I've been exploring the Umwelt of my dog, Malibu through our walks (it is a practice described by Ed Yong in An Immense World). So I'm practicing the practice of ... Umgebung (an Umwelt as seen by another observer).
It is an interesting practice - one that takes extreme empath - it is exhausting and exhilarating at times.
I read a book sometime in the 1990s about a spaceship crash-landing on a planet with beings like trees - the trees were sentient and I cannot remember the title nor much more about the storyline. Those trees had a unique Umwelt, and to communicate the humans had to first, practice Umgebung. [Note: this book could have been by Don Saker - Scattered Worlds series - maybe]. I've been reading about the Hlutr - they have a First Language - of color, they have a Second Language - of sounds, and they have the Universal Language. I'm trying to remember... investigate this...
When I read about a minke whale in captivity that "learned to speak" ... more could mimic a human voice. But to do this they had to do some extreme sound manipulation not typical in their native voice. The "catch" they told a working diver to get out of their pool. Investigating this story ... and pondering their deprived Unwelt... they were reaching out and exploring in the way their environment presented "itself" back to them. But to do this mimic - well that requires great neuroprocessing ability. Like the common - parrot - that we give little thought to...
What would be the First Language of Malibu? He's days old - eyes still closed after being born. He is yet to be sentient... he gets hungry and starts probing the environment with his tongue... finds mom's teat and starts sucking. So smell & taste are his First Language. Much later in life - perhaps after being sentient - he becomes able to understand (Umgebung) the world of his human and their sound Language - so he develops a Second Language of words, & gestures. He is quite good at both, and between us, there may be a nascent Third Language, typically my wife has to translate for Malibu and he has learned she speaks in this Third Language much better than I do. So it quite often appeals to her for me to get off the couch, or out of the programming chair and go for a walk. A walk where he will ignore me and wonder why I don't listen in his first language.
So this Umgebung of Malibu's Umwelt has me wondering if I can distinguish between a First & Second Language by the "facts" that a First Language is received but much less transmitted by the sentient. A Second Language is both received and propagated by the sentient.
This realization of a distinguishing characteristic for First/Second Languages - is brought about by Sarun's article on Swift KeyPaths being a Meta-Programming Language. Yes, dear reader, I'm getting to the point. What's the point?
I do not see the Swift KeyPath as a meta-programming behavior available to me... (should I apply ... YET). I've tried to read about keyPaths and get distracted before ever having the ah-ha! moment. Someone needs to hit me over the head with the point! I've tried to apply Double-Loop learning to KeyPaths, so that the Meta will ooze out... But OMG, it ain't happening. Maybe tomorrow I'll be smarter.
So then I got to pondering... (I love the nuance of the word... pondering) - what is a way to enhance my Umwelt when coding... the IDE is largely responsible for this - enhancement. Some people prefer to code in a basic editor... OK, to each their own. I now want my Xcode editor to pop up a small hover-window with the Instance name that is inferred by the compiler - especially on keyPaths that I'm often confusing what the compiler knows with what I think I "know" and those two are not the same! My mistake!
This whole line of pondering... may have been primed by a Twitter conversation that I had - perhaps mostly with myself... about why humans are still using a very Flat-World (2D) encoding of communication (text on a page) when we so definitely live in a 3D world. What would it take to raise the bar... to pop up a dimension... to communicate in 3D representation of Language? It could not be our "native" (First Language) it would require a popping of our mental stack - up a level of "sentience" (is there a word for this?).
So in order to understand a Coder's Umwelt... one most likely must have experience as a Coder. One would need many varied experiences of a Coder - because there is a wide swath of tasks and input/outputs the coder is learning to deal/juggle/manipulate - mostly in a 2D textural language that describes a virtual behavior (connected to the real via some actuators) that they might have written a test to specify the desired virtual --> actuator --> human response (via largely the visual cortex. What might happen if we popped up a very few layers and thought about how to generate a communication "system" a Language, that included much more than instantaneous light transmission - but encompassed some of our First Languages (smell, taste, touch) into a 3D communication media?
Pondering...
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