Emergence of the Rank-5 society

The evolution of cognition by William Benzon and David Hays is an endlessly fascinating read. I get the same sort of inspired buzz as when watching the Matrix and probably for the same reasons.

Their basic proposal is that human societies can be classified according to different ranks representing different modes of thought as we edge towards more complex societies. As an overview, they explain that Rank 1 is associated with the invention of language, Rank 2 with the invention of writing, Rank 3 with the invention of calculation, and Rank 4 with the invention of computation. Each stage of that procession, they explain, is dominated by a certain way of seeing the world that adds something new and valuable to our collective understanding in the previous stages. It has as much to say in sociology as it does in the science of computation.

I take away a lot of new ideas and questions in this piece. One curious absence in the entire article is a direct mention of a Rank-5 society. What would that entail? What would its hallmark invention be? I come to the conclusion that it's a society that through the medium of machine language has delegated the process of algorithm creation to digital agents, through the process of universal induction and by a mechanism of conscious adaptive system design.

In such an age, I gather that beyond our need to "control" systems, as now, the new way of seeing the world will recognize that a means to balance is paramount in all lasting systems. The notion of "control" thus will evolve to a point where we accept a hands-off approach by creating a good system to begin with that suits our needs, a system that no longer requires our direct involvement because its embedded balance keeps it dependable. Self-managing systems will become the norm, breeding a whole new way of seeing the world and our place in it. The beginning of this age then will be announced by the emergence of AI.

What if the problem is traditional academia?

Memiyawanzi raises an issue in Imposter syndrome about perfectionism run amok among linguistics students (and students by and large). I noticed that the focus is on the individual's internal psychology but I have an even broader perspective on this.


Individual quirks and psychoses

My life experience has led me to believe that many students who seem to naturally gravitate to scholarly pursuits have a common personality type. They tend to be detail-oriented for one and this can lead to this beautiful skill being turned inward on themselves for less constructive purposes (ie. perfectionism, self-doubt, anxiety, depression, etc.). Detail-oriented people, I believe, are precisely the kinds of people that will direct their psychic energy inward rather than outward, unlike the stereotypical jock who will instead gravitate towards physical pursuits to work off those same internal energies. If this inward reflection is used in a healthy way, one can properly evaluate one's weaknesses and adapt. If not, a student can be swamped by her own thought processes. All introspective, detail-oriented people need to learn to manage this hidden battle within themselves to stay on top.

However, we should also consider how environment must also play a part in a student's mental health. If an environment is unreasonable, we all know that it can contribute to an unhealthy mental state in an otherwise healthy individual. Family abuse, gang intimidation, drug abuse, etc. are the typical things we hear about as toxic environments for many children, teens and even adults. Yet what if traditional academia itself is adding to deleterious feelings of inadequacy in hopeful students?


University as a "place of learning"? Are you sure?

We're all led to believe that the university is a "place of learning" but we should question that notion. The university is in reality a "place of gambling" where students bet with their hard-earned money for a mere shot at the workforce and a future career. The wonky global economy only makes the game more exciting for career thrill-seekers. It goes without saying that rich and incompetent people can afford to gamble multiple times until a pay-off while competent poor people have little room for error. University is a business, pure and simple. Intellectuality comes second to money.

If university were really a place of learning rather than the heavily corporatized institution it is, it would be more in line with a rationalist Socratic ideal where strict roles such as "student" and "teacher" are regarded as illegitimate. The reasoning for this is simple. If knowledge as a whole is infinite and all humans are finite beings, then all of us must be ignorant one way or another. If we're all ignorant, we all can stand to learn something and then that means we're all students. Yet since we all know *something*, we're also all teachers automatically.

So when we say "teacher", we're really saying that society arbitrarily recognizes someone as "more knowledgeable" than "students". The meaning of "teacher" has been perverted into a kind of paid career while the student is an indentured servant beholden by peonage to the system. When we say "specialist", we're really saying that society arbitrarily recognizes someone as "more knowledgeable" than non-specialists and this effectively stops "non-specialists" from questioning them out of threat of shame or ridicule. There's no empirical way to measure how much one is a "teacher" or "specialist" because even the boundaries of any particular "subject" or "branch of study" are arbitrarily defined. Simply put, universities avoid this socratic ideal of equality, critical thinking and individuality because they are in bed with CEOs who would much prefer in its stead inequality, yes-man thinking and conformism.

