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.

Escaping the Symbol Prison

The lossy compression algorithms of image formats like JPEG or video codecs like H.264 discards redundant information from images and also reduces the fidelity of the representation.

The lossy compression of language is different. If language rises from an internal simplified model of reality that all humans share, then it's more like a form of compression based on a shared dictionary of underlying information. For example, when an early human scratched a map on the ground with a stick, the simplistic short hand representation of the local environment could be shared with his fellows because they all had the same wire-frame representation of their local environment in their brains. It's not hard to imagine the sounds and character based languages coming from that internal comic book of reality.

Our brain and our being seem to also have a much more complex connection to reality apart from the wireframe/comic book representation. Our dreams, for example, can seem totally real--full fidelity in all the senses. Similarly, when we're just out in the world, just being, we see things with detail that can't be put into language. For us, those experiences, and that sense of the world can be unique to an individual. Perhaps that's the way all animals experience the world.

So.... what if we flip the relationship of language and try to tie it to that animal mind? Is it even possible? How would that work? I'm trying to come up with a way to do planning and analysis within a natural context.

Symbolic Reasoning as an Outgrowth of the Natural World

This blog keeps orbiting around the relationship between nature and symbolic reasoning and language in general, and formal language like math or computer software. Here's one of my older posts on this topic.

Symbolic language is an outgrowth of the natural world. It's a form of lossy compression. The word and concept "tree", for example, is a generic stand-in for all trees and is devoid of information on any particular tree in all its specifics and its relationship to its place.

Cities and civilization seem to be an attempt to simplify the landscape so the stunted representational version of nature comports with external man made reality. That is, the limited mind of man gets projected onto the natural landscape--making map lines into streets and paving over all. The riot of a natural setting gets replaced with empty voids.

The Falsehood of the Symbol

I've been elaborating a concept over the past several posts that's pretty slippery. It's quite possible that human symbolic language arises from a shared internal model of the world that's built into our minds. The model's the dictionary for a form of lossy compression, so we're able to convey a lot of information with a  very low data rate stream of symbols.

That internal model, though, isn't entirely amenable to symbolic translation, and often that internal model is quite low fidelity compared to our sensory experience of the world. All the words written on dandelions, for example, are a feeble replacement for sitting on the ground and looking at one, or eating one.

Writing or drawing, or statuary are not only a low fidelity version of reality, they're also a falsehood. They include a concept that's arguably alien, or an alien presence on earth. They bring about the notion of permanence. In a world of change and cycles, a symbol scrawled on a rock can endure. An idea can seem to separate from the man who thought it.

The man can become subservient to the idea and the word. The mind and waking experience can become subservient to the symbol and this distortion can become the primary experience.

Runes and How Language Gets in The Way

I was reading about the origin and history of the letter "K" yesterday. It's interesting to meditate on the meaning of the letters rather than words, because the letters used to have quite a lot of significance themselves. I was reading about it, because I want to put some decorative trim on my work shop roof facade and I thought I'd form it into a rune.

I have a bunch of posts about language as form of lossy compression. The gist of that is language is a low bit rate form of information transmission about a shared dictionary of concepts.

The letters themselves are raw information, at least to us today. They're a 2 dimensional encoding mechanism. Morse code is another 2D encoding mechanism. An underlying idea with letters and Morse code is that the form of the character should be sufficiently distinct from the other forms so they're easy to distinguish.

Typically, of course, letters are formed into words, and there's only a handful of words, relative to the possible combination of letters, so human beings can readily reject incorrect letters within an otherwise correct word or phrase. (aka the shared language dictionary) In fact, now that people are writing little messages all the time with crappy keyboards, only elderly people care about grammar and spelling. 

The information contained in the letters individually, apart from the shared dictionary of concepts of words and phrases, is more fundamental and in touch with realms of metaphysics because it's outside concepts that are arrived at through cultural accretion where there's an authoritative or agreed upon understanding of what a word like "cow" means.

It's something of a paradox that the letters "c" "o" "w" really don't have any culturally agreed upon concept. In an ancient era, the letters had their own meanings. There's a rune for Aurochs for example, which is the precursor of "u" (uruz), which maybe was onomatopoeic "mooooooo", and the letter "F" is the descendant of the letter that represented wealth and cattle--Fehu. 

In a very weird way, there's more knowledge and meaning present in the letter "k" than in the word "kick" and weirdly, contrary to what a grammar teacher tells you, there's more meaning in the phonetically spelled word "kik" than the word "kick".

A man who promoted the concept of phonetic spelling of English influenced the naming of some institutions in the Adirondak (phonetically spelled) Mountains. One institution is the Adirondak Loj. It really stuck me that seeing that word spelled phonetically on a sign was sort of magical. It kind of slaps your brain when you see it. There's more information present in that word "Loj" than in "Lodge". It somehow unlocks the word and concept from the culturally agreed upon meanings and is more direct.

Reduction to Formal Language Doesn't Work in Reverse

Quite a bit of science and engineering involves creating models that simplify some aspect of reality to a mathematical expression, or to a formal language model like a computer program.

