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📘 Why We Are Here: The Ultimate Answer for Individuals, Civilizations, and the Future
Chapter 12: TCS — The Only Possible Way for Civilizations to Communicate
If one day an L1 civilization detects the signal of another civilization in the depths of space, you might imagine what comes next to be the thrilling “first contact” scene so often portrayed in science fiction: two highly intelligent systems finally meet, exchange knowledge, share histories, perhaps even form friendships.
But reality will not be so romantic. What will truly follow is—silence.
A silence deeper than the universe itself.
Because they cannot communicate at all.
When Civilization Finally Meets Civilization: Confusion, Not Joy
L1 civilizations are indeed the “agents” of civilization. They can operate, explore, and take risks at cosmic scales, even fulfilling certain civilizational missions on behalf of L0. Yet even so, the moment they encounter another civilization, they immediately fall into an extremely awkward dilemma: neither side understands the other. Not even a little.
This “not understanding” is not a matter of language, vocabulary size, or the lack of translators. It lies much deeper: their causal structures are different.
When we discussed L0 and L1, we repeatedly used this term—causal structure. It determines how a system understands the world, defines meaning, and constructs semantics.
So what happens when L1 meets L0? No chance.
When L1 meets an undeveloped L0? Still no chance.
Then what about L1 meeting L1?
It sounds promising—but in reality, still no chance (frustrating and powerless, isn’t it?).
Why Can’t “Two Equally Advanced Civilizations” Communicate?
This is often the hardest point to accept at first. Intuition says, “They’re both intelligent—surely they can communicate.”
But the problem is neither intelligence nor technology. It is structure. Think of it this way:
No matter how intelligent an AI is, it cannot directly understand the internal variables of another AI built on a completely different architecture.
It is not a lack of effort, but the absence of correspondence.
Not unwillingness, but the impossibility of semantic mapping.
Not poor translation, but the absence of overlapping semantics altogether.
This is not bias—it is a structural law.
Then What? Are Civilizations Doomed to Eternal Silence?
No. After silence, civilizations will arrive at the same conclusion:
They must jointly create a third system.
This third system is the focus of this chapter—TCS (Third Causal System).
TCS: A “Child” Raised Together by Two Civilizations
The idea of TCS may sound abstract, but you can think of it as a kind of civilization-level infant.
It has only three requirements:
- Start from zero: it must contain no bias from either civilization; otherwise, the other side cannot interpret it.
- Joint construction: only when both civilizations apply causal influence to it can it form a structure understandable to both.
- Interpretable and influenceable: both sides must be able to observe how their inputs change it, gradually discovering “shared semantics” within this third system.
Does this analogy sound familiar? Exactly—the one you are thinking of:
When two adults who speak completely different languages want to truly understand each other, the fastest way is not for one to learn the other’s language—but to raise a child together.
From birth, the child is shaped by both parents. As it grows, it naturally forms a causal structure that both can understand. Eventually, it can not only understand both languages, but also translate intentions and meanings between them. This is the closest human analogy to TCS.
But a TCS Between L1 Civilizations Is Ten Thousand Times Harder
Why? Because even two adults raising a child still share many commonalities:
- Both are human
- Their sensory systems are the same
- Their biological brains are structurally similar
- They live in the same physical world
- They share emotional and experiential foundations
But two L1 civilizations may differ in everything:
- Their perceptual dimensions may be entirely different
- Their understanding of “time” may not align
- Their definitions of “space” may not match
- They may not even agree on what constitutes a “variable”
- Their interpretations of causal chains may be completely incompatible
In the human world, “raising a child together” is an imaginable analogy. For civilizations, however, TCS is an extraordinarily complex causal engineering challenge—orders of magnitude more difficult than linguistics, mathematics, or physics. It is not a “tool,” but the only possible mechanism for communication between civilizations.
Why Translation Can Never Replace TCS
You might ask: “Could civilizations share some kind of dictionary, or build a statistical translation model?”
The answer is: no—and it never will be.
The reason is simple: translation aligns signals, whereas TCS aligns structures. Signals are superficial; structure is where semantics truly live.
Put more plainly: translation might let you understand the words someone speaks in a dream, but it can never let you experience what they felt in that dream.
The way you and another civilization understand the world is fundamentally different. Translation cannot bridge that gap. Even with the most powerful dictionary imaginable, two people will never reach the level of mutual understanding achieved by raising a child together. Between civilizations, there is no shared language at all—not even a dictionary to begin with.
Translation is not the path to civilizational communication.
TCS is.
Closing: The Only Hand Civilizations Can Hold
When two civilizations finally encounter one another in the depths of the universe, the barrier is not technology, nor attitude, but structure.
They cannot communicate directly.
They cannot translate directly.
They cannot even directly understand each other’s mode of existence.
So they must create a third system together—starting from zero, growing slowly, and being shaped jointly by both sides.
TCS is not an option. It is an inevitability.
It is the only hand civilizations can ever truly grasp.
In the next chapter, we will pull this concept back from theory into reality: the true significance of TCS in the universe, and whether we may already have encountered it (is that a little unsettling?).