[lojban] Re: How many possible gismu?

["H. Felton" <fagricipni@gmail.com>]

On 8/25/09, MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com <MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com> wrote:
> In a message dated 8/25/2009 02:53:53 Eastern Daylight Time,
> fagricipni@gmail.com writes:
>
>
>> "So even given the rate at which I imagine that new gismu
>> might be created; it would be extremely unusual for there
>> to be more than 10 per century, usually less -- 10 per
>> century would be 100 per millennium, leading to at least
>> 7429/100 = 74+ millennia before there is even a possibility
>> of running out of gismu."
>>
>
> You're assuming that change in the world is linear.  It's not.  It
> increases more than exponentially.  So 10 new gismu per century is a very
> (hugely)
> conservative estimate.  After the singularity occurs (in about 2045), we
> might use up all those new gismu in no time at all, since we can't predict
> what
> the world will be like after that point.
>
> stevo

If we hit that point we could well speculate about communicating by
exchanging "core dumps" of the relevant brain states; I could not only
communicate to you that I saw something blue, but also _exactly_ what
shade of blue it was, by copying that part of my memory and and
including it in the "core dump"; I could also communicate to you
everything I know about a subject encoding as a "core dump" the brain
states of the region(s) where that information is stored.  (I don't
say neuron states because I don't assume that we will be using a
structure that involves neurons at that point.)  IF the singularity
occurs, there is, as you say, no way to predict anything beyond that
point.  If the world is to become less comprehensible to us than our
culture and lives would be to a Neanderthal, we can't reasonably
predict how that will affect things; so there is no way to plan for
it.

I put those speculations in the same catagory as
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/futurese.html
puts:
If twenty-third century computer geeks have cybernetic implants to let
them offload cognitive processes to specialised hardware, new slang
possibilities arise such as inhumanly complex versions of "rot-13ed
Pig Latin".
or
In a "world state" with an anglophone bureaucracy of artificial
intelligences, ANSI-standard English could function as a sort of
unnaturally preserved lingua franca even if the human native speakers
died out.
in his speculations about the future of English in the next
millennium, and for pretty much the same reason: "because they don't
make the language's future form any more predictable".

But yes a singularity-type of event could make Lojban as obsolete as
pre-hominid's pointing and "grunting"; but I just don't think that I
could in any real sense reasonably speculate about how a culture less
comprehensible to us than our culture and lives would be to a
Neanderthal, would affect Lojban _in particular_.  I will grant that
the "prediction" of "74+ millennia" is not worth a lot because of the
likelyhood of these types of changes in 74 millennia; my speculations
about the future of Lojban might be accurate out to a few millennia
from now, but I'll not even take that for granted -- imagine the
predictions that I would have made about what computers would be like
in 2000, if I lived in 1950.


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