To say that language is just “communication” is like saying that a jet engine is just “a large space heater”. That’s certainly how animals would see it, but we see the jet engine powering an engineering feat, which overcomes gravity, allowing us to defy plague, animal attacks, and natural disasters as we practically fold space underneath us to arrive on the other side of the world in under a day.
Just as the jet engine uses “space heater” technology to warp us to other parts of the planet, language uses “communication” technology to transform material reality into a customizable, higher dimensional domain with billions of tokens (or, simply, symbols) that grant creative and intellectual access to previously undiscovered places. Tokens can be combined to create entirely new domains in the scientific, poetic, artistic, and ritual domains; mass media broadcasts these tokens for free to 8 billion people so they can access these domains and render new tokens into other, newer domains or dispute the current tokens.
Language is not *just* communication; it’s a means of co-opting communication to realize an infinitely fractal world of potential.
The same fractal environment is present in human violence, with its infinitely branching forms. Like language and jet engines, violence co-opts aggression but fractalizes it to infinity due to the Recursial, Object-based nature of human aggression (ROBA). Whoever partakes in violence is also using a token system; tokens are validated and disputed, producing one murder after the other. So violence is not just “animal aggression”.
Violence, language, and all these fractal forms map onto one another seamlessly. Navigating between the two is a matter of issuing and validating tokens: Putin should feasibly be able to move from violence to deferral by exchanging his token for language, ritual, scientific, and other deferential tokens. There is a marketplace of these tokens, but nobody has attempted to draw up what that ledger might look like because we’re so caught up in thinking that language is communication, violence is aggression, and human trait n stems from correlary animal trait n.
With no ledger, violence continues to baffle us, and we can’t imagine doing anything but funding wars in order to stop wars. The two markets (violence and deferral) need to be drawn up on the same ledger so we can see the clear exchange rates between the two.
AI is CLEARLY unable to do this at the moment!
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