To live is to be born every moment – Erich Fromm
I
Every wave of human progress in 20th century has been overlapped by the crest of technology. The “Victorian virus of machines empowering and overpowering man” has infested 20th century in various contours – tool-making and tool-using becoming the predominant activity and pastime of the age. I don’t wish to discredit the marvelous benefits humans have enjoyed due to the advancement of relevant technology. But, the kind of ridiculous claims that some scientists make are startling as if humans have challenged, transcended nature and dominated it. But the German economist, E.F. Schumacher feels that even if this is the case, then humans are on “the losing side.” Because attempts at transcendence have resulted in self-inflicted violence and destruction.
But, “to hope is a state of being. It is an inner readiness that of intense but not-yet-spent activeness,” argued the German-American psychologist, Erich Fromm. Human hope with unrestrained activeness has kindled his creativity in various directions; tool-making is just one of the facets.
Advance has been accompanied by Menace. Computers and Genes have been two of the most amazing inventions of the past century. Computers have been one of the pinnacles of human innovative thinking – getting the fortunate fillip from Alan Turing as well as misguided direction from Ray Kurzweil; whereas such thinking has been decoded and documented by the Gene geniuses Crick and Watson right through late 1950s.
One thing that still remains decoded is the brain. It is the most complex thing in this universe with billions of neurons and trillions of synapses. AI scientists claim that the transition from today’s limited machine intelligence to lifelike robots is just around the corner or is possible in less than 20 years. Then, as a prominent AI researcher, Marvin Minsky unabashedly warns that humans would be at the mercy of robots for survival. A smart recurrence of the fortuitous survival of “hairless apes” among many living organisms; but, this time, it is the other way round: the Robot has the upper edge.
If one is taken over by the wondrous progress AI has made, a resonant caveat is served by the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker: computer’s intelligence is nowhere nearer to a four-year-old’s commonsense ability. Yet, he also rightly points that on one note, computers really get somewhere near the neural complexity. The complex but smart way in which a computer is manufactured and assembled – providing access to the finer details of computer usage like storing and retrieving data rather than giving unlimited access to the way computer works on the data. The brain too never reveals its intricateness operating through its 3-pound jelly matter and it eludes human grasp in all but one critical aspect. Once humans begin to think, how does the physical matter switch over from a physical state to a mental state? Or the overarching Mind-Body problem.
John Searle annuls the distinction between the mind and the body and argues that the “mental phenomena just are features of the brain.” The startling stages of simulation of human capabilities through Artificial Intelligence fall well short of duplication. Because understanding requires “the possession of mental (intentional) states and the truth (validity, success) of these states.” Computer intelligence at best can simulate the understanding through its rich syntax, but the semantic content remains unrealized. As he rightly points out, the neural puzzle needs to be completely cracked yet but the extraordinary claims of Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec have such sophistry that one gets a glimpse of the “terror of tomorrow.”
Bill Joy writing in the Wired, predicted in 2000 that within the next 50 years, major technological advances like nanotechnology, genetics, robotics would rob humans of their existence. Commenting on this catastrophe, the prodigious American Integral philosopher-psychologist, Ken Wilber, suggests “two ways to control this technology: external legal enforcement (e.g., banning certain types of research), or internal moral constraint (e.g., an interior growth in collective wisdom that seeks and implements wise use of technology).”
Wilber recommends that we require a mix of both the ways to “some degree.” Still, this mélange is of no use until one does interior inspections that entails recognition of our capabilities, restrictions and participate in transcendence from a lower to higher levels of consciousness. AI researchers skim the superficial surface structures of consciousness through algorithms and syntax. Ultimately, what evades their grasp are the various levels of consciousness that have evolved over time – well documented in phylogenic accounts. Or as Wilber wonderfully puts it, AI researchers haven’t yet completely tasted the “thin slice of Kosmic pie.”
A brilliant American polymath, Lewis Mumford, has written amazing accounts of technological developments – he calls them technics. Mumford points out a striking feature of 20th century: “never after the Pyramid age” has mankind seen such limitless proliferation of machines in such short time. That too “altering the traditional conception of both human limitations and technical possibilities.”
However, in the history of the technics, mankind was not a unique species in tool-making. Other species had sufficiently developed technics like “intricate nests, geometric beehives, etc.” As the Homo sapiens evolved, we witness the displacement of tool-use by “linguistic symbols, esthetic designs and socially transmitted knowledge.” Similar evidence was also provided by André Leroi-Gourhan advising us not to mistake tools and machines with technology: “the part for the whole.”
