And, if one is alone, language does them no good. Language is a way for us to relate to each other, to let us know we exist, and in solitary, with nothing responding to one, they will go nuts.

Language is basic, elemental. Pidgin and creoles have common rules which are consistent over time even though unwritten and unknown to the creators of the language.

Fascinating subject.

And “Multitudes, Multitudes” is the title of the book Lt Tom Keefer of the Caine was perpetually writing but never finishing.

10Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.

11Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O LORD.

12Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about.

13Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great.

14Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision.

15The sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall withdraw their shining.

Joel 3: 10-15 KJV

Although ideally there should be more heads, right?

It’s cool, because nobody’s actually trying to fool anyone. ER is large, and contains multitudes.

(No doubt, because of your long exposure and total immersion in computergeekiness, you have somehow succeeded in missing every point I tried to make in my aphorisms. I too, am astonished at our failure to communicate on this, given our usual congruence on most issues, so I will attempt to take up each of your points sequentially and comment on them parenthetically. By the way, how did you break hank’s password?).

Perhaps we just understand the word “language” differently, because I think of most of the things you declare to not be language, are in fact, language.

(Wrong.)

As a codemonkey you’d naturally expect me to focus on “computer code”.

(Code succintly summarizes a set of specific instructions. They may be highly complex, and you may be able to translate any code into a clumsy and baroque form of English, but there are many things which can be communicated in any human language which cannot be translated into code. What would the Sermon on the Mount or the instructions on a bicycle assembly manual look like in FORTRAN. They wouldn’t even compile.)

Music is not a language? Facial expressions and gestures?

(No, no and no. Music clearly communicates something, a great deal in fact, but not the meaning of a text. Facial expressions and gestures are useful for emphasis and nuance, but do not communicate much else. Without the accompanying text, they mean nothing, They are only typographical embellishments, the manual equivalent of changing fonts. The calls of beasts only communicate the simplest unitary concepts, such as Danger!, Go Away!, Let’s Fuck! Feed me!, or I’m over here! There is no manipulable symbolic content. Whales may be different, but we really don’t know. You cannot translate any written or spoken text into any of those communication systems. And mathematics, despite all its power, is not language, just a formalized and succint substitute for a tiny subset of it. You can lie in any language, the formal syntax of mathematics makes any lie instantly ungrammatical. Alas, human speech doesn’t work like that. Again, all these communications systems fail the sermon and bike manual criteria. Even Ameslan is not a true language, it’s just a different alphabet for ordinary English.)

Prime metaphor of our age or not, I must dispute what seems to be one of your key points, that language is software.

(By “software” I meant simply that it is not hardware. Language can be expressed verbally, or written down, or recorded electronically just like code can.. One early definition of “software” is “anything you can send over the telephone”. Software exists independently of any physical medium. But if all language is software by that criterion, all software is, in general, not language. I can afford to be charitable here, our differences are purely semantic.)

And speaking of which, “People don’t invent languages”?

(Yes, languages can be invented. But they are flukes, and their long term utility and viability far from established. The point is the vast majority of human languages arose spontaneously, were adopted by their human populations, competed and evolved and spread into the anthrosphere without individual management or direction.. Grammarians, language academies, lexicographers and other attempts to bring this process under direct human supervision are all quite recent, and let’s face it, not too effective. Languages evolve and adapt without any help from management. They are a collective invention. Klingon and Esperanto are hobbies.)

I don’t disagree with everything.

(I can accept that paragraph.)

If AI ultimately bears fruit, defined as artificial consciousness, it’s intriguing to wonder what thoughts these constructs can think.

(I thought the whole point of software was to compile down to some foundational machine code, equivalent on every machine. Aren’t the differences between computer languages and operating systems simply for the convenience of the programmers? I don’t feel qualified to argue this point, but I do know some people (including myself) think some human languages are better than others in certain areas, but I have never seen this convincingly demonstrated to be true. I know I can’t.)

But having achieved consciousness, these AIs would immediately begin evolving their own languages, used internally to think and to communicate with each other.

(Interesting speculations, but beyond the scope of this discussion. But please feel free to bring them up later.)

