Skywriting at the Speed of Thought..rebuttal will follow

[Guest guest]

Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought

Stevan Harnad

 

Moderators: Olivier Foury, Gloria Origgi

 

1. A Matter of Timing. As the stand-up comics tell us, it's all down

to timing. But other aphorisms are relevant too: Necessity is the

mother of invention.L'appétit vient en bouffant (et l'idée vient en

papotant). There are no monologues, only dialogues; thought is

discursive, discourse dialectical; communication interactive. And it

all devolves in real-time.

 

But we are getting ahead of ourselves: What is it all about? Let us

accept that the Darwinians offer a reasonable approximation in saying

that it is all about survival and reproduction. But species other

than our own managed to survive and reproduce for millions of years

without saying a word. So our wordiness must have enhanced our

adaptivity dramatically, somehow, to have engendered a language-

specific organ (the brain, or rather certain specialized parts of it)

and a proclivity to spend a goodly portion of our waking lives using

it for that purpose.

 

2. The Adaptive Advantage of Hearsay Over Trial-and-Error. What was

the adaptive advantage of language? It can only be measured in

relation to the competition. Those who cannot acquire knowledge by

hearsay must do it the hard way: by direct, trial-and-error

sensorimotor experience. We have shown, in computer simulations

(Cangelosi & Harnad 2001), that little virtual creatures in virtual

worlds survive and reproduce much more successfully if they can learn

from overhearing symbolic descriptions of what's what provided by

their fellow-creatures than if they have to learn by trial and error

from their own direct sensorimotor experiences. In an evolutionary

competition, the symbolic " thieves " quickly out-survive and out-

reproduce the honest sensorimotor " toilers, " who must learn

everything the hard way, from experience.

 

Of course, as described, this is not an evolutionarily stable

strategy, for once everyone who can tell us what's what has died out,

there is no one left to steal knowledge from, and we are all back to

having to do everything the old-fashioned way, through honest toil.

Yet that is clearly not the way it works today, for a lot of our

knowledge -- most of it, in fact -- is recombinatory. Consider the

words in a dictionary. They are defined in terms of other words.

Learning from a definition is symbolic theft, yet it cannot be theft

all the way down (Harnad 1990a). Some of those words we must learn

from direct sensorimotor experience. But once those words -- those

elementary symbols -- have been " grounded " directly through honest

toil, the good old way, all the rest of the dictionary (and

encyclopedia, and every other kind of text, written or spoken) can

then in principle be picked up by hearsay, recombinatory hearsay,

composed out of the symbols we have already grounded directly through

experience. (And there do exist such dictionaries, with a small,

fixed defining vocabulary -- 2000 words or even less -- out of which

all the rest of words in the language are then defined:

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~ggc01r/dict/.)

 

But we have now gotten doubly ahead of ourselves, for we have not yet

accounted for the origins of oral language, let alone the advent of

writing. That is one of the hazards of mentation at the speed of

thought, irrespective of the output medium.

 

3. Recombinatory Knowledge and Reciprocal Altruism. Back to the

virtual world: Whereas an evolutionary competition between pure

ungrounded symbolic thieves and pure grounded sensorimotor toilers

would be an unstable one, and would just result in a constant

evolutionary oscillation between thieves and toilers prevailing, if

the complementary advantages of toil and theft are instead

internalized within hybrid creatures who are capable of both, as we

are, this results in the optimal combination, and a stable one. The

child grounds his first word meanings through direct sensorimotor

toil, the old way, and can then (in principle) acquire all the rest

through symbolic theft, consisting of recombinations of his already-

grounded symbols, rather as in the case of dictionary definitions.

This hybrid sensorimotor/symbolic ability is a clear advantage over

the pure sensorimotor one. To see how, one need only compare the

potential difference in time, effort and risk, between learning which

foods are edible and which are toxic (or learning which animals are

dangerous predators to flee from and which can be safely foraged

alongside) through direct trial-and-error experience versus through

hearsay.

 

Hearsay has its risks too, you say? We might be misinformed? Yes

indeed, and that risk never quite vanishes. But language almost

certainly evolved in a kinship and tribal context where there was

minimal motivation to mislead the co-bearers of our selfish genes.

