Languages act-react in the Universe

Among the most advanced and respected new sciences, there is a new discipline called Theory of Complexity, specifically a part of that science called Theory of Organisms.

It aims to describe any system of the Universe as an organic ecosystem, made of similar cellular elements, ruled by networks of energy and information.

Imagine a robotic machine or a human organism.

We can describe both as an accumulation of cellular elements - metal atoms in the robot, carbolife cells in the human being - ruled by two systems of information and energy - electronic information and electric energy in the machine, ionic information and carbolife energy in human beings.

Both can be described as organisms.

Of those three elements of organisms, the cellular species, and the networks of energy and information, we are interested in this book in the networks of information of the species.

Those networks turn out to have systematically a hardware, a cellular support of specialized elements, and a software, a flow of information that moves through that hardware.

The software are the languages of the species.

In our example both species, the robot and the human being, have languages of information, that flow over a hardware - digital languages over silicon in the machine, visual/verbal languages over neurons in the human being.

Those languages are what common people might call the mind of those organisms.

The human mind is made of verbal and visual languages. The mind of the robot is made of digital and visual images.

Both minds exist on a hardware. In the human being, the hardware is the brain and nervous system, which store and let the information flow. in the machine the hardware is the chip and the electronic and magnetic system which let the information flow.

All this means that languages do have a material existence, a material support, which is essential to the workings of the organism.

Why languages are important? The key word is 'action -reaction '; the second Law of Newton, and one of the fundamental laws of the Universe. Languages provide an easy way for organisms to act and react in the Universe. Without languages, organisms would be blind, and could not protect themselves against harm in the hostile environment in which they exist.

action -reaction however requires speed. This is indeed the key element to understand the nature and pretended spirituality of languages. Languages are 'light', and fast material systems, that flow at great speed within the systems of organisms, carrying a lot of information in a minimal quantity of time. This allows the organism to act-react fast to the environment. Since they are light to be fast, normally men have associated languages and spirituality. Now we know those languages are material. Before we couldn't see the mechanical waves of sound that are the substance of the verbal language. Nor we could measure the speed of light which is the substance of visual languages. Now we know those speeds are not instantaneous, and those languages have a material support both within our organisms and externally when they communicate with the world.

We know also that languages are fundamental to organisms, because they allow the organism to communicate and interact with the Universe, absorbing energy and information from that Universe.

The quality of languages select species

We contend in this book that languages are in fact the main element of an organism, that determines its survival. All organisms have an organ of energy that we call body, and an organ of information that we call brain, the site of the mind, of the language. We know that the Darwinian Universe selects bodies according to their efficiency to manipulate energy. So the strongest survive. However the Universe also selects minds and systems of information, by their efficiency to manipulate information. And that selection is even more important for the survival of a species, than the selection of bodies.

The main process of selection of species is caused by the evolution of informative brains, and its linguistic minds, the hardware and software of information that rules organisms.

In turn that evolution determines the evolution of bodies, and the survival of those organisms, which have better brains and bodies together.

This fact makes languages even more 'real', more 'material', more necessary.

The evolutionary process of languages will be proved studying the evolution of species on Earth, which is primarily an evolution of minds of higher complexity, that prey over species of lesser minds. What kind of minds and languages? Light-minds, light-languages, brains able to absorb light and obtain information from that light in order to communicate in the Earth-Sun Universe. Indeed, species with better informative light-languages have always been the rules of the earth.

Plants were the first species to rule on Earth. Yet when animals developed a more complex brain, able to extract from light not only energy as plants did but also information, they became the rules of the earth, and preyed on plants. Then those animals developed to the gigantic size of dinosaurs. Yet the dinosaur despite its size did not survive to the massive reproduction of carnivorous mammals with a highly developed brain and night vision, able to act together as hunting herds, against eggs and small dinosaurs, without parental care.

Forget the rock from the skies. Biologists not physicists are the specialists in life on Earth. They have always affirmed that mammals caused the extinction of dinosaurs. All facts back them. Within one hundred thousand years of the arrival of the first mammals, the last dinosaur died. Only those dinosaurs who escaped into the air, and avoided the ferocious ground mammals - the birds - survived.

