I feel a tinge of regret for not posting more frequently. However I have a pressing deadline for a book I am writing so this proto-thesis must take a backseat. However I still think about this and try to find evidence to support what I eventually want to say. Whether all these bits come together into a cohesive thesis is far from certain. But I haven’t given up.
The broad strokes I have so far is that any eventual metaverse-like system is driven by some innate human need. I hesitate to consider it a teleology in having an objective. Yet I do believe there is a motive force which does not allow us to rest but causes us to use technology toward certain ends. Those ends seem to be greater community, greater intimacy and an ever larger society. Some of that is clearly ideological since there are just as many reasons to believe the opposite, that we are driven to consume and spoil our environment for short term benefit and to engage in ever more violent and destructive wars, even if the periods of peace also grow longer. I ignore the second and focus on the first.
To have the kind of ideal metaverse so many dream of requires a species capable of abstract thought, of symbolic communication, as well as whatever drive that causes us to spend our excess wealth on the technology that can make this happen. I am feeling my way along and I do not hesitate to visit rabbit holes that may hold clues. One such hole is human language.
Language is the human ability to exchange information with another human. It confers an evolutionary benefit and is necessary for a social species. The acceleration of human development has been in lockstep with the growth of language capabilities. What I want to do is establish some back story regarding language. The congnitive developments of the species will not be easy to come by but I found a youtube which discusses some archealogial evidence for human language development. I will simply post it here for the moment but the main take away is that we have some reason to believe that anything resembling spoken language can be traced to somewhere between 3 million years ago to 300,000 years ago.
Here is where this fits for me. Many social species do very well without speech even if they use rudimentary communication. Ant use touch and smell, birds use sight and sound, whales and other mammals use more complex sound and hearing. But the information carrying capacity slowly grew over time and this must have accompanied an increased mental capability to use the information gained as well as formulate speech acts for some purpose. Language is what language does.
If you take a long view, each technological improvement in communication from marks to signals and on through writing changed two fundamental aspects of human communication, time and distance. We beat on drums because they can be heard farther, smoke signals too. We carve on rock because they last. Each extends the universe, the Teilardian Noosphere wider and encompasses more of humanity.
As we ventured further from whatever human cradle we evolved from, we brought language. But as we migrated, our language evolved until it became unintelligle to those we left at the origin but intelligible to those nearby. Yet our transportation systems allowed us to live largely in isolation from communities that were many days or week travel.
Two human forces in history would change that, war and trade. As civilizations evolved and resorted to war, conquered people would feel pressure to assimilate and that meant adopting the language of the conquerer. But trade too put pressure on people to learn new languages so as to successfully trade. So with transportation systems both for war and trade improved, so did the interaction of different groups.
For now this is a sufficient origin story of our ability to engage in symbolic communication, a capability without which all else is impossible.
YouTube: When We First Talked
transcript: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCW0zyDGuXc
References
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