The Symbolic Species
Discusses the evolution of language from the viewpoint of symbolic reference as opposed to the conventional grammar-based theories.
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8recommend
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2007–2025years
100% recommend
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What Hacker News says
- The technology of language is designed to fool the receiver. That's its primary goal. Read any substantial text on language post western functional linguistics like Deacon's The Symbolic Species. In his view "language is a virus or a parasite"
Once language became a strategy of cybernetic and then cog-sci regimes (which is what all computer science is modeled from), the basic principle of control-deception in language became electronic through its perceptions of socialization, which comp sci totally mistakes as information (see above) and then control, accelerated and now automated. The entire point of computer science operating socialization is completely off the rails mindblowingly simple-minded and damaging to us. Algorithms a/b tested to succeed are in essence, suicidal to the survival of our species. We're not optimized to horizontalize communication of this type: arbitrary metaphors and symbols. Language wasn't built for speed, horizontalization or decentralization.
Now read the above again. To call Donna Haraway the great theorist/historian of cyborg studies and the development of science into cog science pseudo in any way reveals you have never grasped anything deep and resonant about human computer interaction.
- Anyone assuming social media is progress rather than regressive should be reading Deacon’s The Symbolic Species esp the first chapter. Any use of language as communication or conflates them simply ensures social media is maladaptive. Words do not communicate, people do, with breath eyes voice pauses blinks. These are social, not text and images and discontinuous videos.
- The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon--specifically its containment heirarchy framed logic. Made much more explicit in his second text, Incomplete Nature.
- "The Symbolic Species" by Terrence W. Deacon might interest you.
- I remember part of this book called "The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain", and the author got so angry when layman compared birdsong to speech. It was a very interesting book though.
- My favorite theory of the origin of language: http://www.amazon.com/The-Symbolic-Species-Co-evolution-Lang.... It unfolds a bit like a murder mystery, so I won't spoil the ending for you. If the middle section seems a bit of a slog -- persevere!