To be clear, a real student questions others with reason, thinks for herself, investigates the truth no matter how inconvenient, stands up to stupidity and holds her own but none of this is conducive to corporate "team-playing". Learning is and must be a solitary pursuit.

From that angle then, is it any wonder that even a well-meaning, normally adjusted student might feel mentally unhealthy? The university has turned into a kind of ideological war zone meant to separate the true scholars from the status-hungry. The status-hungry win in this system.


On a side note...

Take in UCLA's Campus casts wider safety net for depressed students. This quote is a mixed grab bag of good and grim:

"'Fortunately, at UCLA we have a lower suicide rate than other campuses, and overall we have a higher rate of students who are already being counseled at CAPS,' said Susan Quillan, chief of clinical services at Ashe, who oversaw UCLA’s participation in the partnership."

Oh good, they have a lower suicide rate. We can sleep well at night then. Keep in mind that corporations have made depression into a disturbingly profitable industry (ie. pharmaceuticals) while simultaneously causing much of the woe by creating a head-trip system that runs counter to sense. Irony much?

New atheists and old debates

I've just read the June 2007 article The New Atheists at the Nation by Ronald Aronson reflecting on the rise of atheism, particularly in published literature, in America during the height of the Bush regime. "Atheism" as we're exploring it here is in a broader sense of a "lack of belief in or devotion to invisible cartoon characters called 'gods'". During that period of time, as we all recall, religion was pushed on us like crack cocaine as the economy was coincidently dismantling itself brick by brick, evolving into the exciting roller coaster of red it is today. (Notice how I've cleverly employed a reflexive mood to avoid speaking of any hypothetical agents that may or may not have been treasonously involved in this transitive but possibly non-agentive act of "dismantling".)

Back to atheism, one question implied is to what end should atheism be expected to supply us with "hope" in our daily lives? Aronson reasons:

"Living without God means turning toward something. To flourish we need coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life's vital questions."

But flourish by what definition and by who's standards? A rationalist may recognize in this subtle statement the attempt to politicize mere truth here. That is, the simple truth that any argument that unnecessarily invokes hypotheses about the existence of an invisible, unmeasurable being to explain the unknown is by any rational definition invalid. We don't need anything. We flourish just fine by logical means and it's the irrational that suffer immensely. Rather it remains Religion's onus to explain why it's had the right all this time to manipulate reason away from tried-and-true Logic to give us all the illusion of an answer to life's vital questions. Why must atheism be expected to attain an ideal that Religion has itself failed to reach? More manipulation.

Additionally why must we, in a world absent of benevolent sprites, "turn" to anything other than Logic (and thus to atheism as a result of that Logic)? What other mode of thought is as functionally complete? What kind of competent adult prioritizes invisible beings over the measurable, the unknown before the known? What does that implicit set of priorities say about such individual's psychological and cognitive state and why should we "respect" their banter by silencing our challenges? If organized religions (ie. cults) manage to still hold on, I'm bold enough to argue that it's precisely because mental illness too persists.

Another observation of his catches my eye: "In recent polls, far more respondents have declared themselves willing to vote for a woman or African-American for President than for an atheist--atheists are more unpopular than gays." As a gay atheist, I sadly must concur, so I guess that means I'm doubly maligned. Triply so if you count being constantly outspoken against nonsense. (Nobody likes a loud mouth, they say.) To prove that point, ignorant hysteria has once again hit the fan recently, this time over transgender Chaz Bono's involvement in Dancing with the Stars. According to some lunatics, her on-air trysts may somehow cause a transsexual apocalypse, kind of like a Borg collective but with rainbow flair perhaps.

