
So Long: A Common but Mysterious Goodbye - nivethan
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/so-long-origin
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K0SM0S
> _Wherever the expression originated, it diffused quite rapidly. By the 20th
> century,_ so long _became a common expression of farewell—and no one knows
> how it happened._

"How it happened" is a hallmark hard problem in studying human language —
whether from linguistics, anthropology, neuro-cognitive sciences, art,
philosophy...

The gist of the question is this: is language solely "within us" and we "trade
it" and evolve it as we communicate; or do the complexity and distribution of
its "existence" give the phenomena a "life of its own", so to speak. (it then
breaks your mind exponentially to notice that e.g. "math" is also but a
language)

Claude Lévi-Strauss famously thought that humans were too 'dumb' to master
language and we were mostly rehashing bits and parts of premade sentences,
things we'd heard or read before, with slight analog variations (a minor form
of what he called "memes", the idea of "cultural genes", memory+gene). He was
proved dead wrong by neuroscience a few decades later, we do "think" the
language; but the concept of "memes" remained in anthropology (well before,
and hopefully after, the homonymous but only loosely related internet-slang-
designated .gif phenomena).

____

Recently I heard Jeff Hawkins on Lex Fridman's AI podcast with this
interesting suggestion: that e.g. "science" is a distributed super-
intelligence. A "thing" which evolves, grows, meets problems, adapts, finds
solutions, structures itself internally and in relation to its environment,
has external effects in the form of technology and thinking, etc.

I found the view fascinating.

Each scientist as a tiny part of the whole, very limited in spacetime, can
never "see" or "think" at the same level that "science" does as a collective
organ-ization (alt. organ-ism). Science _is_ in effect much bigger than
anyone; it actually survives and endures even better than states or
corporations; it may even "cross over" to be furthered by children or allied
species of ours, long after or own demise. Science is a "thing" and it's damn
smart, perhaps even smarter than any and all of us in some sense, because it
never ceases to carry the "intelligence" put into it by giants whose shoulders
we stand on in all presents, past and future.

In some sense, science is at times even too big, too grown, too much for us
individually. (notice: that's precisely the concept carried by "super")

____

Is "language" such a collective, distributed "thing" with a life of its own?

Writing this, I wonder. What happens when languages meet? Do they recognize
each other? Do they battle? Do they communicate and exchange knowledge? Do
they mate, engender hybrids? And what would our "science" do when it meets the
science of aliens?

I find this great food for thought, in generally questioning "intelligence"
and its manifestations.

