What the research shows and what Stephenson is alluding to also points to the way the design of digital technology has flattened human-computer interaction by prioritizing speed.
It is not impossible to design digital products that achieve the same balance of fountain pen on paper. But having used the iPad for journaling with a good toothed screen protector, I think we are still far from it. Even with the barrel rolling and pressure sensitivity, an actual pen just writers so much more expressively.
Yes, the nomenclature in math is atrocious. It isn’t much better in physics or biology however. As a species, we suck at naming and classification, and keep starting new trends atop old ones.
There is certainly need for the many abstractions of math to be as complex and well specified as they are.
There’s no reason for their nomenclature to be so bad. The end result is a substantial portion of the population, which can certainly hold and manipulate abstractions, fails to even contend with pure math.
I do think visualization tools will help in the future, to demystify some of this. But as with all sciences, the need for personal glory/mentor deification often conflicts with broader explainability.
Why is it hard to argue lifespan has been a major factor?
You speak of “prerequisite brain structures to support recursive grammars”… would they arise in short lived species, given we know these are complex brain regions that take time to develop, need experience to become fully useful, and are energetically expensive to maintain and run? How do you do that if you live a relatively short time?
On the flip side, precisely in longer lived species like whales and elephants, your statements begin to fail. Elephants (when left in the wild) do accumulate knowledge of huge stretches of a continent and pass on that knowledge horizontally and also down to their progeny.
Whales and dolphins also show initial signs of such linguistic competence.
What these species don’t have is our opposable thumbs, etc. Things that aren’t directly responsible for language and would have evolved without it (as opposable thumbs have in other species), that nevertheless added to what language can do.
That should give you a sense of how language in humans is only as complex as the humans and their society is.
As for writing, I’m really not clear that it’s better than leaving smell traces, when it comes to information density, and speed of sharing. Where it does better is in surviving across generations, and that is indeed an advantage, that our language can go through a short lived medium (sound) AND a longer lived medium which doesn’t tax our memories as much.
Note that writing is a much later invention though, than language. And very tied to our opposable thumbs which can make fine marks and do so repeatably enough that we could associate repeated sounds with repeatable symbols and generate this writing based transmission system. Take that away and we’d remain an oral culture. We’d have do what Sanskrit users did before they found stable ways to write, and create ways to improve memorization. That too has survived generations. Just takes a lot more of each person learning, compared to writing.
But scale of knowledge acquisition is mediated by, at minimum, lifespan, and what knowledge there is to verbalize and pass on, no? It’s not like we got the language then built our hands based on the knowledge shared by another person with hands.
Instead, these co-evolved. Our language is shaped by that, and we shouldn’t give it too much causal power when it’s only a slice of the system.
We are also very unclear on what birds can communicate. They’re social migratory species with 4 color vision and magnetoreception. Their sensory context is deeper and richer in some ways, and whatever communication they layer atop it will be shaped by that. What seems like squeaks and chirps can hold information that another bird, but not humans, can decode. We’re getting better at layering all this context and then interpreting bird song and sounds.
But we’re at the beginning of this exercise, not a place where we can make a firm conclusion.
Simple. Energetics. Gaseous exchange has many energetic benefits that you give up if you have a mostly inert atmosphere.
If all your reactive chemistry comes from water/minerals, you’re also a heck of a lot more tethered, as both these cycle slower than the atmosphere.
A dynamic atmosphere is a huge component of the energetic efficiency of life on earth. And while it’s totally plausible other chemistries can match this, what’s implausible is for no chemistry to match it.
And when it comes to complex life on earth, it literally didn’t happen till oxygen percentages got sufficiently high in the atmosphere, a two billion year long process set off by Cyanobacteria. You can’t get big bodies if you can’t get this kind of energy.
We really don’t know this for certain at all. We do know crows can communicate information about the face of a person they dislike to their murder, including to new generations. It seems a bit of a stretch to say their cultural transmission is quite that narrow.
In general, pre-writing human oral culture seems to have dynamics much in common with such abilities in other animals. Barring error correction mechanisms, oral knowledge can degrade in transmission, limiting its reach and success.
This isn’t to say human language doesn’t have its distinctive features that are very useful. But the language came from a different brain, and is suited to the particularity of our brains. We should hesitate to place solely on language something that’s also driven by us having more things to say.
Are we conveniently assuming that only humans will be able to read and tweak their genomes, and do synthetic biology?
An odd assumption if we’re generously granting FTL or even regular space travel to aliens.
Everything from the lack of radio communication to the commonness of biological precursors like nucleic acids and amino acids in space points to multicellularity being the relatively rare thing, at least in our part of the galaxy.
We don’t hear from them or see them because if they’re out there, they’re still microbes eating each other. That one case of the two forming a symbiotic relationship, which leads to more endosymbiosis… that’s where I suspect our real rareness lies.
Note: terrestrial chemistry is no different from chemistry that can occur anywhere, given the right molecules and conditions, and even then it’s a matter of degree.
Nitrogen being replaced by helium would actually be fine but for the niggling issue that we need nitrates. There are no heliates (?) to compensate. The name doesn’t even make sense… helium is the sole gas to have an ium end like metals- chemically it’s that meaningless what you call it as an ion…it shines elsewhere though.
For biology, it’s a necessary condition that the environment react with it and it reacts to the environment. Over time the two become deeply intertwined through the process of evolution.
It’s hard to see how that kind of evolution will occur if a lot of the environment is nonreactive.
Survival may be plausible though. There’s been some research showing some bacteria can survive in high helium environments. That’s a far cry from proving something like a bacterium can evolve in a helium environment that’s non-reactive though.
It is not impossible to design digital products that achieve the same balance of fountain pen on paper. But having used the iPad for journaling with a good toothed screen protector, I think we are still far from it. Even with the barrel rolling and pressure sensitivity, an actual pen just writers so much more expressively.