A, B, C

10

Even communication of affection and the acknowledgment of the existence of others through touches and nuzzlings and lickings and caresses work the same way. Smell and taste are only slightly more direct, because they start out by depending on the shape of molecules that actually originate with the other, instead of wave functions that are not as material but more process, such as sound or light. But only slightly more so. And once within the thinking-experiencing-interpreting-feeling part of any creature (the brain), all are wave functions again. Smell is still our most intense memory prod. We fight it more and more; we use, it less and less. But before you die, watch it save your — and maybe someone else’s — life at least three times, i.e., it gives the group a survival edge, which is only one piece of evidence for its usefulness and efficiency. To have evolved, it has to have others. Brain structures have built up to take care of “meanings” at the level of the word, of the phrase, of the sentence, of the topic, and any kind of physical pressure in general for every other stage of interpretation. Primates — not to mention mammals in toto — learn them mostly by exposure and some evolutionary pre-wiring. But learning must precede the “reception” of communication of what has been learned, and in all individuals the associational patterns that comprise learning occur at slightly different times and at different positions in the world and thus the learning process itself is different for each one of us, particularly today among us humans; which is to say, communication by sound is primarily a vibratory stimulation of something already there, not a material (or ideal) passage of something that is not.

This both is and is why information cannot pass directly between living creatures of any biological complexity. Information is the indirect evocation/creation of congruence, of pattern.

This is what discourse is and controls.

From one side, language can only be explained communally. From another, it can only be experienced individually. That’s because “community” and “individual” are abstractions that have been extremely efficient for negotiating lots of problems since writing came along. (Before that, we have no way to know for sure.) But as our population has grown so much bigger in (arbitrarily) the last two hundred fifty years, it’s begun to look more and more efficient to expand “community” from something tribal to something far more nuanced and ecologically inclusive. Some people see this as a return to tribalism. But it’s just as much a turn to science. As for “individual,” I can even entertain an argument that holds that “logos/discourse” was initially a metaphor put forward by philosophers such as Heraclitus and the Mesopotamian rabbis (which means “teachers”) to help stabilize the notion that language is never “our own,” but was always from another, at a time when there was not the technological or sociological support for a model that was, nevertheless, in its overall form, accessible to anyone who had ever learned to speak a language other than the one she or he grew up with, and/or watched a child learn its “own.” Most of a century later, Plato called all this prelearning “remembrance” and speculated it came through reincarnation. I don’t believe that was a step in the right direction, other than to nudge thinkers to pay attention to history. But little or nothing that creatures who have evolved do or think has only one use. That’s another thing evolution assures. That’s what we mean when we say an adaptation is efficient.