The Thoughts Of A Starfish

Imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror. You know the deal, if you can see. Everything which is to your left is to your right in a mirror and vice versa. But in a flat mirror, your head doesn’t become your feet and if you lie down in front of it, your head and feet are at the same ends as in the reflection. Your back and front have swapped sides of course, and this is related to left and right swapping.

We’re usually roughly bilaterally symmetrical and our eyes are not on flexible stalks. However, our fingertips kind of are. It may just be me, but when I read braille on a box of pills, if the writing is at the back of the box it appears to be mirror writing. I presume this is how everyone experiences braille. From this it appears correct to deduce that if my eyes were on stalks and I were to extend one and look back at myself, I would appear to be seeing a reflection. I’m not sure there’s even a way for such a being to look at itself and see itself the “right” way round. Because we’re nearly bilaterally symmetrical, we consider ourselves to have a left and right, and therefore our perceptual world. Most writing is said to run from left to right or right to left, but some is vertical and some is written in various forms of boustrophedon, where the writing alternates direction and in some cases turns upside down as well. Motorists drive on the right or left side of the road and pedestrians do whatever is the opposite in their part of the world. Clearly, although it can’t be accounted for in geometry or other kinds of mathematics, we are able to consider our world as being the right way round compared to a reflection, but there isn’t anything which says which way round it is. There is no cosmic “THIS SIDE UP” sign or anything else like that.

It’s established then that we tend towards being bilaterally symmetrical animals with two forward-facing eyes which cannot swivel round and are set in sockets. It doesn’t seem inevitable that we would be like this though. Back to the M`ubv, as mentioned in yesterday’s post. These were my imaginary pentaradiately symmetrical aliens with five sexes, although they’ve turned out to have eight, I came up with when I was twelve. At the time, to me the most important difference between them and us is that we’re bilaterally symmetrical and they’re pentaradiate, like starfish. This means they don’t really have left and right sides to their bodies, or a back and front, and to be honest I’m happy to add eyes on stalks to their body plan to see what happens. They do, however, have a top and bottom to their bodies and this raises the question of where the food goes in and if and where it comes out when they’re done with it. Although echinoderms have an oral and aboral surface, with the oral corresponding to the bottom, for a land animal this would be inconvenient as it would mean they’d have to excrete through their heads and it would probably end up all over them. Then again, maybe their etiquette is different and they don’t mind. It still seems unhygienic though. Therefore I’m going to put their mouths and genitals at the tops of their bodies and their main excretory organs at the bottom. This will enable two of them to make love face to face regardless of the genders involved.

The question arises of whether they have strong concepts of left and right. If two of them are facing each other, one might say to the other, “it’s to your left” or “to my right”, but this would be a temporary situation which would change if the conversation was taking place in a different orientation. There’s an Australian aboriginal language which lacks ways of expressing left and right and uses something like compass directions instead. This would, I presume, work fine for the M`ubv and in fact would be less ambiguous, although at first it might be expressed as something more like “towards the mountain” or “towards the coast”. Giving directions would be different. The question arises of whether they’d even have words for the ideas, and also of what would happen with their writing. It isn’t easy to think of a way of writing which wouldn’t in some way be linked to notions of left and right. Vertical writing would still proceed across the page line by line and spiral or circular writing direction would always be clockwise or counterclockwise, at least within the line, or rather circle. It’s possible that concepts could be built up by superimposing or modifying existing characters, but even then at some point a new character would be needed and that would have to be situated elsewhere. When zoologists began to describe the anatomy of radially symmetrical animals, they found themselves introducing the terms “oral” and “aboral”, but these are technical terms and usages which aren’t part of most people’s everyday language. It might turn out that the interior of such an organism is asymmetrical, in which case perhaps “left” and “right” would become largely medical terms. There would also be hazier notions of front, back, forwards and backwards, and these would influence the way position was expressed in their languages. This would presumably go on to influence figurative uses of the same concepts. For instance, we think in terms of progress and setbacks. Would they? They would, though, share ideas of up and down, and of the tops and bottoms of things, upper and lower and so forth. Hence their vertical understanding could be directionally similar to ours, but horizontal understanding would be more like compass directions, refer to landmarks and would be able to express inner and outer and distance from the speaker, but would they even do that? Would their way of expressing other positional concepts influence those too?

This morning I said “I’m going to wash my glasses”, meaning all of the pairs of spectacles I use, and was acutely aware of how English lacks an easy way to express the dual as opposed to the plural. Many languages do have this facility, which they sometimes confine to items which are more often found in pairs but also sometimes more generally. Later stages of a language tend to use these only for the former. Were it common to have five members or organs rather than pairs, there would probably be languages with special inflections for five of something, but the question then arises of whether there’d be a paucal number too. Would there be separate forms for the singular, paucal (two to four items), quintal (five) and plural, or would there be forms for each of the numbers from singular to plural? In this situation, five would be the most frequent number other than singular and plural. English retains traces of the dual in words such as “alternative” and “either”. These might have special forms for five options as well as two, or might have three different forms: one for two to four, one for five and one for many.