The case is fundamental to understand the selective process caused by languages:

We call it the paradox of Goliath: Goliath, the dinosaur, the big computer, are eliminated by David, the mammal, the chip, which is smaller yet it is faster acting-reacting in the Universe, because it has a faster language. So the paradox is that the Universe selects brains which are smaller, and yet have faster languages. This happens because in a small space, a language can take decisions faster. The chip is faster, calculates faster, because electrons take less time to move through a chip than through a vacuum tube. So chips have survived in the economic ecosystem.

The Paradox of Goliath is the key to understand the selection of languages: those languages who carry more information in less time survive. Those species who use languages that carry more information in less time survive. So the mammal survived. The chip survived. The sling of David, which was faster, than the sword of Goliath survived. The small ships of the English pirates, faster than the Spanish Galleons survived.

We can follow further that evolution of languages after the mammal to prove our point.

Languages create forms

After the mammal it came the human being, that developed a complex vision of space, his visual and mathematical languages of perception, and a complex vision of time, his verbal understanding of the passing of time. Again those languages gave him more information and a faster capacity to act-react to the environment. So man became top predator.

To that aim he brought about a second fundamental quality of languages.

The capacity that information has to create 'forms'.

Indeed, the second element that defines the importance of informative networks and their software, languages, is the capacity that languages have as a software flow, to imprint different substances.

Languages, information, is able to jump from substance to substance and create new forms. Here is where the essence of the 'spirituality' of languages become material. A language carries information, yet in-form-ation is basically form. If we talk of a primary substance in he Universe, an amorphous substance that we might call energy, made of quantic elements, we can talk of many energies. Gravitational energy made of gravitons, electromagnetic energy made of photons, atomic energy made of atoms, electronic energy made of electrons, water energy made of molecules, a human energy, made of a mass of humans. All those energies are basically an amorphous organism made of quasi-infinite forms, undifferentiated.

Who is going to give that mass a form, an organic structure, able to have direction, to move with a purpose, to have a will, to act-react in the Universe?

The language. Those flows of information which are smaller, and move faster, and go through the mass relocating the cells of the mass till creating a 'network of information', a network of form, that shapes the mass with a purpose.

Languages of information, languages of form, in this manner can be applied to a given substance and mold the substance with a purpose. And species with a lot of language, a lot of information can use their language to mold the external universe to the image and resemblance of that information. In this manner they can expand their 'energy-force', by molding external energies to its image and resemblance, and use that external energy to its advantage.

Such is the essence of the creative process of languages, by which the form of a language reproduce externally.

There are many of those linguistic processes of reproduction. Genetic information stored in DNA cells reproduces by attaching certain molecules to the DNA in the same form that the DNA has, reproducing the DNA. Factories reproduce machines by enlarging a software form, a plane of a machine, and using its bi-dimensional form to create a 3-dimensional form called a machine. In this manner a software form, an informative language, of lesser size, and faster speed of informative processing, becomes a blow up species, with bigger size, more energy, that imitates the form of the language.

This second quality of languages, of information - to reproduce itself - was fundamental to the expansion and triumph of the mammal with more information, the human being.

It meant that men shaped masses of energy into form through the use of our languages, verbal and visual languages.

What kind of forms we created with those languages?

Two kind of forms.

Verbal languages were the substance humans used to shape with masses of human beings, organisms structured to function and act-react in the Universe. Those organisms made of human cells ruled by verbal networks, were called 'human societies'.

On the other hand visual languages, were able to create a simple resume of the forms of the Universe, called geometry, which basically reduces all forms of the Universe to two essential forms, the cycle of information and the line of energy, combined into the wave.

Men then imprinted cycles of information and lines of energy into external substances, such as stones, wood, and metal, creating instruments. Some of those instruments called weapons, made with lines of energy imprinted in hard substances, became extremely powerful, and allowed the human mammal to kill all other species on Earth. First the javelin then the bow, finally the sword, made of man, thanks to the creative capacity of languages, to flow over other substances, and form reality, the top predator on Earth.

Through the mathematical design of machine forms with the simple geometry of the cycle and the line, man invented an entire new kind of species, machines, which gave him total power on Earth.

