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by frikk
2969 days ago
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I recently finished reading Snow Crash (1992), which touches on this topic in an interesting way. The general premise without giving too much away is that ancient Sumarian was made up of a specific structure that acted as a kind of assembly language for the human brain, enabling self-executing code like "How to Bake Bread" or "How to Plant a Field". A villager could go to the "source code repository" aka "the temple", get a recipe for some function they wished to complete (or needed to be completed by the village in general), and execute it by having it read to them by the priest. This was a way to bootstrap human society, ultimately giving rise to free thought and "higher level language" that was not bound by self execution. It was a pleasant surprise and I found myself enjoying it immensely, even with a bit of suspension of disbelief. |
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Something I find interesting is that the instructions described in the book, the Sumerian 'Me', actually existed. They were instructions on how to do fundamental things, managed by the priests and which the Sumerians believed came from their gods and goddesses. The concept of neurolinguistic programming by the Sumerians is a nice fiction, or at least there's never been any evidence of it.
A good book on it is Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character, by Samuel Noah Kramer. https://www.amazon.com/Sumerians-History-Culture-Character-P...
An online version can be found at his university: https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/...
Interesting bits around the Me are around page 116.