I’ve gone on at length about how combat between antagonists sets the Merge field and this is how signals are generated, verified, and rejected, both in animals and humans. A change in the natural weapons of an animal, such as the sudden appearance of a new horn or claw, would create a new animal Merge field. But if even a slight physiological difference is detected, the odd-animal-out is rejected, expelled, or killed, often by its own mother. If the mother doesn’t do it, the horde will do it. A super-rat with oversized tusks and freakishly sharp claws could dominate another rat in combat, but probably not before it’s dominated by 10 angry rats that want this freak out of its sight.
It’s worth pondering what makes an animal (and a human) consider an odd-one-out a “freak,” and this is one of the functions of the Intent-Load System (ILS). (For simplicity, I’ll use the term “model” to describe any external thing/animal/person which is to be mapped onto the “subject’s” ILS.) In short, the same *neural blueprint* is shared across the entire species because all species members share the same anatomy. The ILS assesses other models of its own species by mapping them, mostly automatically and subconsciously, onto the subject’s neural blueprint, which creates an Internal Motor Representation (IMR) 1. This is how the subject determines the intent of the model. All the sensory organs are put to use in this. In many animals, the nose is crucial: the IMR can help the subject determine the model’s intents based on its scent.
Most of the time the model’s IMR conforms to the subject’s ILS without an issue. It’s a “match.” This doesn’t eliminate the chance of conflict: when the subject determines that a model “intends” to acquire his food or mate, they will enter the combat loop phase. In combat, the subject contually relies on the ILS to determine the “intent” of the model and beat them in combat. Both antagonists and all members of their species share the same exact neural blueprint scheme, so we can expect them to use the same basic move set with only slight variations. The antagonists *lock* into one another during the combat loop, sometimes to the point where they’ll roll off a cliff or fail to notice a hunter throwing a net around them. Perhaps this is because the entire ILS is engaged during combat and affords the subject little or no perceptive capacity outside the combat.
Slight differences or asymmetries in the model will cause red flags in the ILS, though. If the model has only one eye, a misshapen head, a strange walk, etc., these domains in the IMR indicate, “Hey, something is seriously wrong. You can’t judge intent in this spot *here*.” The normal combat loop can’t be relied upon because the neural blueprint isn’t 100% engaged. There are lots of responses to this. The mother will kill or abandon her young, the group will gang up on them to kill them, the “normal” one might flee the “monster,” and the “monster” will not acquire a mate, unless through force.
The ILS naturally prefers symmetry: the subject can look at either side of the model and form a rapid assessment. Asymmetry requires far more processing (I have a difficult time copying people because I can’t decide which side to engage first; other Autistics might have a similar issue… I also have some pretty significant asymmetries such as a missing vein in my right arm, one of my ab muscles is shaped like a triangle… does this affect my ability to judge and mimic symmetry?).
The ILS does not prevent asymmetry, though. Sometimes asymmetry is worth the cost. The right claw on a fiddler crab is a mate attractor. The male narwhal has a massive bone protruding from the left of its jaw. While an asymmetry might escalate conflict, other benefits might be advantageous enough to allow its survival.
Asymmetries aside, the ILS generally prevents novel updates to the phenotype which might give a significant advantage to one side in a combat loop. Any such update would have to be immediate and species-wide, or else it would need to remain undetectable for enough time for the odd-one-out to gain enough dominance and spread its new genes rapidly, again perhaps by force. It’s why all animals in a given species mostly look the same, fight the same, and almost never die from combat. If there’s death it’s usually less acute: organ failure, hunger due to losing mobility, etc. Deviations from the standard neural blueprint are typically cause for elimination.
We would expect the ILS to also be employed for mating. All the same rules apply, except the ILS will detect that the model is of the opposite sex, perhaps thanks to an asymmetry as in narwhals or caribou, or the genitalia will be exposed as in chimps. But a different scheme must be set into play. In many mantid and spider species, the female is freakishly large compared to the male (who I guess is freakishly small), and she will attempt to eat him. Gorilla males are freakishly large compared to females, as are lions. A different scheme must be set into play here that’s not combat-oriented. Aside from the goal being “reproduction,” there might be some “predation” overlap, especially when the sexes are highly differentiated. When the sexes look very similar, as in bonobos, then females will gang up to fight off the males. Other systems might combine “combat” with “reproduction,” as with chimp males who are notoriously abusive toward females 2.