This was the beginning of a new age for man, the age of technology, and the age of a new language, the language of geometry, of mathematics.

Languages had again selected a species. In fact, it seems that Europeans today are descendants in a 90% of their population from the bow men that arrived from Africa in the ±20.000 before Christ.

How shall we call this new species of man, that uses languages imprinted externally over new substances, and controls the Universe in this manner?

I use a word: the animetal, or the Homo Mathematicus, to distinguish him from the Homo Sapiens, or Homo Verbalis, that came first, and used the word to organize and form human beings into substances. The animetal came latter and using mathematics and constructing machines in space with mathematical designs have come to dominate the Homo Verbalis.

Women who are better with words, became with the growing power of the Homo Mathematicus, dominated by males who are better using spatial forms, and created most of the weapons of our society. For a while in History there was actually a balance between the two languages of mankind, and societies ruled by verbal languages [religious societies], were as powerful as societies ruled by digital languages [weapons, monetary flows of information and simple machines].

This period of balance however ends around 1600, when the evolution of mathematical languages reaches a new discontinuum. It is the age of the scientific method, that invents with the language of mathematics a series of new machines that break the balance between verbal societies and mathematical societies. Mathematical machines based in geometrical cycles of information and lines of energy, able to transform in this manner information into energy and vice versa, start to develop at an amazing rate thanks to the press, and the clock, and the vapor machine, and the scientific method of mathematical design. Such method creates an entire new range of new linguistic species: machines designed with mathematical tools, and monetary forms, that act as a social language among human beings.

Again the ecosystem of the Earth changes, and those humans who better understand the language of mathematics, survive and eliminate rival cultures. Northern Europeans are at the Head of this new linguistic wave. They conquer the world and reform it to the image and resemblance of their culture.

However in the XX century, they discover information machines, and design with mathematics, machines and weapons of so much power, that even those human beings, become increasingly obsolete to their machines. Today computers have become predominant, even to some extent over its creators, human beings.

We live indeed in the digital age, and those who do not understand the mathematical language, are brutalized by the system. The language imposes the species who better speak the language [information machines]. So men are discharged and destroyed by the system, as women were brutalized by men with weapons, and Neanderthals were brutalized by humans who spoke, and dinosaurs were extinguished by rats who saw in the night, and moved faster, and attacked in herds.

The evolution of languages is thus fundamental to understand the processes of creation and extinction on Earth, before and during history, in the past, in the present and in the future.

The vitality of languages; the ages of languages.

We conclude that languages are vital species, as bodies are. They are merely lighter, faster, and as a software form, can jump from object to object, becoming imprinted in other species.

How can we prove that vitality of languages?

Merely studying those languages as vital species, and observing on them the same qualities of vital species.

Languages can reproduce, even faster than bodies do.

Languages require energy and absorb energy to form themselves as vital species do. You need electricity to create electronics, light to create images, sound energy to create words. Languages need less energy than bodies yet they do need energy.

Languages of course process information as living beings do, even in higher measure.

Finally and this is the key prove of the vitality of languages, languages follow the common pattern of the existence of species. They are born, reproduce, evolve, grow, mature, and then go through an age of decadence and die away.

Languages do have an existence which is vital, not spiritual, and can be described with vital terms. Among those vital terms, the most important is the concept of age that explains the creation and extinction of vital beings, including languages. A language as a body goes through an existence in which we can distinguish 3 ages: a young age in which the language is invented and evolved, a mature age, in which the language and the species who speak the language dominate a certain territory, and a third age in which the language becomes extinguished by a new language and species who speak that new language.

Those ages correspond to the youth, reproductive maturity, and third age of a body.

So in this book we will study not only the evolution of languages on Earth, but also when we arrive to the age of history, the evolution of human languages, verbal and visual languages, and their ages, in the human societies those languages have 'formed'.

Indeed, languages, we say, are the software that runs over an energy hardware, which in history have been human masses, modeled by verbal languages and visual arts, and objects modeled by mathematical languages.

Those 2 are the languages that seem to have dominated history.

It follows that the masses of humans that we call civilizations, and the objects that we call machines, have followed the 3 ages of formal languages, and gone through a youth, maturity and extinction, as the languages that formed them lived and died.

