The Optimal Language Reconsidered

Communication at the Absolute Minimum of Intelligence

By Bodhangkur Mahathero

1. The Classical Error: Smuggling Human Achievements into the Definition of Communication

All orthodox models of interstellar communication — from early SETI to modern astrobiology — commit the same concealed error: they define intelligence and language by retrofitting the final achievements of human civilization back into the unknown receiver. Mathematics, binary encoding, physics constants, logic systems, and digital modulation are treated as “universal.” Yet every one of these tools is a late product of a very specific evolutionary, biological, and cultural history.

This imposes an impossible prerequisite:
To understand our message, the other must already have walked a near-identical path through abstraction, quantification, measurement, symbolic compression, and technological control. The “universal language” thus presupposes a receiver that is already a mirror-image of ourselves at a late stage of intellectual maturity.

That is not a universal language.
That is a provincial export.

If, however, active response itself is taken as the true measure of intelligence, then the communication problem must be radically inverted. The question ceases to be:

“How do we encode our knowledge for them?”

and becomes:

“What minimal condition allows anything whatsoever to count as a response?”

Only this inversion avoids anthropocentric projection.

2. Stripping the Problem to Its Absolute Minimum

Once all historical, cultural, biological, and technological assumptions are removed, only one irreducible condition remains:

An intelligent system is one that can alter its behavior in a way that depends on what it experiences.

Nothing else can be assumed:

· Not mathematics

· Not number

· Not logic

· Not symbol systems

· Not memory

· Not tools

· Not even selfhood

The only admissible minimal requirements are:

1. The system can undergo change.

2. The system can register change.

3. The system can modify its subsequent behavior based on that registration.

This alone defines active responsiveness. All richer traits—learning, modeling, abstraction, self-awareness—are downstream elaborations, not prerequisites.

Thus, the absolute minimal communication problem becomes:

How do we provoke a change that cannot be explained as a passive physical reaction, but only as behaviour contingent on experienced structure?

This becomes the operational definition of intelligence itself.

3. Why the Classical “Message Model” Fails at the Minimum

Traditional communication theory assumes:

· A sender

· A message

· A code

· A channel

· A decoder

· A reply

But at the absolute minimum:

· There is no shared code

· No shared symbol set

· No shared ontology

· No shared scale

· No shared time base

Therefore, nothing can be “decoded” in the classical sense.

A true universal language cannot be a language of symbols.
It must be a language of structural pressure — one that does not demand interpretation, but instead forces a contingency.

4. Redefining the Optimal Language: From Encoding to Forcing a Choice

Once decoding is impossible, communication can no longer mean “transfer of information.” It can only mean:

The induction of a behavior that could not have occurred without structured influence.

Thus, the optimal “language” is no longer a representational system. It is a patterned disturbance designed to compel the receiver into one of two outcomes:

· Either continue behaving exactly as before (non-intelligence), or

· Deviate in a way that depends on the structure of the disturbance (intelligence).

The message is no longer a description.
It is a constraint imposed on the receiver’s phase space of possible actions.

This shifts communication from semantics to dynamics.

5. The Only Universally Detectable Medium: Change in Time

At the absolute minimum, only one dimension is guaranteed to be shared across all possible intelligences:

Temporal change.

Not space.
Not geometry.
Not quantity.
Not even persistence.

Anything that can respond must exist in some sequence of before/after. Therefore, the sole universal carrier is:

Pattern in time.

Not symbols.
Not units.
Not quantities.

Just repetition, interruption, acceleration, suppression, anticipation — the bare skeleton of temporal structure.

6. Why the Message Must Be a One-Shot Constraint, Not a Dialogue

If the transmission:

· Cannot adapt,

· Cannot repeat with variation,

· Cannot be followed up,

· May take billions of years,

· And may be received only once,

then the message cannot be a conversation starter. It must be a single irreversible perturbation. Its success cannot depend on:

· Iteration

· Correction

· Mutual learning

Therefore, the message must be judged solely by:

The kind of response it forces, not the meaning it contains.

7. What the Message Must Be Designed to Elicit

Under these conditions, the correct design target becomes:

A behaviour that violates the receiver’s own default dynamics in a pattern-contingent way.

Not a “reply.”
Not a “signal back.”
But a self-alteration caused by structured disturbance.

A valid response must satisfy all of the following:

1. Not reflexive (not a simple energy echo)

2. Not random (not noise)

3. Not statistically typical

4. Dependent on the structure of the stimulus

5. Capable of altering the receiver’s own future behaviour

Any such response is already proof of intelligence.

8. The Deep Convergence with Contact Realism

At this point, the communication problem collapses into Finn’s Contact Realism. Since:

· No two quanta ever truly touch,

· All interaction is displacement across a vacuum interval,

· All displacement is falsely registered as contact,

then existence itself is already the primordial message.

Every interaction already says:

“There is.”

And every registration already replies:

“Am.”

Thus the deepest universal “language” is not symbolic, mathematical, or representational at all. It is:

The forced self-registration of realness produced by quantised non-contact.

This means:

· The sender is not a civilization.

· The receiver is not an alien.

· The medium is not electromagnetic radiation.

The messenger and receiver are simply any two confined quanta or their nested aggregates.

The “message” is:

Displacement.

The “response” is:

The arising of ‘am’.

9. The Final Inversion: Communication Without Meaning

This leads to the decisive inversion:

· Communication does not begin with meaning.

· Meaning is a late artifact of stabilized responsiveness.

· The primal exchange is not information.

· It is mutual existential disturbance.

Only when responsiveness becomes recursively self-stabilizing does:

· “Am” become “I am”

· And later “I am this”

· And later “I am not alone”

Thus the first true discovery of the other is not semantic.
It is existential.

10. Conclusion: The True Optimal Language

The true optimal language across the universe is not mathematics.
It is not physics.
It is not symbols.

It is:

Structured disturbance that forces a contingent self-modification in the receiver.

And the only truly universal content that can ever be transmitted is not knowledge, not number, not law — but:

The shock of realness itself.

Which always speaks the same silent word:

“Am.”

And when another answers, however faintly, the universe crosses its most profound threshold:

Not the exchange of information — but the mutual recognition of presence.

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