And language is a form of reciprocal altruism: Except if we are

competing for the same finite resource, you lose nothing if you tell

me, honestly, what is and is not edible, or which are and are not

dangerous predators; and tomorrow it may be I who know something that

you do not. So " cognitive barter " may be a better descriptor than "

theft " for the adaptive advantage conferred by language.

 

4. The Oral Tradition. The oral tradition arose out of this

reciprocal altruism. It can be thought of as a collective, serial

form of cognitive barter, whereby we inherit the knowledge of those

who have it already, and in return, we add what we ourselves know, or

at least pass on what we have learned. It is the oral tradition that

allowed the benefits of language not only to be collected and passed

back and forth within a generation, but to be passed on across

generations.

 

But what about timing? Not time across generations but real-time,

during " online, " i.e., synchronous discourse: the timing of hearing

and saying. We were constrained here by the time constants of our

sensorimotor input/output organs. For various reasons that there is

no time to discuss here, I don't think that language actually began

in the oral modality but in the praxic one of body movement, gesture

and imitation (Harnad 2000). Yet it is neither an instrumental

connection nor a morphological resemblance to its referent that makes

a symbol a symbol. It is the fact that we intend it to refer to that

referent. This is Saussure's " arbitraire du signe " : Although the

power of naming is more likely to be first discovered in an

instrumental or imitative context, the instrumentality and the

mimesis eventually become irrelevant to the naming, and the name

itself might just as well have been in binary code, once it is used

in discourse. Language is in this sense inherently digital.

 

Moreover, as the true advantages of language do not come from naming,

but from combining and recombining strings of names into propositions

that define or describe further truths, the optimal sending and

receiving medium would need to be a faster and more independent one

than bodily gesture -- a medium one can use even if one's hands are

full, or if one's interlocutor is not watching, or in the dark. In

short, once the advantages of language were discovered and being

used, the oral medium was the natural one to specialize for this

purpose, and so it did (Steklis & Harnad 1976). Our inborn language

capacity is closely linked to the speaking and hearing parts of our

brains (though it probably has not lost all its ancestral links to

gesture either, as evidenced both by the sign language of the deaf

and the various other gestural languages that have been spontaneously

created in many cultures across the ages).

 

The means of specialization in question is called " Baldwinian

Evolution. " We are not born with an innate linguistic skill fully

encoded in our brains. We are not born able to speak and understand

fluent French or Chinese. We are born with a pre-adaptation to be

able to learn language very quickly, and a strong predisposition to

do so. Hence we have evolved brains that are born " language-

prepared. " (It is this organic adaptation that our computer

simulations (Cangelosi & Harnad 2001) -- according to our

interpretation of them -- show to have been shaped by the dramatic

evolutionary advantages of symbolic theft over sensorimotor toil.)

This kind of Baldwinian preparedness is shaped gradually by the

benefits it confers in terms of survival and reproduction in much the

way that structures such as wings, fins, eyes and hearts were

gradually shaped by the benefits they conferred (Harnad 1976).

 

5. The Speed of Thought. But in becoming specifically adapted to the

hardware of speech and hearing, language also took on certain

temporal, sequential constraints. A picture may be worth a thousand

words, but the picture can be apprehended at once, through many

parallel visual processors, whereas the words can only be apprehended

serially, and at the limited speed of human speech and hearing. There

is hence reason to believe that the speed of human thought itself is

of approximately the same order of magnitude as the speed of speech

(Harnad 1991). Some of us may speak a little faster than we think,

others a little slower, but the the discrepancy is rarely great. Nor

could it be, for if we thought much faster than we speak, we would

encounter short-term memory and interference effects when we tried to

vocalize our thoughts. Moreover, there is another, perhaps more

fundamental contraint on the speed of thought, namely, that discourse

is interactive. It takes two to lingo (at least). So, again, it is

better if you do not speak faster than I understand, and that I not

think much faster than I can speak, for it is not only my own

thoughts that must stay in phase with the words we exchange, but your

thoughts too.

