The Nature Of Human Communication, Or: Why We're Not Still Living In Trees

Let me start off by saying that this is likely to be fairly long. I will try to keep it interesting, but if you're not prepared for it, this may seem fairly academic. It is, however, very, very important, so I hope that you read it; you might get something from it, or not, but if you don't, it won't be from lack of trying on my part.
That said, here goes.

We don't live in trees.

We, that is, the entire human race with the exception of a few stubborn holdouts who do it just to spite the rest of us, don't live in caves, either.

As a species, we have largely adapted our toolusing to an extent allowing us to survive in the harshest environments our planet has to offer; people live at both poles, people live at the equator, and on top of mountains; people even, to a limited extent, live underwater.

Why are we able to do this? It is not an idle question. The reason that we are able to do all these things, as a species, is because we have communication. Not the primitive hoots and howls of the chimpanzee, or the gestures and movements used by non-vocalizing species, but a highly adapted speech consisting of very abstract concepts allowing for quick transfer of ideas from one member of the species to another. Not only that, but we've adapted the methods of communication to extend to regional dialects; that is to say, we have separate languages based on the vocal transmission of data, each with its own vocabulary of ideas which it is capable of transferring.

Central to the mechanism, however, is the fact that in order for it to work, the participants all have to agree on the same meanings for words. If I say "go get ice cream," meaning "leave this location, go to another location, and bring back to this location a tasty dairy confection made from milk, sugar, flavorings, and ice crystals mixed into a semi-solid colloid" and you hear "go rob a liquor store" it just won't work. (This is, as you may have guessed, a bit of an extreme example. The point, however, is nonetheless valid, for all that.)

Now, human language is an interesting thing, because it has more than one level of data traffic. The way it works is as follows:

1. I formulate a thought.


2. I select, based on denotation - absolute objective meaning - words that express in the clearest terms possible the idea which I wish to convey.


3. I say those words, in the pattern dictated by their meaning.


4. You hear those words.


5. Your brain splits the verbal message into two separate sets of meanings: the denotation - the absolute objective meaning of the words - and the connotation - the associations those concepts have for you as an individual.


6. Based upon context, your brain interpolates those data sets to interpret my intended meaning from my verbal message.


7. You react according to your brain's interpretation, correct or not.

Now, as you can guess from the last item, in order for communication to be a success, the closer both of us are to the denoted meaning of the words used, the more accurate our cross-translations will be, and therefore, the lower the percentage of error introduced by our differing viewpoints.

Play the telephone game sometime, and let me know how that works out for you.

For those of you who don't know, the telephone game is very simple, and it illustrates the differences between connotation and denotation rather dramatically. Get together a group of 15 or 20 people. Have them stand in a circle. Write down a sentence, as simple as "there is a cat" or as complex as the preamble to the Constitution, and read it to the person to your right. They then go on, without the written version, to pass the message around the circle to their right, never seeing the original message as a referent. By the time the "telephone" gets back to you, you will see differences between what you sent out, and what you got back.

Now, a simple denotative sentence, "there is a cat," will not evolve too much; it's simple, and doesn't involve a lot of free association. However, by the time you get the Preamble to the Constitution back, you will likely not even recognize it. The reason for this is, again, the difference between connotation and denotation: "there is a cat," doesn't have connotations, really; it's a simple statement of a fact which is binary in validity: it is either true, or not. There's no partial cat, no shadings of cat present: there is, or is not, a cat. The Preamble, on the other hand, contains some highly abstract concepts, most of which are not immediately verifiable as a factual determination: you cannot tell if there is, or is not, "Liberty," without thinking about it, which means that the message will inevitably be passed on with shadings introduced by your translation.

