Socrates vs. the Written Word (2011)(wondermark.com) |
Socrates vs. the Written Word (2011)(wondermark.com) |
Unlike Oral cultures where a point of view can be questioned and held accountable, a written version changes these expectations since it can only be conveyed one-way, i.e a trust-me mentality.
Secondly, humans having evolved in an oral world are used to much greater exertions and development of their memory (eg: recalling and narrating complex oral epics) which writing (and later computers) greatly weaken.
Ong makes a similar argument in Orality and Literacy (1982) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7182447-most-persons-are-su...
In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.
But the point about culture of questioning is an interesting one I hadn't heard before.
Yeah, good point. At a cultural level, this was a change from an Oral world where _knowing_ what to recall, being able to, and being 'witty' about it mattered a great deal; to a Literate world where things could be cited, 'looked up', and compared.
> Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274–7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato's Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.
Wasn't Plato writing this stuff down? Why would he argue against what he was literally doing at that moment?
I think I'm also not clear on who "Socrates" is supposed to be here and his relation to Plato. The article attributes the argument to the actual person, while Ong seems to consider him not only as one of Plato's characters, but as some sort of self-insert for Plato, to ascribe the argument to Plato himself.
Plato’s writing style used historical and invented characters who argued in a dialogue.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/#WhyDia
“In some of his works, it is evident one of Plato’s goals is to create a sense of puzzlement among his readers, and the dialogue form is being used for this purpose.”
What more puzzlement than to follow the hero into confusion and doubt, only to be lead out by the brilliance of his later unfucked arguments?
I just a guess…
Also it should be noted that ancient writings did not include punctuation or whitespace, and presumably they were meant to be read aloud and listened to. Augustine (354 - 430 AD) mentions someone reading in his head as odd.
But, and this is important, Plato almost certainly did not agree with everything he had Socrates say in every dialogue. Sometimes he is just playing with ideas. Personally, I think Plato is just being provocative about books in this dialogue to push an idea as far as he can.
There's also the objection to "putting it forth into a world of discord and uncomeliness". If I was being uncharitable I could say that he fears criticism, like he's saying the ideas will be ruined if taken outside of his Svengali-like reality distortion field. (Or more charitably, he wants a good faith environment to discuss them in, instead of exposing them to hostile trolls who just won't get it.)
(This is supposedly a letter written by Plato, but probably is more like fan fiction written by his contemporaries.)
Isn't it always like that, every time?
"And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing"
--
[1] Because words are literally artificial marks on paper, and he's literally [2] questioning their intelligence here.
[2] Except he's not, is he? He's verbally questioning their intelligence, because he's actually opposed to doing anything literally literally. [3]
[3] This is getting me twisted in philosophical knots.
Well, we don't literally know that — we only know that Plato wrote that he said so, and as other have suggested, maybe Plato verballed him.
On a similar note, any argument along the lines of "well, the elderly have always thought the new generation was getting worse, just look at Socrates saying the youths have no manners" or something. Besides the fact that Athens did fall and lose its entire overseas empire right around when Socrates was old, and he thus may have had a point, it's also just... possible for things to get better or worse? New generations are growing up under completely different circumstances with different technologies, of course Gen Z and Gen Alpha will be doing better in some areas and worse in others than Gen X or Millenials.
Both arguments fall into the fallacy of "you are criticizing A. But 100 years ago, someone criticized B, and they were wrong" which is just like... yeah A and B are not the same thing. Young people 2000 years ago are not young people now, even if Socrates 2000 years ago was wrong in criticizing the youth of Ancient Athens, that has no bearing on modern arguments. Even if Socrates was wrong in criticizing reading, that has nothing to do with modern criticisms of social media, crypto, AI, video games, etc.
Well let's not forget that early phone communication quality was ahem not-very-good, so of course errors were an issue.
When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.
When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.
Also, subjective experience-based words like 'difficult', 'easy', 'entertaining', 'funny' or even 'good' and 'evil' can vary widely between individuals. I didn't realize this until I met certain people who had very different values to mine. They had completely different definition of 'good' and 'evil' or 'right' and 'wrong'.