There’s a new field of academic study called “existential risk”, and in addition to things like meteor strikes, they think a lot about the potential consequences of AI.

(We are already at severe risk from the consequences of AI, and automation in general. And its not because the machines will take over and establish some technotyranny. It is because we have become so dependent on them to do our day-to-day business that we have to devote increasingly large proportions of our talent and efforts just to maintain them, not to mention reorganize our culture to meet their needs. Steam and electricity caused massive social dislocations, the cyber revolution will make those look trivial.. And all those SF computer dystopias we read in our youth totally failed to anticipate how vulnerable this technology would be to common criminals and pointless vandalism, commercial exploitation and government abuse). Ned Ludd may have been right after all.)

Makes me sympathize a little bit with the conservative reaction to attempts to understand the “psychology of conservatism”.

(Don’t ever sympathize with conservatives. They only interpret it as weakness, cowardice and appeasement.)

Perhaps we just understand the word “language” differently, because I think of most of the things you declare to not be language, are in fact, language.

As a codemonkey you’d naturally expect me to focus on “computer code”. All computer “code”–if you mean “source code” and not the binary output of a compiler–is expressed in a computer language. Among the formal definitions of “language” is “(5) : a formal system of signs and symbols (as FORTRAN or a calculus in logic) including rules for the formation and transformation of admissible expressions (6) : machine language” (Merriam-Webster). (Even your Fortran is there…I wondered for a moment if there was something about it that led you to think of it as not language, but even Fortran is expressive enough to seem recognizably a language, I think.)

Music is not a language? Facial expressions and gestures? (You, a Latin man, would deny gestures are a language?) Does my lifted eyebrow and mocking grin, if you could but see it, communicate nothing?

Prime metaphor of our age or not, I must dispute what seems to be one of your key points, that language is software. It most definitely is not. It is an expression of an idea (broken down into instructions to manifest the programmer’s idea), an idea expressed in language. You can’t create software without language, but the result isn’t (usually) language (except in the narrow case of writing a new language in an old one).

And speaking of which, “People don’t invent languages”? Even allowing for the arbitrary exclusion of created computer languages, I’m sure you’ve heard of Esperanto, and it’s not the only invented language. Must I bring up Klingon? Must I?

I don’t disagree with everything. Certainly language and our mental architectures are intimately connected, and language conditions the thoughts we can think…yet it’s an interactive process, because we constantly extend language as we learn to think new thoughts. (To be clear, grammar and syntax seem to evolve, though at a slower pace than vocabulary expands. I’m not talking about quantity of words here…for example there’s a distinctly new language evolving on commercial Web sites, “clickwriting”, a language refined to promote the particular behavior of clicking on links. DanS has posted some examples on OpToffy.)

If AI ultimately bears fruit, defined as artificial consciousness, it’s intriguing to wonder what thoughts these constructs can think. Would an AI coded mostly in C think Kernaghan-Ritchie style, thoughts bracketed into neat blocks and nicely functionally-decomposed? Would Fortran-based AIs be good at science, while COBOL-based AIs make good accountants? Let’s try not to think about LISP-based AI.

But having achieved consciousness, these AIs would immediately begin evolving their own languages, used internally to think and to communicate with each other. And like humans I’d expect them to evolve their languages as their mental capacities grow. It’s likely that no human could ever “get inside the mind” of an AI, lacking a capacity for highly-evolved machine language. Yet AIs, having been created by languages that sprang from the human mental architecture, will probably have little trouble understanding us.

There’s a new field of academic study called “existential risk”, and in addition to things like meteor strikes, they think a lot about the potential consequences of AI. It’s a serious thing any more, no longer a crackpot paranoia. The idea of living alongside beings able to see inside our heads, yet whose thoughts are opaque to us, can be a bit frightening.

Makes me sympathize a little bit with the conservative reaction to attempts to understand the “psychology of conservatism”. Understanding not being their strong suit, they must feel terribly disadvantaged and vulnerable, which feeds into the native paranoia. Nyah ha ha ha! [Communicates in the language of villainy by twirling mustache.]

OK, feeling less neglected?