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I'm doing a little reading on both of them now. Big question: how to make them successful as social movements. I wonder if their elements can be modeled in a fashion similar to that which I did above. And if so, if there's anything that such an application can tell us about how to improve their chances for success.
This seems like a promising direction. So let's say that by religion I mean a useful meme. The meme consists of a doctrine. That is, a collection of statements regarding human belief or action. A person infected with the meme lives in accordance with the doctrine. The doctrine is designed to cause a useful effect, apart from its own flourishing. The effect is caused by changes in behavior of the people infected by the meme. The effect need not be explicitly stated within the doctrine. This a broad definition of religion, as it doesn't require that the doctrine contain any statements about the supernatural. But at this point I want to keep things open. As some posts have suggested, there's a lot of argument about what does or doesn't constitute a religion.
In order to be successful, a useful meme must be sufficiently:
- Transmissible, meaning that it must be pragmatically possible to expose many people to the meme.
- Infectious, meaning that a significant number of people exposed to the meme must become infected.
- Contagious, meaning that it must spread of its own accord, until it has infected a threshold number of carriers. The threshold may differ from meme to meme, and is whatever threshold is needed to enable the successful creation of the desired useful effect.
- Viable, meaning that it must be possible for a person to survive and prosper when infected with the meme.
- Robust, meaning that once a given person is infected, it must resist eradication within that individual.
- Hardy, meaning that it must be able survive, and possibly flourish, in a variety of intellectual environments, and there must be no commonly found environment in which it cannot survive.
- Resistant. Meaning that beyond a certain degree of spread, there cannot be an obvious method by which a (presumably non-infected) person or group can eradicate it.
- Stable, meaning that it must not change its nature significantly over time. Changes that continue to allow it to flourish and to cause the desired effect are permissible.
This list is not meant to be definitive or exhaustive. And I don't claim to be using the best terminology.
For example, some religious doctrines contain the idea that if you cease to believe in any part of the doctrine, you will suffer in Hell upon death. This idea might enhance the robustness of the religion by discouraging the development of disbelief. Others contain the idea that it's your duty, or that you're rewarded in some fashion, for converting non-believers. This idea might enhance the contagiousness of the religion by encouraging those who are already infected by the meme to work to infect others.
Using this framework, perhaps the original post might be improved a bit. Putting some of the questions asked in the original post into the new framework, we get:
- What useful purposes does religion serve? That is, what kinds of "useful purposes" can be designed into such memes?
- Are any of these purposes non-supernaturalistic in nature? That is, can a completely non-supernatural religion flourish and create a useful effect?
- What is success for a religion and what elements of a religion tend to cause it to become successful? That is, what elements of currently existing religious doctrines have helped them to become successful?
- How would you design a "rational religion", if such an entity is possible? That is, is it possible to design a religion that encourages "less wrong" cognition?
- What are the relationships between aspects of a religion, and outcomes involving that religion? For example, Catholic doctrine includes elements that discourage birth control. Lack of birth control encourages higher birthrates among Catholics. This encourages there to be a larger number of Catholics in the next generation than would otherwise be the case. Thus the toolkit now contains one element: the prohibition of birth control as a means of increasing the contagiousness of a religion.
- How do aspects of religion cause them to evolve differently over time? For example, Catholicism contains a permanent, authoritarian hierarchy of individuals who are dependent on the church for their survival and satisfaction. Without the Church, a Cardinal with no other job skills might starve or suffer disrespect from the community. Thus he is incentivized to increase the authority of the Catholic church in order to help secure his own survival. Over time, Catholic doctrine adopted the idea that the Pope is infallible. It might be possible to draw a line between the two phenomena and say that in a doctrine which supports a social structure that includes a permanent, authoritarian hierarchy of individuals who are dependent on believers for their survival and satisfaction, the doctrine will tend to evolve towards the accumulation of power for the hierarchy so as to ensure and increase their survival and satisfaction. Possibly another element for the toolkit.
What other such heuristics exist? Would a large enough collection of such heuristics aid in the analysis and design of religious movements?
Unfortunately, I can't give a good definition for this except by example. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, Atheism. I suppose that it might even be possible to ask the questions assuming that science is a religion. The focus of the questions is intended to be on the engineering and social aspects, rather than on a question like "Should Atheism be considered a religion?" I understand that the vagueness makes this a less than perfect delineation of a topic.
Done. Not pretty, but the links seem to work.
How do I do that? Is it sufficient to edit a web address into the text of the old and new threads?
