So Long: A Common but Mysterious Goodbye

> Wherever the expression originated, it diffused quite rapidly. By the 20th century, so long became a common expression of farewell—and no one knows how it happened.

"How it happened" is a hallmark hard problem in studying human language — whether from linguistics, anthropology, neuro-cognitive sciences, art, philosophy...

The gist of the question is this: is language solely "within us" and we "trade it" and evolve it as we communicate; or do the complexity and distribution of its "existence" give the phenomena a "life of its own", so to speak. (it then breaks your mind exponentially to notice that e.g. "math" is also but a language)

Claude Lévi-Strauss famously thought that humans were too 'dumb' to master language and we were mostly rehashing bits and parts of premade sentences, things we'd heard or read before, with slight analog variations (a minor form of what he called "memes", the idea of "cultural genes", memory+gene). He was proved dead wrong by neuroscience a few decades later, we do "think" the language; but the concept of "memes" remained in anthropology (well before, and hopefully after, the homonymous but only loosely related internet-slang-designated .gif phenomena).

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Recently I heard Jeff Hawkins on Lex Fridman's AI podcast with this interesting suggestion: that e.g. "science" is a distributed super-intelligence. A "thing" which evolves, grows, meets problems, adapts, finds solutions, structures itself internally and in relation to its environment, has external effects in the form of technology and thinking, etc.

I found the view fascinating.

Each scientist as a tiny part of the whole, very limited in spacetime, can never "see" or "think" at the same level that "science" does as a collective organ-ization (alt. organ-ism). Science is in effect much bigger than anyone; it actually survives and endures even better than states or corporations; it may even "cross over" to be furthered by children or allied species of ours, long after or own demise. Science is a "thing" and it's damn smart, perhaps even smarter than any and all of us in some sense, because it never ceases to carry the "intelligence" put into it by giants whose shoulders we stand on in all presents, past and future.

In some sense, science is at times even too big, too grown, too much for us individually. (notice: that's precisely the concept carried by "super")

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Is "language" such a collective, distributed "thing" with a life of its own?

Writing this, I wonder. What happens when languages meet? Do they recognize each other? Do they battle? Do they communicate and exchange knowledge? Do they mate, engender hybrids? And what would our "science" do when it meets the science of aliens?

I find this great food for thought, in generally questioning "intelligence" and its manifestations.