“In Arrival, the film adaptation of Ted Chiang’s Nebula award-winning “The Story of Your Life,” a seven-limbed alien species arrives on Earth in twelve mysterious monoliths spread around the globe.”
“the heptapods, like us, have both spoken and written language, which she names Heptapod A and B. However, unlike with humans, the two differ significantly from each other in appearance and behavior.”
“Heptapod A is a bit like cetacean song, but raspy and deeper.”
“Heptapod B is an ephemeral, coffee stain-like script that encodes meaning in a self-arranging dark smoke projected by the heptapods from one of their limbs.”
“Banks and theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) seek to deduce the points in common between the aliens’ phenotype — their form of organic life — and our own, going beyond their sevenfold asymmetry and general anatomy, to questions of the heptapod’s way of thinking, and the structure of their mind.”
“To begin to answer the heptapod question, we have to look to the evolutionary history of life on Earth.”
“By understanding the specification of our own species phenotype we’ll have a bit of solid ground from which to orient ourselves to the newcomers.”
“Because this is science fiction, not fantasy, it’s safe to assume heptapods, like humans, evolved to be suited to a particular environment, in a specific world.”
“Heptapod B doesn’t play by the rules we’re used to. Its symbols are semasiographic, depicting meaning rather than sound, and don’t appear to follow any linear order — each expression in the script is rendered as features projecting from different segments of a semicircular backbone, like so many pools and threads of ink spreading adventitiously from a central spill.”
“Yet, Heptapod B obviously has more going on than do monkey howls, which are also unordered; or emojis, which also encode meaning rather than sound. In the universe of Arrival, the heptapods identified something in human language that is unique to the human biological endowment among all the Earth’s intelligent species. This something is popularly known as UG, or Universal Grammar.”
“Scientists have theorized, not uncontroversially, that the human language faculty is at least in part genetically encoded — that language, in all its mystery, complexity, and beauty, is part of our phenotype, a species-wide phenomenon that, operating from the core of what we may call human nature, has had indelibly marked the history of our species.”
“Like other parts of the human organism, the virtual organ responsible for language develops over the course of each person’s growth and development — in the course of normal development, the human brain naturally implements the computational processes that power language, just like it implements those processes that interpret sensory information or control our fine motor skills.”
“According to this view, because the basic properties of language are genetically encoded, a newborn’s brain need only be provided with the correct stimuli in an appropriate environment and, like the seed of a vine planted in fertile ground, the organism will self-assemble. Indeed, linguistic and cognitive science research increasingly suggests that there is only a single human language — the language of thought, of which every other language is simply a type of dialect.”
“The concept of “linearized hierarchic structure” seems a little more obscure, though its effects are likely just as intimately familiar.”
“The linear ordering of the word remains the same; what changes is the underlying syntactic structure, which doesn’t care about linear order at all. Words follow each other one by one; when we hear them, our brain immediately begins to interpret them and try to arrange them into meaningful clusters, or phrases, which are themselves interrelated throughout the sentence. Phrase structure, and therefore syntax, is non-linear.”
“All language users are masterful artists, capable of producing a discrete infinity of virtual sculptures out of meaning.”
“When Weber naively presents Banks with an audio recording of Heptapod A, the alien’s spoken language, he’s giving her raw data: phonetic form and nothing more. Like anyone hearing an unfamiliar language for the first time, it’s basically impossible to interpret.”
“What’s more, unlike with human languages, which often come to resemble one another through historical or geographic association, no one on Earth has heard spoken Heptapod before. It’s with good reason, then, that Banks insists on engaging with the aliens directly, and soon thereafter, on trying written, rather than verbal, communication.”
“If the brain is so well adapted to picking out human voices, it’s because speech is a literally “noisy” channel through which to transmit a signal. Written language is a cleaned up version of the same signal, with none of the background noise.”
“At least this is how human language works — it’s an encoding of the same linear string that gets externalized at spell-out. Even in systems that don’t directly represent sound, like Chinese script, readers can pronounce the words they read on a screen.”
“It comes as a great surprise, then, when Banks discovers that Heptapod B, which should by rights be a crisp, standardized register of Heptapod A, neatly linearized, turns out to be a splotchy, disorganized mess, an inky coffee stain ejected from a tentacle and suspended in mid-air, with no beginning or end — unlike any known language, written or spoken. But language processing doesn’t stop at spell-out, and phonological form is not the only product put out by the human language faculty. If the original thought-form somehow survived spell-out and linearization, order-free yet structured, an object of pure meaning, this would begin to look a lot like Heptapod B.”
