The Hierarchy of Language Coming from the Combat-Merge Field

Recently I used animal combat loops as evidence that animals don’t utilize objects in their built-in combat “systems.” Animals do, however, have rudimentary signaling which, I claim, is generated from a very simple and limited Merge field. We can imagine this Merge field as a shared moment of anticipation which validates or rejects signals based on whether they have a shared meaning in the combat loop. Since animal combat loops never change, Merge remains the same, and therefore animal communication systems (ACSs) are static. If animal combat loops are static, then animal combat cannot be adequate for pushing any update to the genome that might cause speciation.

Predation, however, might dwindle speciation. The Galapagos Islands presented a huge diversity of species to Darwin on his arrival, indicating that, with no apex predator, the various species were able to be maintained. However, larger, more combat-ready versions of these species could be found on the mainland. It’s therefore worth pondering how speciation and crises intersect.

The 5 chief crises that animals and humans alike have to contend with are, in order of increasing acuteness:

• infertility
• plague
• famine (including lack of water)
• natural disasters
• predation (from other species).

Lack of offspring (infertility) leads to a generation-long reduction of a species, plague can take years, famine kills within a few months, a natural disaster can kill in a few days, and predation kills in a matter of seconds. One could make a case that it’s the more acute crises which force a species update the quickest. Intraspecific combat (buck-vs-buck, chimp-vs-chimp) within animals is hardly a crisis in this sense: animals that lose fights usually don’t die, they just get bumped down the pecking order. The genetic material of losers might still survive in the gene pool in a slightly diluted form, extending for generations. And so I would argue that animal combat itself is no crisis at all.

I’ve been contending that animal combat generates the Merge field, which is where signals are Parsed (agreed upon and added to the vocabulary, disagreed upon and discarded, questioned, etc.) between the antagonists. Merge is probably not intended to push an update to the species, but is only designed to give it a hierarchy.

Human combat, on the other hand, utilizes objects for combat, making the antagonists’ weapons unknowable, causing the human combat loop to become radically complex, or recursive. Both sides anticipate the weaponry of the opponent and also anticipate the opponent’s anticipation itself in an effort to avoid total death and destruction (since simians and hominids alike would be defenseless against a rock to the head) and this scenario never closes. It’s like an ulcer in the human combat system, making it unoptimized. Hence human combat creates an infinitely deep Merge field. This Parses signals, all of which inherit this same deep hierarchy.

Perhaps nouns were the first signals parsed from human Merge. Nouns are easier to place anywhere in sentences and can be modified by any other grammatical construct – verbs, adjectives, adverbs, articles, prepositions, etc. Introducing higher levels of warfare involving cut stones, bronze, etc. might then produce higher order grammatical concepts like verbs and articles, which become more specialized due to emerging from an increasingly complex Merge field. Nouns can’t modify articles (“tree the”) but articles can modify nouns (“the tree”, “a tree”). We might be able to take Chomsky’s hierarchy of grammatical terms and trace it through time over the course of updating aggression kernels, but this is something I’m not qualified at all to do.

Human (grammatical) language is therefore a symptom of, and resolution to, the Merge field left permanently open by unoptimized combat. For animals, their Merge field is closed outside the context of combat. Animal signification therefore must cease when not in combat. They just become the environment again.

It’s also worth pondering, How do animals interface with crises? Is there a Merge between chimp and plague? Between elephant and famine? I think this would be a misuse of terms. These crises cannot create a second pole of a Merge field because they won’t validate terms. However, we can imagine the genomes of these species interacting with and being guided by these crises somehow, which might be leading the genome on its long winding adventure toward wherever it goes. We might say that all crises experienced by the subject are handled by some kind of Crisis Interface Function. We could order it something like below. Merge might originally not have been intended to push the genome at all since it wasn’t in the Crisis bucket, yet this is exactly what it does in humans, possibly even pushing the human genome toward domestication due to utilization of language.

1. Crisis Interface Function
   1. Immune System (plague)
   2. Libido (infertility)
   3. Metabolism (famine)
   4. Flight (natural disasters)
   5. Killing/fleeing (predation)
2. Combat Function
   1. Merge (signal sharing, setting hierarchy)

For humans, the Merge subroutine finds itself in non-stop usage and receiving constant updates, and so it exerts an inordinate amount of pressure on the genome to expand skull size to allow brain growth, eliminate hair, color the palms and eyes differently, etc. Merge begins to take on the properties of a Crisis function which we are always reacting to. It almost appears to be stuck in a DO-LOOP routine, producing an infinitely deep hierarchy at all times, with an infinite variety of signals, each of which carry this hierarchy.

Or, perhaps in humans, Merge is simply categorized as a Crisis function from the beginning.