Journeyman Philosopher

A very interesting thought entered my mind the other day while discussing the concept of scripture in the classroom. Scripture (writing), as we all take for granted, is a technological invention. It is a technological invention that permeates all of our society. In order to be able to write and to understand someone’s writing it is necessary to be trained in it, without this training our own writing becomes disjointed and nonsensical whilst the writing of others becomes alien.

Ask yourself why it is that when you read someone’s blog whom you disagree with you find it inherently more offensive than when you encounter the same opinions verbally? This has to do with more how we perceive writing than with the content of the words themselves. Plato commented that writing was in a sense ‘inhuman’ as once thoughts were transferred on paper they became separate from the individual thinking them. This separteness in essence put them on a different plain of reality than the verbal words and opinions the writing stemmed from. You can’t argue with text, all text is a statement of truth in some manner or another. If you read ‘The dog ate the cat’ you can reply ‘No it didn’t’ but this in essence does not change the composition of the text ‘The dog ate the cat’ is still ‘The dog ate the cat’ regardless of your objection to it.

To understand and cope with this concept human beings have taught reading and writing for centuries and in essence it has transformed how we see the world (as a matter of fact our world would not exist without writing). A technological invention came about that we in essence societally evolved ourselves to use efficiently. In such a manner we evolved through technology. Take this line of thought to the present day. Currently we depend on huge amounts of technology to live our daily lives, but one fundamental difference between how we have adapted ourselves to understand writing and how we have adapted ourselves to deal with technology is that in essence technology although becoming more complicated and powerful is progressively being made more human user friendly, whereas writing was a system adopted because of its advantage despite its lack of user freindliness.

With writing we adopted an efficient system of technology for the transmitance of knowledge and maintained it through generations ‘by teaching ourselves how to work with it’, however now computer technology is being adopted and used in society as an efficient means of a varied amount of things yet fundamentally ‘it is being taught how to work with us‘. There exists an important transference of power, initially human beings evolved through the technology of writing however now the technolygy of computers is evolving through us!

This I believe is very important. If artificial intelligence does ever come into existence human beings are in some ways going to be an evolutionary ancestor of their species, just as in some ways the technology of writing has become an evolutionary ancestor of ours.

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