Chapter 6: The Possibility Engine
December 28, 2024·29 comments·In Brief
The dominant theory of human language, that we evolved a specialized biological device to acquire it, solves too many problems at once. Yet a simpler explanation sits in plain view: language systems themselves evolved to match how young brains actually learn, not the reverse. This changes everything about why we're vulnerable to symbols, stories, and the networks that spread them.
• Language is theoretically unlearnable, yet children acquire it effortlessly. A child's brain uses dramatically wider neural networks for language than an adult's. This isn't a limitation being overcome by a special language organ. It's the entire mechanism. The plasticity doesn't fail with age; it's supposed to fade, and language evolved to take advantage of that window.
• Language mutates relentlessly toward easier acquisition. Irregular verbs regularize, phonology simplifies, grammar streamlines. These aren't random drift. Over generations, language systems that made themselves more learnable survived. Those that didn't, died with the minds that held them. Natural selection acts on symbolic systems the same way it acts on organisms.
• The prefrontal cortex is built for possibility-seeking, not rule-following. Its neurons branch excessively in childhood, exploring connections across every region of the brain. Then they prune ruthlessly during maturation. A child acquiring language isn't computing grammar rules. It's a possibility engine cranked to maximum sensitivity, detecting patterns, cues, and relationships across every modality at once.
• Depriving children of language doesn't just impair communication. It damages their capacity for abstract thought, symbolic play, and theory of mind. The brain needs exposure to complex symbolic systems during critical periods to develop its full potential for symbolic cognition. Language and the symbolic capacity of the human mind are inseparable partners in development.
If language evolved to be easily acquirable by our brains, then everything designed to spread symbols spreads more easily too. Stories, narratives, new ideas, false beliefs. We cannot help but integrate new symbols into our understanding. The same evolutionary pressures that made language transmissible between generations make individual symbols and stories transmissible between minds.
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Comments
An elegant, eloquent, and powerful start! Gonna be a great read.
It makes me consider the overwhelming power of AI taking over social networks.
And binge drinking, which likely hasn’t reached a pinnace yet.
At what point does binge become baseline, and powerful cannabinoids, ketamine, and (perhaps) other soon-to-be-available psychotropics dull the wider population even more than their smartphones already have?
Smartphone sports gambling probably gets there first.
When it goes Orwellian and is referred to as “Victory Bingeing”.
I got a small shudder when your autocorrect killed some humor when you simply copied and replied to part of my comments. That was not expected at all. Did you make a manual change?
“Pinnace” was intentional on my part, being part of the semantic meaning wordplay like Rusty and Shakespeare were having fun with in the article.
Spooky
I did make the change, thoughtlessly assuming that your autocorrect left intact a marine reference. I’m sorry - went right over my head. Hardly spooky, anything that goes on in there.
Rusty, do you think what you’re describing is a new field of study?
I don’t think so. It’s a multidisciplinary application, to be sure, but I think as we progress you’ll see that many of the underlying topics have pretty robust fields of scholarship to call upon.
May it bring scholars from around the world to a major university in Nashvegas.
Jim
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Stepping down from the empyrean heights of the Gospel of John: humans have not done well when new media - new ways to tell the stories - have become widespread. Whether it was the printing press and the subsequent Reformation and Wars of Religion, to the newspaper and the revolutions in America and France, to broadcast media and the rise of both communism and fascism, to apparently social media today, it seems the less savory actors tend to harness the system first, only to unleash havoc that eventually settles into some sort of new, purportedly wiser order. That is, until the next form of media comes along.
Reminded me of this:
Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories
David Comberg 1.34K subscribers
2,050,888 views | Oct 30, 2010
Short lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the ‘simple shapes of stories.’
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