You're all getting into some really interesting material here, and I think that it has significance beyond the scope of conlangs. I didn't want it to get lost, or ignored by non-conlangers, here, so I started a new thread for it, called "The value of ambiguous speech". This isn't to say that it wouldn't be great to see more discussion of the application of ambiguity to Ithkuil, but I didn't want you to miss out on the wider thread if your attention was focused here.
Update: ChristianKl pointed out to me that I should put a forward link to the new discussion here (bear with me, I'm a newbie), so I'm going to try to edit one in after the fact.
Click here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/n0o/the_value_of_ambiguous_speech/
Sounds like a good addition to my reading list, although I just looked at her books on Amazon and the prices on most of them are outrageous (I couldn't sell a book for $28, let alone $280). But with luck it might be possible to dig up a list of the basic primitives, with commentary, on the internet somewhere.
Perhaps a special sort of quote symbol used to highlight metaphors?
All good points, and among the strengths of conlangs in general. It still amazes me that past efforts at reforming English spelling, like President Roosevelt's, weren't accepted.
I understand the temptation. From the beginning I wanted to scrap parts of the alphabet and start over. From the pedagogical perspective, accepting the fact that children have to learn 4 versions of the same alphabet (capital and non-capital, print and cursive), makes me feel like I'm condoning torture. The only common English uses for the capitals are to set off sentence beginnings and proper nouns, both of which could be handled differently. And now that we're beyond the days of manual typesetting, the only justification for print fonts is that they're easier to read than cursive fonts. I'd love to find or create a non-capital, cursive font that's just as easy to read as print fonts, and then scrap three of the four alphabets. but even separated and with serifs, cursive fonts just never seem to be as easy on the eyes as print fonts. So I decided to stay with contemporary English conventions to enhance ease of learning for English-speaking adults.
Sorry, I don't have a link for it. The result is just something that I remember reading about many years ago. I looked at the link that redding posted and while it probably isn't the same paper (I think I read about this before 2011) the result seems to match what I remember. There's a possibility that if the linked paper could be retrieved, then whatever I read may be in the bibliography, although I don't know if I'd recognize it as such.
Agreed. This was one of my more painful realizations, that I might have to do more than one iteration of the conlang before developing a finished product, because there will be no way to understand the flaws in the first version well enough to correct them until after learning to speak it fluently.
I've looked into the subject of ontologies (I did research on knowledge base design years ago). The problem wasn't finding ontologies, but finding non-arbitrary ontologies. That is, no matter how one ontology categorized entities, you could always find another that categorized them differently, and no non-arbitrary reason to select one over the other. And I didn't want to give in to the temptation to just choose one and use it regardless. I finally gave up and decided that treating each concept in isolation (for the purpose of dictionary building) was better than using an ontology that some users might find highly counter-intuitive.
I took a look at Cniglic. It seems similar to an idea that I noted as a candidate for an eventual add-on, to use diacritic marks as emotion indicators. The problem that this was intended to solve is that it seems overly limiting to be restricted to the one emotion indicator "!", and to have to put it at the end of the sentence. I much prefer the idea of having many such indicators, and being able to apply them freely throughout sentences. Implementing them as optional diacritic marks above vowels seemed like the best bet. But I haven't gone anywhere with the basic idea, except that at one point I began looking for a "definitive" list of human emotional states. I don't remember ever finding a list that I thought was reliable.
The problem that I see with this is that people are basically lazy-brained. Even if a language requires that you choose a final particle that indicates evidentiality, people will just not use it. For example, if the written form of a language requires that a sentence end with ".", "?" or "!", and each one is an evidential particle, then tomorrow someone on the internet will say "By the way everyone, I'm tired of doing all of this evidentiality stuff when I don't need to, so I'm just going to write '_' at the end of all of my sentences, and it doesn't mean anything but that the sentence is over." Within a week the convention will be adopted all over the world, and mandatory evidentiality will be a thing of the past. It might or might not be a good idea, but I just can't see a grammatical requirement overcoming human laziness.
Many years ago an acquaintance of mine in college said "A system without an application is a useless ornament." I believe that he was quoting someone, although I have no idea who (BTW, if anyone here knows where this quote might have come from I'd appreciate the reference). In the case of a conlang, part of the beauty comes from the fact of its widespread use. While I agree that mandatory evidentials are a tempting idea (I'd certainly like a language that has them), I don't believe that they'd hold up well in actual use.
Also, the topic is now up and running in the regular "discussion" area.