The sense of true compassion, the purposeful attempt to understand another person's perspective within reason, has been lost as religious leaders either condemn others with outright loathing or confront them with insincere politesse drenched in disrespect and willful stupidity. This just leads back to how it's ironically organized religion that's failing to offer a life-affirming purpose to individual existence. It's this continued apathy of the religious, their self-contradictions and their increasingly nihilist undertones that are sure to eventually unseat Religion's common allure, even without the help of outspoken atheists.

The evolution of empathy

There's a great talk here available online at the Centre for Inquiry website that I just have to share with everyone called Evolution of empathy. The speech is very insightful and spoken in plain language. It gives a lot to think about on different societal attitudes towards moral behaviour, behavioural tendencies in social populations, and what direction we're all headed in. (No, it's not necessarily completely doom and gloom at all.) It personally gave me a few positive insights to reflect on.

The Pompeiian diet of the poor

When reading the article Pompeii skeletons reveal secrets of Roman family life on the BBC website and the part about the diet of the poor, we're told that the diet may not have been so impoverished as one might assume. This reminds me a lot of the theory of the original affluent society.

Despite some criticisms against the idea of a relatively more leisurely ancient lifestyle in comparison to our hectic modern environment, one can hardly pretend that the excessive modern urbanization that we now have hasn't led to a large segment of our population being all too dependent on other entities to handle food gathering and production, sometimes to the point of crippling dependence. Afterall, how many of us city-folk pick our own berries, fish our own trout or grow our own radishes? Most have lost this ancient knowledge.

We most often go to grocery stores and buy the items we need. Yet we can't do this without first earning monetary tokens from someone else. We therefore struggle in dead-end, highly demanding, even mentally or physically toxic jobs just to acquire the means to obtain food and shelter. Our complete inter-reliance on apathetic strangers through a multi-layered economic system for even the most basic necessities is somewhat unique to modernity. And it's precisely our lack of personal autonomy in so many ways that makes us, in a manner of speaking, "less wealthy" than even our Roman antecedents.

We shouldn't feign too much shock at the notion that the poor in ancient times may have had a healthier diet than what we're capable of or are willing to supply our most vulnerable population despite all our showy technology and superficial symbols.

Indo-Aegean kinship terms

Coincidental to the previously mentioned *pR-reduction in Etruscan, I've long noticed that if the Etruscan word for 'brother' which is generally accepted to be ruva (nb. inscription TLE 232) were instead *pruva, it could relate nicely to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) equivalent *bʰráh₂ter-. Of course it's ample speculation but I'd like to explore a possible set of Indo-Aegean kinship terms because, for anyone really knows, there may be some gold in that river of speculation.

Remember that I reason that the Indo-European language family is quite distinct from the Aegean language family but that nonetheless an ultimate pre-Neolithic relationship exists between them. I estimate that these two families would have diverged at most 9000 years ago. To reconstruct Proto-Indo-Aegean accurately, we need to first to reconstruct pre-stages of both Indo-European and Aegean first. This is an unending series of refinements, to be sure.


Reconstructing Pre-Indo-European kinship terms

Internal reconstruction shows that PIE's kinship terms are mostly unanalysable save for their oft-employed kinship suffix *-h₂ter-. I sense that these kinship terms are largely preserved from prehistoric times but that their shared characteristic suffix has been added quite recently in PIE's development by false segmentation and subsequent analogy from the only truly analyzable term in this set, *ph₂tér- 'father; provider' (< *peh₂- 'to feed, provide' plus actor suffix *-tér-). If *ph₂tér- were a like replacement for a reduplicated nursery term, *pápa-, pre-existing in the language then *máh₂ter- could easily have been coined by analogy to replace earlier *máma-. In turn, our analysis of PIE *bʰráh₂ter- and *dʰugh₂ter- suggest that the inherited stems from the earliest recoverable period are *bʰrah₂- and *dʰug-. We should consider that they once existed in isolation without the suffix.

Thus, I choose to reconstruct earlier Mid Indo-European nominative case forms *baráhʷa-sa and *déug̰a-sa since Syncope operates in the earliest part of the Late IE period, resulting in *brāu-z and *deug̰-z . Note that at this stage, the feminine is indistinguishable from the masculine since both are just subsets of a common animate gender. Then we can see how original *brau- plus kinship suffix *-xter- could be mashed together as *brá-xter-, shaped in both vocalism and accent position by analogy with 'mother', while *deug̰- adopts the zerograde and accent placement seen in 'father' to result in *dug̰-xtér- (and then due to regressive spread of uvularity from *x: *duɢ-xtér-).