That said, connotations are unique to an individual. The concept of ice cream, to me, conjures a memory of when I was about 6, "helping" my father, who was the tallest man in the world, hand-churn milk and sugar in a brine bath to produce something that I thought was the sweetest thing in the whole world until I met my wife. To you, it may invoke a sense of dreamy relaxation, or a lazy summer afternoon, or ANYthing that has been in your experience, and related to the concept of ice cream, because your brain stores data in a relational quasi-database, in which data can be accessed and crossreferenced with incredible speed because it can be accessed in multiple ways, rather than sequentially.

DEnotations, on the other hand, don't change from individual to individual; they are absolute. Ice cream can connote anything it wants to to either of us, but either way it refers by denotation to a sweet or semi-sweet dairy confection made of milk, sugar, and flavorings mixed with ice crystals into a semi-solid colloid.

The reason for this is so that when Thag the caveman wants to lift a boulder, and says so to his friend Grag, (they're cavemen, and therefore don't care what I call them; Geico ads notwithstanding, they're extinct,) Grag helps, instead of watching and grunting. Or, more recently, so that when we want to build a vehicle that can take us to the moon, we can all agree what each part is supposed to DO.

The United States political system is a horrendous mess. Everyone pretty much agrees on that, although I tend to use less temperate language when describing it, myself; the phrase "Mongolian clusterfuck" just LEAPS to mind.

A question that gets asked, in a rhetorical sense, by people who don't care what the answer is, fairly often is "Why?"

Why are things so profoundly fucked up?

The answer is, in itself, also the reason the question is rarely asked seriously - the people who ask it don't WANT the public to think about it. And it is - without further fanfare - our language is changing, but more importantly, our concept of what language is is being changed by people who have an agenda.

It is important at this point to note that I do not espouse the professed or actual views of either of the major political parties in any way, shape, fashion, or form; we will discuss what views I personally hold in a bit. I am also not intending to point a finger at ANY single group and say "THERE! THEY are the ones responsible!" because ALL of the groups are responsible - each has its agendas, and they are ALL using the same methods to achieve them.

What is the change? Very simple. The change being pushed by each and every political group, all of them, even mine, is that the connotations of words - your personal, individual, private mental associations with the words used - are more important than their denotations.

How does this work? Well, here are a few examples.

Term		Denotation		Intended Connotation
Liberal		One who believes in enacting necessary changes to the social and governmental structure.		One who believes that everyone has a right to everything, and that the state knows best.
Conservative		One who believes in avoiding unnecessary changes to the social and governmental structure.		One who believes that God Is Good™ and that He knows best for everyone, and the state does too.
Libertarian		One who believes that your right to say or do anything you want should only be limited in that it cannot infringe upon the rights of others to do the same.		One who believes you ought to get a bigger tax refund, and boot the other groups out of Washington.
Anarchist		One who believes in as little government as possible.		One who believes in no government at all, and you should too, by God.

See? The differences between the actual meanings of the words, and how they are currently represented, are profound. Maybe you, as a reader, don't agree with my interpretations; you're certainly free to do so. However, you have to admit that my base premise is in fact sound; the meanings of the words, as perceived by the public, are changing, and they are changing away from their literal meanings in favor of emotional appeal.

The problem with this is that if we allow ourselves to get away from actual meanings, then we're back in the trees, more quickly than you might expect. It's outside the bounds of possibility for one person to fully understand every aspect of every technology and its manufacture involved in everything in our society - I know, I've tried. But what is possible - IF we have absolute, objective meanings to our language - is for you to read a car repair manual and fix your own water pump, despite never having fixed one before, and despite never having really even looked underneath your car any more than absolutely necessary. (You motorheads please leave me alone; I'm not picking on you, it's called an EXAMPLE.) If we have no absolute meanings, however, and are solely dependent upon connotation for our communications, than a repair manual for your car becomes country directions: "Turn left at what used to be the fairgrounds before they built Old Man McGee's barn on it, that burned down a few years ago, and you'll find..." If you don't understand fully and completely the entire thought process used by the writer of the manual, it is useless to you.

