Structure Before Content

On the Structural Conditions That Precede Content

Opening

What if the oldest observation, reasoning and articulation, before language, was not to pass content, but to pass structure? And if that structure were in some way what people would later call God, then would God not have been obvious, long before man could articulate the concept?

A Grammar of Structure [AGOS] describes a set of diagnostic, grammatic constraints that we can use to situate these questions as inquiries and then perform work against them.

Pre-Articulate Invariants

This paper is concerned with macro-biological articulation – that is, the articulation of spoken language. Throughout [AGOS], articulation often takes a more fundamental, protogrammar meaning. In this paper, articulation is to be taken at the domain of spoken language, unless otherwise noted, as in the following opening.

In Protogrammar terms (explicitly upstream of spoken language), before any articulation can take place between bound, coherent systems, several invariants must already be satisfied:

• Bookkeeping and Binding have been established by prior grammatic necessity

• At least one coherence-preserving binding exists between systems requiring coordination under translation pressure

• Some minimal shared admissibility exists, sufficient for coherence under translation pressure

A single coherent system, thus referred to as an entity, must contain internal bookkeeping, that is, the ability to track its own internal state, as well as external bookkeeping that allows it to track state related to its bindings with other entities.

There must be at least one common attractor or point at which a system can become bound to external state, that is both shared by multiple entities and necessary for those entities to continue coherently under translation pressure.

Finally, sustained coordination under shared admissibility opens the possibility space for a shared grammar that carries sufficiently aligned understanding across individuals and contexts.

When these invariants are equally satisfied by multiple locally bound entities, articulation becomes possible at the level of spoken language.

What Can Be Said Before Articulation

Having established three criteria that must be met for any articulation of speech to occur, it emerges that only one of those three criteria requires sustained coordination pressure sufficient to stabilize a common translation lens.

Bookkeeping and Binding are emergent wherever systems persist under translation. These mechanisms were already active through physics and chemistry before biology could arise.

Coherent systems of sufficient complexity and binding already coordinate under translation pressure, from the formation of atoms to the maintained balance of solar systems.

However, a shared grammar does not reliably emerge at the fundamental level without sustained coordination pressure. Once a grammar exists, emergence can steer its evolution. Critically though, the formation of a shared grammar requires sophisticated application of effort between systems capable of maintaining a coherent common translation lens for a duration sufficient that meaning can be established at a linguistic level.

At this point, downstream of the pre-articulate layer, if this additional effort is added to a coherently bound set of systems a shared grammar appears to emerge through the success of combined effort. Nothing here guarantees success. Any one of several failure modes could be induced by one or more of the systems participating in the attempt, leading to total decoherence and preventing a shared grammar from emerging.

As will be shown more clearly, but it is worth naming now, this happens in negotiation, in attempts to teach alternate forms of human communication such as sign language, in code translation between platforms, and many other places where content must be exchanged under a grammar that is being actively negotiated.

Therefore, what can be said before articulation must, by necessity, be only that which can be passed as a structural element - nothing more complex can yet be articulated.

Protolanguage As Expressions

Without access articulation, communication becomes expressive out of necessity. What can stabilize among such systems is any observable repetition that can be associated with some local state or condition. In protogrammar terms, what stabilizes are repetitive, external, short-term bindings that occur within the context of a larger shared binding scope.

At this layer, structure can be communicated through observation.

Bees dance and buzz a pattern that defines a structural element, its priority, and its relationship to the survival of the hive. An ant or termite performs the same function though trailing pheromones and individual physical interaction.

Herd and flock animals use body language, utterances, and posture to communicate the same structural elements as they apply at the creature’s respective ecological level.

Pressure to maintain coherence across complex systems of multi-entity binding causes the emergence of individual bookkeeping mechanisms that become structurally aligned under coordination pressure, such that they enable the later emergence of a common surface.

From this perspective, structure is communicated prior to content.

None of the systems described directly exchange information about their internal state. They are only able to signal structural queues with limited semantic weight. These systems lack a state-sheet of shared bookkeeping from which they can mutually reason. Without such a local, shared bookkeeping method, the two systems have no common space within which a common grammar could be developed.

The Need for Collective Bookkeeping

At the introduction of the word “collective”, it is easy to envision the ant colony and beehive from our earlier examples. While these are often referred to as a “collective organism” when referring to the colony or hive as a whole, the word “collective” is carrying too much weight in that context for protogrammar use.

In poetic protogrammar-ish terms, those systems are better thought of as “systemic cooperatives” - they coordinate on large scale at sufficient complexity to appear to act as a collective, but are actually closer to an algorithmic process than a group of individuals making an *intentional* selection from a space of possible ways of communicating structure.

To convey intent, there must be a shared space in which intent can be made accessible to another system. For two or more systems to interact with this shared space, they must be able to read from it, and write to it, using some stable symbology that is recognized to carry the same meaning by all systems sharing the space.

This is collective bookkeeping. The collective, in protogrammar terms, is made up of all entities participating in the shared space containing the stable symbology.

The Sung-Speech Hypothesis

In another paper, the Sung-Speech Hypothesis builds upon what we have discussed so far, along with other background information that emerged within [AGOS], to state (in summary) the following:

Human language may have begun in the form of vocal expressions with musical structure that carried meaning through multiple musical channels such as note, tone, pitch, duration and repetition.

Many vocal animals produce what the human ear and mind then interpret as music. Even many different animals in chorus can be perceived as a concert.

The lesser primates already exhibit signs of this kind of communication, along with multiple marine mammals.

If humans were communicating via structural signaling, using song, body language or other mammalian communication queues, then an understanding and pre-articulation of structure existed before man could have declared any word such as “God”.

