Much of modern science is an attempt to track data points between A and B. These are assigned values, numbers, etc. For example, if you select the color just at the transition between green and light blue you get a hex value of #00BBAA, aka verditer.
It would be pointless for most people to know this or most other obscure color names like wenge or smaragdine. Most modern languages only deal with black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, and a few others. 11 or so to be exact1.
But the modern human mind knows that it is possible to identify and name every one of the 16,777,216 colors that a computer can display. There are instruments to identify every cardinal point on the globe. Most are assigned with numerical values, but we use language to assign words or symbols to them, like inconsequential, extinct islands such as Sandy Island, New Caledonia. The island is gone, but its memories remain. A symbol is assigned to the memory.
My Autistic brain wants to name every possible point between A and B, between Green and Blue, between this coordinate and that, because I can feel the intent of scientific instruments bearing down on me. Every point can be named, but none of these names will be shared by anyone else. They will sit unused in my personal lexicon, receiving no attention, exercising no influence on anybody.
But points do get named. Which ones? And why?
Brown’s Human Universals notes that every language’s first color is “red.” Is “red” defined because it is the most useful data point between black and white? What defines “usefulness?” It appears that modern linguistics is involved in a kind of holy war trying to decide whether such “concept formation” is arbitrary (David Deutsch) or from some kind of rational process (Ayn Rand). I’m not sure about Deutsch, but Rand claims that the concepts must be rational. If the sacred is “irrational”, then according to Rand, the sacred can’t originate a word.
Earlier I wrote that the value in a word is not a matter of simple utility, but rather what is most pertinent in the sacred order. After red comes green and/or yellow, and so on down a predictable hierarchy. Why were these colors added in such an order? These colors must have been liminal spaces between known things, and so they demanded naming. Their intent to be named was felt by enough people, and so they were named.
[My Intent Load Theory does not actually assign intent to things like color or whatever else intends to be named. That’s a process of anthropomorphization. And yet anthropomorphization is exactly what we do whenever something intent-loads on us: the volcano intends to erupt and we anthropomorphize it as a deity requiring a chicken sacrifice, or a plague intends to kill every child and we make it offerings. Intent Load Theory only states that the process of anthropomorphization in humans is totally normal and necessary.]
Most of the weird color names in between are foreign in origin, like falu from the Swedish city of Falun, feldgrau which is German for “field gray”, or represent something obvious like shamrock. These appear not to be liminal colors, since they’re just based on the basic spectrum with qualifiers, and yet they all have definite hex values that you will find in agreement across Home Depot and other paint stores worldwide. Scientific instruments, liquid capital, and other functions of our modern culture make everything potentially liminal.
But most liminal things are useless. In fact, almost all liminal things are useless by definition. When you’re tying your shoes, the liminal state between making the first and second loops does not need a name. But let’s assume that an explosion occurred at a children’s therapy center at the precise moment when the children were all in this liminal space between emulating the teacher making the first and second loop, rendering them less capable of fleeing the building. The crisis would likely inaugurate this liminal space and we would probably then have a word, or an idiom: “between the loops” might come to mean that we’re not prepared for what’s about to happen.
In the above example, the liminal space is possible. Perhaps then it’s only a crisis which assigns a word or an idiom to a concept. A micro-crisis (but a crisis nonetheless, an economic one) might produce less interesting liminal terms like the weird color values: an OCD homemaker wants some mix between fuchsia and periwinkle, yet the paint store states they don’t have this color, so the threat of a bad Yelp review might trigger the creation of a new color in the mixing room, and the crisis will name the hideous color perchsia.
Crisis might be what produces words.
Sometimes liminal spaces don’t exist. There’s no liminal space between a monocle and a pair of glasses, or between a cigarette and a chimney, or between running from an ax murderer and running a triathlon. The concepts themselves do not allow for a liminal space between them. One such non-liminal space is, according to the ROBA Hypothesis, the Last Common Ancestor (LCA) of chimpanzees and humans which had some liminal cognition with liminal communication capacities. If the human can be minimally defined as having access to recursion (this access might have been granted due to the bridging of object usage and combat), there is no liminal space. Either you’re human or you’re ape. Either you’re human or animal. Either you’re human or not. Saying that a human is a primate is pandering to the wrong set of scientific instruments, those created by the communication sciences. The correct set of scientific instruments is the one which tracks violence.
And yet the intent load of scientific instruments continually demands that we consider liminal spaces like these, even when they don’t exist. What does this intent load do to us?
Scientific instruments might demand that we name the liminal points between defined points, even when liminality doesn’t exist there. This is a radical departure from the traditional notions of the sacred. A schizoid personality will see these scientific instruments, and technology as a whole, as operating almost independently of human agency, putting excessive demands on us as participants, and playing us like “pawns.” As an infamous schizophrenic murderer once said:
But an ideology, in order to gain enthusiastic support, must have a positive ideals well as a negative one; it must be FOR something as well as AGAINST something. The positive ideal that we propose is Nature. That is, WILD nature; those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control. And with wild nature we include human nature, by which we mean those aspects of the functioning of the human individual that are not subject to regulation by organized society but are products of chance, or free will, or God (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions).
Ted Kaczynski, The Unabomber Manifesto, pp. 69-70
In short, Ted’s calling for the wholesale destruction of technological society, of technique to use Jacques Ellul’s terminology, which appears to operate on its own recursive belt line.
In fact, technological society is simply the current language kernel of mainstream science. It’s part of the recursive process. I’m not convinced the center will hold much longer, since it continues trying to make liminality where it doesn’t exist, and causes far too much distraction from everything that is important.
This runaway usage of scientific instruments, and the failure of Autistics to identify their correct usage, is, I believe, part of the cause of the Autistic-Schizoid fissure that’s occurring right now. Schizoid personalities are capable of seeing fractures and inconsistencies that Autistics aren’t seeing. A shared language is necessary.
The crisis identifies the liminal to create language. At the thermodynamic level, this is a movement of recursion away from its active state (which can devolve into lawless violence) toward the symbolic state of language.
