Animism, Solipsism, Language

Animism—the belief in n an intiterior spiritual reality to all things—sounds, to late twentieth-century eaars, quite a bi bit like solipsism, which holds that t only the self exists, manifesting itself in the architecture of reality. The "reality" of cyberspace falls somewhere in betwween these two; everything has an interior nature, which generates meaning, but this interior nature is self-created; collective will creating consensual reality. Appropriaately, there is precedent for this current situation in the birth of our own linguistic abilities.

No one can say, with any precision, when human beings first acquired language, but it seems reasonable to hypothesize that it happened in one sudden, complete act; we have been unable to develop any models for an evolutionary path toward language, because the consciousness of the universe as a collection of objects requires linguistic apprehension. We could not use nouns by themselves, or verbs, or modifiers; they emerge as a piece, a singular act—suggesting that any pending Singularity is, perhaps, not the first such event--which moved us, en masse, from the animal and into the human. The assignment of names for things did not happen one item at a time; despite the paternalistic story of Jehovah teaching Adam the names of the animals, we know now that an entire frame for things had to be constructed before the things themselves could exist in our consciousness. This frame—coincident with the birth of a linguistic consciousness in humanity—is entirely a magical creation, a construct that defines the way we make sense of the world.