 

So although our stereotype for the oral tradition is that of one old

bard or minstrel telling (or singing) his homeric tale as a monologue

to many rapt but mute listeners, a more realistic and revealing

primal picture would be a conversation or dialogue, one in which the

cognitive interaction was bilateral, synchronous in real time, and

the information exchanged was of some immediate (and, eventually,

eventual) practical benefit to one or both parties. That was the

pragmatic context in which language acquired and exhibited its

adaptive value and etched its permanent place in our brains about

100,000 years ago; the tale-telling came later.

 

Nor could either the initial or the primary value of the oral

tradition have been in the tale-telling about ancestors and their

exploits. The adaptive advantage must have been in all those

practical, daily, survival/reproduction-related matters in which

learning by hearsay minimized the lost time, errors, effort and risk

entailed by having to fumble and find out everything for oneself --

either solo, or solely through direct behavioral observation and

imitation of others. And in the cumulating store of knowledge -- the

database, we would call it today -- that was being transmitted within

and across generations by word of mouth.

 

6. Interdigitating Thought. And in the fact that two heads are better

than one -- in fact, better than one plus one, if the individual

heads would otherwise be doing whatever they were doing all on their

own. Dialogue not only informs, and trades existing information; it

also elicits and stimulates novel interdigitating thoughts that again

may not have occurred solo. In that sense, interactive cognition may

create information. Language is already recombinatory : Combining the

resources of two interacting heads opens up possibilities that go

beyond the sum of the two parts thinking alone.

 

And thinking itself -- at least the kind of thinking characteristic

of human beings -- surely co-evolved with speaking, not only in

tempo, but in its sequential and recombinatory nature. And its

interactivity. So much of thought is inner dialogue, and even when an

inner monologue, addressed to some imaginary or remembered

interlocutor.

 

So the interactivity came with the territory, and so did the tempo of

the interaction, and hence of the action; and that interactive tempo

tempo was roughly that of speech. One could perhaps rehearse an

uninterrupted mental monologue at some length internally, but overt

speech in daily life in our ancestral environment was surely anything

but an uninterrupted monologue.

 

7. Verba Volant, Scripta Manent. So now imagine this: What if real-

time dialogue were no longer permitted? Suppose oral interactions

could only be unilateral monologues, with the turn-around time for a

reply being at least a day, but possibly weeks, months, or years. It

is unlikely that creatures with the kinds of brain specializations we

had evolved -- even with our vaunted capacity for delayed

gratification -- could or would voluntarily conform to such a slow-

motion form of discourse. If short-term memory and interference

problems precluded thinking or conversing much faster than we speak,

then surely long-term memory and interference problems (not to

mention the immediate practical demands for which the oral tradition

originally evolved) preclude thinking or conversing much slower than

we speak.

 

Yet that is precisely the constraint that the advent of writing and

the written tradition 5000 years ago brought with them. First, the

advantages, and they are legion: Verba volant, scripta manent.

Writing leaves a (potentially) permanent record, guaranteeing

continuity, allowing fact-checking, copying, copy-sharing, off-

line/asynchronous reading, etc. Surely it is writing that made

science and scholarship if not possible, then at least far more

likely. It is hard to imagine that collective, cumulative, self-

corrective, systematic and continuous enterprise arising and enduring

within the oral tradition alone.

 

8. Phase Lag:Lento Subito. But writing also had a dramatic negative

effect (unremarked, because the oral tradition remained available as

a back-up and complement, and because no other alternative was known

or imagined) on the temporal, interactive dimension of linguistic

discourse. It instantly transformed it into asynchronous, off-line

monologues instead of the synchronous dialogues for which our brains

and our thinking capacity are optimized. It either eliminated the

interactive dimension entirely, or slowed it to a pace that was

almost a caricature of what the human brain is capable of. Writing is

asynchronous discourse -- out of phase with the speed of thought and

of synchronous mental interaction. (Perhaps having already developed

the habit of listening quietly to tale-telling by the bards prepared

us somewhat for this abrupt transformation.)

 

But because its benefits were so great (and because the oral modality

was still there, in parallel), literacy has been seen as almost as

unalloyed a benefit and as revolutionary an advance as language was.