Brother to mother as daughter to father. They say blood is thicker than water afterall, so why not also their associated labels?


Reconstructing Aegean kinship terms

On to the Aegean family, Etruscan ruva 'brother' and seχ 'daughter' might temptingly be derived from Proto-Cyprian *pruwa and *sikʰ with little hyperbole, in turn from Aegean *parówa 'brother' and *síka 'daughter'. The aforementioned Etrusco-Rhaetic *pR-reduction would take care of the missing *p in the first term and Cyprian Syncope follows my currently prescribed rules. The avoidance of word-final vowel loss in *parówa is understandable when compared with the expected Cyprian result, **pruw, which proves to be an awkward shape even by the phonotactic rules of later Etruscan (ie. word-final *-uv is entirely unevidenced in Etruscan as far as I know). I have yet to confirm these two kinship terms in Minoan but I would expect they'd be identical to these Aegean protowords unless I've erred in my extrapolation.

The Proto-Aegean words for 'father' and 'mother' are based on stronger evidence. Minoan a-ta-i is attested consistently on multiple libation tables and I do believe it's referring to their great Mother Goddess. The father term, *ápa, was likely in Minoan vocabulary as well, at least if we are to analyse Hittite god Appaliunas in Aegean terms: *ápa 'father' (Etruscan apa) and *launa 'leonine; of lion(s)' (Etruscan lev 'lion, lioness'). So I feel pretty secure in suggesting Aegean *ápa 'father' and *átai 'mother'. This results in Proto-Cyprian *apa 'father' (resisting syncope as a nursery term) and *ati which spawns identical Etruscan terms.


Are there Indo-Aegean kinship terms here? What can we conclude?

If we indulge further and compare our internally reconstructed terms in both language groups, the Mid IE kinship package (*pápa- 'father', *baráhʷa- 'brother' and *déug̰a- 'daughter') start to bear strong similarities to the Aegean set (*ápa 'father', *parówa 'brother' and *síka 'daughter'). We might assume that 'mother' has been replaced in Aegean and that Pre-Aegean *d, having first become *t by systematic devoicing of all inherited stops, lenites to *s before a front vowel.

For now, there's little to conclude with certainty other than that a relationship between Indo-European and Aegean kinship terms is within a realm of plausibility. However, this mental exercise opens our minds to new possibilities to investigate. Can we find other examples of Aegean palatalization in other shared words? Why would the word for 'mother' be replaced in Aegean and where does *atai come from? If correct, are there social or cultural implications to this kinship replacement? Or is there a simpler explanation for these similarities?

As always, more information is needed and these further questions will help confirm or reject what are for now admittedly shallow hunches. Open brainstorming like this however is still a constructive process, even when all we have is hunches... especially when all we have is hunches.


UPDATES
(04 Nov 2010) I decided to add something to "[...] while *deug̰- adopts the zerograde and accent placement seen in 'father' to result in *dug̰-xtér-." In light of commenter input, I felt the need to elaborate that *dug̰-xtér- becomes *duɢ-xtér- by assimilation of the velar stop by uvular laryngeal *x. (See comments below.) In traditional notation, by this assimilation, an unevidenced palatal *ǵ is therefore avoided.

Children of Men

Today, there was a real cinematic treat on the Space Channel called Children of Men. The film stars the brooding Clive Owen together with a small but strong role by Michael Caine, acted brilliantly as always. Although Julianne Moore (as Julian) is listed on covers as a selling point, I think anyone having watched this can agree that her contribution in the film pales in comparison to the solid work of Clare-Hope Ashitey (Kee). The 2006 movie is a dystopia set in 2027. No child has been born for 18 years for reasons that scientists can't explain although out-of-control pollution is hinted as a cause. As such, humankind has less than a hundred years of existence left unless a miracle happens. It turns out that an African refugee named Kee is humanity's hope since she, just as inexplicably, is bearing child. Thus begins the dangerous journey of this expectant mother, protected by the kindness of a small band of philanthropic strangers who would sacrifice themselves for the welfare of this child.