Telepathy does not exist in reliable form. This is a fact. There are studies that indicate some very interesting things, but nothing concrete that we can use on a day to day basis. Without the ability to reliably, repeatedly, on demand, read and understand the entire contents of the mind of another human being, communication on a connotative basis is totally useless.

Now: I promised a little bit of discussion about my personal politics, and here it is.

In denotative terms, I am an Anarcho-Federalized Capitalist. What this means is that I believe the government does not permit me to do things, it exists for the purpose of protecting my right to do them; that the government should follow a distributed, minimally centralized model and be as small as possible; and that if I work harder than someone else, or just plain do my job better, I ought to get paid more, because my labor is worth more than my competitor's. Meritocracy is the true equality: you are worth as much as you deserve based solely on your actions, not on an accident of birth, your race, your religious beliefs, or any other such twaddle. If you and I get hired at the same time, and you do a better job than I do, you are worth more to the company, and should be compensated accordingly, regardless of any other considerations, period.

I also believe that it is in the nature of humans - indeed, of any living thing - to be self-interested to an extent, because without self-interest, you have no motivation to eat, drink, sleep, reproduce, or find shelter in a rainstorm.

I also believe that the current generation of executives of all stripes are, with few exceptions, and across all industries, incapable of divining the location of their asses, even with the assistance of both hands and a mining light - and I'll tell you why.

My elite education in economics, consisting of two one-semester classes, allows me to understand a basic, simple truth of economics that seems to elude almost all current executives: as your margins increase, the rate at which you lose customers increases faster than does your revenue from the increased margin.

Put simply: if you take a tenth of a pie each as your profit, and nine-tenths of a pie as your costs, you will sell more pies than the guy who has the same costs but adds enough margin to make a fifth-of-a-pie profit on each one. Not only will you sell more pies, but you will sell so many more pies, that you will end up with larger profit in the long term than will the gentleman with a higher individual profit-per-unit.

What does this mean? It means that the record companies would quit hemorrhaging money if they'd lower their prices. It means that Hollywood would make more each year on $3.50 movie tickets than they do at $8+. It means, ultimately, that the reason our economy is in shitty shape isn't that our executives are greedy; it's that they're not greedy enough.

What does this have to do with communication? Communication is learned. It is NOT innate. If it were, children would be born knowing how to speak and read. Can they? No. They must be taught.

A renowned, now deceased, science fiction writer named Robert Heinlein was famous for saying, repeatedly and in many different ways, that the education system sucks and didn't used to; it's great to think that he's exaggerating, but he wasn't. Children in the late 1800's typically learned Latin, upon which our language is based, as well as Amer-English; mathematics to a point where they could solve today's college-level maths in their heads; history to a much greater degree than do we; science to a greater degree than do we, (for all that what we learn today is more advanced, less of it is actually retained,) and most of all, critical thinking skills.

These days, our schools are falling apart. The political groups exist in the schools as well, and are so intent on pushing their agendas that they are neglecting to push an EDUCATION, with the result that students graduating high school in 1955 had received approximately the degree of education achieved by a current college senior. Our economy is falling apart because we, as a society, have allowed the ideologists in our schools to produce a generation of executives so poorly-equipped to understand the real world that they cannot understand that 5 pies is more than 1. (A tenth part each of fifty pies is five pies; a fifth apiece of five is one.)

If you are unable to understand that this is bad, and that our basis for communications is teetering on a fine edge, then support your local partisans, regardless of which side; the sides won't matter any more once we run out of aircraft mechanics and the people who can teach them. But if you get it, and can understand that an understanding of the objective nature of reality is necessary for our society to continue to function, then get busy and demand of your community that the schools do away with the ideology - of ALL kinds, from creationism to political theory - and instead get down to the business of educating our children with FACTS, because facts are the basis of human communication, and without them, we are nothing but mute, irrational, though oddly hairless, monkeys.