That process is like a form of lossy compression. Information is discarded as the "essentials" of a natural object are modeled.

Actual nature works the opposite way, as one zooms in on any element of a "scene", there's more and more information. The bandwidth required to "read out" and so represent it in a model seems to expand. Also, any natural object is connected with every other natural object, so the state of one thing contains some portion of the state of other things. For example, the electrons in the antenna on the smartphone move in reaction to the motion of the electrons in the cell tower antenna.

The elaboration of a formal language model of nature probably can't ever recover the "original" in any fidelity.

A New Basis of Language

Many people have looked at languge as the cornerstone of civilization, and a tool of control or cultural engineering: Commies invent new sins and sin-labels on a daily basis, for example. More importantly, language represents bindings of components of the brain. Our extremely analytical/economic civilization, for example, emphasizes communication about value of things in human-trade terms rather than their place in nature.

If language is a low-bandwidth dictionary-based lossy-compression medium of thought transfer from one brain to another, then the dictionary of symbols represents a map of the brains of the interlocutors, and maybe more importantly, is an expression of how they get on in the world--how they get their toast for breakfast.

Cities made modern men and formed how they think and which parts of their brain they use.

Non-Systemic Organization

Methods of agriculture and gardening are probably built into our genetic memory. For example, the idea of making a "bed" for the plants and grouping the same kind of plant all into one place is somehow encoded in our brain and body the same way a squirrel knows to stash nuts in a tree. The reason people do that is to make the harvest less labor intensive. People tend to devise systems around a specific version of "efficiency"--usually labor efficiency.

Nature doesn't do that, obviously. If there's any single principle to cite, it'd probably be energy utilization. It seems like nature just makes use of all available energy--if there's a niche where a plant can live, it will grow. Some gardeners and farmers follow that scheme to the degree they can. It makes the plants more resistant to pests. However, even in those schemes, quite a bit of area will be left fallow compared to a natural meadow for example, so only a fraction of the sunlight will be utilized.

Nature also builds on what we'd think of as "failures". A tiny tree that only lives two seasons improves the soil. An ancient beech tree that collapses and wipes out four other trees improves the soil and makes more niches for animals to live. The apparent chaos makes more complexity and room for life in a smaller area.

The way people plan, and carry out plans is built on language. Language, as pointed out in many posts on my blog, is a form of lossy compression--really driven by the same concepts of efficiency that shape our genetic memory of gardening. A "failure" for a human is really lost time. For us, there's really no grand scheme, we rarely have a feel for the whole, and our place in it. A farmer who depended on a crop that failed, for example, would be destroyed. Failure would mean his own loss of property, or maybe even life.

An engineered system, like a farm field or a garden bed or a whole farm, tends to be worse at converting solar energy into plants or animals than nature is over the same area. Engineered systems--really most types of "systems" are based on word-consciousness. Other modes of consciousness aren't so amenable to a system, or organizing people who aren't in that same mode of thinking.

Symbols and Actual Reality

Reality arose from the word. That is, a sensible world was partitioned from formless chaos by a symbolic representation. Creation emerged from formless waters that were personified by the Egyptians as the god(s) Nun. It was spoke into existence as the creator god.

Symbols are representations of information. Information emerges from the relationship of multiple distinct things and time. The information is something that's "alive" and in the world, while symbols are dead things that are outside of time. They're like footprints of an animal left in cement. They're the record of information. They're only brought back to "life" by being replayed.

Since there are so many distinct things, there's an infinity of information everywhere in the universe. However, for any animal, the ability to perceive and record via the senses is severely limited. Living creatures all seem to use some form of filtering, and lossy compression to experience external reality. We all seem to have some built in dictionary that's a form of representation of external reality. Indeed the forms of animals and plants are geometric and constructed from underlying molecular machinery that's coded in DNA in some way that is possibly analogous to physical algorithms.

There's a built-in gap between what we perceive and what is. There are a few different schools of belief on this fundamental problem of existence. The solipsistic perspective is there's no external reality at all, and that "the world" is really an expression of our belief, or our inner world. The scientism religion belief is the inner world can be made to exactly match the external world via science and the discovery of underlying mechanisms of nature--then this world can be transplanted into a computer. My personal belief is we can hop across that gap of experience by shifting our consciousness.

In simple terms, we can shift our consciousness from the left brain to be more right brain focused, leaving the realm of language and symbolic interpretation of reality into more of a direct experience... that is, we can think with the outside world and sort of be the outside world. A concrete example can serve to unfold this concept.

Imagine a vulture soaring on thermals. In his action, the bird feels and knows the lift from the rising air coming off a south facing hillside, for example. We can have a sort of similar experience when we do some all consuming physical task, like walking across a log, or carrying a heavy, awkward load over uneven terrain. That task displaces speech based consciousness. The experience of those moments is very complete. There's no model of reality that's being consulted, rather the body and the nervous system dance with reality, or inhabit the external world.

My general feeling is that sort of experience of the external world can be superior to the toy model version of reality for many tasks--specifically for agriculture. That will be the topic of the next post.