from ekho
Creating my own words
- Developing new terminology is important to accompany a sentient-centric narrative. If our words hide reality, make new ones. If we were to start looking at the world like Ekho, an alien journalist, with need a terminology, and maybe even a new language, to accompany it. The first small step I made in this direction is creating the The alien journalist dictionary, written by a bias free alien correspondent reporting from Earth, writing for the Beyond the Galaxy magazine. Here are some word examples:
- https://sentientworld.org/the-alien-journalist-dictionary/passivist/
- https://sentientworld.org/the-alien-journalist-dictionary/productification/
- During the last 10 years, I have created about 900 words, only a handful of those are in the dictionary. Some of the words are personal stuff, some describe elements and patterns in my experience, some are related to ethics. Some of them use new combination of sounds, but many of them are familiar to you and they are actually a refencing of an existent words, e.g. weapons of mass destruction included those that kill animals in huge numbers, life intentional fires and trolling nets. Most of the words I have stop using and as of today don't find useful at all, but around 200 of them remain significant in my life, and I have ongoing awareness to them, to a varying degree.
- I started noticing how we say things that are completely wrong, how we coin phrases that are completely false, by ignoring the global majority. It's a free country. really? It's a "free market". Really? for who? for most beings in huma civilization which, to our economical system, are mere property, numbers, or not even that? Once I saw it, I could not unseen it. The language that hides the slaughter of the enslaved and the extermination of the free is everywhere. In the conversations on the economy, politics, food, brotherhood. Fish is a being, fish is the action of killing that being, fish is the body of that killed being. Whaling is killing whales, but humanning is by no means killing humans. Hiding the atrocity of animals is everywhere in language, crafting a worldview by word definitions that push out the ones that don't speak in our language. It is everywhere in the symbolic world of language, and it reflects everything is the civilization we built; In our pavements, in our transportation system, in our supermarkets, in our stock markets.
- One day, as I was doing my regular thinking-walk outside, I thought to myself, "you've been doing those for a few months, and you don't seem to come back with any real insights. Why do you keep walking?" It was in this walk that a very simple thought arose: maybe it's just not just the environmental terminology that is hiding the sentient and highlighting the insentient. Maybe it's in all of our language. This distortion starts form human language systematically describes subjective experiences as objective realities, creating a deceptive worldview that shapes our values, separates us from other kinds of beings, and flows into the training of AI. Watch this 5 min talk I gave, called A Slip to the Tongue: How Language Unwittingly Shapes Bias Towards Animals, if you wanna know more.
- With the help of AI, and for AI, I think humanity can develop a language that keeps the experience in the center of language. We can test how specific language changes affect values and behavior, in humans and machines. Much more on that coming soon.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum"— - Noam Chomsky. Language is that limited spectrum.