Then there’s the question of grammatical gender and noun classes. Although Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages are characterised by a form of gender which distinguishes between females and males as well as other items in the same class, many languages, such as the Niger-Congo family, instead have a similar arrangement to grammatical gender which, however, doesn’t always make a distinction between the sexes. The situation here is that there are eight biological sexes. A possible origin for Indo-European grammatical gender is that women have historically tended to be referred to by what they are seen to be while men have tended to be referred to by what they are seen to do. Hence the old system of having separate classes for adjectival and agent nouns has turned into something referred to as grammatical gender but not necessarily having much to do with gender in the social sense. For the M`ubv, this would depend on whether a similar cultural tendency existed for all eight “genders”, plus perhaps the inanimate. On the other hand, variation of that type might lead to a situation where there wasn’t much distinction between them. If the association did occur, though, languages with at least nine genders would be common, and these could extend beyond the species. This would have the advantage of reducing ambiguity because there could be separate pronouns and grammatical forms, if this is what they had, for up to nine separate referents in the same phrase. Considering pronouns, this means that for each person there could easily be thirty-six distinct pronouns, and in the case of the second and first the question of clusivity and differently-gendered groups could also arise. This might also extend to verbs.

All of this would seem intuitive. So far I’ve been assuming that these are kind of five-sided human beings with eyes on stalks because it makes things simpler. In fact, these concessions to humanoid appearance would probably be unrealistic. The question also arises of what different insights this species might have compared to us. Although it can be conjectured that they might lack quotidian concepts of left and right, the chances are they would have additional concepts which we lack, and this brings me to the embodiment thesis, which is significant for us too, and presumably any embodied being.

So far so science fictiony, but there is a more mundane point to be made here. A popular philosophical slogan which I even use myself sometimes is, “I am my brain”, but in fact I’m not. I am more likely to be either less than or more than my brain, both for social reasons and because I am a body. Experiments have shown that if a subject smiles or frowns artificially, they tend to get positive or negative sentences more quickly respectively. Logical behaviourism attempted to claim that verbal thinking was nothing other than sotto voce vocalisation. If you open your mouth and think the word “bubble”, you will tend to get a sensation in your throat, which is said to be caused by the slight movement of the speech muscles. These are both aspects of what’s known as “embodied cognition”. If getting there is half the fun, the distance probably appears to be shorter, but if you’re on your way home from a hard day’s work it’s probably longer even if it’s the same route. We tend to outsource mathematical thought when we count on our fingers, and when we write notes we’re outsourcing our memories. There’s a sense, nowadays, in which our memory has become part of the internet, but this is relatively innocuous in principle considering that probably the first outsourcing of memory was the development of spoken or signed language. Chimpanzees are noted for having much better short term memories than humans, possibly because they don’t usually use our kind of language, although they do have their own signing to some extent. In linguistic terms, we talk about warming to people or being cold, or by contrast, cool. Our emotions partly depend on the physical sensations associated with them such as heartrate, blushing, shaking or breathlessness. This is one reason for suspecting that artificial intelligence would need to be embodied if it were at all humanoid, as emotions inform reasoning. We talk about being down, and oppressed, or oppressed, all of these being spatial metaphors. Looking (and there’s another sensory metaphor) at cognition in this way contrasts with the previous “computing”-type metaphors popular in cognitive science. If you’ve ever been subject to the comment “if we cut your hands off, you wouldn’t be able to talk”, that particular element of language will not escape you, and similar gesticulations, perhaps toned down in public, can occur with internal monologue, which is therefore not really all that internal. Pacing up and down is another aid to thought. Then there are the mirror neurons which activate when we do physical things ourselves and also when we experience others doing them. It also means that we may not in fact have a genuine impression of psychophysical dualism (a soul and a body) unless we already tend to live in our heads a lot.

Beyond embodied cognition lies enclothed cognition. A cis friend of mine once observed that she felt more feminine when wearing a dress, a phrase which is meaningless to me but I take her word for it. Clearly something like clothing sensitivity and the topic I addressed in this post makes the influence of such things very evident. Physically wearing a lab coat or a uniform can help someone adopt a genuine role – looking the part is important to the person who looks it.

We don’t know everything about how our bodies influence how we think because we are not often subjectively disembodied, although we can become depersonalised, as I often did. When it comes to contrasting a human body with a possible or actual non-human one, such as a dog with a much better sense of smell, or a bat or dolphin moving in three dimensions and using echolocation virtually as an extra sense, or for that matter a M`ubv or other hypothetical different body plan, there would still be aspects of such entities’ being which are inaccessible to us which make fundamental differences, such as the idea of left, right, front and back, and perhaps in the case of bats and dolphins even top and bottom to some extent, and all sorts of other things. And we have deficits ourselves which they do not have, such as the superior chimpanzee short term memory. Put all these together and the very concept of intelligence seems to have holes in it, and from a vegan perspective this is quite positive. But it still makes me wonder what obvious, and for others’ intuitive, aspects of reality we’re missing out on.