II
Hominids of the Paleolithic age sparked the first developments of human technology in the form of stone-tools but their mind just experienced the external reality. There was nothing specifically human in such primitive technics like stone tools, fire – until Man reconstituted his own physical organs by employing them for functions and purposes quite different from what they originally served. It was during the Mesolithic and Neolithic ages that the mechanism needed to symbolize the experience came in the form of language that gradually developed over time.
Two media which helped externalize the memory from the body are given extensive commentary by André Leroi-Gourhan: Speech and Gesture.
Paleontological evidence suggests that when the quadruped’s forelimbs were freed as locomotive organs for purposes like climbing, digging, etc, stone-tools too helped in the development for picking, carrying and chewing food – thereby “liberating the mouth for speech.” The wondrous interplay of various organs to articulate speech is in itself a striking advance.
Language provided the basis for vocal utterances in the form of speech. The evolutionary significance of linguistic utterances is that they are explicitly social in that they facilitate the sharing of mental representations collectively – as seen in major development of the age: farming. Some 12000 years ago, farming gave humans a chance “of making present preparations for a future harvest.” This externalization and socialization of memory through the linguistic capability let loose the “experience” into the public.
Leroi-Gourhan recognized that, if speech is a medium of representation involving the production of meaningful vocal utterances, it has a parallel and complementary counterpart in gesture. Gestures combined with tools constitute techniques. For Leroi-Gourhan, gesture was to technique what speech was to language. Technical expressions like movements, , forms, rhythms, colors were no less meaningful than spoken ones. For this reason, Leroi-Gourhan saw the origin 35,000 years ago of what he called "graphism" as the beginning point for a whole new range of representational possibilities, the culmination of which would be written language, perhaps the most powerful form of cultural memory.
III
Paul Ricoeur, in his lifelong project of “philosophical anthropology,” has put forth a body of temporal thought. Heidegger’s saying that “memory is the foregathering of thought” is used by Ricoeur – while discussing historical knowledge – to understand the past in the present through the accessible “traces of the past.” The past has two facets: the individual’s memory that animates the present (the part); the collective memory that provides a backdrop for individual memories to take shape. This collective memory is endorsed by the “testimonies” gathered by the individual memories. Ricoeur doesn’t wish to prioritize one memory over the other but one memory “feeds” into another. So, historical accounts are “interpretative” in nature having “a character of likelihood or credibility rather than certainty.” Further, memory is bound to be forgotten – everything of the past cannot be completely recalled in the present. So, testimony gives “credence to the historical representation of the past.”
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics has an amazing way to deal with the memory of the past in the present. The past is not behind the present; or the present is not independent of the past. A cause is incomplete without consequence; the meaning of the cause includes consequence. So, the meaning of the past includes the present; the present belongs to the past. Moreover, the present – in its task of completing the meaning of the past – keeps active the “conversation of the past.”
At the end of Phaedrus, Plato - through the Socratic dialogue - creates an Egyptian myth of a “famous old god” Theuth. When Theuth visits the king of Egypt, Thamus, he entices the king that letters “will make Egyptians wiser and give them better memories.” But Thamus politely refutes the claim saying that “the discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the externals written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence and you give your disciples not truth, but only a resemblance of truth.” So, speech is preferred to writing.
Speech and Writing have wrestled with one another for quite sometime now. Derrida argues that the speech is another form of writing. He feels that the opposition between speech and writing is of crucial importance as the “privileging” of speech by repressing writing is a “fundamental operation of the epoch.” But, John Searle claims that this is no enticing argument in history because Derrida’s only evidence is Plato’s Phaedrus. Writing coupled with logical theory has been the mainstay of philosophers of language; Searle says that “philosophers have tended to emphasize written language as the perspicuous vehicle of logical relations.” So, there is no question of “repression of writing.”
Searle is aptly comfortable about one thing: “Plato correctly points out that you can ask questions of a speaking person in a way that you cannot of a written text.”
References
Mumford, L. The myth of the machine: technics and human development. New York: Hartcourt, 1996.
NYRB Review (Oct 27, 1983) of Jonathan Culler’s On Destruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism
NYRB Review (March 4, 1993) of John Searle’s The Rediscovery of the Mind
TLS Review (Sep 30, 2005) of Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting
Wilber, K. The Collected Works of Ken Wilber (Volume 2). Massachusetts: Shambala, 1999.
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