Re: CHAT: Alienness, was I'm new!

On Sun, Oct 22, 2000 at 03:02:36PM -0400, Jim Hopkins wrote:
[snip]
> There is also the question which I once before raised, as to whether any
> human author, no matter how great our imaginations, can possible create a
> construct that is truly alien to our own mental framework or perceptual
> field.  IMHO anything we imagine or produce is thereby inherently human, no
> matter how farfetched.  The underlying substrait is necessarily human.
[snip]

True enough. What can be exploited, though, is the fact that human beings
are actually much more varied than we would tend to think. Those who have
never seen more than the culture they grew up in will perceive another
culture as pretty alien, although it's just different cultural rules for
the same human things. This is just on a collective level; individually,
every human being is extremely different. I think if this individual
difference is projected in terms of non-human things (i.e., contrived
"alien" cultures and things), it could well give a convincing appearance
of being alien; although it's no more alien than the extremities of the
human spectrum.

This is why, IMHO, alien conlangs can, indeed, seem convincingly
alien-like; although my opinion is that if something were actually the
product of non-Terran intelligence, it would be so different as to be
incomprehensible by human minds. For example, the fact that a conlang is a
language to begin with betrays its human source -- who's to say that
aliens communicate with languages? Who's to say they communicate at all in
a way human beings think of communication?

I once imagined a species of creatures which, although I put them in an
Earth-like setting, explores what happens if we drop the human perception
of individual personalities and communication. These creatures, although
physically many, exhibited a strange unity of personality -- every one of
their actions seem to be coordinated by an unseen leader, and conversation
with them elicits responses as though they were all one entity. Their
collective personality is a sum total of each individual, and in fact,
*is* their individual personalities. Injuring one of them is equivalent to
injuring all of them, no matter how far apart they may be physically. On
the other hand, each one of them can do actions independently of each
other; but in their consciousness, every action that each performs is also
part of the history of every other.

So far, I have not developed an explanation for their strange personality
unification, and nor do I intend to; the "how" and the "why" is
intentionally left unanswered and unanswerable. I just like to give it as
food for thought :-)


T