Fall 2021 Summary
It was a wild semester in Dr. Carter’s Information of Meaning course. I hope it is not my last course with the youngest grey haired man I ever met. I loved getting to know him by way of his many stories, jokes, classroom routines, and emails probably more than I loved the subject matter, which is saying a lot. I’m not one to cry in public, but almost want to, thinking about this semester coming to an end. The intention here is not to blub, but to review some of what stands out from the reading assignments this semester, and perhaps tie some of it together. Had I known then what I know now, I would have been recording every song and story Dr. Carter told from the beginning of the semester, and interweaving it into this review. I suspect it would turn into a novel or more to really do the whole thing justice. We have been enriched! His life really should be a movie. Something along the lines of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Forrest Gump. I can neither confirm nor deny this semester was like the first time you (ahem never) drop acid. Absolutely no one could have prepared me for what was coming. Even if it wasn’t the first time. Mind definitely blown.
Charlie Gere’s Digital Culture covered the history of technology up to 2008. The thing that stands out most to me is that this sort of “rationalization” or “signification” (digitization of information into discrete elements) toward efficiency in communication and storage is not new - although advancing exponentially to a point it will outgrow us if we’re not careful - but is something the human has done since we made our first conscious choice. It is that sort of human culture that produced the digital age, rather than vice versa, and it is the sort of human culture we shape and that can continue to shape our technology.
It’s almost like we were patterned to be this way. As we read in Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations (TGBV), digitization is in our very genes - the ones and zeroes of our discrete alphabet-like elements, the base pairs encoded in our DNA transcribed into RNA, revealing the codons of our unzipped amino acids read like words by ribosomes translating them into our proteins, “and on and on” as Dr. Carter would say.
“The God of the scientists, one is tempted to suggest, created man in his own image and put him into the world with only one commandment: Now try to figure out by yourself how all this was done and how it works,” (23, Hannah Arendt, as quoted in TGBV). Arendt’s thought affirms one of my favorite quotes from Galileo about not feeling obliged to forego the use of reason, senses, and the intellect with which God has endowed us.
“And as seekers, we may well discover from science many interesting answers to the question, ‘How does life work?’ What we cannot discover, through science alone, are the answers to the questions ‘Why is there life anyway?’ and ‘Why am I here?’ … In my view, DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God,” (88, 140, Dr. Francis Collins, head of The Human Genome Project, writing in The Language of God - unassigned). Dr. Collins believes in an evolutionary process that does not exclude the possibility of God’s intimate involvement at every step of the way (205).
In my view, after learning spring semester how cognitive scientists distinguish between human and animal language, it is like God wrote his programmed language in us and for us the way someone engraves a tiny riddle into a diamond that only a jeweler’s magnifying glass can help you read–but as yet we have no interpreter, no rosetta stone that tells us what it all means. We have only our bodies running a program we didn’t design, like we’re AI. The programmed language in our bodies even corrects for errors in the signal. Who designs a program only our bodies can decode? It has to be someone with a jovial sense of humor who understands the way nerd engineers tick and wanted to give them something fun (but of weighty importance) to figure out, like the riddle at the beginning of The Gold Bug Variations (I assume).
We are wise to heed Dr. Collins’ warning against leaving ethical decisions solely in the hands of scientists. A discussion of social construction/evolution of science and the ethico-political implications is also covered in Pandora’s Hope by Bruno Latour. Perhaps we are wise to prepare for…
…a scenario similar to the one we read about in Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, where much of the world dies from a probably engineered virus, or the scenarios labeled “never” or “unacceptable” in Dr. Collins’ book, including “designer babies with precisely predictable outcomes” (269). Yes, the times they are a-changing, aren’t they? But we’re still dignified individuals who can shape the sort of human culture who can swim against the digital tide, right? Earth Abides was actually the second book we read this semester. The digital age hit the reset button back to the Pleistocene, basically. We had to rethink everything about what organizes our cultural fabric, rip out the seams, and start over. COVID-19 restrictions have forced many of us to reevaluate our values and what we’ll accept as a new normal, and we don’t seem to be learning good lessons. Our liberties are worse for the wear, worse than after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, and science is worse for the wear, especially when it comes to losing public trust. We used to think science was just silly when it couldn’t decide if something was healthy or not - now we think it’s political propaganda and eugenics. It’s as if we stand on a precipice of becoming tools, or becoming aware we’ve been tools for a very long time and will potentially never be pretend-treated like persons again. Digital Culture traced some of the history leading up to this, ironically kicked in to high gear by folks who used to be free-loving hippies. Makes no sense. The worst tyrants have the best intentions. Or some b.s. Oh well.
The two most influential books for me this semester, though, were Pandora’s Hope (Latour), and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Persig. Together with Kant, Hegel, Levinas, etc. they helped me fill out the Venn Diagram thingy I birthed in various courses after a very, very long and complicated pregnancy stretching back to 2007 and even earlier. It synthesizes all my splintered, scattered, disorganized thinking into a tidy, neat, intelligible whole. It digitizes it, if you will. Some say that takes the soul out of everything, but that makes about as much sense as saying sheet music begets silence (save that one soundless song Dr. Carter played at the beginning of the semester, paired with abstract art that was all white, LOL!!!). Nah. Sheet music helps you play… and if there are others around, it helps you all get on the same sheet of music, unless you prefer cacophony. First the sheet music (or at least the order it represents - we can always improvise)… then the actual playing of music… then the dancing. If we choose. And of course it will always be a work in progress. It was sort of designed that way.
A Word on References
I loathe doing references. I would accept demerits in order to avoid doing references. If I ever get as far as an actual thesis, I will probably be paying someone to do my references. Say no to references. Please don’t flunk me for plagiarism. If somebody wants to know the publisher and year, that’s why God made Google.
Ask me for my updated Venn DIagram thingy if you’re curious. I’m actually going to start working on it as soon as I submit this. It’s the one I submitted for the midterm. It is mostly still the same, just needs some tweaking. Maybe I’ll share it without invitation when I’m done, depending on how fast I finish. Thank you for teaching me this semester. Live forever.
Your assistance is also needed in the triads thread.