“This linguists call LF, or “logical form.” If phonetic form is like exiting through the gift shop at the language museum, logical form is like touching the artwork.”
“Phonetic form is language as spoken, logical form is language as understood.”
“The computational processes that link clusters of meaning together, chaining concepts to each other in nested hierarchies, are both eerily intuitive and strikingly exotic, and the subject of ongoing research.”
“So much, that if we take another look at the splotches and curlicues of Heptapod B, it becomes more and more familiar, more and more human.”
“This is why the heptapods came for us: not because humans are good, special, or virtuous. They came because we’re similar to them, because our world, our technology, our languages, bear the traces of a historical, convergent evolutionary trajectory that, on two different planets across the vastness of the interstellar medium, brought our two species’ phenotypes miraculously close.”
“The heptapods, for all their faceless, seven-sided symmetry and imposing technology, have eaten from the same tree of knowledge we have.”
“As far as the film shows us, this turns out for the best. Planetary and interplanetary war is successfully averted with the help of the transtemporal cognitive abilities unlocked by Banks after learning Heptapod B, triggering a sort of second mental infancy. Like a child learning the magic of language, or a bird first taking flight, Banks is in a sense not becoming like the heptapods, but becoming more human, more herself.”
“Humans call our species Homo sapiens sapiens. The second sapiens, often elided, is there for a good reason — it marks us, contemporary humans, as behaviorally distinct from our anatomically identical ancestors.”
“The break, hard to pinpoint with precision due to the imperfection of the archaeological record, came about 80–60,000 years ago, when homo sapiens were only one of various human species. At this time, for reasons anthropologists are still investigating, the language faculty made its first appearance in our species, likely as an instrument of cognition, or a language of thought that allowed us to chain thoughts of previously impossible complexity, reason with unparalleled precision, and, ultimately, conquer the Earth.”
“When we evolved the capacity for recursive, hierarchically structured thought, the one true human language underlying all languages, is when our species truly became itself.”
“It’s from the earliest signs of human symbolic behavior in southeastern Africa that the story of our life begins, and the story of countless nonhuman lives begin to end. As we spread out across the globe, diversifying our languages and expanding our technologies, developing controlled fire, perfecting tool use, becoming seafarers, harvesters, builders, and agriculturalists, we quickly drove all our human relations, our closely allied human species, to extinction.”
“Armed with complex thought and a means to externalize it, our plans and schemes have spread their effects without the need for our direct intervention. Species are doomed from the moment we look to a new landscape and begin to think of the possibilities. The judgment is passed down before we utter a word.”
“This is not to say we would be better off without language, or that there is a moral lesson to be gleaned from better knowledge of our biolinguistic nature.”
“Language isn’t an omen, but a gate, a virtual organ that opens up our organic being to what Heidegger called “the open.””
“At the threshold of this gate, we can capture a discrete infinity of possibility — no single fate, but an uncountable plurality of fates.”
“That the gate allowed the heptapods to reach out to us means something, not about the timeless fate of species, but about the atomic, finite choices we make out of what we have been given.”
“No right-thinking or peace-loving alien species would choose us, humans, for alliance. The heptapods chose us because we, like them, are consummate destroyers, so skilled at war we wage it from a distance, almost invisibly, speaking softly about co-existence.”
“When the heptapods turned whatever sensory organs they may have to the stars, they encountered potential comrades in arms, biologically endowed with untapped capacities needing only to be nudged into activation. Born into this, we continued to become more fully ourselves.”
“We know language is powerful, but even an infinitely generative machine may have infinities it can never access, incommensurable truths it can never articulate.”
“The boundaries of the human aren’t only sketched out by language, but by the whole of our being. Beyond these boundaries, our notions of right and wrong fail as they approach the limit of comprehension and our sense, so deeply held, that we are logical, moral creatures, collapses.”
“And this is perhaps the darkest thesis of the film — disabused of the illusion of choice, and brought out into the bright open light of timeless time, it may be the case that humans would continue, earnestly and full of hope, like any animal on the hunt, to choose the future we have made for ourselves.”