I'm just now finishing Deacon's The Symbolic Species and have to comment on what he says near the end. First, note that Deacon's theory of language rests on a set of hypotheses: 1. Humans evolved symbolic language due to some limited set of external, ecological stimuli, such as better group coordination for resources, assisting in [...]
Art of Violence
The ROBA Chip – A Pi-sized AI Model
onA question for anyone who understands AI: are there any AI companies which have a coherent theory of human language? Or are all AI companies just force-feeding massive amounts of data into their training systems? Because the latter is not a theory on language. My hypothesis is that no AI company has a coherent theory [...]
The First Word Might Have Required Object-based Intimidation
onWhat exactly caused the bridge between object-usage and combat which gave rise to ROBA in humans, which (per my hypothesis) produced human, recursive language? Apes have the capacity to "reach" for combat using objects. As seen in the 1980s macaque studies, apes' axions extend outward when given a tool, and then the axions retreat once [...]
Death from a Distance – Failing to Bridge the Spandrel between Object-Use and Combat
onI recently was leaving a comment on a previous post and thought it worth reposting it here. Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza's Death from a Distance sits on my shelf unread. It's over 600 pages. The hypothesis is: Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe attempts to explain both human evolution [...]
Testing the Simulation Hypothesis with the ROBA Hypothesis
onElon Musk recently joked that the reason that the James Webb telescope experienced delays because the computers were busy trying to render what the planets looked like, since the programmers who created the simulation we're currently living in failed to anticipate that we humans would have been able to see these stars. It's a fun [...]
AI Poisoning
onPerhaps the reason driverless cars are "uncanny" is because the average person can't merge with a car. When we drive a car, we are using a tool which has, as a result, our linguistic expression. We can detect hesitation, anger, happiness, etc. while watching how another's car moves. It allows us to predict flows of [...]
New Violence Levels Put Higher Demands on Linguistic Memory
onWhile reading Steven Pinker's Language Instinct, he poses an interesting rule about English, which is very picky about word and phrase order. One can say, "He gave the girl that he met in New York while visiting his parents for ten days around Christmas and New Year's the candy," but this is a "top-heavy" sentence. [...]
Self-Reinforcing Kinship Mesh Networks Enforced by ROBA
onLewis Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) is one of the more thorough kinship books written during the late 19th century. It's worth noting his work because he appears to have been at the cutting of a science of kinship that has basically faded from popular memory.Morgan had previously done enormous legwork in his Systems of Consanguinity [...]
The Copernican Oracle
onFrans de Waal's book Mama's Last Hug (2019) is so far very good. It's good not because I agree with him, but because he has the balls to take his viewpoint to its logical conclusions. Which is: if humans are just animals as he claims, then to attempt to differentiate ourselves is to engage in [...]