I’ve settled on the combat loop as the one system which radically differentiated humans from animals: the sudden potential to utilize object-based combat (OBC) spelled instant death for one or both antagonists, even others in the periphery, which never happened in animal combat. Not only this, the object of combat can continue changing from loop to loop, even continue changing during a single loop. If we imagine how this works in the Intent-Load System (ILS), it would be like huge “danger” signs flashing over the hands of the opponent. The weapons are totally unknown. It’s not safe to just engage and kill him. Both antagonists share this uncertainty. This forces the antagonists to share in a far longer moment of shared anticipation (seemingly infinitely longer), and the Merge mechanism would have generated, verified, and rejected signals constantly. This produces human, grammatical, “recursive” language. The smartest chimps can learn some of our signs, but they can’t understand grammar because they have no recursive Merge field to draw from.
I want to check my bias, though. I’m a stuntman and I think a lot about combat. Am I missing something?
It’s worth pondering whether sexual reproduction between a male and female produces its own version of a Merge field. We could just call it Sex-Merge. Maybe this field exists between same-sex couples in bonobos too. It must in humans. Various signs are passed into Sex-Merge, verified or rejected, and then added to the lexicon. The variety of bird song might be produced due to the radically different visual schemes (plumage, coloring, dancing, etc.) between the genders. If bird appearance is subject to regular changes, Sex-Merge might be ripe for producing an equally vibrant lexicon. We can adorn ourselves with jewelry, skins, plumage, and hats to also produce a vibrant sex-lexicon (sexicon?). The Australian Bowerbird loves decorating its home.
What about predation? Animals have many calls that indicate presence of predators or prey of other species. The arrival of new predators and/or prey might alter this field as well and produce a new signal. We could call this Predation-Merge.
And other, potential Merge fields? What about how an ecosystem itself responds to the presence of a species, such as when a herd of goats decimates all the grass on a hillside? What if beavers knock down all the trees and create a tree shortage crisis? Is this Eco-Merge?
Two things come to mind:
1) All these animal merge fields, including combat, are relatively stable. When a population of animals encounters a new crisis (whether it be plague, famine, infertility, predation, or natural disaster), there might be a new signal or two generated from Merge. Does use of these signals alter the phenotype? Or do the other pressures do it? Is an animal’s language “elastic” enough to expand to encompass all the new signals? If it isn’t, does this push for speciation? Of all these potential Merge fields, combat appears to be the most stable, while sex might be more variable, and predation even more variable than that. Perhaps animal communication systems (ACSs) emerge primarily from reproduction and predation. However, this might force speciation at a rapid rate due to the bird’s small brain, thus we have 10,000-20,000 species of bird3. Primate linguistic elasticity might be greater, hence we have 376–524 species of primate4.
2) Human crises are arguably as stable as animal crises, except we’ve been able to drastically reduce the predation and famine crises to some degree, perhaps even infertility (debatable). Human Sex-Merge however remains highly variable due to many factors. Human object-based combat is far more variable, though. It’s through the use of object-based combat that the Combat-Merge field remains in a permanent state of flux, and never closes, and this creates the bewildering number of deep signals that we use in language, which when pieced together to form a given grammar. I can’t imagine human Sex-Merge has this potential, since it’s just nowhere near as dynamic. There are a million ways to kill someone. There are lots of ways to get it on too, but not as many as ways to kill. The unabridged Kama Sutra is only 566 pages 5.
So, after all this, I’m still convinced that object-based combat, which renders human combat wild and unpredictable (which I call Unoptimized) is what generates the constantly changing linguistic field that we are STILL in today. Theories which claim that some external force pushed us to evolve language 100,000-2,500,000 years ago have to contend with the fact that we are still constantly updating our language, and its necessity is no less today than in palaeolithic times. The only crisis that remains continually in flux, and constantly gaining in potential destruction, is object-based combat, human violence. It produces grammatical language.
All steady Merge fields which feature no significant updates are Optimized-Merge fields. These reign supreme in the rest of the species on the planet. The Unoptimized-Merge field only appears in human, object-based combat (violence). It allows the creation of infinitely deep grammar of language, preventing our own destruction.
Object-based combat (OBC) allows us to go anywhere and have the curse/blessing of language which can help us Parse the environment around us. The use of Parse from OBC, if it results in domestication, might have circumvented the usual speciation process and allowed humans to drastically change via language-driven phenotype updates without losing our ability to interbreed. This would explain why there are no living “intermediary” species between simians and humans. This would also explain how humans affect phenotype shifts in domesticated animals: they are reaching to acquire grammatical language, giving them a few novel signs, which restricts the expression of neural crest cells in extremities. Neanderthals might have simply been a less domesticated human. Nowadays we’re all more or less equally domesticated *and* domesticatable because we still have OBC -> Unoptimized-Merge -> language. So long as we use it, we shouldn’t split as a species.
Though anything is possible.
- Rizzolatti, Mirrors in the Brain, 2006
- Goodall, Through A Window, 1990
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate
- https://archive.org/details/the-complete-kama-sutra-the-first-unabridged-modern-translation-of-the-classic-i/page/492/mode/2up