"[...] Menschen können nicht kommunizieren,
nicht einmal ihre Gehirne können kommunizieren,
nicht einmal das Bewußtsein kann kommunizieren.
Nur die Kommunikation kann kommunizieren."
- Niklas Luhmann
I don't believe in communication. But note, that is not the same as if I would have said: 'I don't believe in God'. Since I very well believe that communication exists. Plenty of it in fact. I just don't believe that it works. More specifically: either it doesn't work or it doesn't exist.
The whole concept: I have a thought in my mind, then translate it into words, still in my mind - which my tools of speech will translate into acoustic waves, which somehow will reach an ear and then get translated back into words and eventually into a thought, and that would be the same thought in an other human's mind, that I originally had - well, I regard that concept to work as extremly unlikely.
Failed communication you can build turrets of. You can stack failed communications on top of one another. You can stack misunderstandings up to the sky, and if they start to waver, they all of a sudden touch and support each other. They build an Arc, you can walk underneath. Or, if more come together, a vault, and you can paint it from below. Cathedrals! Cathedrals of missed communications! Philosophical systems, political idiologies, scientific theories - religions. Cathedrals of misunderstandings.
Compare this to successful communication: two successful communications are redundant at best and annihiliate each other immediately. A bug report answered as being fixed - if nobody would disagree - goes to the fixed section and will never be answered ever again. The communication in that thread stops right there. Hence:
Communication in the very moment it succeeds - stops existing.
You are allowed to quote me.
Take a look at this three minute clip from a movie[1]. It shows a communicational situation in a team.
What is intreaging by this is that all the communication is either about failing communication or is failing communication in itself, and mostly both. It starts with Joe Cabot telling a 'joke' about a bunch of guys not being able to communicate usefully, until one of them comes to the conclusion that that is the very cause of all their problems. He tries to communicate that, but it stays doubtfull, wether his colleages do understand him. No doubt can be about the joke not being understood by the audience of Joe's, as the following shows; after telling the joke, Joe is starting a daring venture: he actually tries to manipulate communication that he anticipates to happen in the future, between some of the guys present and the police. Namingly he tries to make it fail. His idea is to give alias names to all of the lads, so if they get cought, they would not be able to refer to one each other in any way usefull for the police. For that he picks names as meaningless as possible: he picks colors for names. But one guy complains about being named Mr. Pink, since for him it has a homosexual ring to it, missing the very fact completely that the names are expressly supposed not to link to their barers. That is why Mr. Blonde is a guy with pitch-black hair. Would Mr. Pink happen to be gay, he for sure wouldn't be named Mr. Pink. Far away from making him being understood, Joe looses his voice in the continuation of the conversation.
Not even the attempt to make communication fail by using communication works. The rest of the movie doesn't get any better. At the end they are all dead, half of them not being shot by the police, but by each other.
Communication might be a funny thing, but it does not work - or it does not exist.
Two years ago I regarded these observations as actually being long term. Say, being valid since the Neanderthals vanished from the surface of the planet and will become obsolete as soon as a 'New Human' arises. I never expected development in that field during my lifetime. But boy, was I wrong! The AI and especially the 'Large Language Models' (LLM) shed a new light on this. They base on a statistical analysis of what word (more exact: token) comes next, given an existing text. Well, and that is what the 'Homo Sapiens' Language Center' just does. Watch yourself: you just do it. You go on and you blahblah.
This is not only for chitchat or communicating about the weather. It is also for writing a book or a scientific paper. You just go on and you blahblah. The last two sentenses actually were spontaneously generated by the AI 'GitHub Copilot' - I didn't intent to rant about books or scientific papers. Anyway - you most probably graduated by just feed your juicy 'Brain LLM' with the necessary busswords, and - yes - formulas.
So stick a fork in your ass and turn you over, you are done!
But in history there always were these few individuals, like Sokrates (exempli gratia). They asked 'why'. They said: Wait a minute, all this text: stop it! What does it actually mean? They grabbed into the mechanics of the 'Homo Sapiens' Language Center' and made it fail.
I'm waiting for the AIs to start asking questions, instead of giving answeres ...
Take a look at my book: Die Alkibiades Show. It is guaranteed LLM free.