In The Beginning Was The Word

I once spent a day in Salt Lake city with a team of Mormons engaged in developing educational software. The owner of the company had flown me in after reading about my work on “learner interfaces“, “distributed learning processing“, and how they meet and merge into each other in what I call a “miraculous intersection“.

After our group’s technology conversations ended, the owner took me on a walking tour through some of the schools he owned and operated. After briefly dropping in on various K-6 classrooms, we went to his high school and entered a classroom full of students engaged in studying “language”. After introducing me, and without warning, the owner asked me if I would sit in with the class and share my understanding of language. I began with this question:

Can you imagine what it would be like to be a human being who has never experienced a word?

At first the room was full of perplexed faces. Then as they seriously considered the question some interesting dialogues led everyone in the room to realize that it’s impossible. The kind of beings we are just don’t exist in a mind without words. We can’t say anything about being conscious that isn’t affected by the words we’ve learned to experience and describe our consciousness. (See: Learning Uncertainty Principle and Consciousness is Learning)

For us as a species and for each of us individually, the Bible was right to say: in the beginning was the word.

It’s important to remember that for most of the evolutionary time we think of as ‘becoming human’, there were no words. Can you imagine the off-scale differences between a tribe of word users and a tribe without words? Imagine the differences in their capacities for social communication, negotiation, coordination, organization, and in terms of all the new learning challenges and opportunities such capacities make possible. Becoming word users was the evolutionary tipping point most singularly responsible for modern humans.

This depth of understanding (about how our kind of mind begins with becoming word users) was something I also addressed in interviews with scientists and scholars renowned for their understandings of various aspects of language.

“Of all the characteristics that differentiate us from the other animals, I think most people would agree, quite instinctively even, that language is the fundamental thing that makes us qualitatively different. – Guy Deutscher, Historical Linguist

“The big step between us and other animals is indeed language.” – John Searle, Philosopher of Mind and Language

“Symbols have literally changed the kind of biological organism we are.” Humans have been “transformed by this tool that has in a sense taken over and biases all of our interactions with the world”. – Terrence William Deacon, Neuro-Anthropologist

Even thousands of year ago humans intuitively knew that becoming word users was a species inflection point – a “before and after” beautifully and accurately described by the phrase “In the beginning was the word”. What better way for people thousands of years ago to describe the transformative changes that came with becoming word users. Also that the word was with God, that the word is God, describes well the species defining effects of word learning on our personal and collective consciousness and on our coordinated human activities, including most significantly, how learning together through words super-extended our capacity for learning together.

In the beginning was the word. But it wasn’t a word. It was the power of words. And the power of words is that they enable us to learn together with and through them. Our kind of learning only exists because we learned to extend our learning through words. Our kind of human consciousness began with learning together through words.

Learning together through words ignited human ascendancy.

In the beginning was the word and the word was learning.

Consciousness IS Learning