Re: what is etymology? (linguistics and biology)

Holographic etymology

The galaxies in the cosmic depths form 3-dimensional
patterns of clusters and filaments, while pictures taken
of our planet by night show similar 2-dimensional patterns
of light: clusters and filaments. I find it fascinating how
gravity in one case and logistics in the other case
generate analogous patterns.

Also the neurons of the animal including the human
animal form a cluster, namely the brain, and a filament,
namely the neurons along the intestines, only recently
discovered and dubbed a second brain by some biologists.

The human brain contains one hundred billion neurons
(even double as many according to Gary Marcus), each
one connected with a thousand other neurons, thus
achieving a degree of complexity that corresponds to
a space of twelve dimensions.

Biologists have been wondering how many microbes
dwell on the surface of leafs: six times as many as the
surface of a leaf should hold. The solution came from
fractal geometry: the surface of a leaf has a fractal
dimension between 2 (area) and 3 (volume), yielding
an area of about six times the classical area on the
scale of microbes.

A fractal dimensional increase allows many more
microbes to dwell on a leaf, and the twelve dimensions
of the human brain's neuronal interconnections allow
to store many many many more information than can
be compiled in a book the volume of the human brain.

My thesis: when acquiring and learning languages
the human brain establishes connections among them,
generating a deep and stable pattern of words I call deep
etymology, or, perhaps better: holographic etymology.

Next time: the oldest written word known so far
(10,000 years, Goebekli Tepe / Göbekli Tepe)


Paying homage to my good alas departed friend An Elk
by attempting a reconstruction of her lost second theory

At age fourteen I had an insight: when I do a chore in
a clever way I can save energy, so intelligence may be
linked somehow with energy? In 1970 I asked a physics
professor at a private meeting and he said no, I must not
confound intensive and extensive quantities (whatever
this means). A first confirmation came from Eric Chaissac
who says that information _is_ a form of energy. A couple
of days ago I remembered my good friend An Elk, whose
life had come to a tragic early end. The fossils in sci.lang
(the ones of my generation, that is) will remember her quite
famous theorem, her first theory, which is her's and belongs
to her alone, and, ahum, follows along this line: dinosaurs
are thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and
thin again at the other end ... An Elk, a dear friend of mine,
as I should have said above, once remarked unto me that
she had a second theory in mind that shall be a general
theory wherein her dinausaur theorem will just be a special
case. Now let me pay homage to An Elk by attempting a
reconstruction of her lost second theory, and thus free her
from the mockery piled upon her poor self by the notorious
Monty Pythons, who were at least honest enough to call
themselves "whacky boys."

Picture a cosmic brontosaurus rotating around his gravity
center, shed a stroboscopic light on him, and you may see
a pattern of a galaxy: bulk of matter in the center, spiral arms
- or necks and tails of the dragon - around the center, and the
ring of potential earths in the outer region, much as the beast's
brain. Actually, a galaxy forms a sphere of dark matter, as does
a solar system, with a disk in the center; again the Elk principle
in a general form: thick in the middle (disk), thin and thinner
when removing from the central disk. Or consider vision. We
just see a tiny spot of our visual field clearly, due to the fovea,
everything else unclearly, yet we have the feeling that we saw
all clearly, owing to our knowledge that helps the eyes (we see
what we know, said Goethe), and our mobile attention that
enlarges what we focus on while blending out the other regions
of our visual field; also applies to the other senses (from my
theory of perception from 1974/75, you may look up my page
An Allegory of Seeing, on my website). The tiny spot we see
clearly is just about the size of the sun or the moon on the
sky. The organization of vision certainly is a most intelligent
one, and resembles a cosmic order. This makes me wonder
whether intelligence might be at the very heart of matter and its
alternate form energy. If so, intelligent design and evolution must
not be at war - evolution is a friend of intelligent design. Albert
Einstein overcame the former idea of an ether, a sea of particles
filling the empty space, yet it seems now that even space-time
requires particles, revealing the same organization once again:
no even distribution over any axis, but periodic concentration.
In other words: An Elk rules. We may fully understand her
second theory only when we have really abandoned Lego
physics and biology of the still mechanistic era and see the
entangled world of quantum physics come full swing. Let me
foresay a discovery for that time: An Elk's general theory
predicts not only the bulk of matter in the center of a certain
space, it also predicts filaments going out from the center,
in the special case of her DT (dinosaur theorem) neck and
tail of the dragon or brontosaurus, and this predicament
of filaments is all but trivial. Filaments are present in the
highest form of organization known to us earthlings, in the
gray matter of our very brains.

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