The verbal languages of man, that controlled through laws and religious ethics, human masses, that build entire civilizations based on verbal mandates, have lived and died.

So have done their civilizations. The last to die was communism based in the verbal languages of Marx..

The digital languages of mathematics that controlled through money and machines designed through geometrical forms, entire civilizations based in trade and weapons, have lived and died. The last to die was the European civilization based in gunpowder weapons, extinct by the arrival of new 'digital species' of weapons, atomic bombs.

We can say that verbal thought is the software of civilizations based in a hardware that understands verbal thought, the human being, called the believer, the citizen.

While mathematics is the software-language, of a kind of civilizations that we shall call a metal-civilizations. Mathematics allows to design machines of metal - first weapons, today scientific machines - and financial systems of information based in metal-money [copper, gold, silver, today electronic money in the mind of computers]. Those metal-civilizations also live and die, when new machines and forms of money substitute them.

Thus we can consider that Social organism of History use two languages, and two dominant species that handle better those languages: digital languages, and metal species such as machines and money; and verbal languages, and human beings, that believe on them.

If we now take the simile of the Organism and explain Historic organisms, civilizations and nations, economic systems, and cultures, with that simile, we could say that there are two kind of organisms on History:

- Cultural organisms in which human beings are cells, of a collective verbal mind of laws and ethics mandates, the nervous system of information of those cells. So there is the body of Islam, the body of Christianism, made of human cells, of believers, which are the 'temple of the language', of the word of god...

Those civilizations live and die, as their languages, and ideologies go through 3 ages, of youth, reproductive expansion, and cultural decadence of the ideology and language.

- Economic organisms in which human beings are secondary to metal machines, company-mothers of those machines, money and weapons, shaped by digital languages. In those civilizations the 'social cells' are 'animetals', men associated to weapons, machines and money, which rule with them the society through monetary values [prices/wages/costs], through violence [weapons, warriors], or through digital knowledge [machines, scientists].

Again those civilizations live and die according to the ages of their icon machine. So there was for example the Greek-Roman civilization based in iron swords, erased by the hordes of cavalry warriors that destroyed the legions.

The end of verbal and artistic cultures.

Further on when we analyze the life and death of verbal and mathematical civilizations based in human masses, and machines, we observe that in the past centuries the first kind of social organisms, based in verbal languages, and other 'artistic forms' [visual arts that reinforce the power of verbal castes, with paintings, buildings and temples], have been substituted by social organisms based in monetary languages, and scientific, mathematical knowledge, and the machines money reproduces and science evolves.

So we have to conclude that in the process of evolution of the Earth, from the plant to the animal that perceives light information, to the man that perceives and stores temporal information with words, there is a new stair, the digital age of mathematical languages, and information machines such as computers, or robots that use digital languages to communicate.

This has caused a general third age for all cultures based in words. We call that age the 'baroque age of human societies', since those societies are based in human beings, human values, verbal values. Now they are submissive to digital societies based in machines of information and the peculiar values of money. To deny this is to deny modern history.

Thus at the end of the book we study that 'third age for the human species and his languages, his visual and verbal arts, an age of extinction and substitution of human languages by digital languages, and human workers/soldiers/citizens, by machines. Such are the fact that this book studies in detail, through the analysis of the linguistic species of the Earth, and the verbal/visual cultures and civilizations of history, extinguished rhythmically by 'digital machines', weapons constructed with geometric forms... A process of extinction that unfortunately today seems to accelerate as new digital machines dominate our information, and energy to a degree never witnessed before in any civilization.Yet language evolved fast, and men increased social and temporal awareness, beyond the evidence of the eye thanks to the first words. The Paleolithic men was left behind. The Neolithic arrived.

The creation of verbal languages increased social and temporal understanding: each seemingly stable form of space received a name, and each seemingly moving cycle of form [Time cycle] received a verb. Such simple syntax undoubtedly allowed perception of reality far beyond previous musical languages. Now all reality could be classified according to the two universal parameters: cycles of temporal information [verbs] and forms of spatial reality [names]. Now the mind of man, had a temporal mirror to represent Universal information perceived by the light-eye of spatial nature. Those events were memorized by neuronal networks, and remembered when they happened again. So the individual knew what was going to happen, since he had discovered the absolute law of reality: Things happen in the same manner, since cycles of time guided by bio-logic causality, are as stable as forms in space.

