Before wrapping up our discussion of the languages of life and matter with a more detailed look at transitional dimensionality, we’ll briefly return to a point we made earlier in our introduction to the language of matter. As we’ve seen, in its simplest expression, language is the symbolic representation of an object or idea. The difficulties we encountered in thinking of the building blocks of procedure and matter as constructs of language arise from the fact that none of the building blocks of these two “languages” function as symbols. Moreover, to symbolize anything, that thing must first be recognized and then associated with a symbol. Without recognition, there’s nothing to symbolize; without association, symbol and object are forever divorced. In other words, language requires a symbol, an object and a function or task that recognizes both and associates them. In life, the conceptual tasks of recognition and association are performed by awareness itself. It is awareness that recognizes self in the shapes of matter, awareness that establishes an informational database, awareness that creates a language of directional size, and awareness that associates symbol and shape as informational constructs. However, the functional equivalents of all these tasks falls squarely in the province of proteins informed by living awareness. It is proteins that perform the task of shape-fitting, proteins that read, transcribe, update and maintain the genes of memory, proteins that operate on the directional size of matter parts and other awareness-informed tasks, and proteins that perform the physical means by which an amino acid is associated with a specific anticodon in a molecule of tRNA.
Awareness recognizes the direction and size of matter shapes because they’re compatible with its own left-right-forward orientation. At the dawn of life, it recognized and selected one directional size shape – right-handed nucleotides – as symbols linked to memory, and another directional size shape – left-handed amino acids – as building blocks of functional procedure. Then, it set about building a directional size look-up table – the spiraling genetic code – to establish associational correspondences between the two. Applying those correspondences, it built an ever-increasing repertoire of complex protein shapes that collectively design, store, translate, assemble, update and maintain its own physical body.
The relationship between memory and procedure works as a true language because all the elements of language are present: symbol, object and a means of recognizing and associating the two. Undergirding this high-level functional expression of language are the lines, planes and shapes of matter. Proteins are able to perform their tasks of recognition and association because all the shapes they operate on – the nucleotides of memory, amino acids and proteins of procedure and the shapes of matter parts – all share the common properties of direction and size, properties that are compatible with the left-right-forward orientation of awareness. Left-right-forward applied to shapes is size and direction, as suggested in Figure 1 above. Therefore, when life began speaking to itself in a flash of self-recognition, it inevitably spoke the language of directional size.
Human languages are organized in the same way. We recognize objects and ideas of interest and then choose a unit of memory (a sound, glyph, physical token or sequence of letters) to symbolize them and store the association in a mental “look-up table.” Later, when we encounter an object or idea, we scan the associational table. If an existing symbol matches the shape of the object or idea, we apply it in the present instance as a way of describing the thing we’ve encountered to ourselves. If no pre-existing symbol is a match, we create a new one, apply it to the object or idea and store it in the look-up table for future reference.
In human languages, we easily grasp that the look-up table that underlies any given language doesn’t link two different languages – one of shapes / ideas and the other of symbols. There’s only one language – that of human thought which continually recognizes, grasps and applies associations between the shape of objects / ideas and the shape of symbols in a variety of formats: as written words, spoken sounds, gestures such as ASL, pictures like icons and / or physical objects, like money.
The same is true for the language of life: there aren’t really three different languages – one of memory, one of procedure and one of matter. There’s only one: the directional size language of life. By means of this language, life understands shapes as integrated wholes comprised of directions and sizes. The world of shapes is recognizable and knowable because the direction and size that define them are matter-linked expressions of life’s own in-out-forward orientation.
As we’ve seen, this language is the common link running throughout the structural units of memory, procedure and in-out boundary. As such, it is reflected at the highest level of the genetic code. As we’ve seen, class linked to amino acid R-group size is the organizing principle driving the “yin-yang” shape of the middle base table. Within those two groupings, direction is reflected as the spiral inherent in the code – the top-left to bottom-right in-out reversal of base pairs that is the symbolic expression of life’s own in-out boundary.
This understanding of directional size resolves the difficulty we encountered in assigning “letter” or “word” status to amino acid class and R-group in our discussion of the functional units of meaning in the “language” of procedure. Now we see that the difficulty traces to the fact that size and direction are themselves the “letters” of one language that come together in an endless variety of “word” shapes. As shown in Figure 2, life selects four directional size, right-handed shapes for use as symbols of memory and organizes them in groups of three to form 64 unique directional size “word” symbols. It then associates each of them with its own selection of directional size objects – an assortment of 20 left-handed amino acid building blocks – to create a lexicon of its own making. Each building block (Class I or II) reflects large or small size and in-out direction (a hydrophobic or hydrophilic response to water, respectively), which together determine how it functions in a folded protein.
These twenty building blocks are then strung together in chains of any length to produce an endless variety of larger directional size shapes capable of recognizing, engaging with and operating on any other directional size shape. In this way, awareness uses the simplest constructs of meaning – direction and size – extracted from a recognized equivalence with its own left-right-forward orientation and applies them myriad functional tasks that together constitute the living structures of “self,” as suggested in Figure 3.
With this lingering point from earlier in the chapter now addressed, we’ll conclude our discussion of language with a more nuanced examination of transitional directionality. In the discussion that follows, we’ll return to a reference of the three “languages” we’ve used before: the “life languages” of memory and procedure, and the language of matter. In doing so, we’ll simply bear in mind that in actual practice, it is awareness that applies these so-called “languages” to its own physical structure and that in doing so, it is actually using only one language – the language of directional size, that allows it to associate the symbols of memory with the shapes of amino acids to make proteins that then interact with itself and the world.
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