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  • [MUSIC PLAYING]

  • JASON SILVA: So Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired Magazine,

  • has this wonderful idea about how the emergence of language

  • was actually the first singularity, right?

  • In other words, the world on the other side of that line,

  • after language emerged, would have

  • been unimaginable to the creatures

  • standing on the previous, on the other side of that line, right?

  • Trying to explain the nuances of a Shakespearean sonnet,

  • to an ape, are simply unimaginable.

  • Right?

  • This is inconceivable, we simply lacked the wetware, right?

  • So language.

  • What is language?

  • Kevin Kelly says it's a tool that

  • allows the mind to know what it's thinking, right?

  • It turned a feral mind into a tool

  • that could now think with purpose and deliberation,

  • right?

  • Language allowed us to create a virtual world in our heads,

  • and pull the present forward to meet that.

  • The ability to design, to envision, to plan, to imagineer

  • was the natural consequence to the emergence of language.

  • Again, a tool that allows the mind

  • to know what it's thinking, right?

  • Language has to do with sentience,

  • before language, there was no self-awareness,

  • there was no self consciousness, right?

  • Language came about as a kind of vortex of self-mirroring.

  • Right?

  • Language and self-awareness is kind of

  • like plugging a video camera into the TV,

  • aiming it at the TV, and then seeing the engulfing infinity,

  • right?

  • The recursive infinity loop that gets

  • formed, and-- and, I don't know, I

  • find that idea to be astonishing.

  • And when you really think of how it transformed

  • the mental operating system, right, you

  • can see why Kelly would call it the first singularity.

  • Language.

  • [MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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