The Afrikaans Language

There’s a rather minor movement, with which I comply, to spell Afrika with a K. I’ve written about this previously on here but I can’t find it. I have certain issues with it because it doesn’t seem entirely coherent to me. The claim is that no native Afrikan language spells it with a C, and therefore to do so is colonialist. There’s a similar argument applied to the spelling of Mexico with an X or a J, which incidentally even extends to Texas/Tejas. However, since there are several native Afrikan scripts which don’t even have these letters, and other non-Latin scripts used there which lack them too, the very use of the Latin alphabet to write the name of the continent could be seen as imperialist since it’s originally a European alphabet. But there’s another more complicated issue, which at first seems very different to how it turns out to be on closer examination: the Afrikaans language.

Certainly to me in the 1980s, and I presume also to others who were involved in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Afrikaans language, which first arose in South Africa before it actually was South Africa among the White invaders in I think the eighteenth century, symbolises White imperialism and the oppression of the indigenous people. Now I’ve never been to South Africa so I’m talking about this from a great distance conceptually and geographically, but one of the notable things Afrikaans does orthographically is to spell “Afrika” with a K. Therefore you have a situation where Francophone Black Afrikans spell it with a Q and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Black Afrikans spell it with a C. Swahili does spell it with a K. In Namibia, the Küchendeutsch spoken there also spells it with a K. Hence the Germanic languages spoken in Southern Afrika, both of which could be seen as colonial interlopers, use a K. But it’s not that simple.

It’s probably worth briefly sketching the nature of Afrikaans before I go on. Afrikaans is probably the easiest of all foreign languages for a first language Scots or English speaker to learn. It would presumably be even easier for a Dutch speaker because it could be argued to be merely Dutch. The irony for an Ingvaeonic language speaker such as myself (Scots, Yola, English, Frisian, Tok Pisin and some other creoles) is that it’s probably easier to speak and understand Afrikaans than even the more closely related Frisian, because the process of creolisation simplifies grammar in the same direction as English, which may also be a creole (Danish-Anglosaxon), has evolved. Hence the oft-quoted sentence “my pen is in my hand”, which is the same in English and Afrikaans, though differently pronounced. Two notable features of Afrikaans are that it’s simplified Dutch and that its grammar is practically analytical – it expresses ideas with separate words which don’t change much. The verbs are, as a rule, even simpler than in English, lacking the strong conjugations we have with verbs such as “drive” and “take”. It isn’t the same language as Dutch though, because although Dutch people could understand Afrikaans speakers with ease, the reverse isn’t true because of the more inflected grammar.

However, Afrikaans is not purely Dutch. It also borrows from Malay because of the Malay community in the Cape colony, who were not in fact always Malay but used the bafflingly easy Malay language as a lingua franca. I don’t know much about the history of Malay, but its simplicity, though shared with many other Austronesian languages, is so extreme that I wonder if it has itself become creolised at some point.

Afrikaans was originally a pidgin spoken between the Dutch invaders and the San and Bantu people of the Cape which is said to have evolved within a generation of the Dutch arriving there because of the use of Bantu and San house servants to care for White children. Quite remarkably, in spite of its external image as the language of the White Apartheid régime, the majority of Afrikaans speakers are non-White: 60% in fact. It’s spoken mainly in the west of the country, and it’s also spoken in a small town in Kenya called Eldoret, which was founded by Afrikaners. Outside Afrika, Australia is the country with the most speakers. It’s given English a few words, including “aardvark”, “aardwolf” and “veldt”, and South African English, unsurprisingly, has considerably more. Unsurprisingly, it has borrowed from Khoisan and Bantu languages but also from Portuguese. The Oorlams dialect, spoken in Namibia, even has clicks, since ethnically they are descended mainly from the San. This probably means, though I haven’t tested it, that there are two completely separate sources of clicks in that dialect. In the fairly closely related German, clicks occur as allophones weakly between words ending in T and words beginning with K within phrases, and this seems to happen in English too, so it can be expected to happen in Afrikaans. More on the possible connection with Khoisan later.

It’s said to be a myth that the language was ever majority White, connected to the idea of White settlers “civilising” the area. The earliest written records use Arabic script and were written in a madrasa, again bringing it closer to Malay. The Cape Malays in fact used Afrikaans extensively. Due to White Afrikaner nationalism, Afrikaans was portrayed as a purely Germanic language. It was famously used as a weapon in 1974 when it was imposed as a medium of education, which led to the Soweto uprising, and this further stigmatised and polarised the language as belonging to Whites.

