Signals Have A Structure

Signals have a structure. Most of it is protocols. That is, simple, repeatable, schemas that help communication succeed. At least, in nature that’s how it is, and these protocols are discoverable to observant humans who can resist making up fantasies about them.

Human signals have protocols too. Except that they are often deceptive or manipulative. Language itself has this general property under clumsy use. ‘It’ ‘tells’ us what to see or think… know or discover… even ‘how to look’. Unless we remain or until we become aware of this.

This is a false signalling environment. What that means is, before you even start to make a signal here, it has been co-opted. Usually in at least 20 important ways of which you are entirely unaware.

In fact, if you’re anything like a common internet user, you are not even aware of the topic I am approaching, let alone its scope, anatomy, and implications. In a false signalling environment, the protocols and the purposes are pre-co-opted. They can be retrieved, but not in an situation where the ‘users’ cannot even recognize the terrain.

0. Advertising Availability for Connection
1. Link Negotiation ( matching identity)
2. Host / Guest determination
3. Initial Synchronizations
4. ID exchange / validation
5. Speed of Transfer protocols
6. Error Correction Protocols
7. Test exchange
8. Asset Transfer / Modulation
9. Closure Protocols
10. Link Break

All communication is signalling. All of it follows protocols.

But the protocols here are toxic, because the actual purpose of our being here is primarily falsified by our situation and the human cultural environment. Our actual purpose is for each other, the possibilities of intelligent human culture and learning. It is not for corporations to study and profit from our behavior, while starkly limiting our opportunity to become human together.

This is a classic double-bind: any (apparent) move loses or is punished.

Signals acquire purpose and intention from context prior to emission. This is directly manipulable amongst people who are unaware of this. People who are aware of this are resistant to such manipulation, and can even turn it ‘inside out’ so that the mimic gets ‘taken’ by its own game.

Signals have a structure. The first is protocol, and that is a complex matter in itself. But let us examine the other aspects of its anatomy in a cursory fashion.

The largest part of a common signal involves the implications of context, which includes skills, deprivations and analysis of participants. It also includes feedback from histories, both present, recent, and previous.

Another aspect of a signal is purposive. This aspect is layered, and much of its actual content and intention is most often nonconscious. Other than the initial layer, the others often masquerade.

Compared to this content, the superficial signal in language is actually trivial.

Another aspect of a signal is in the specifics of the choices its encoder makes. Each of these has impacts and implications. The modes and selections within the signal of tone, token choices, sequencing, suggestion, play, threat, and so on.

Most of the above can be handled without language.

Only a small portion of the signal is in language. A relatively modest portion of human beings have anything other than cursory linguistic awareness, semantic awareness, rhetorical awareness, or the associated skills and perspectives these produce. Such persons, while fully human biologically, are subject to language and their vast misapprehensions of its dangers and capacity to misframe. They are literally ‘the subjects of language’ in a sense analogous to the subjects of a tyrant. But it is a dead tyrant. A dictionary.

Most of what we ‘get’ from any signal has to do with the degree of our capacity to derive intelligence (meaningful new or confirming (or negating) senses and information) from it. A passive recipient who is aware only of ‘the words’ cannot even understand language itself, let alone signals. But even those who develop a modest grasp of this situation are still only barely able to communicate.

Actual skill means awareness of each of these orders of structure in the signal. And the capacity to analyze, verify, falsify, manipulate, and recognize them. Without this, we are not language users. We are subjects of a cruel incapacity in our education about the nature of signals, thought, representation, language… and communication itself.

I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.

As a cognitive activist, my dream is that my work may contribute to our ability to understand the origins of our strange situation as modern humans, and assemble effective replacements for what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of.

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