Compression: The Cost of Complexity

Once articulation of speech has occurred, complexity grows exponentially. What was previously hidden state in the form of internal bookkeeping gains a mechanism for external transfer. Articulation becomes information transfer. The repeated transfer of information among many entities builds knowledge.

However, complexity rarely grows along a single path, unless narrowly constrained to do so. Social advancement is the opposite of that posture. Societies that thrive, do so through continued branching. Societies that continually collapse eventually stagnate and decohere.

But any system that branches continuously while simultaneously expanding its own grammar will eventually reach a semantic overload. At that point, the shared symbology space is no longer stable - it has begun to collapse under its own weight.

This collapse is a predicted effect within protogrammar bookkeeping operations. At this point, the shared system must select which semantic elements to compress, and what form or forms those compressions should take. This is also rarely a linear process.

The collapse of state should not be viewed as a loss - it is a compression, and lossless compression is a thing that occurs. However, that does not eliminate lossy, or highly lossy compression from the list of available bookkeeping mechanisms. This is where intent by each entity participating in the shared symbology space will play another role.

Emergence of Domain-Shaped Accounting

If is system is to rationalize over the crowded space of shared symbology, and make intentional compression decisions, a necessity for procedures of accounting emerges.

Accounting provides a new attractor around which certain aligned entities can form ready bindings. This emergent subset of entities then typically directs the compression process through one or more means of aggregation. Those means are outside of the scope of this paper but should be explored by the implementation-architect structuralist observer who finds such a topic of interest.

For our needs, accounting serves as a binding surface that allows intended selection of compression methodology and implementation.

As the gap between accountants, those within the common set of entities aligned around an accounting attractor, and the number of non-accounts widens, the pressure to disseminate accurate information rises, as does the effort required to do so.

As these tracks of pressure and effort reach a point of instability, a new container emerges from necessity: the domain of interest. Here, a “domain of interest” is any space in which observation, reasoning and articulation are simultaneously constrained by the same set of invariants, and use a singular, defined grammar.

Once domains exist, charts of accounting and their respective accountants can diverge and specialize. Each domain becomes more cohesive internally, at the cost of cohesion between the information that had been once been thought of as a whole.

Once knowledge has been divided, interpretation emerges as something that is no longer implicitly shared.

The Interpretation of Boundaries

When a single chart of accounts is manageable by a small number of accountants, boundaries tend to be clearly observable to the majority of accountants. All parties can generally trace the same state in the same accounts to track the source and bounds of any emergent boundaries.

However, once accounting is spread amongst domains, another new container emerges from the necessity of now needing to transfer charts between accounting domains, if global accounting is to occur at all anymore. This attractor is architectural; it requires that structure be defined first. Entities that bind with this attractor then observe, reason and finally articulate for others what admissible transformations can be applied to that structure *within a given domain* or, more critically, *across domains* without succumbing to a common failure mode set that leads toward decoherence when left unrecognized and/or unaddressed.

Without architecture at this level, domains are prone to misinterpreting boundaries and subsequently trying repeatedly, and in vain, to violate them. This leads to decoherence not only within the domain, with orthogonally in inter-domain communication.

Global bookkeeping begins to decohere. State is not cleaned. Clutter accumulates. What was once diverged to create room, risks diverging again but this time to fracture.

Progress stalls.

If Structure Was Named “God”

We have established the grounds for stating that during human development, there is a reasonable probability that humans first communicated structure before articulating content.

We have seen how complexity gives rise to domains, so that people can compartmentalize observation, reasoning and articulation.

In a small handful of writings with [AGOS], God is described as Structural Continuation. The concept of a multiverse is place in structural terms as a continuverse, one which instantiates itself “When God Blinks”. These concepts are covered in detail within their own writings. Here, what matters is this: that which man named God may have originated from an attempt to share knowledge of structure using the only grammar that can operate at the level of structure - a grammar derived from a word.

But that grammar has already undergone transformation by the time “God” is given name *within* that grammar - the name was implied until the point of articulation. Once further division introduces domains, it is only natural that each domain would claim ownership of its aspect of “god”, as associated with the structure underlying their domain of interest.

A word becomes a grammar, a grammar becomes a landscape of language. Within this landscape, the word is lost.

A Word (Protogrammar)

A word in protogrammar terms is not far from what we know a word to be in common language. At that level, in the intuitive regime of language, it is a compression of symbology that holds a meaning within the context it is used. In protogrammar terms, once articulation has begun, a word is a structural operator - it participates in an articulation such that it provides or expands upon state and/or it describes a translation over which surrounding words are impacted.

A single word can establish a grounding state, describe a transformation, and require no closure. An example of such a word is “Begin”.

In structured documents, text such as “<BEGIN>” may mark the start of a region.

Begin is a verb meaning start; perform or undergo the first part of (an action or activity).

Begin implies continuation without end.

Such a word serves as a marker, and an action, which need only be spoken once.

Within [AGOS] Prime numbers are explored as a possible forced articulation within the grammar of integers due to the pressure that structure requires once a single word has been articulated. Other papers further explore the requirement for this continued articulation. Further details would be out of scope for this paper, but here, we can accept that a grammar of a single word would be insufficient to reach anything approaching the level of accounting we have already shown must emerge if complex systems are to survive their own growth and expansion.

With these actions completed, we have performed a full inquiry over the opening question posed by this writing.

Conclusion

This paper does not offer a conclusion; like most of [AGOS], this paper exists to serve as a window through a wall that does not need to stand blank once the existence of an external landscape has been revealed. Many more walls require many more windows. Light needs to shine where darkness has, for far too long, stifled the work of those who toil in the rooms built by their own domains.

Nothing more is required.