Interplanetary Species Society (ISS) 16:30–18:30 Dialoguing with the More-Than-Human Introduction – Exosemiotics [16:30–16:40] Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei 10 min = 1,200 words [x] zacalo lec aibo zacalab biaibca bi ac biaibca'ju eclal-ecalale c'beo alelud biaio luc bu befuc, ef ec ci, cicaodol ucluc, leo! The desire to communicate with other species is an old one. I just read you the first lines of the poem "Oath of the Inventor" written in the language AO, designed in 1919 by the Russian anarchist Vol'f L'vovič Gordin. In a pamphlet from 1924, Gordin declares: Everyone, establish anarchy, speak in human language, in AO! Boycot natural, national, state, and international languages. Esperanto is the language of European "international" imperialism. Invent pan-anarchism!1 The main cultural task of AO was the "eradication of religion and science and the proclamation of a new civilization: pan-inventism."2 The language was featured in the "First International Exhibition of Interplenatary Machines and Mechanisms" organized by the Interplanetary Detachment of the Association of Inventors in April 1927.3 [x] "Students who study and speak the language 'AO' are cosmopolites (citizens of the Universe) who have expressed the desire to embark on interplanetary travels,"4 it said in one of the exhibits. [x] The way in which Gordin conceptualized AO presages much of the way in which interplanetary communication becomes thought in the twentieth century. For example, he equated "the language of humanity" with the invention of humanity itself5: humanity invents itself by speaking the universal cosmic language. Thus he sets the stage for later artificial languages such as Hans Freudenthal's Lincos from 1960, as driven by a very human more-than-human ideology [x]. 1 V.L. Gordin, AO-russkij grammatičeskij slovar' (Moscow, 1920), cited in Sergej Kuznecov and Patrick Sériot, "Linguistica cosmica: La naissance du paradigme cosmique," Histoire Épistémologie Langage 17, no. 2 (1995): 211–234, at 218. 2 V.L. Gordin, Čto za jazyk AO (Moscow, 1920), 8, cited in Kuznecov and Sériot, "Linguistica cosmica," 221. 3 Kuznecov and Sériot, "Linguistica cosmica," 215. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 217. * * * In 1968, Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem presented the transformative effects of receiving a "letter" from outer space in his novel His Master's Voice. It shows in excruciating detail the effects on the human psyche of receiving a enormously important message without context, without key, and which can mean almost anything: None of us knows […] to what extent we were the instruments of an objective analysis, to what extent the delegates of humanity (in that we have been shaped by and are typical of our society), and to what extent, finally, each of us represented only himself, with the inspiration for his hypotheses about the contents of the "letter" being supplied by his own – possibly raving, possibly wounded – psyche in its uncontrolled regions.6 This fundamental uncertainty about the nature of communication has found its way into so-called scientific approaches, too. The first international academic conference dedicated to Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI) was held in 1971 in Soviet Armenia. From the Western side, participants included luminaries such as Carl Sagan, Freeman Dyson, and Francis Crick. Despite the optimism of the conference participants about the technological possibilities, very little attention was paid to the actual contents of any interplenatary message, including the question of meaning and language. Soviet astrophysicist B.I. Panovkin threw cold water on the entire enterprise by stating that without access to a world, we have very little chance of deciphering any symbolic or non-symbolic system of communication. He phrased this thus: 1. "No isolated symbol system can interpret itself within a framework of a symbol system alone." 2. "An isolated symbol system will reconstruct its own knowledge in the set of symbols used." 3. "Pure structure or code gives us no clue as to the real meaning of what is being communicated."7 To receive an interplenatary or interspecies message, or, in fact, to claim to have found one, is thus very close to dreaming or hallucinating. Panovkin thus arrives at the sobering conclusion that "what is needed is a close identity of the historical background of the two societies. That identity must be so great that to some extent we must speak of a second earth or 'earth prime'."8 [x] To circumvent this issue, he proposes to send a universally recognizable image or 'meme': a cat. [x] 6 Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice, trans. Michael Kandel (San Diego: Harvest/HBJ, 1983 [1968]), 32. See also Anthony Weston, "Radio Astronomy as Epistemology," Monist 71, no. 1 (1988): 88–100, one of the few scholarly articles referencing Lem's novel (92). 7 Carl Sagan (ed.), Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973), 318. 8 Ibid., 321. * * * Panovkin's sobering conclusion is echoed near the end of the century by Douglas Vakoch, who states that "in absence of knowledge of physical and cultural clues, communication between two species can be almost impossible."9 In fact, it appears that CETI is part of a much larger set of problems, which I call here following Vakoch "exosemiotics"10: problems of undeciphered scripts on earth, communicating with other species such as bees, whales, and trees, and leaving warning messages about nuclear dump sites to ourselves 100,000 years into the future. To give an approximation of the enormous scope of our enterprise today, I will therefore propose a schematic representation. This representation is organized along two axes: the measure of semiotic complexity of the symbolic system on the y axis, and the genetic difference between sender and receiver. [x] So let's fill this up: At genetic distance zero, we find semiotic systems that are targeted to myself: • Shopping lists I write to myself [x] • Dreams [x] Then we go to semiotic systems that communicate between me and other humans from the same species • Traffic signs [x] • Human language [x] • Crime scenes [x] • Music [x] • Fashion [x] One step further we find other primates, such as apes [x] And other mammals, such as dolphins [x] This also possibly includes our future selves, whom we are trying to warn about nuclear waste dumps. [x] At this point we dive into the complete unknown, where questions of scale and time become infathomable. We find here • Pioneer plaque (1972) [x] • Arecibo message (1974) [x] • Voyager Golden record with the Sounds of Earth (1977) [x] 9 Douglas Vakoch cited in David Dunér, "Cognitive Foundations of Interstellar Communication," in Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, ed. Douglas Vakoch (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 449–67, at 459. 10 Douglas Vakoch, "Constructing Messages to Extraterrestrials: An Exosemiotic Perspective," Acta Astronautica 41, nos. 10–12 (1998): 697–704. • Cosmic Call 1 (1999) written in Lincos [x] • Trevor Paglen's Last Pictures (2012) [x] Traffic signs and shopping lists are symbol systems of which we have the semiotics more or less nailed down. [x] Human language, culture, and our own selves continue to elude our own powers of understanding and even a general semiotics of human communication in all its forms remains completely out of reach. [x] Everything beyond this, from talking with dolphins, sending warnings to our future selves, let alone talking to aliens, all of this is in the realm of exosemiotics. This is perhaps more to scale [x] And this is only as much as we can imagine based on our scale as humans of about 170 cm tall, a lifespan of 80 years, perceiving light with a wavelength between 390 and 700 nm, breathing oxygen, and so on. Speed up or slow down time, increase or decrease our size, and the very nature of our communication and symbolic systems unravels. It is completely unclear to us whether deforestation is understood by the root and fungal systems trees, whether our pesticides convey confusing messages to bees, whether our sprawling megalopoles communicate anything to the earth's crust. We know nothing about the precise pattern of our steps as interpreted by colonies of ants, nor do we know much about the protocols with which the biome in our gut communicates with our brain. And what about talking to AIs, the dead, or simply just listening? And what if communication as we imagine it is just that, a figment of the human mind? I am looking forward to discussing these themes with our three speakers today, and of course, you, the audience..