. All higher lifeforms --- elephants, dolphins, chimpansees to name a few --- seem to have a basic language (complete with structure, syntax, grammar) AND the mental capacity to develop it further, given enough time. I wonder if there's a "hard limit" in brain complexity above which sentience and advanced communication become possible.
Registered: Nov 1999
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posted
The entire point of having a brain is to be able to make associations. This is good to eat, but this isn't. This is good to fuck, but this isn't...
I believe that the language center is the natural extrapolation of associative abilities. The power of labeling things so that they can be properly catalogued can't be denyed. The more you can associate correctly, the better off you'll be.
Apples good. Snakes bad. That sort of thing.
Language also has an entirely chemical foundation within the brain. Seems logical, eh? Everything that happens in the mind is a complex dance of chemistry--from the smallest neuron firing to the largest "brainstorm" of pure insight.
I notice that I think in words, and images. How do babies think? I remember reading about a study where they would put babies on a table with a transparent glass surface. There would be a checkerboard pattern underneath the table, which would effectively make the table look solid and safe at parts, and then appear to have a cliff like drop off of about five feet at others.
They would place some kind of stimulus, such as Mommy or a favorite toy across one of the apparent gulfs and then see if the baby would cross the glass.
Until about the age of eight months they always would, unmindful of the danger. After that they never would, recognizing the fall.
It was decided that this didn't show the development of depth perception, because other experiments had shown babies to possess that from birth.
No, this was a very real development from within the brain. Some kind of cognitive association tree had emerged, which could now utilize depth perception for survival puposes.
What I am suggesting, although I'm not stating it clearly, is that as these associative trees are developed, the Root structure is submerged, and eventually forgotten.
Which is where we come back to those kids in the sand. Cory was at a "cusp" age, so to speak. Not entirely comfortable with adult language yet, the Root, default language was still there. He could flip between them, to better express himself.
The chemistry of his brain was in a state of flux. Growing pains, you might call it. I want tests done on this.
Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
That would be interesting, if it works that way, to have them remember the 'base language' of their childhood....
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
Chomsky? Good Stuff. And Snow Crash is one of my favorite books. Deals with the Enki mythology quite heavily.
I'm only relating something I saw once, and my own thoughts about it. I'm of the opinion most folks will be skeptical that it even happened unless they've seen something similar.
There's nothing wrong with that. My friend went with his mass to a Catholic service in a Wal-mart Parking lot once in order to recieve a message from the Virgin Mary, and he claimed to have seen things I don't believe in. (It's interesting though, because he saw those things when he was a kid, and now that he's an adult, he thinks he was hallucinating...along with everybody else there. It's fascinating stuff when he tells it)
I suppose that with the exception of the black triangle UFO I saw in Utah (which was not a stealth fighter), this is the only thing I've ever seen that wasn't readily explained by science.
Registered: Jan 2001
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
Member # 256
posted
Er...I'm not so sure I see how we're conflating spaceships and conspiracies with the deep or transformational grammer hypothesis, which is ultimately a testable claim, and not considered totally nuts by those in the know.
Registered: Mar 1999
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