And so it surely was, especially when its reach was incalculably

enhanced by Gutenberg's invention less than 600 years ago. Note,

though, that no compensatory organic change in our brain occurred,

either as a result of the invention of writing or the invention of

print. Both were purely cultural developments. And writing seemed, by

its very nature, to entail dissociating asynchronous written

interactions from the speed and synchrony of interacting thoughts.

 

9. Skywriting: Accelerando Poco a Poco. Until the online era and the

advent of " skywriting " (Harnad 1990b): I am now going to draw your

attention to certain relatively new capabilities that have already

become quite familiar to all of us, and so I will have to make an

appeal of the kind that Schopenhauer made: that we should try

to " make it strange " again, as if encountered for the first time, so

we can see the hidden (and I think revolutionary) potential in

skywriting that we have not yet realized or exploited:

 

Email is undoubtedly a great convenience and a time- and money-saver.

It has consequently replaced a great deal of letter-writing; and it

has no doubt generated more letter-writing where the old medium would

have inclined us either not to bother -- or just pick up a phone and

call instead. But email certainly has not replaced phone calls the

way it has replaced snail mail. Why? The answer is clear, and it

isn't just because of the cosiness of hearing a voice. It's timing.

The phone draws on the primal tempo of real-time discourse, which is

what our brains -- and the speed of thought -- are specifically

adapted to, one might almost say optimized for. The oral medium is

(to borrow a metaphor from its successor and use it paradoxically) an

on-line, synchronous real-time medium, whereas writing is an off-

line, asynchronous, non-real-time medium.

 

10. Synchronous Versus Asynchronous Communication. What makes writing

non-real-time, however, is not the fact that it is necessarily off-

line, for typing can be done on-line too! But anyone who has tried

real-time online interactions in writing knows that it is maddening

to wait for and watch someone's slow typing materializing before

one's eyes -- complete with real-time backspacing to correct typos.

And even if they could type error-free and as fast as they could

speak -- or if the " dictascript " capabilities of which Dan Sperber

wrote were already advanced enough so one's words were instantly

converted to writing in real time -- that still wouldn't be a

satisfying or satisfactory way to interact linguistically in real

time. A little reflection shows that if I had real-time dictascript

capability and you had real-time dictascript capability, we would not

sit watching what the other had written, we'd switch to audio, and go

back to the oral tradition, leaving our respective dictascripts to

serve as an instant transcript -- to be looked at off-line at some

later time!<

 

And yet, and yet, email's almost-real-time capability, together with

its capacity to preserve a permanent record -- a text on which one

can then work off-line to edit and enhance it -- is not altogether

non-interactive either. Surely it is relevant that the turn-around

time for email is incomparably faster than any prior written medium

had been (with the awkward medium of telegraphy -- mediated by the

telegraph operator and prohibitively costly for iterative exchanges --

its only precursor). The time constant for written exchanges had

been, as noted, a day at its fastest, and more like days or weeks on

average. Moreover, if the exchange had not just been that of written

letters, but of published texts, then the delays could be more of the

order of months or years (and not just because of the delays imposed

by peer review, but because of the delays inherent in the Gutenberg

technology of encoding and dissemination). Compared to such

unbiological delays, the potential turnaround time of almost real-

time email exchanges begins to take on a new interest.

 

11. A Tempo: Allegro Assai. And in some ways, email embodies the best

of both the oral and the written traditions: Email is potentially

almost as fast as synchronous oral exchanges, yet it preserves a

written record, and allows optional off-line time for reflection

between iterations, if needed, unlike spontaneous real-time dialogue.

It also has that other remarkable feature -- the one that motivated

calling it " skywriting " -- namely, that email can be one-to-many

(recapturing another of the long-lost features of the oral tradition,

where the bard can tell the tale to a large audience in real time) in

almost-real time: as if the email were being written in the sky for

all to see. To the extent that the bards were inspired by

their " live " audiences to feats of greater creativity in their

(always extemporized and improvised) elaborations of the oral

tradition in real time, skywriters too can know, as they compose and

post a text (or a comment on someone else's text) to an email list

that, almost instantly, many will see it, and some will reply (also

almost instantly).

