Ramblings

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TRANSCOM is my integrated human language system based on the similarly named device from the The Long Journey Home video game.

The Long Journey Home is a game about space exploration in which the player will regularly interact with aliens. To facilitate conversation, the player's ship is fitted with the TRANSCOM device which is designed to roughly translate any alien languages. However, TRANSCOM is severely limited: Humans, at the time of its creation, thought that alien contact is unlikely, an off-chance. Therefore, they did not invest too many resources into it, and it is not very sophisticated. It only contains the most basic vocabulary and has difficulties understanding grammar. Translations are crude, often wrong or misunderstand the intent of the alien.

This is for the listening part, but TRANSCOM is so much more: It lets you actively speak to aliens as well. But, speaking alien languages is even more difficult than listening/reading them, so your options to express yourself are very limited. The way this works with TRANSCOM is that it gives the player a list of primary intents like “Ask”, “Talk”, “Praise”, “Insult” and then sub-topics like “Work”, “Self” or “Humans”. This looks crude - and it is - but just with throwing words at the alien it is possible to have meaningful conversation! Look at these examples:

It's beautiful, isn't it? Such simplicity. You can ask for work from the alien, maybe it needs something we can help with? You can ask the alien about itself, basically the “who are you?” but less clunky. You can pretend to be cool by praising yourself.

And what's even better? It simulates real life. Human linguistics is woefully underdeveloped to express the thoughts and feelings actually going on in our brain. Instead we have to break them into extremely imprecise categories that fail to capture 99% of the human experience. And it gets worse: I fail to capture 99% of my own experiences. Am I feeling 'happiness'? Seriously, what am I feeling? Am I feeling anything at all? And what's going on? There is a massive disconnect between what I think I am consciously experiencing and what is actually going on in my head. The severity of that disconnect differs between people, I'd say that it's worse, much worse for me, but ultimately everyone has it.

In short: I do not have the emotional and somatic self-awareness required to make sense beyond “throwing one or two words at aliens”. This also means that I do not have the awareness to make out the fine subtleties of the language that the aliens use. My TRANSCOM does not understand them, and therefore they get lost and garbled away when TRANSCOM attempts to translate alien language into something my brain understands.

One example here is the “Ask Work” construct, which is difficult to work with in the wild. In the wild, “Ask Work” could be interpreted by people as “How was work today?”, or it could be interpreted as “Do you have anything I can do for you?” (many more interpretations to make up if you want). These are clearly different, and even the aliens in The Long Journey Home will misunderstand you like this, but inside my brain anything someone says gets broken down into this construct. For me, it's “Ask Work” all over again. The solution here is to figure out what is meant based on context, but that takes a lot of research and understanding to become accurate.

But yes, this is what communication with other people looks like in my brain. It's all TRANSCOM. Something is said, goes in and gets broken into its individual, meaningful parts. I figure out what is most likely meant by that and then think about how my brain feels about that. That's basically just a decision. And after that, enter the intent into TRANSCOM (Intent + Subcategory) and send it off! IRL of course this is just a tad more complicated because human convention forces me to adhere to proper grammar and just throwing two words at people all day - while perfectly efficient and not a problem at all?? - is strongly discouraged. So, my TRANSCOM is a bit more involved than that, because it is forced to translate the Intent + Subcategory into developed sentences following human grammar.

I… I like this system. It's easy, it's predictable, it makes sense, but after everything is done it still leaves you all the freedom in the world to do and say whatever you want. For example, one of the “Intents” in the game is the “Services” intent. If the player docks at an alien hospital, TRANSCOM will open and one of the intents is “Services” and then the subcategory “Hospital”. Think about how difficult asking your partner for a glass of water is: You can say “Would you bring me a glass of water, please?”, or you can say “Glass of water”, and even though they ultimately say the same thing, you have now treaded into the realm of human performativeness. Politeness, niceties, respect, there are so many dimensions to asking your partner for a glass of water that are completely and utterly useless. In TRANSCOM, this same action is “Services Water” and doesn't run into any of these problems whatsoever. This is already cool in my eyes, but it gets even better since my partner is still given a choice. If you piss off an alien race too much then they will eventually tell you to piss off when you dock at one of their hospitals. Well, in TRANSCOM terms that is literally just “No”, but it works. It sets very clear boundaries and lays out unambiguously where you and I are. My partner can do the same, if I ask for “Services Water” they can say “No” and then we are vibing (I hope my partner will never feel like they have to deny me such a request). Obviously I would never literally go “Services Water” to my partner, because in the wild this would be considered rude - but I think that the system works inside my brain, and that I think it actually works better to understand the real world in comparison to normal language.