Thoughts on Assimilation August 27, 2015

The original idea behind this blog (Dragon Theory) is that there is a dangerous tendency for human beings to be assimilated into machines, giving up their essentially human nature to serve the nature of the machine. By "machine", I mean a system that operates by impersonal inflexible rules, in contrast to the chaotic, creative behaviour of real human beings. We use "machine" in this way when we talk about an army as a "war machine".

I still love this idea. Like all good ideas, it raises more questions than it answers. Today, I'll consider some of these questions. In some cases, the questions are more interesting than the original thesis, which is a good thing. I have always thought that progress results from asking impertinent questions rather than from the answers we discover.

The theme of a recent issue of Scientific American (August, 2015) is "How we conquered the planet". Curtis W. Marean puts forward the thesis that the key to our world-conquering success is our ability to cooperate, especially on large scales, with individuals who are unrelated. Like any good thesis, it raises more questions than it answers--many of the same questions raised by "Dragon Theory".

Exactly what is meant by "cooperation"? Several threads of cooperation come to mind and all of them promote "assimilation" - surrender of individual human nature to an artificially created entity.

• Trade. There is plenty of evidence that humans are traders by nature, quite willing to barter with strange humans rather than simply stealing what they want. Trade is the mother of "economy" -- a slippery slope leading to the idea of money. The more a person depends on trade the more a person becomes defined by economic principals. A person becomes poor when he measures himself by the degree to which he participates and relies upon the money economy and that participation is slight (the famously large part of the human race that lives on less than a dollar a day).
• Conquest, loot and pillage. A very popular form of human cooperation which is made possible when individuals think and act as members of a gang or army. The degree of coherence and assimilation often determines the "success" of the conquering hoard. In many cases, it defeats enemies who are "weak" only because they are less organized, less assimilated. The Mongol "hoards" are my favourite example of a "war machine", which assimilated most of the civilized world by means of a very short list of operating rules - laws which explicitly overrule such human qualities such as mercy, fallibility and judgement. 

There are obviously many other forms of assimilation that humans are good at (religion comes to mind), but I will pass over these to focus on one that has, until today, escaped my notice: language.

It seems that language is the key to the unique degree of cooperation that Marean talks about. Today, I started to wonder if, by learning a language, we automatically become assimilated into something that has a life of its own. This is an idea that is hard to discuss using language itself, like fish discovering water. Do we surrender something of ourselves by learning to describe our experience in the same way as those around us? Without realizing it, do we learn to ignore every aspect of our experience that cannot be communicated and discussed with those around us who speak the same language?

Western philosophers assume that all truth is accessible to language. There are notable exceptions. Wittgenstein claimed that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence. Of course, we can't say just what is passed over. But we can ask if the same things will be passed over by speakers of different languages and whether there are important things that will be passed over by any speaker of any language.

I have been a computer programmer since there were computer programmers, I have seen the evolution of computer languages over half a century. "Languages" like FORTRAN and COBOL barely deserve the name of language. Modern languages, like Java, make it possible to express ideas that could never be expressed in COBOL or FORTRAN - ideas that are, in many cases, very difficult to express in "human" languages. For me, it's quite natural to see that language defines a world of ideas that can be expressed and also a (presumably larger) world of ideas that cannot be expressed. Moreover, as a follower of Zen and Tao, I'm quite aware that the world is larger than the world of human ideas, whether these ideas can be expressed in language or not.

Returning to the issue of assimilation, is language the necessary mechanism of all assimilation? Noam Chomsky famously claims that the ability to form ideas that can be communicated linguistically is an innate quality of the human brain. Does this mean that we are "hard wired" to be assimilated?

Human languages are famously sloppy, fuzzy and ambiguous. Computer languages are none of these things. The use of "language" to describe both systems is an analogy only, but the language of Mathematics is closer to the computer side of the analogy than the human side. What is more, hardly any scientific knowledge is respectable these days unless it can be mathematically described. 

Again, we are faced with the problem of a fish discovering water. It seems that we are totally immersed in a world that is described (or lied about) exclusively in language. If, for the moment, we imagine a world outside of that world of language, we come to understand what we mean by being assimilated by language.

In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination. One example of this can be found in the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. Trump’s popular appeal speaks to not just the boldness of what he says and the shock it provokes, but the inability to respond to shock with informed judgment rather than titillation. Marie Luise Knott is right in noting, “We live our lives with the help of the concepts we form of the world. They enable an author to make the transition from shock to observation to finally creating space for action - for writing and speaking. Just as laws guarantee a public space for political action, conceptual thought ensures the existence of the four walls within which judgment operates.” The concepts that now guide our understanding of US society are dominated by a corporate-induced linguistic and authoritarian model that brings ruin to language, politics and democracy itself.

- Truth Dig

What would be the alternative? How does the fish walk up on the beach? One hint is the idea of aesthetics. Anyone who appreciates art understands the futility of describing its meaning with words. Yet there is meaning. To the Western mind, a "philosophy" is something constructed out of words. This includes Western religions, such as Christianity, whose "theology" rests firmly on centuries of arcane interpretations of ancient stories. Other traditions, especially Tao and Zen, specifically eschew words and even human ideas in general to promote an aesthetic -- a way experiencing the world wordlessly.

This points to a way of escaping assimilation (at least this type of assimilation), which is to cultivate aesthetic sense. This is to value our direct experience of the world and to be skeptical of attempts to draw us into the herd by means of language. We need to be skeptical of "reasons why", interpretation, valuation, analysis and synthesis. Actually this isn't such a huge leap. We have just been sold the idea that things are not "real" or "important" unless they can be boiled down to language. Most of us understand quite clearly that this is wrong but (of course!) we have problems saying just why this is. 

Perhaps the world we "pass over in silence" is the important one. Perhaps it is where we can discover who we really are.

Note to self: comment on "Monkey Sphere and Echo Chamber"