 

12. Quote/Commenting. Perhaps the most powerful optimization in the

hybrid online/off-line -- yet potentially almost-real-time -- medium

of skywriting is the quote/comment capability (Harnad 1995; Light et

al. 2000): One of the limiting factors in oral monologues is memory:

If, in a conversation, you speak for too long without letting me

reply, I will surely forget some of what you said, and my eventual

reply is bound to be much less focussed than it could have been if

the chunks between interventions had been smaller. But we don't

always think in short chunks, and you might have lost your bard-like

inspiration if I had interrupted you earlier, or you had cut yourself

short out of courtesy.

 

Email has no such time or length constraints (except the number of

real hours in a day, and the likely interest, attention-span and

patience of one's skyreaders). Yet, in providing an instant written

record, it makes quote/commenting possible in replying: deleting the

portions on which one has no comment, and re-focussing attention on

those portions one wishes to address -- with the pertinent quoted

excerpt re-presented as a context (and the entire text potentially

retrievable as well, as a broader background context, and context-

check). The PostGutenberg polyloquy [1] is readily translatable back

to the Gutenberg medium too (see Hayes et al. 1992, Harnad 1994,

Harnad et al. 2000).

 

13. Dead Authors and Live Interlocutors.There is also something

intrinsically very conversational and interactive, hence very like

the oral tradition, in this quote/commenting capability itself, over

and above the accelerated rate of exchange with one's interlocutor(s)

provided by the email and web postings. Emulating this instant " text-

capturing " power of digital-text processing would again have been

prohibitively time-consuming in the Gutenberg medium, in which

copying, retyping or real cut/pasting were the only options. This

instant quote/commenting capability can even restore to digital

interactions with inert texts (even when their authors are long-since

dead) some of the " live " interactivity of the oral tradition --

albeit rather one-sided in the case of an expired author, but other

skyreaders can in principle take up the interactive baton, and it can

be rather exhilarating to carry on a live if unilateral dialogue with

a long-dead author in almost real-time before a live audience that is

potentially the entire planet! (The scholarly practise of learned

footnoting, and the literary/rhetorical practise of presenting ideas

in the form of dialogue or dialectic, are both early harbingers of

the potential power of quote/commenting, and its rootedness in the

oral tradition and near-synchronous mental interaction.

 

Nor is it only the possibility of performing before a large audience

that can inspire creativity in a skywriter: According to the anomaly-

driven theory of human inventiveness, it is not agreement and praise

that inspire and elicit the best from us (though we need some of that

too), but challenges, criticism and encountering problems that our

current ideas appear to be unable to handle. In my case, my own

better ideas were born whilst in the grip of " creative disgreement "

with multiple skywriters critiquing and quote-commenting them in

almost-real time.

 

14. Open Peer Commentary. There is always the possibility that a

predilection for such celestial dialectics is peculiar to me, and to

a minority like me, but I have some evidence that this may not be

so: twenty-five years ago, I founded an open peer commentary

journal, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), modeled on a journal

founded twenty years earlier by the anthropologist Sol Tax (1907-

1995), called Current Anthropology (CA). The formal concept of " open

peer commentary " was, as far as I know, original with Tax, though of

course it had its precursors in symposia, both oral and written, in

the past. CA had rapidly turned into the most visible and influential

journal in its field, largely because of the peer-feedback feature,

and BBS in its turn did so too, attaining a double-digit " impact

factor " within a few years of its inception, making it one of the

most cited journals in the multiple disciplines it covered (the

biobehavioral and cognitive sciences). BBS authors, too, eagerly

sought and kept coming back for peer feedback (some willingly running

the peer guantlet as many as four times across the years, as one of

its current co-editors did), each time eliciting 20-30 critiques from

peers across disciplines and around the world, all co-published with

the target article and the author's replies.

