Citing the precedent established in the last issue (Character Sound & Number Volume I, Issue 2; An Interpretation of Life as the Basis of Intelligence, Part I: Origins), I begin by again stating the obvious: The purpose of life is survival.

　　　After, in the same last issue, venting my contempt for the ideas of modern reductionism, I now reveal my own reductionist tendencies: Philosophical enigma turns out to be quite simple when addressed from the perspective of biology. Life begins with a single mandate governing all of our biological functions, the mandate to continue.

　　　Survival, of couse, is also an ultimate impossibility. Where life and death are concerned, we are clearly playing with a loaded deck: The Darwinian disposition of evolution in favor of

　　　The word survive, however, suggests another interpretation. Breaking it up into its components we get the prefix sur, meaning over, above, and beyond, and vive, from vivre, meaning to live. The literal meaning of survival would seem to be to live over and beyond, or to surpass living (in this case, physical existence).

　　　More about the word survival later. First, let's look at the question of continuity in the context of the phenomenon of instinct.

　　　Instinct is the survival mandate in action. Classically defined as innate, as opposed to acquired, instinct comes in the same package with life. We can describe it as the embodiment of the momentum or propensity for continuity of the animate life force. And since that momentum is, as we have noted, up against overwhelming odds, the challenge of continuity necessarily imparts a demand on the animate organism for some degree of inherent foresight and judgement. We can, therefore, also describe instinct as the innate embodiment of natural intelligence.

　　　By running a quick inventory and summary of the habits of animate species we find that instinctive behavior, to a greater or lesser degree depending upon the evolutionary complexity of the species, falls into three general categories:

1. INDIVIDUAL PRESERVATION: The instinctive performance of basic functions necessary to individual survival. These would include the acts of acqiring and ingesting food, responding to the need for sleep and rest, and deliberately avoiding danger and bodily harm.
2. PROCREATION: The sexual urge leading to conception and birth.
3. PRESERVATION OF THE SPECIES: Social instinct, beginning with parental nurturing and protection of offspring.

　　　Humans, of course, share these three categories of instinctive behavior with the rest of the animal world, however we do so within the context of that uniquely human linguistic

　　　That cultural environment, on the other hand, is also evidence of an overriding fourth manifestation of instinct unique to man:

4. CURIOSITY: The instinctive desire to know, the motivation to acqire knowledge.

　　　Here knowledge is interpreted broadly to include know-how and the pursuit of physical as well as mental disciplines. We can reasonably say that the desire to know motivates us more than the rest of instinct combined. One mark of the success of civilization is the removal from everyday life of issues regarding food, shelter, and protection from bodily harm as life-threatening concerns. For those of us privileged to have been brought up in such civilized environments, the acquisition of knowledge is unquestionably the primary focus of life from earliest childhood.

　　　We are an inherently curious species. To wake up in the morning and go to bed at night with questions is part of the human predicament; we live and die to know and learn, and that obsession is the foundation of our unquely human world. Notwithstanding the adage about necessity as the mother of invention, the greatest human breakthroughs in the arts, sciences, and humanities all derive from our obsession and sheer infatuation with knowledge. No one said the light bulb was necessary; after all, we managed quite well for most of history without it. We invent for the sake of invention, to discover how.

　　　Now, since curiosity equals the ability to ask questions, fourth-level instinct comes bound together with our faculty for language. This point is the crux of the present discussion. So there can be no confusion, I will delineate my use of the word language: Language, like knowledge, is subject to broad interpretation. Human expression takes on a variety of forms, not all verbal, and curiosity itself begins with a sense of wonder that precedes the formulation of the question. At the same time, wonder does not become a question nor yield results until it is verbally stated, and aesthetic forms of expression (music, art, dance, etc.) are aestbetic because they occur within the context of verbal culture. Language here means verbal language, the ability to recognize and communicate meaning through the medium of sound.

　　　To acquire knowledge means to distill experience into abstract terms. We learn through experience, however what we learn is of an order over and above the experience from which it derives. It resides in the storehouse of memory as a generality and enters conscious cognition in the form of a verbal statement that can be applied the next time a similar experience arises. Abstraction is linguistic in nature and origin: Language is the essence of abstraction.

　　　Man's works and achievements, the products of knowledge, may or may not be physical, however knowledge itself is clearly abstract: It lives in the world of ideas, in words and numbers. And if, as we speculated in the previous issue, the original abstraction is a universally creative absolute state of energy, then language, as the embodiment of the

　　　Meaning in human life is the product of the language instinct: Our innate capacity for language is the root and core of human intelligence. Contrary to the notion that human intelligence came first and then invented language, language creates man in its own image.

　　　If, as we are now saying, the acquisition of knowledge is the object of human life, then the meaning of the word survival in the human domain begins to become clear. Survival in this context is the recognition of meaning over and above the business of ordinary existence. Our destiny is inexticably tied to our faculty for language.

　　　By one estimate, we have been around on this planet for about 3.6 million years. By the same estimate, roughly 3.4 million of these years constitute an age of post-natal infancy described in terms of slow physical evolution. Somewhere within the last 230,000 years, probably within the same time period as our acquisition of fire as a tool, we began to develop the first glimmerings of verbal communication. The human vocal apparatus, we can speculate, developed the capacity to make sounds, and these sounds, filtered instinctively through the less-than-conscious human gray-matter, then began to acquire meaning through a sub-conscious process of social consensus.

