this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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Hm, I think I start to see your point. I guess the thought of language as something like human language is biasing a lot what we consider language. It feels kinda weird, but if I shake off this narrow view on what a language is, all sorts of alternative ways to look at it come to mind.
I think it helped that you mentioned a technical manual that is a form of language but that doesn't count as a conversation. And having a conversation in itself is very much biased by our human form of language.
And now that you mention the proteome and metabolome, it really seems like a much richer form of information and that much more back-and-forth is happening. I guess epigenetics have shown that the DNA/RNAs are much more plastic than we thought, too.
Thanks for this conversation, it did actually help me get to explore this much more and change my mind :)
I think part of this confusion comes from the general usage of language to mean specifically human art and culture, like "Language Arts" or "Vernacular Language". Thinking about language as the simple components and systems that carry information might seem disrespectful to the totality of human expression, but I think it helps to see just how unique our flavour is, and how much we could grow.
Well I'm glad to have expanded your horizons! And also glad I got to use "proteome" in a conversation. It's such a cool concept that most people won't appreciate. :D
Haha yes, it is sometimes sad when other people around cannot really appreciate certain thoughts or concepts of one's own.
One book that really got me excited about studying biology well over a decade ago was Evolution in four dimensions, which touches on some similar topics as in our conversation. Or maybe even in reverse, how language is actually some dimension of evolution in itself. Since then my knowledge on evolution and genetics got a bit rusty because I specialized in ecology. But I find it deeply fascinating how evolution works and what mind-boggling stuff it came up with.