Communication 1
The communicative impulse is subordinate to the impulse to persist. Biological enteties pose the greatest risk to our persistance and we as biological entities pose the greatest risk to the persistance of other entities. This is because their actions are far more complex and hard to predict than non-biological enteties. The actions of a rock, a non-biological non-concious entity, are always caused from without, it is pushed by the weight of something above it and so it moves, or is thrown by a human. It’s motion and action is not caused by the reaction of complex internal mechanisms to the environment but instead by the environment on it’s own. It is comparativley predictable. To predict and understand the things around them (to the degree necessecary for persistance) is of great use to the persistance of entities, but understanding is only a quality of concious entities. Non-conscious biological entities have an interface between themselves and the world, they are not entirley at the whims of the environment. Instead they react in their own way to different environmental situations. They even act differently to the same situations if they themselves are different, for example when they (their interface) have changed over time. Perhaps their interface is that which is programmed in their genetic code. Conscious entities are biological so their behaviour is a result of both the interface and the environment, as are non-conscious biological entities. It’s behaviour is the result of this interaction. But they add still more to the interaction. Their interface interfaces with itself. The consious entity recognizes that it istelf is part of the environment and treats it as such, so that the way it interfaces loops back and changes the way it interfaces. This causes faster change and more complexity. As Kierkegaard says,
“The self is the reflection that reflects itself to itself.”
But conscious entities are not only faced with the challenge of understanding themselves as a complex self reflexive interface. They must also understand the other concious entities all around them. Humans are compelled to understand other humans. Because this is a shared imperative communication arises.
If we think of the goal of communication as the goal to be fully and completley understood then we must admit that it is a futile one, for our tools are hopelessly inadequate for such a task. In fact the tools could never be up to the task anyway for the nature of the world is just the case that one impulse cannot ever fully understand another. To do so would be to become that impulse and cease to be the previous one. “Become” isn’t even the right word, it would be to perish and be replaced. Each consciousness is an island unable to get outside itself and is also condemed to keep itself company because of it’s self-reflexiveness. Every impulse too, cannot get outside itself else perish, though one perishes far more quickly than the other.