Wednesday 7 March 2001

Pic of the day: Psi-clones. (Actually, credit goes to master punster Al Schroeder for calling Superboy a Psi-clone in the first place.)

Clone me now

I was casually looking into lojban, the supposedly logical and culturally neutral artificial language. After a few pages of reading my suspicion was raised. One of the first words I learned was "ninmu", which was presented as a root word meaning "woman". Not a bad word about "ninmu", but this being a root word is horribly bad. It means that the whole language is flawed. There should be no root word for "woman", because "woman" is not nearly a root concept. Woman is simply a female human. One can argue that human is not a root concept either, but religions may vary on that point. No matter. The language failed. Is this the best that Earth's linguists could come up with? Clone me now!

Having root words for woman means we are on the same road as the current languages: Sheep - ewe - ram - lamb, cattle - cow - bull - calf, horse ... All of this really supports the ancient tradition that Adam just pointed at the creatures and came up with a name, except that we've got a Babel's confusion of different languages each with their own random names. Don't get me wrong: I can see the need to have a short name for ewe when sheep is your work, your food, your clothes, your hobby and your money. It has obvious advantage over "she-sheep" in being shorter, easier to say, and priceless for puns. ("Love ewe" anyone?)

When constructing a new language, we have the possibility to make short prefixes or (preferably) suffixes that denote gender from a generic root word. They could even be separate words for that matter. If we keep the root words short and the suffixes short, we need not end up with much longer words than before ("woman" is already longer than "man", this is dubious enough as is. It would be better if we were called "sheman" and "heman" respectively, but even better would be to construct new and better words from scratch. Better, not just different.)

OK, you are bright people. You understand what I'm saying here, right? It's not like I'll join the groups that insist on wryting "womyn" because the old word is contamynated. What I say is that when the world's linguists get together and try to make a new improved language, they should not just pick random words from their mother tongue and make a word that sounds different. They should rethink thought itself. But they failed at this basic task. Clone me now, for a better future.

***

Actually, cloning would probably not be enough. The events that made me into me can never be repeated. One should not even try. Even at birth, a child with my genes would be different. The human genome does not specify the position of every capillary in the body or every neuron in the brain. It is just a library of the proteins used to build a human body, plus some control code, mostly defining the treshold values of the various chemicals. Starting from the same genes, small variations in temperature or acidity during the first few days would necessarily create a slight difference in the developing embryo, and these would be magnified for about nine months. You cannot repeat a human, not even in body. Much less the soul.

Luckily, information is not passed on in the genes only anymore. Rather, we are able to transfer our knowledge and even understanding, with some work. However imperfect our language, I trust it. If I say these things again and again in different ways, sooner or later I believe a vague copy of my understanding will form in your brains. It will be different, subtly different perhaps, but colored by your experiences rather than mine. It may not be a perfect replica ... but then again, the original was not perfect either. It may even be an improvement.

***

There was a group of science fiction writers, and presumably some other people at the time, who thought that progress in linguistics would dramatically enhance human capabilities. It is a well known fact that we do not use our brain fully. (Then again, neither do we use our kidneys or liver fully, and I never heard anyone complain. I certainly don't use my gonads fully either, now that I think about it.)

Anyway, these guys supposed that with a better language, we could think deeper, faster, and better. There is something in that. Especially for us who tend to think in words, having good words helps. I would not vote for a guy who don't know what "infrastructure" means, even if he kissed babies till he puked. But I don't think words will give us telepathy and levitation. Sorry.

***

Speaking of which, I've been thumbing around in the GURPS basic set chapter about Psionics. And I feel good about the fact that this kind of stuff only exists in comics and fantasy books, not in our world. That would be creepy. And it is strange for me now to think that for a while, this stuff was very real for me.

I supposedly inherited my moderate psionic powers from my mother's side, and I think she had hers from her father. She would know things without sensing them, like when one of us was in trouble. For instance, I remember when I secretly made a magic herbal tea from, among other things, foxglove (digitalis); it would have killed me for sure, if not my mother suddenly had turned up and stopped me. As I've said before, the multiverse must be littered with dead Magnuses. (Yet another reason to clone me now, right? Make up for the paracosmic shortage.) Or the time she dreamt about the car crash where her sister was hurt, shortly before it happened. Stuff like that.

I did not think much about this until in my 20es when I spent quite a bit of time in emptyness meditation. (Sort of related to zen and other buddhist practices, but without the religious part.) As the weeks went by, I would experience gradually more pside effects. At first I thought it was fun: I knew what the price of tickets was in Bergen before I moved there. I knew where someone had put their shoes, in a room I hadn't been in ever. I would know when a meeting was cancelled, without anyone telling me. I would think of calling my brother, and he would call me. (Not impressive, you say, but consider that I and my brothers typically talked once a year or less ...)

And there was the whole thing of the Girl Who Talked With Her Eyes. It was rather scary, because until then I had never seen people convey more than a basic emotion. But this was more like entire sentences, and faster than I could translate them into words. (Which was the way I controlled my thoughts.) I'm not going to say anything more about this, because she is still alive and all too easy to identify.

It was eventually girl trouble that made me pray to God to take away these non-rational things, and I stopped the deep meditation too. Since then I have lived in a rational universe, except for prayer, and I try to keep those rather general too. The other stuff not just doesn't happen anymore. As far as I am concerned, it never did. I remember it, but I choose to think it may all have been a very long series of very strange coincidences. It could be, you know, and it would sure make things simpler.

But just to be sure, you should clone me now and see what happens next time over.