All living organisms communicate one way or another. Communication comes in many forms and occurs on many scales – from chemical signaling via cell signaling molecules that pass between individual cells to the complexities of human written language that pass between nations on our planet. Human communication often is in the form of a dialog. This is the most natural and fundamental method of sharing thoughts and ideas between two individuals. Of the many forms of human communication between humans, the sharing of ideas by talking, reading and writing is the most powerful. Knowledge acquisition is an essential element of communication and we can share nothing we’ve learned from experience with others without also learning the ability to communicate.
Our species exists as a collection of cooperating groups that share communication skills. Communication is central to our cooperating with others allowing us to coordinate our goals, motivations and efforts. The most basic building block of communication is a dialog between two individuals. In the distant past of our species and in early life communication began as simple pointing and hand gestures. Over time this evolves into a shared sign language and eventually to a shared spoken and writen language. Answers to questions about how language evolves are still speculative and there are several hypotheses (Wikipedia has a brief description). When we are communicating we are building individual connection between us by sharing our thoughts or ideas however imperfectly. Usually the goal is an attempt to obtain mutual understanding of something. We communicate by making statements in a common language and in dialog share our reactions to this statement. Is this what happened? Is my observation correct and the way you saw it? Is what occurred an effect of come cause? Are my claims true in your judgement? If we go back and forth on these questions we can come to some shared understanding or at least result in a better understanding our how our perceptions and interpretations of what occurred differ.
On the other hand, without communication we continue to distance ourselves from each other. We are free to develop our own interpretations of things that occur. Without a shared understanding of the world subgroups evolve with unique narratives – interpretations of events and ascribing causes to these events – that can be remarkably different from others witnessing the same event. With more isolation unique interpretations of events go unquestioned and in such a way cults develop. If left by themselves, separated or isolated societies can, after many generations, develop a totally separate language. And after 1000s of years even turn into a sub-species as some anthropologists suggest occurred in early human evolution. The point can be made that language facilitates communication that can be either inclusive – sharing evolving a common viewpoint, or exclusive – effective in keeping others out of a group. A nice talk describing how language might have developed and continues to evolve can be found here.
In future blog posts I will explore the process of dialog, explain how we misunderstand each other. and to look more deeply into this idea of Truth – with a capital T. I will explain the ways in which truth is an ill-defined notion that has a lifetime and a birth and death process all its own.
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