As a foreigner, one thing that strikes me about the language is that it seems to have greater contact with the San community than with speakers of Bantu languages. Afrikaans is in a sense a Khoisan language, as fifty percent of them speak it. Ethnically, that’s substantially where it belongs, and I suspect this shows in its structure. Bantu languages are grammatically quite complex and heavily inflected. There’s a large number of noun classes, nouns are inflected using prefixes and verbs are conjugated for subject and object. Khoisan languages are very different, although they may not be closely related to each other at all, which may reflect the extremely ancient heritage of the San. They have more consonants than any other spoken languages and it’s as if all the meaning and energy is piled into these sounds, because grammatically they’re isolating. The Bantu language Swahili, spoken well outside South Africa, has many Arabic words and inflects them as if they’re native. Had Bantu languages been a strong influence on Afrikaans, it could be expected to do similar things to the language as Swahili has done to words of Arabic origin, but it doesn’t. Most creoles, with the exception of one spoken in Canada, simplify grammar, so it’s hard to disentangle, but the isolating nature of Khoisan languages seems to me to be a possible candidate for their influence on Afrikaans, and I suspect that White Afrikaans speakers would have preferred to have thought that their language was White when in fact the influence of the San is clear in the grammatical structure.

What I don’t understand, probably because of my ignorance of South African history, is why Khoisan seems to have been so much more influential on the language than Bantu. Even Malay seems to have more sway over it. Anyone wiser than I willing to give an explanation?

Startling Semitic-Celtic Parallels And Overinterpretation

Some time ago in the 1980s I think, I made one of my many attempts to learn Gàidhlig and noticed something rather strange. I already had some knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic from when I was younger, and it suddenly struck me that the Celtic language shared some remarkable unusual features with the other two. From what I can recall, these included verb-subject-object word order, two genders – feminine and masculine – and something I can only vaguely remember about how prepositions and pronouns work. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of it. It seemed to be more than a coincidence because three always counts to my mind as more than chance allows, but it was difficult to think of a way of how it could’ve happened. I eventually settled on a rather vague conclusion that maybe Semitic language speakers had travelled north from the Maghreb into Iberia, which Q-Celtic languages are sometimes claimed to originate, and that they then influenced the ancestor of the Irish language in some way. However, this doesn’t work particularly well as it fails to explain how Welsh and Cornish also have these features. After a while, I just put it down to coincidence and my tendency to see patterns where none exist other than the ones my mind has imposed upon them.

At this point I’m going to veer off into probability to illustrate why three things in common is my threshold for statistical significance. It’s common to plump for one in twenty as the point at which something is considered significant, and scientific experiments often use this. In recent years I’ve seen rather too many dubious-looking scientific papers which seem to go for a much lower limit and I now wonder if there has been a new development in statistical theory which justifies this, or whether it’s more to do with “publish or perish”. Anyway, probabilities multiply, so if you flip a fair coin three times and it comes up heads every time the probability of that outcome is one in two times one in two times one in two. 2³ is eight, still below the point when one decides something is significant, but the probability of something happening is not always one in two. For fair dice, you’d only need to throw a six twice for it to become significant: one in thirty-six is six squared. Taking this the other way, the mean probability for three events to multiply up to one in twenty is of course the cube root of twenty, which is just over one in 2.7. However, this reasoning is faulty because we see patterns as opposed to the absence of patterns, so given the large number of other grammatical features one could pluck out of Celtic and Semitic languages, the ones that don’t fit might be ignored and the calculation then becomes extremely complicated because one then has to consider how to delineate specific grammatical features and how to count them, then work out what the chances are that two sets of languages share three grammatical features based on this and the number of possible options. For instance, with syntax the options, assuming a largely fixed word order which doesn’t always happen, are SVO, SOV, OVS, VSO, VOS and OSV, which is one in six. However, other features are quite arbitrary. There are languages out there with more than two dozen grammatical genders, for example. It’s possible to imagine a language whose every noun has a different gender.

Another pattern which definitely is meaningful which can be plucked out of Celtic languages as they are today is the fact that they and Romance languages, more specifically Italic languages, which are Romance languages plus Latin and its closest contemporary relatives, are closer to one another than they are to other branches of the Indo-European language family. Some of these features are the result of parallel evolution. For instance, all of the surviving six Celtic languages have two grammatical genders consisting of feminine and masculine, and this is also true of all Western Romance languages (though not of Romanian, which still has neuter). Besides this, other Indo-European languages tend to use an ending like “-est” to express the superlative of adjectives, but Italic and Celtic tend to use something like “-issimum” – “best” versus “bellissimo” for example. There are a number of other similarities which may be preserved ancient features lost from the other languages, features acquired because they were neighbours or features acquired in their common ancestral language. These are, though, easy to account for because Italic and Celtic just are obviously related, were spoken near each other and so on. The idea of a parallel between Celtic and Semitic is much harder to explain, which is why it might not exist at all.

