Creating my own words
3 min read
- Developing new terminology is important to accompany a sentient-centric narrative. If our words hide reality, make new ones. If we start looking at the world like Ekho, an alien journalist, we 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 correspondent reporting from Earth for the Beyond the Galaxy magazine. Here are some word examples:
- Beinghood
- Antifaunism
- Faunacide
- Crimes Against Animality
- Floating Slaughterhouses
- Compassion-based Civilization
- Weapons of Mass Destruction
- Slaughter Product
- Productification
- During the last 10 years, I have created about 900 words, only a handful of those are in the alien 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 referencing of existing words, e.g. weapons of mass destruction include weapons that kill animals in huge numbers, like intentional fires which destroy animals' homes and burn them alive, or trawling nets which are a wholesale slaughter of marine animals. I have stopped using most of the words I created, most of them I don't find useful at all, but around 200 of them remain significant in my life, and I have an ongoing awareness to them to a varying degree. Words are awareness to patterns, appearing in your mind in response to certain conditions.
- I started noticing how humans say things that are completely wrong, 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? most beings inside human civilization are mere property, numbers, or not even that. Once I saw it, I could not unsee 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. Humans are 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 is reflected everywhere in 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 at this walk that a simple thought arose: maybe it's not just the environmental terminology that is hiding the sentient and highlighting the insentient. Maybe it's in all of human language. This distortion starts from language systematically describing subjective experiences as objective realities (this is a 5 minute lecture I gave about it), creating a deceptive worldview that shapes our values, separates us from other kinds of beings, and flows from us to AIs.
- With the help of AI, humanity can develop a language that keeps experience at the center. We can test how specific language changes affect values and behavior in humans and digital beings. My current independent research explores language redesign as a neglected AI alignment strategy. I am developing alternative semantic primitives, meaning basic conceptual building blocks for representing reality, and testing whether reformulating thoughts through them can influence my understanding of reality and ethical behavior.
"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.
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