If you see a cycle of time happening many times it will happen again. If you heat water many times and boils it will boil again. A cause and its effect is part of the same event, and they will happen. proteins. An image is a quantic soup of photons (see "Theory of Time"), tied by your eye. In all forms of space, there are ties of causality as in all events of time. They are merely very close together. So causality in time is as certain as the fact that your leg and arm are part of the same organism, caused by your nervous system.

With that realization that now we have lost with the arrival of the Neopaleolithic, the Logic man appeared, and the age of maturity of verbal thought arrived. Men became the Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

 

Indeed, in the same manner that a cat looks constantly like a cat, water under fire constantly becomes steam. Temporal events are as real as spatial events.

If you make a top predator robot, it will kill you, because top predator species kill.

This is as certain as the fact that you are the same every time you look yourself into a mirror.

This is what the Californian man has forgotten as he goes back to the Neo-Paleolithic.

This is what the Neolithic men learnt. It was the beginning of "Science", of knowledge of the cycles of reality, of the constant repetition of facts in reality, that we call memory.

 

 

Evolution through languages: Social art.

 

So it is clear that languages shape the top forms and cycles of the pyramid of human behavior. They are also responsible for the existence of man as a social organism, driven by the '4th arrow of organicism', social evolution. Since we man evolve from our individual, primitive cellular state, into complex social organisms, by sharing visual information (art) and verbal information (laws, ethic religions, languages) that create our collective mind as members of a nation or civilization. So Human languages have a second fundamental function in man: to allow our social evolution in complex organisms of multiple human cells.

We are social through our languages of evolution, functions of the brain/eye/word system, which are  the higher, independent plane of existence that perceives independently of our body the space-time Universe.

In that sense societies are never racial but cultural, gatherings of linguistic minds that agree on certain existential mind beatings, certain actions of the mind on the external universe, and other men (artistic creation, ethics, etc.)

So we could say that history of man as man, is history of his eye-wor[l]d; and by defining the eye-wor[l]d and the way it interacts with the Universe we will define man.

 Hence we cannot base in physiology and biology but in history, art, and language, the analysis of man as a social being, that perceives space and time in its higher pane of existence.

The evolution of verbal art and visual art is in that sense, parallel to the evolution of the social human mind.

This means, we have an interesting tool to study scientifically the evolution of the human mind: the remains of art through history.

They show our minds as a species. How our mind has perceived time and space, and processed that information, since the age of the caves, till the age of internet.

 

The mind of social man is indeed verbal, temporal. It follows that all healthy cultures should try to improve  the verbal, ethical, legal and literary perception of man.

Men learnt with words to work with other men. So societies were born, beyond the simple level of herds of genetic nature. Social evolution started.

 

The jump from man to society: the networks of historic civilizations.

 

The key word is 'social network'. They are the essence of life organisms. You need a herd of cells belonging to the same species, DNA-cells, stars, atoms, molecules or human beings. If we see them together we call it a body, if we see them loose, we call it a wave, or society, but it is the same thing. Those herds will create networks of information and hunt together as a group, stronger than the individual preys. Those preys then are shared by the herd, which builds a network of energy to give each cell a part of the capture.  So the individuals die away, and the social herds survive. Finally the tightest herds, become bodies, creating a new being, that no longer feels as a herd but as a macro-individual. And the process starts again. So quarks gathered into Nucleons, nucleons into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into cells, cells into bodies, and bodies into ecosystems, and societies. A nation is one of such organisms. Verbal and visual information shape its brains, and we humans are its cells. If you extend that concept to the entire planet, 'Gaia', as biologists call it,  then according to that definition, we are the cells of Gaia?.

Each animal, each plant is a cell of the living planet.

Imagine Gaia's cells: herds, roaming on the savanna, forests, banks of fish on the seas of Gaia. Her networks of energy and information are the rivers and seas, the arteries of Gaia, around which her cells live. The atmosphere are her lungs. The mechanical sounds, chemical smells and light-images those cells use to perceive, to inform themselves, are Gaia's networks of information.