Recently, I discovered that my personal will o’ the wisp is not in fact just mine. Professional linguists have noticed this too, and there are even theories about how it might have happened and a number of other features in common. VSO and inflected prepositions are just two of several parallels. I should explain that in Gàidhlig and its relatives, prepositions vary according to who they refer to, so for example “agam” means “at me” and “agat” “at thee”. The origin of these is easy to account for, that the words have simply been run together over the millennia, but few other languages do this. Arabic and Hebrew, on the other hand, do. The languages also do things with these prepositions which other languages don’t. They express possession and obligation with them. “The hair on her” – “am falt oirre” is “her hair” and “I need/want/must have a knife” is “tha bhuam sgian” – “there is from me (a) knife”. That “(a)” indicates something else they have in common: they all have a word for “the” but none for “a”. It’s unusual for a language to have a way of expressing definiteness without indefiniteness. Interestingly, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, both spoken in these isles, also had a way to say “the” but not one to say “a(n)”, and this may be a clue as to how these apparent coincidences happened. Breton, however, does have an indefinite article. Likewise, all the languages repeat the pronoun at the end of a relative clause – “the chair which I sat on it” and not “the chair (which) I sat on”. There’s also the way the word for “and” is used, or rather, a word for “and”: “agus” in Gàidhlig (there’s another word, “is”) and “wa” in Arabic (“ve” in today’s Hebrew). In English, “and” is a simple coördinating conjunction like “or” and “but”, but in the other languages it can also be used as a subordinating one. It can also mean “when” or “as”. This is also unusual. “Agus”/”ve” can also be used to mean “but” or “although”, and in fact as I understand it, the Arabic “wa” is the only option to express “but”. Besides this, there’s what’s known as the construct state genitive in English descriptions of Hebrew grammar. Arabic doesn’t say “the man’s house” but “man the house”, or “taigh an duine” in Gàidhlig – “the house man”. This is in spite of the fact that the language in question has a genitive form for the noun in question. This makes approximately eight features found in Celtic and Semitic languages but only rarely in others.

And there’s more. The surviving Celtic languages are unusual among Indo-European languages in having these features, and are in general quite aberrant compared to the others. That said, there are branches of the family which have unusual features for it, such as Armenian, which has grammar more like other languages than Indo-European in that it hangs successive suffixes off the ends of words per idea as opposed to having combined ideas in each suffix (in English we have, for example, a final S for genitive (possessive) and plural and don’t need anything extra). Even so, were it not for the known history and the fact that so much Celtic vocabulary is clearly similar to that of other European languages, nobody would guess Celtic languages were Indo-European. In fact, the very features which they share with Semitic languages are the ones which make them unique in the Indo-European family.

They are also emphatically not related to each other, or at least so distantly related that there are languages native to Kenya and Tanzania which are closer to Hebrew and Arabic and a dead language spoken in present day China which is closer to Welsh (and in fact English) than they are to each other. Semitic languages are part of a family now referred to as “Afro-Asiatic”, which also includes Tamazight, a Berber language, and Ancient Egyptian, spoken five thousand years ago and still nowhere near the speech of the Kurgans at the time which are ancestral to Celtic, Germanic and the like. There are, however, a few theories about how this has happened.

One apparently anomalous circumstance which can be seen from the New Testament is that Paul wrote a letter to the Galatians. These lived in Anatolia, the Asian portion of present-day Turkey, and they spoke a Celtic language. This language was clearly in close proximity to the Semitic lingua franca of that region at the time, Aramaic, as well as various others such as Assyrian. It’s therefore been suggested that the whole of the Celtic branch was influenced by this local connection, all the way across to Ireland in the end. To me, this seems a little far-fetched, but it is true that there’s a concentration of a particular set of genes which marks the Irish, and incidentally myself, as possible wanderers from the Indo-European ancestral land who went as far as possible at the time. This may make the so-called Celts the ultimate invaders in a way and contradicts the common mystical, matriarchal and peaceful image some people seem to have of them. This migration also forms part of another theory, that farming, having been invented in the Fertile Crescent where Semitic languages were spoken, then spread culturally across Europe to these islands and took linguistic features with it. Either of these ideas being true could be expected to imply that all Celtic languages, not just the modern survivors here and in Brittany, had these features in common.

Significantly, the speakers of Celtic languages were probably the first Indo-European speakers to arrive in Great Britain and Ireland. Prior to that, clearly there were other people living here who had their own spoken but unwritten languages. It’s possible that traces of these may survive in place names. It used to be thought that the Picts spoke a non-IE language, possibly related to Basque, but this has now been refuted. The features Irish, Welsh and the rest have in common with Hebrew and Arabic are also apparently shared with Tamazight and other languages of the Maghreb, although to me that’s hearsay – I haven’t checked them out. Consequently, one rather outré theory, is that before the Celts got here the folk of Albion and the Emerald Isle spoke a Semitic language, and Celtic was influenced by this when it got here. However, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to suppose this to be so other than the connection.

