[Diwali]

Originally Posted by Aulirophile

Has anyone here ever heard of General Semantics? It's a science invented in the early part of last century that is, sort of, the study of translating the world "out there" with the world "in here." Better known as the verbal and non-verbal worlds. It has a very heavy emphasis on language because that is the primary way we (humans) do such translating. It's inventor, Alfred Korzybski, basically took everything currently thought about human thought and interaction and tossed it. Built the whole thing up using the scientific method.

Some fun stuff about G.S. G.S. is the source of the only scientific explanation that explains the difference between humans and animals. Other animals have commerce, use tools, communicate with sounds (thought not at the level of humans, I concede), etc. In only one area are humans different. We time-bind.

Time-binding is defined as the act of taking someone else's "territory" their personal knowledge, and turning it into your "map." So let's say someone runs an experiment on genetically modifying fruit flies to increase homosexuality. I actually just read this study which is why it came to mind. That took a while. The guy who did the study knows the territory better then I do, he walked over it. "The map is not the territory" is a principle of G.S. But I have a map. I could walk the territory if I wanted or I can take my slightly abstracted idea of years of work and be done.

Now let us look at that. I just took years of someone else's work, read a paper for a less then day tops, and I know almost as much as they do. This is time-binding. When Isaac Newton said "If I see far, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." He was referring to time-binding, though he didn't know it.

Time-binding results in an exponential increase in knowledge. If we took all the information from when writing was invented to the death of Christ and said it was one unit of Human Knowledge, or H.K. and then measured the increase over time, we'd see the same curve as Moore's Law! An exponential one, that is. In the Age of Enlightment we had around 4 H.K. In 1943 we had 64 and it was doubling every eighteen years.

Does anyone else find this fascinating? I can never understand why G.S. is so overlooked.

Mind...Blown...Can't..Go...On...

I've never ever thought about what you are talking about right now. That's some crazy shit, and it's pretty interesting.