　　　This beginning occurred long before cultural memory, however we can reasonably assume that the evolutionary process of acquiring language as a species was something like the process we go through in childhood. That prcess likewise occurs outside of individual memory, however in our roll as parents, we are afforded the opportunity to relive this process in our children. Nothing is more captivating than watching a baby in action: I can attest to the mesmerizing power that infants have over their parents. A large part of this captivation, I believe, comes from the subconscious recognition that we are watching, not only our future, but also our past unfold.

　　　Babies are not born talking. They are, however, born with a natural propensity for vocal expression, as any parent will tell you. Long before we speak, we feel, and we express these feelings through utterance.

　　　Baby cries, and later laughs, as the expression of her basic emotional disposition (happiness / unhappiness). Crying and laughing have no linguistic significance in the context of syntax and meaning. They are the uninhibited expression of a state of being, and as physical acts, they originate somewhere deep within the abdomen and project outward through every fiber of our body. When she cries, baby cries not just with her mouth but with her whole being.

　　　As baby finds her voice, she begins to exercise and explore this newfound faculty to its limits. Baby begins to "talk" in unintelligible monologue. These first sounds are remarkably unlike anything that occurs in adult language-so much so that I for one found them quite impossible to imitate. Baby, at this stage, shows no apparent interest in, nor exercises any effort toward, making these sounds

　　　Eventually, however, these sounds begin to crystallize into consonant-vowel syllables. With both of my children, the first enunciated "words" in baby's vocabulary were ah sounds, "da da da..." and "ma ma ma..."

　　　Father and mother most conveniently assume that baby is calling them by name: Mama is almost universally interpreted as a label for mother, or, as in the case of Japanese, food (after all, mother and food at this stage are pretty much one and the same). In making this assumption, however, we adults project in baby our already developed ability to name people and things. Baby's reality, I believe, is quite different. She is not living in the world of people and things but in the subjective world of her own wants and desires. "Mama," in baby's own vernacular, means neither mother nor food; it is an expression of an internal state we would express as "I am hungry" or "I want attention."

　　　With that connection in place, baby crosses the bridge between subjective and objective reality and the world appears for the first time as a place in time and space occupied by temporal objects and people. Baby becomes gradually aware that she too is a unique physical entity, and the internal self-awareness and self-consciousness of the first person, I, comes into being.

　　　As modern humans we cross this bridge within a short window of time between late-infancy and early-childhood. We do so, however, on the shoulders of several tens of thousands of previous human generations. On the other hand, our evolution as a species from pre-linguistic infancy to linguistic childhood occurred inside a linguistic vacuum. With no already existing linguistic culture as context, the process of learning language could only have been arduously slow. We are reasonably excused for a rate oflearning that today would be called severely retarded: The language ability we now take for granted is distilled from two hundred thousand years of unconscious and semi-conscious verbal groping.

　　　The bridge between subjective and objective reality spans the distance between utterance and meaning, emotion and the beginnings of reason, and animal instinct and the beginnings of human thought. Objective reality, in other words, is the product of our linguistic evolution.

　　　Evolution in Japanese is shinka, composed of the characters susumu, to advance, and bakeru, to change: i.e., advancing change. The same syllables, shin and ka, can, however, also be written with the characters shin, belief, and ka, or nani, the question word "what?" As this play on meaning would suggest, human intellectual development can be broadly described as a function of curiosity and the evolution of the questioning or inquiring mind in antithesis to belief.

　　　Human intellect (i.e., the language instinct, curiosity), we have surmised, developed spontaneously as the natural extension of the inherently intelligent directional propensity (the survival instinct) of animate life- energy. We acquired our intellectual capability, not from our physical environment-there was no intellectual big brother around to hold our hand-but through innate trans- parental guidance in the form of natural intuition.

　　　Primitive man, I imagine, does not ask many questions. He lives more or less spontaneously and intuitively in a murky state of unrealized consciousness. Out of this nebulous beginning, as human self-realization begins to congeal into words and sentences, intuitive precepts likewise begin to

　　　At the same time, parallel with his acquisition of language and in inverse propotion to his dependence on intuition, man also begins gradually to doubt and to question. This activity marks the birth of the human intellect acting as an independent agent (the birth of free will). Somewhere in the "middle ages" of man's intellectual development, the process of inquiry also begins to be institutionalized, eventually becoming the modern disciplines of philisophy and science.

　　　Intellectual development, fueled by the next great leap in linguistic evolution-the evolution of written language as the pillar of culture and civilization-has, within the course of recorded history, gained snowball-like momentum, until we now find ourselves hurdling toward the twenty-first century at breakneck speed on the crest of an avalanche of unprecedented technological invention. We have come a long, long way from our primitive beginnings. My enthusiasm for modern technology, however, as you have probably guessed from past issues of this publication, is tempered by the precarious state of affairs it seems to have brought with it. Compared with what is possible, we have a long, long way to go.

　　　I reflect that, as a child I acted with an air of autonomy and a certain confidence in my actions, as though life was of my own making. As an adolescent, I also assumed a certain degree of intellectual autonomy, and by the age sixteen I was already sure I had a leg-up on the ways of the adult world.

　　　Sometime after becoming a parent myself I realized for the first time the extent to which each