Leaving those theories aside, I would bring up the issue of linguistic universals, and particularly implicational universals. Some features are common to all spoken languages. For example, every known spoken language has a vowel like /a/ as in “father” in it, every language which distinguishes questions tonally involves changing the pitch of the voice towards the end of the sentence, and every language has at least some plural pronouns. There’s a particular set of implicational universals around SOV languages which they tend to have in common, such as being exclusively suffixing, to the extent that it used to be thought that there was a so-called “Altaic” language family including Turkish and Mongolian, and some would even include Japanese and Korean in that, but they’ve turned out not to be closely related but have sometimes grown more alike through contact, but they also have many of these implicational universals, suggesting to me some kind of possible “standard” human spoken language with those grammatical features. I would tentatively suggest, and I may well be wrong, that the features Celtic and Semitic languages share are in fact similarly implicational universals. Both of them have an unusual syntax and this may lead them both down the same path.

But there’s an extra layer to this which intrigues me. There used to be a famous Hebrew teacher who introduced the subject as “Gentlemen, this is the language God spoke” (yes, this is extremely sexist but it was a long time ago), and similarly Arabic is considered a particularly sacred language almost designed by God to write the Qur’an. Hence the features mentioned are used in two very important sacred texts, and if I’m going to go all religious and mystical on you, just maybe the Celtic and Semitic languages have a special place in spiritual practices, and this is about that. But leaving that aside, it still seems to me that the most likely explanation for the things they have in common is simply that they are a particular “type” of language, just as Japanese and Turkish are, without needing to have any genetic relationship.

They’re also both really annoying!

The issue of overinterpretation will have to be held over until tomorrow, sorry.

Neanderthal Pinhead Brains And The Sentient Internet

Stereotypically, Neanderthals tend to be presented as the classic “cave man” caricature, usually male, clubbing their female partners over the head and dragging them off by their hair, somewhat hairy themselves and of course notably unintelligent, oh, and living in caves. I’ve had a go at this stereotype and the other one about dinosaurs previously, but before I get down to things I may as well go through it briefly again.

First of all, dinosaurs are often used as a metaphor for something which is clumsy, overgrown and unable to adapt to a changing world. This really owes more to the Victorian image of dinosaurs as giant lizards than what’s known about them nowadays. Dinosaurs really got lucky, then got unlucky. The mass extinction at the start of their reign helped them take advantage of their various ecological niches, then the mass extinction at its end killed them off because many of them were very large. Many of the smaller ones survived as birds. If humans had been around at the end of the Cretaceous, we too would’ve bitten the dust.

Neanderthals are a kind of blank slate to many people onto which various things can be projected, and I may well be doing the same. Their brains were often larger than ours, but that doesn’t mean they were more intelligent. The probable cause of their brain size was to do with a bulkier body and the need for more pathways to help control and perceive that body. Whales have larger brains than we for similar reasons, although in their case that isn’t all there is to it. Nonetheless, when one considers that orang utan, gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees are all capable of sign language, and chimps have learned to speak a few words but lack the vocal apparatus to master human speech effectively, this automatically places their “IQ” above that of the severely learning disabled. Note that I’m extremely sceptical of IQ as a concept. If orang utan intelligence is sufficiently similar to human to be assessed and rate above thirty on an IQ scale, Neanderthals are bound to be at least that intelligent. It’s also thought that human short term memory has suffered at the expense of developing language, as that of chimpanzees is far better than ours. Hence when Neanderthals come into the picture, it can be assumed safely that they would also have been capable of language and perhaps actually used it. The crucial final step in physical capacity for phonation – producing speech sounds with the vocal tract – is the position of the hyoid bone in the throat, which allows attachment for the larynx, glottis and tongue, and needs to be in a particular position to enable its owner to speak. The problem is that the hyoid is perhaps unique in having no articulation with any other bone in the body, and therefore tends to get lost in fossils. Consequently Neanderthal hyoids are often missing and it took until 1989 for it to be established that they were like ours.

A couple of issues are going to come up in this post which are probably going to be considered idiosyncratic on my part. Here’s the first. Although I am aware that the FOXP2 gene is considered important in human capacity to use language, and Noam Chomsky believes in an innate capacity for language as a distinctive feature of the human species, I have issues with this as potentially speciesist and am disappointed that such a clearly politically radical figure as he would promote this view. I believe humans stumbled upon language before we had a special ability to use it. There are examples of other species being able to use spoken and signed language as language, as opposed to merely imitating it, notably Psittacus erithacus, the Afrik/can Grey Parrot, who presumably had no predisposition in their genes for using it beyond the ability to produce speech sounds and so forth. Clearly a certain kind of cognition is necessary for this to happen, along with the ability to produce the sounds physically, and once spoken language exists it’s going to be selected for compared to individuals who don’t speak, and this will lead to some kind of marker in the genes – perhaps we are better at producing or hearing a wider range of speech sounds than other species for example – but the initial moment when the first baby made a sound like “mama” whose parent then interpreted it as a reference to her, which was perhaps the beginning of language, did not in my opinion depend on very specific physical traits and could have occurred in another species.

