PSETI Seminar: Patterns of Communication in Complex Living Systems As A Blueprint for Universal Communication

Anamaria Berea
October 6, 2022

Abstract:
In this paper I am exploring patterns of ubiquitous communication as a signal of successful communication evolution, that started local in various complex systems and became global. Intelligent communication is a coevolutionary process where innovation in artifactual communication (i.e., writing, telegraph, the Internet,...) and the type of collective behavior that forms a civilization intertwine and produce patterns such as universal transportation systems signals, universal brand logos, universal computer languages, and many more. The current “age of data” in our civilization is a result of two major forces: the global spread of artifactual means of communication (writing, computers, and the globalization of human languages) and the global spread of physical systems of recording and storing communication (the long evolution from Mesopotamian cuneiform tokens to current organizational servers and supercomputers). In alien languages, we would similarly expect for language to have coevolved with the social and technological evolution of that particular civilization. Globalized languages and large systems for communication are products of selection and adaptation mechanisms emerged from the economic systems of that civilization. At the large scale of the civilization, the planetary systems of interconnectivity for transportation and communication show artifactual, global patterns of signals and language of the largest magnitude known to us so far. I am also exploring a methodological reversal: can social and collective behavior laws that we find in cell-cell interactions, animal signaling and proto-human languages function as proxies for universal language patterns? Can we extrapolate from the empirical laws and statistical regularities of the social and collective phenomena in all these complex living systems to understand language evolution? We know that Zipf law applies both to languages and to complex systems such as cities or companies; we know that marginal analysis in economics (cost/benefit) also applies to metabolism and chemical communication in other species. What other laws from collective and social behavior of animals, humans and computers can we infer with respect to their universality and extrapolate on their probability to be found in alien languages?