This is one of my favourite sci-fi films of all time because, unlike most directors of the genre that resort to an over-reliance on 'futuristic' special effects to carry a plotless movie, this dystopia relies squarely on solid acting and storyline in the midst of a bleak setting of all-out civil war and opportunistic violence. The premise is all too realistic and if you're not disturbed by any of it, quite frankly, you're probably not human.


The camera tilts and turns through streets and corridors as if we the viewer are invisible participants in the horror. At one point, the camera is splattered with a victim's blood but it continues on navigating through the scene, suggesting by this subtle detail that we ourselves are stained with this future blood by our own witness. A very stark warning. Competing philosophical views (ie. fate versus randomness; atheism versus faith) are referenced but are tactfully presented without beating it over our heads as in Hollywood films. It's really a collector's movie; it's that good!

Now, to come back to the topic of linguistics, the point of my blog afterall, Kee softly sings a lullaby in an African language. I wanted to test out my online research skills and see if I could call up the name of this song, its lyrics and the exact meaning behind it. Well, I have to pat myself on my back. YAY! While I assumed at first that it was in Swahili, the sweet song is spoken in a more obscure language called Gã. The endearing lyrics of the song^[1] go perfectly with the film's bittersweet seesaw between the senseless self-ruin of the masses in the short term and the striving towards a higher purpose by a few in the long:

Kaːfo, kaːfo, kaːfo ni moko kwɛ oɖaŋ	Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry for someone to look in your mouth
Sika kɛ kpɔ yɛ oɖan	A gold nugget is in your mouth
Kaːfo ni moko kwɛ oɖaŋ	Don't cry for someone to look in your mouth[2]

NOTES
^[1] Agawu, Representing African music: Postcolonial notes, queries, positions (2003), p.99 (see link).
^[2] Agawu explains the nature of the lyrics in the aforementioned reference: "Mother speaks to child, trying to dissuade him from crying. There is a gold nugget in your mouth; if you cry, people will see it and want to possess it because it is precious. So hide it by closing your mouth, by not crying."

The apocalypse... atheist-style!

I'll get to serious stuff in a moment, but first some levity. A great comic called Subnormality at Viruscomix explores a 'scary' world of atheism and reasoning.

The Atheist Apocalypse!

(It sort of goes along with my previous post about the current trend of populist-driven anti-intellectualism.)

Creativity and society

Just today, I found this article called Why is there Anti-Intellectualism?. Steven Dutch uses Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel as a base in his inquiry into what it means to be truly creative. It's very thought-provoking and, well, creative!

Some questions that arise in my mind are:

• Might we say that 'tinkering' is a prerequisite to 'true creativity' even if the latter is not the inevitable result of the former? Hence: tinkering > true creativity.
• In such a curiosity hierarchy that we may infer from this, might curiosity be in part connected to Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Afterall, I can't imagine people stuck in survival mode having the time or energy to expand their minds beyond the immediate here and now, even if they are capable and willing of higher thought under better circumstances.
• And extending now far beyond this immediate topic, might this pyramid of thought already be instinctively understood by power-hungry dictators who seem to always manage to reduce the governed population to abject poverty in order to make mindControl and groupThink more effective? Who has time to think about government corruption when one's home is being seized because of a housing bubble and one's job is being exported overseas by way of out-of-control globalization?
• Finally, could the latest surge of anti-intellectualism in the past decade (albeit based on my own subjective perception drawn from the increasingly influential internet culture which is replete with cowardly anonymous trolls that exploit logical fallacies at every turn and often attack people like me who are just innocently blogging my thoughts) be just the pretext to establish a modern tyrannical regime by brainwashing the population to blindly ridicule anyone who dares exhibit signs of enjoying scholarly pursuits? Quite frankly, if I were a dictator, corrupting the will of the people through poverty and anti-logical political rhetoric is a deliciously evil way to establish systematic censorship of thought in all levels of society without needing to enforce oppressive rules by myself.