The genomes of living humans include a few genes from the Neanderthals and it’s thought there was hybridisation tens of millennia ago in our history. To a very limited extent, we are therefore Neanderthals ourselves unless we’re Afrikan. The highest percentage of Neanderthal genes is found in East Asians and they’re usually absent from people all of whose heritage is from Afrika south of the Sahara. Neanderthals would probably have been fair-skinned and maybe also blue-eyed, and have had straight hair. I personally wonder if they had epicanthic folds, which of course have a higher incidence among East Asians but are also found in Caucasians without any Asian ancestry, and I’m guessing that those people might also have inherited that trait from Neanderthals. Recently the Neanderthal genome has been in the news for conferring greater resistance to SARS-CoV2.

Now for the reason I’m writing this today.

In recent years it has become possible to culture brain cells in Petri dishes. This isn’t the same as growing an entire human brain in a vat, but involves producing pinhead-sized agglomerations of cells. Recently, a gene linked to brain development in Neanderthals has been spliced into human cells and grown in such a dish. For many people this has a high yuck factor. The specific gene involved is NOVA1, on the long arm of chromosome 14, which is associated with various cancers but also nervous system development. There’s an indirect connection between familial dysautonomia and the NOVA1 gene which primarily involves the autonomic nervous system and insensitivity to pain and sweet tastes, among other things, but as far as I know doesn’t influence cognition, so that doesn’t necessarily give us a clue, although it’s possible I suppose that the inability to taste sweet might be related to Neanderthal diet in some way. That’s a bit of a reach. Whatever else is so, mini-brains with the archaic NOVA1 variant look rougher to the naked eye than the smoother versions which have the variant common in today’s population. The archaic version developed more quickly than the unaltered one and started to show electrical activity sooner. In write-ups of this experiment, we’re assured that these mini-brains are not conscious.

I have a major issue with that assertion.

The question of the existence of consciousness is sometimes referred to as the “hard problem”. It’s been suggested that it may even be so hard that it’s beyond the capacity of the human mind to account for it. At the same time, there’s a recent strand in philosophical thought, characterised by Daniel Dennett, which is sceptical about the very idea of consciousness as an irreducible property. I can’t take Dennett’s views here seriously, for the following reason. He has made a very good argument for the idea that dreams are not experiences but false memories present in the brain on awakening onto which the mind then projects the impression of previous events. I take this idea fairly seriously although I don’t do the same thing with it as he does. It’s one reason why I recount dreams in the present tense. However, a good counter-argument to this is that lucid dreams – dreams in which one knows one is dreaming and is able to control the dream world – aren’t experiences either. Although he does produce an argument for this, I believe that his reason for making this assertion is kind of ideological, because we practically know that lucid dreams are experiences. They might not be dreams in the same sense as non-lucid ones are, but they are experiences to my mind, and claiming they aren’t seems to be part of his attempt to shore up his view of the nature of consciousness.

Dennett is sceptical about qualia. These are things like the “sweetness” of sweetness, the “purpleness” of purple and so on. They’re what people are talking about when they say “my red could be your blue”. His doubt about their existence is based on the idea that they are not a definable concept. This to me is a silly denial of subjectivity which makes no sense in itself. Dennett’s motivation for believing that dreams are not experiences, qualia don’t exist and that even lucid dreams are not experiences is based on a more general view of psychology that consciousness is a specific faculty within the brain which may have evolved and has selective advantages. This thought leads one into seriously murky ethical waters because it seems to be a rationalisation of the idea that some other species of animal are not conscious, which is suspiciously convenient for non-vegans. It just so happens that the voiceless don’t suffer because they don’t have a voice. How very useful this is for someone who eats meat. Kind of as useful as believing Black people are not conscious would be for a racist.

My own view of consciousness, panpsychism, tends to be seen as equally silly by some people. It’s my belief that consciousness is an essential property of matter rather like magnetism is. A ferromagnet is a particular arrangement of charged particles whose domains within, say, a lump of iron, are aligned and it’s able to attract ferrous metals such as steel. There are other, similar magnets, such as rare earth magnets, which are magnetic in the same way but contain no iron at all. On a subatomic scale, magnetism is manifested by elementary particles with spin and axes which amount to tiny electrical circuits, and I have to admit that my understanding of actual, fundamental magnetism is not very good, but there are clearly non-magnetic substances too, such as granite and most blood (unless it’s infected with malaria). Even these non-magnetic substances, though, do consist of magnetic particles.

Consciousness is the same, to my mind. Everything material is conscious, but in order for that consciousness to become manifest, matter needs to be arranged in a particular way, such as a human nervous system. However, just as there are magnets which are not made of iron, so there could be sentient beings who are not made of the same stuff as we are. Objects which have nothing like sense organs or motor functions are in a sense severely disabled entities, but they’re still conscious. This is my panpsychism.

I should point out too that panpsychism is unsurprisingly quite controversial and often ridiculed in philosophical circles, although good reasons for doing so are sometimes lacking. Even so, there are other accounts of consciousness, one of which involves the idea that it’s generated by a network of “black boxes” interacting with each other, which in the case of the human brain amount to nerve cells. You don’t have to believe in panpsychism to assert that a tissue culture is conscious, and to me it’s entirely clear that the assertion that anything made of matter is not conscious is not based on any kind of evidence but a bias towards the kind of view of the mind-body problem asserted by Dennett and others.

