Human communication is proactive.
Humans study monkeys, while monkeys don't study humans. Humans put questions to Artificial intelligence, not the other way round.
Carl Popper classified societies into open and closed types. This is similar to the classification of psychological types into extraverted and introverted. Such division is not specific to humans.
Human communication is based on non-human communication. Most if not all processes in the material world can be described as communicational processes. A stone which is heated by the Sun is communicating with the sun. It receives the Sun’s heat and responds by raising the temperature. This is a uni-lateral communication, because the Sun doesn’t intend to communicate with a stone. This is an involuntary communication.
Human communication is based on the non-human communication but this doesn’t in and of itself mean that it can be reduced to non-human communication and can’t contain any new tools and new goals, or provide new content.
Humans think about communication, first of all, as a verbal process. The use of appearance (skin, hair, clothing) and purely pragmatic activities (building houses, eating) to communicate imply a qualitative difference between human communication and animal communication. They show this difference more than verbal communication. Music, paintings, sculpture and other arts occupy an intermediate position between these (“decorative”) types of communication and verbal communication.
Humans communicate in different modes and for different purposes: survival, pleasure, amusement etc. but they always aspire that communication will be based on truth and aimed at finding the truth. It is fundamental to human communication to distinguish between falsehood and truth and to endeavour to destroy falsehood.
For all its similarity to animal communication systems, human communication through words, i.e. speech, has a unique property: it infinitely expands both the possibilities for lying and the possibilities for truth. Using metaphors, humour, wordplay and other means, humans turn verbal communication into an instrument of communication, entertainment and cognition, the possibilities of which seem limitless.
The human brain has a huge potential for both positive possibilities and the formation of illusions, but thanks to communication a person can even control their own brain, increasing its positive and negative capabilities.
Even when people falsify information, they do it for the sake of truth, and sometimes falsification is a path to verification and vice versa. This makes human communication an incredibly complex, fascinating, and potentially endless process.
Humans change in the process of communication. Any healthy human being begins to communicate as any other animal, as an individual in a family, a tribe, or a pack. Communication is a way to attain a personality while belonging to humanity. Emergence of one’s own personhood and emergence of humanity are different processes, albeit they are deeply interconnected.
Humanity is secondary to being a person. A human being grows, rising from individuality to personality. The life of an individual is a story, the life of a person is a history. Personality nurtures humanity through history, in spite of the processes of separation, discommunication, and oppression, which corrode both personality and humanity.
Humans are constantly improving their communication, and two inventions have proven to be particularly important to that end. First, the invention of writing. Writing is alienated communication that can exist without the original communicators, even after their death, that can be inherited or be an object of action by other people. Second, modification of communication on the scale of "personal/impersonal”. The main example of impersonal alienated communication is money. Money is impersonal, while literature, which has been developing in parallel with it, allows for a deeply personal communication.
At any given moment, the life of any human being can be best understood as a form of communication: both with themselves (intra-communication) and others (inter-communication), both individualistic and personalistic, both inherited and newly invented, aimed at both uniting and alienating through hate and love, fear and hope, war and peace.
15 april 2024