2015/12/27

My name, as all legal documents have it as, is Frederick. When I asked my mother about it, she told me that my dad, who exists as nothing but a blurry image in my mind, liked the sound of it. And it is just that, a sound, that I rarely respond to. All my achievements are associated with my startling common last name, and everyone who I talk to calls me FD. Yet FD is also just a sound. A collection of phonemes that have no intrinsic meaning. 

​

People say that their names give them power, that it belongs to them. It’s an identity that people hold close to their hearts. But I’d argue that names give the people calling us by it power. My mother calls me Frederick because I will always be an extension to my father, a long lost, but not forgotten memory. My publications are printed with Callahan to reflect the formality of academia, and the lack of importance of your personal identity in the face of science. Everyone else learned from one another. I don’t have a preference for the name FD. The names I am called represent the feelings they have for me. It is where they met me, the experiences we shared, a part of me still, of course, but not me. Not everything about me.

​

I started taking linguistics because I was intrigued by the power of language, by how we as a species have learned to create so many arbitrary rules just for our own convenience. How that then became an argument, a justification of rightness. I realized soon that language is powerful like I thought it was. Just not in the way we think it is. I think it necessary for us to understand how language is a byproduct of human nature. Despite what societal expectations think, everyone ends up being fluent in something. Dialects are languages themselves. We do not have to force ourselves to learn a language, because that’s how the human brain and body works. 

​

Why then, is intelligence in other species measured by something that’s so intrinsically human? They do not have the vocal cords to speak our languages, but they do communicate. They have ideologies and ways of society that we are just beginning to understand. By finding a way to understand animal behavior from their perspective and translating it into our own words, I believe we will make leaps and bounds of progress in our understanding of intelligence as a whole.

​

If I am accepted into the Federation, the technology that I’d be able to access, especially in the Delta series, will allow me to create greater translation tools within humans and also between species. We will understand intelligence in a much greater scope than before, and hopefully can translate this knowledge into the development of artificial intelligence, creating a truly dynamic experience.