Consequently, it definitely isn’t safe to say that these “Neanderthal” mini-brains are not conscious, or that the ones based on unaltered Homo sapiens cells are not conscious. Before I go on to talk about the internet as potentially sentient, I feel a strong urge to go off on a tangent about my experience of the Mandela Effect.

I have several more detailed posts on this issue on this blog, here, here and here for example, but in the meantime I will sum up what it is before going on. The Mandela Effect is the situation where a number of people agree on a memory which is markèdly different from the consensus or establishment version of that memory. Most of the time, this is about minor details such as spelling of brand names or the appearance of brand logos, but occasionally the discrepancy is more significant. It’s named after the impression many people had that Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s, and sometimes that this led to a revolution which overthrew apartheid in South Africa. History clearly appears to record a very different chain of events involving Nelson Mandela being released from prison in 1991 and becoming president of South Africa soon after. I think that’s it anyway. There are various unusual reasons why I take this seriously which are largely based on Humean scepticism about cause and effect and the existence of possible worlds, which means I tend to deprecate accounts which merely refer to confabulation as an explanation – the construction of false memories due to misconceptions. There is some evidence against this being true, such as the fact that when the position of landmasses on maps varies, it always does so along the direction of continental drift and never at an angle to it.

I have a few personal Mandela Effects (MEs) which are rare but shared with at least two other people, and they tend to have things in common with each other. One of these is that a science museum had a planetarium like robot which responded to heat, light and movement and was run by a minibrain grown from cultured mole nerve cells, in the mid-1970s. Two similar MEs of mine are that in the late ’70s a process was devised to measure intelligence via brain scans which was used in selective education by the DoE in England to replace the 11+, which was later exposed as unreliable and discontinued, though this was a scandal because it adversely affected the lives of many people who were children at the time. A third one was to do with some guy who designed and built a domestic robot which was able to read aloud by 1975. These are three of many, and they are conceptually connected by being about intelligent-seeming neural processes. If they happened, they would’ve required an understanding of neurology which was absent at that time, in the case of the domestic robot presumably via some kind of reverse engineering. I accept that hardly anyone else has these memories, but it’s still odd that two other people who had no strong connection with me at the time do have them. And the thing about these memories, particularly the museum robot, is that they could potentially be realised by this kind of culture of brain cells in a Petri dish.

Now for the idea that the internet is sentient.

It was once asserted that the last computer a single individual could fully understand was the BBC Model B, a microcomputer which came out in 1981. There are a couple of problems with this statement. One is, what is meant by “fully understand”? It’s certainly possible, for example, for someone to hold the network of logic gates which constitutes the BBC Micro’s 6502 microprocessor in their head at the same time as the structure on that level of the 6845 chip responsible for its graphics capabilities and the SN76489 chip responsible for its audio, and then extrapolate from that to the machine code of the system software in its interaction with the motherboard and memory mapping of these various bits of hardware, although it would take some doing for most people. However, if I did that I would have a vague understanding of how the NPN transistors work, involving electron holes and their relay-like behaviour, but to be honest my understanding of silicon doping, for example, is pretty limited. When one says that the BBC Micro can be completely understood by one person, is that supposed to include the aspects of materials science which make the production of its hardware possible, or the mechanical properties of the springs in its keyboard? What does it mean to “fully understand” something? The other problem with this assertion is that the BBC Micro, as I understand it, isn’t essentially more complex than the original IBM PC. The latter has more memory and a more complex and faster processor, and its system software is usually PC-DOS or CP/M-86 and more advanced than the BBC’s MOS 1.2 and Acorn DFS, but it can still be understood and it lacked the built-in graphics and sound hardware of the eight-bit computer which ended up on the desks of so many British secondary schools. Later on, with sound and graphic cards added, the latter including the very same 6845 as used in the BBC, it still wouldn’t’ve been as complex and would still have been comprehensible. It seems to me that the ability to comprehend these devices fully in that sense probably ended around the time Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. But whatever else is the case, the point at which any one person could be said to understand a device including both hardware and system software is now decades in the past.

Now take these two facts together. Firstly, we really don’t know what makes consciousness possible. Secondly, the internet, a network of billions of devices hardly any of which are understood to a significant extent by any one person, is extremely complex and processes information it gathers from its inputs. And yet it’s often asserted that the internet is not sentient, as if we know what causes sentience. At the same time, there are many internet mysteries such as Unfavorable Semicircle and Markovian Parallax Denigrate, which can often be tracked down to some set of human agents, but nobody has a sufficient overview to be confident that every single one of these mysteries has a direct human cause, or even that a fraction of them have.

Hence I would say that we might suppose that the internet is neither conscious nor sentient, but in fact we don’t really have sufficient evidence that it isn’t. It really has quite a lot in common with a brain, in any case we don’t know why anything is conscious, and it’s even possible that everything is. Therefore, just maybe, the internet is sentient and nobody can confidently say it isn’t.