 

I take this as evidence that the perceived value of " creative

disagreement " is not unique to the likes of me. But what is

remarkable is that all of this occurred before the optimal medium for

it had arrived! For, far from being near-synchronous skywriting, CA-

and BBS-style open peer commentary had been implemented

unbiologically, the old, plodding, terrestrial way, with months of

delay between target article, commentaries, response, and their

eventual co-publication. No doubt this form of off-line, sequential

symposium has and will continue to have its uses and value. But is it

not time that we also capitalized on the PostGutenberg possibility of

launching open peer commentary skyward, so it can draw upon the full

speed and power of near-synchronous cognition and communication?

 

 

15. Fear of Flying. What is holding us up? -- and particularly as the

new medium is not only there and ready now, but is already being used

informally for (pedestrian) skywriting in the many graffiti boards

for trivial pursuit that are proliferating all over cyberspace, the

cyberchat groups? My guess is that what is detaining the peers of the

realm (the research community) is the feeling that there is something

inherently ephemeral about the new medium -- that it occupies only a

virtual space in the real republic of letters. They worry that words

written in the sky will vanish into thin air as surely as words

spoken orally do.

 

 

That is not the only retardant factor. (There are other, likewise

unfounded worries -- about peer-review, about academic and career

credit, about copyright, about priority and plagiarism, about online

readability, about information overload, and more.) But the

predominant worry is still about the apparent immateriality -- the

virtuality -- of skywriting. Digital bits just don't have that

reassuring lapidary feel that palpable terrestrial objects always had.

 

 

16. Automatic Skywriting. But here we might be able draw on some of

our innate biological resources: Just as when the neurologist needs

to tell the alexic(but non-agraphic) patient (who can see, but has

lost the ability to read, and hence assumes he also cannot write) not

to worry, and just to launch fearlessly into " automatic writing " --

with the result that the patient discovers he can indeed still write

after all (even though he cannot read what he has just written) -- so

we need to be told by veteran fliers not to worry [2] , and just to

launch fearlessly into automatic skywriting: confidently

quote/commenting back and forth on what we have skyread, and

otherwise doing exactly what has come so naturally to our talking

heads for at least 100,000 years. Thinking, after all, like speaking

and remembering, is all virtual too! It leaves no palpable record

(although it does leave a trace -- in our brains). We just have to

learn to trust the traces on the web, as we already trust our brains,

confident that the information will always be there, accessible

whenever we need it, even though we cannot literally put our fingers

on it. We need only generate the digital corpus itself; its

navigability and preservation will be ensured by a new breed of

celestial curators and conservationists. (Google has already

resurrected 20 years' worth of legacy skywriting from the Usenet

archive that many thought -- and a few hoped -- had vanished for ever

in the aether! Peripherals perish, but bits perdure!).

 

 

Nor should we underestimate the awesome power of boolean searches

over an inverted index tracking every word in every text that has

ever been skywritten: Google, covering over 3 billion documents,

already has an information-finding and retrieving capacity -- ranging

(potentially) over all of human knowledge -- that not only exceeds

that of any human brain, but that places any untutored layman within

a few keystrokes of being as well-informed as the most diligent

scholar of (paper) days past, on just about any topic. This virtual

search-and-retrieve capacity is the one we have to learn to rely on,

as we propel our brainchildren into the PostGutenberg Galaxy.

 

17.Open Access. And the last papyrocentric habit we need to break is

the notion that access-toll-gates must always separate our

skywritings from their would-be skyreaders, commentators, and users

(Harnad 2001). This will certainly continue to be true of skywritings

we write for trade (royalty revenue, fees, salary), but it is already

obsolete for skywritings we write only for their scholarly/scientific

research impact (our peer-reviewed journal publications). Such

writings profit (and have profited in the past) from access-blocking

toll-gates about as much as commercial advertising does! (Imagine

charging potential consumers admission for the right to see the " Buy

Coppertone " ads that smoke-trailing planes skywrite over our beaches

in summer!)

 

 

18. A Matter of Time.There is every reason to believe that our

talking heads and their interacting minds will be incomparably more

fecund once those slow iterative cycles by which our knowledge had

been created and accumulated in the Gutenberg era are restored to the

speed of stone-age thought by skywriting in the PostGutenberg Galaxy.

It's all a matter of timing. And reaping its rewards is just a matter

of time.

 

do you agree? as G.Carlin has said..Think about it.

.......bob