If we divide Gaia, in different human ecosystems, divided by natural frontiers, we can talk of a series of small social organisms, nations and civilizations.

In that sense we can define a Macrocosmic human Organism as a Social Ecosystem composed of human beings, carbolife energy, and verbal and visual networks of information based in the human mind [visual arts, and verbal thought, religions, laws, and literature]:

Such ecosystems are like 'loose organisms' where around water-energy veins, 'cells' of human life live and survive, centered in their homes as DNA molecules survive in the home-cells of a body.

To do so they need to create  a natural environment, in which human food [carbolife food] can be collected, where every cell has basic human property [homes, home products, clothing]; where the networks of social information based in verbal thought [laws, ethics], can run all cells and solve colliding interests. Where a collective brain [government] solves those social problems, and encourages a healthy social body, promoting human goods, organizing the 'social movements of the cell', to that aim, and promoting collective goods [health-care, education, verbal learning, arts].

All those conditions create a healthy organism of history as the create a healthy individual organism:

Words are therefore the 'informative networks' that organizes communities of human beings, gathered around 'water veins', into the first social organisms of mankind, the river civilizations.

 

The corruption of social gods: The parable of Genesis: the tree of metal-technology.

 

 

So simple to understand, and yet today so little people perceives the organism of God, of social history, that as Nietzsche put it, 'is dying, because men have killed it'. Scientists, and weapon designers we might say have killed God, the organism of social History, despite earlier warnings by the first prophets=historians of the future, who said 'do not eat of the tree of science, of his good [machines] and evil weapons, because they day you do, your species will die'... So the myth goes, when Adam the first scientist discovered metal, God condemned him to work as a smith [Islamic account of the original sin], and ever since 'Adam the Smith' and his sons like Cain, also a Smith, or Adam Smith the founder of economics, have evolved metal and killed with weapons the beauty of the Genesian paradise of life.

 

The Genesis told us the parable of the 'original sin of man'. It explained, how mankind had ruined the paradise of carbolife, because humans were too arrogant, and wanted to be superior to all creatures of paradise. So they discovered new species, technological species, metal species, symbolized by the 'tree of science'. Yet those metal-species were not all good. There were many rotten apples, many bad fruits, in that tree. Fruits that will cause the extinction of mankind. Obviously the legend was talking about weapons. Since what other species of the tree of science can extinguish mankind? The parable of the tree of science was a warning. In the XX century weapons of all kind, made of steel, killed around a hundred million human beings. They are basically the last stages of evolution, of those first 'machines of metal' which were the bronze chariots that destroyed Ur, the civilization that invented writing, 5000 years ago. It was then, when according to the legend, a man, probably a writer, from the temple of Ur, left the city, with his family and moved up the Euphrates. His name was Abraham, and either he wrote or took with him a book, the oldest book preserved by mankind, called 'Genesis'. man, that was leaving behind a city destroyed by hordes of bronze charioteers. He understood that metal and man were different species. Different species killed each other, even if they might be symbiotic for a while. He was an evolutionist, 4000 years before Darwin came with the same concept.

 

God=The Laws of Evolution  said to Man:

'Do not eat of the tree of science=technology,

of its good and bad fruits=weapons,

because the day you do=evolve them

 certainly you will die=become extinct'

 

 Genesis, Bible. Biological translation on Italic text

 

 

The intelligence of Genesis surprises us. How it describes the paradise of carbolife, how it understands that man is the top predator of that ecosystem, and as such it should take care of it. How it understands the sin of arrogance of man, his incapacity to keep his top predator position in that ecosystem, destroying it, worshipping a new species, the species of metal... It is without doubt the last work of the Verbal culture of the Neolithic, the masterpiece of the Neolithic baroque, as the images of Altamira and its hunters are the masterpieces of the Paleolithic baroque.

Works that foresee the destruction of a culture, its energy and information, and the birth of a new one

We live indeed in the human baroque, the last age of human languages. To understand why we have to understand the biological meaning of the wor(l)d, the human language.