Sunday, August 12, 2018

Cities and Simplified Nature as an Outgrowth of Lossy Compression Language

Holocene civilization is really the agriculture/city civilization. Language is often celebrated as the necessary pre-requisite for humans to create civilization. What if, instead, language is a really low bandwidth/low fidelity way to communicate ideas, and cities popped out of it as a sort of crutch, or maybe a better analogy is a set of leg braces? Rather than being a pinnacle of evolution and the height of creation, it's really a sort of evolutionary cul de sac.

Maybe our brains are capable of dealing with natural complexity and even working with natural complexity but language--as a form of dictionary based lossy compression--is not. Maybe analytical thinking is possible within a natural context without math or grammar.

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