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teldok in english -->teldok.org [ swedish ] |
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Via 40 |
The Long Now of Information
Via TELDOK 40: The Long Now of Information sets out to discern fundamental patterns in human information handling. Some of these are cognitive and perceptual, some are social and organizational, some have turned out to be physical. Consequently, if these fundamental patterns actually were to change, this would be most important.... Descartes laid down as the foundation for believing anything at all in his own existence ”cogito, ergo sum”, I’m thinking, thus I exist. He understood to exist himself because he was conscious about himself thinking. We might demote this self-evident suggestion to formal philosophy, but that’s just because we cannot imagine not being conscious. ”Not being conscious?” Yes, the suggestion forwarded by research – and, as I have stressed already, it’s tenuous, speculative, working with indirect clues – is that consciousness has not always existed but is rather a recent development. ... there is even the argument that consciousness developed and existed for a while, a couple of thousand years ago, then disappeared, to reappear only a bit more than a thousand years ago. And now, partially because of information technology perhaps, our perception of consciousness may be said to be turned upside down. Logic, consciousness – are there any other such profound and possibly overlooked changes in the nature of human cognition, perception, and thinking? With the same caution as previously, there are strong arguments to suggest that the perception of color is also fairly new. Think of it; Homer’s descriptions of colors are distinctly odd. So color perception, the way we have it and with the same rainbow, may be another recent development. ... The main point is that we are blind for those things that seem, are, must be – so self-evident that we just would not understand how they could be otherwise at all. But, on the other hand, if they were to change, that would be the most important and pervasive change of all. So – this is my starting point: if that which is self-evident were to change, that would be the most important change of all. The great French historian Fernand Braudel suggested that history could only be properly understood by distinguishing between three different patterns of development, three different cycles in time. Ordinarily, history has been understood as a series of events, battles, inventions, business cycles. The time horizon, the event horizon, is short. Underlying these events, however, are changes that are important in understanding the whole series of events – changes in trade routes, in markets. Finally, there is something even less moving or changing, la longue durée or the long permanence. The life and tools of a Swedish farmhouse did not change very much between, say, the 14th and the 17th century. Consequently, changes in that long permanence are really earthshaking if and when they happen, even though they may happen too slowly for people to observe. The last two centuries have certainly seen a number of permanent structures, previously belonging to the longue durée, turning into fast-changing features of the market restructuring or even event horizons. Most futurologists concentrate on tracing trends, which is to trace a series of events or the sum of such an event sequence. My proposition is that future studies should also be more concerned with la longue durée, simply because it is the backdrop for profound structural change and events happening ”on top” of them. Furthermore, if they set the stage for the future, a change in that stage that we perceive as permanent and unchangeable would be the most important of all. You should now have recognized my concern for the development of consciousness and our perception of colors ... If we were to develop some other faculty of the same type, that might be of overwhelming importance. ... To some, this would not be a very large surprise. We may tie this to the fact that our consciousness is capable of handling, of being conscious of, at the most, 50 bits per second, but more likely something like 15 bits per second. We also know that through our senses we receive something like 11 million bits per second, so there must exist some very powerful sorting mechanism somewhere. We take in a large number of sensory inputs, and they constitute an unconscious base for creativity, intuition, and, most importantly, emotions. When ancient people felt the Gods present in a direct way, this might have been due to their direct contact with their body sensations. Brunelleschi, who was responsible for completing the cathedral of Florence, was more of an engineer and architect than an artist, and he succeeded in inducing the local authorities to allow for an early type of patent system for him to gather a better return on his inventions (or at least one particular among them). But he seems also to be the one responsible for a turning point in art history, introducing perspective – yes, that convergence of lines at a distance that we learn of in drawing class. Before, all paintings were þat: there existed no foreground nor distance in the sense we are now used to. ”Are used to”. How could we possibly ever unlearn such a discovery? And how could we ever miss making it? Well, that’s the definition of discovery – and here is another one that might seem self-evident once it has been made; still ingenious and rightly famous artists before the 15th century never did it. It is a question of seeing. Our ways of seeing are primed by what we – ”are used to”. There is a book collecting paintings produced by Europeans who had just arrived in Australia in the 19th century. The landscapes look distinctly odd. That is because they are European landscapes in an Australian setting. It was plain impossible for the newly arrived artists to really see and register what their eyes transmitted; there was an element of interpretation, an intermediary information process in between, and that was pre-programmed by their upbringing, by what the were used to. Likewise, when European ships first arrived to the straits of Magalhães, the Patagonians could not just comprehend them as ships. No such ships could exist, according to their frames of reference; the Indians of America first perceived the mounted conquistadors as a new kind of monster, horse and man combined and fused together. (All of this has to do with perception and cognition rather than brave scientific or technical pronouncements that it is impossible to make þying aeroplanes.) The Long Now of Information was authored by Dr Bengt-Arne Vedin, who also (among a great number of published works) edited the recent (May 2000) TELDOK Report 135E: IT, Innovation – Israel. |
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by PG Holmlov (pigge@teldok.org), +46 8 713 5129. |