Since other replies are drifting in this direction, I'll reply to my own post with a comment about Heinlein's fictional conlang Speedtalk, to which Ithkuil has been compared. Like a lot of people, it was one of the ideas that got me interested in conlangs. But after a bit of research I concluded that it wasn't a fruitful direction to head in. I ran into some research in which the rate of information transmission of various natural languages was compared. It turns out that in languages that are spoken faster, as measured in phonemes per second, the information carrying content, measured in bits per phoneme, is smaller. The result is that you really don't seem to get a lot of bang for your buck by monkeying around with your language design to try to increase the rate of information transmission. The bottleneck at the high end seems to be in the processing capacity of the brain, not the structure of the language.
I looked at the Wikipedia page for Ithkuil. It doesn't seem to be geared towards preventing cognitive errors, so much as packing as much information as possible into as few phonemes as possible. For most of them I can't see the point. In English I can say "Trees are green." in a few simple words. From the sound of it, in Ithkuil I'd have to pack in so much information about the trees that it would take me an hour to figure out how to write the sentence. Is the set of trees spatially contiguous, in a specific but unnamed forest? Or is this the set of all trees on earth, being denoted as members of an abstractly defined set? And how do I feel about the matter?
Also, the creator packed the phoneme set so tightly that I can't see how he's going to avoid a high rate of transmission errors. There comes a point where you've got so many vowel sounds that individual sounds are so close together in phonetic space that you can't reliably distinguish between them.
So far I've been going in the opposite direction. Rather than including multiple layers of meaning in each word by complicating the sounds and grammar, I've been planning to restrict meaning to one meaning per word, with each additional bit of information requiring more text to transmit, and no restrictions on what the user can leave out because it's irrelevant. It looks to me like Ithkuil goes in the opposite direction. Which isn't to say that there isn't some interesting material there. The creator seems to have broken down his informational overlays into unusual categories, such as "configuration", "affiliation", "perspective", and so forth. It would be interesting to read about why he selected the categories that he did. So there might be some interesting stuff there to borrow. But it seems that he gave up too much in the way of usability. What good is a language that decreases the frequency of common cognitive errors, if the only people who can use it are already so smart that they rarely make such errors?
I have a number of evidential categories available for use, as well as some relating to certainty, which I view as a separate issue (source versus certainty). But I hadn't put any thought into making their use mandatory. There are certainly advantages to making it impossible to hide information by making the inclusion of some information carrying categories necessary. But it seems to me that not all possible information is going to be relevant to all possible statements or circumstances, and that forcing everyone to always include evidentials, even when they aren't relevant, will carry a high price. There are probably aspects of speech other than evidentials that it would be advantageous to include in some circumstances. If the grammar requires that they all be included in every statement, then every statement will be overcrowded with irrelevant add-ons. Also, there's the problem of enforcement. If, for example, you require that each statement end with an evidential, then what will stop irritated users from simply omitting it? If you create a system of grammar such that each of the add-ons must, unavoidably, be merged into the words, perhaps by some mechanism similar to verb conjugation, then how many people would volunteer to use such an inconveniently complex language? In order to be successful, a constructed language must be designed such that many people will want to use it. Only a few have reached that peak, such as Esperanto, and Klingon.
It sounds like you were trying to construct an a-priori conlang, in which the meaning of any word could be determined from its spelling, because the spelling is sufficient to give the word exact coordinates on a concept graph of some sort. I thought about this approach some time ago, but was never able to find a non-arbitrary concept graph to use, or a system of word formation that didn't create overly long or unpronounceable words.
I was originally thinking about including non-ascii characters, but eventually compromised on retaining English capitals instead. The biggest problem that any conlang faces is getting people to use it, and anything that makes that more difficult, such as requiring changes to the standard American keyboard, needs to be avoided unless it's absolutely necessary.
Hi,
I'm a middle-aged computer scientist/philosopher, who specialized in artificial intelligence and machine learning back in the stone age when I was getting my degrees. Since then I've done a bit of work in probabilistic simulations and biologically inspired methods of problem solving, mostly for industry. I've recently finished writing a book about politics, although God knows if I'll ever sell a copy. Now I'm into a bit of everything. Politics. Economics.
I came here looking for input into a conlang project that I'm working on. Basically it involves the old Sapir-Whorf/Eprime/Loglan dream of creating a language that's better suited for rational cognition than English, and I'm looking for linguistic mechanisms that might aid in this and that need to be built in from the bottom up (since surface mechanisms can be added later). I already know of the three conlangs mentioned above, although I don't speak them, so I'm looking for ideas that aren't contained therein, or that if they are might have been missed by a person without a deep knowledge of the languages. I did a search of the archives here and saw some discussion around this general topic, but nothing of immediate use, although I could easily have missed something.
All ideas welcome.