Talking to these people is strange and sometimes uncomfortable because you're using the same language and can 'understand' each other superficially, but you know you're not actually speaking the same language. You know they interpret what you're saying differently; they have fundamentally different goals and beliefs about the world and about you.
For example, some action or belief which might be second-nature to you, might actually be seen as strange and a weakness from the other person's perspective. But there are many, many distortions like this.
In fact, no two humans understand the same language in the same way. Often, what people believe, is shockingly different; you just never realized because you never discussed in depth and never defined your words and broke them down into their atomic parts... And in elite social circles, many taboos exist precisely to prevent any such exploration from occurring as such explorations might jeopardize relationships. Many relationships serve a strategic purpose and aren't about truth discovery.
So, we go to Socrates (without really knowing much about the guy other then 1-2 anecdotes) as he is our new hype salvation. Cause it is impossible for this our new hyped tech to cause harm, because writing and Socrates something something 2000 years ago. Also, it will destroy the world and replace people which means you have to give us more money now and celebrate us.
So please come up with another talking point. Not every historical anecdote where someone opposed some kind of progress can be applied to centralized data centers that contain stolen material.
They are still considered by many people as the greatest philosophers of all time, especially by those who have never read them.
And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing.
Especially given the lack of competition in the space, and people mostly using models from 2 or 3 providers.
With every emerging technology or change, let's assume any particular concern about the technology will likely live somewhere on the spectrum from real to unsubstantiated. It seems important to tell the difference, because how will we know where to spend our time, money and effort if we waste it equally on all apparent problems, real or not? So: how do we tell the difference? One way is to look at history, and learn from our mistakes when engaging with new technology. In many cases, real problems emerge which at first might look like tail risks. "Illusory" problems might look real early on, but often have to do with matters of tradition, appearances or status-quo bias.
Let's take an example: the steam engine. How much of the earliest criticism was about the greenhouse gas emissions? Nobody conceived it. And how much of it was about morals, religion, junk science, or protecting incumbents? If we can identify patterns across these, it might make us better at identifying problems in the future, too.
He had arguments though. And they were correct and irrelevant. Just like the arguments against calculators, computers, wikipedia, AI. Or against farmers diet (as opposed to hunters/gatherers diet).
Do technology makes as dumber? Always, at least in few ways. Does it matter? It hasn't mattered for last 10000 years, no reason to think this time it's different.
And its worth remembering that technologies change us in unexpected ways. They can fix a problem while creating new ones
What sort of dimensionality do we lose when thoughts go from ephemeral forms transcribed into concrete english language structures? Is this lingua franca holding us back in some ways from different thought patterns that might be better in some ways?
Dream states or psychedelics probably get you closest to this sort of "knowing without having the knowing put into discrete words" state of low level cognition. I wonder what might be there in our minds if we managed to strip our thinking of being bound by the limited framing offered through our languages?
Inner speech/string of words.
Pictures/visual memory. Think more of the form of a picture a movie or camera works in.
Conceptual thought. In my mind this works more like simplified iconography with action/logic occurring but otherwise unspecified.
True, but I don't think leaving it unwritten makes it better.
On the one hand, yes, I agree with you.
On the other hand, I’ve played the game of telephone. I can’t imagine a game of telephone played over multiple generations has any sort of fidelity.
Here is one example where knowledge was well maintained over 12000 years.
https://indigenous.sl.nsw.gov.au/recent-updates/ancient-abor...
That is where rhyme and repetition comes from. We kind of lost how to do that.
But then again, when you talk to people who don't learn because "you can find it on the internet anyway", they come across as dumb. When you encounter people who can do basic arithmetic because calculator, there are situation where they are ... dumb and not useful. When you encounter people who use car to get everywhere, they cant really walk - they think 1km is a long hike. It is going to be the same with ai.
I'll restate these ideas in a more explicit claim. All symbols are defined via one's own subjective experience.
One's own understanding/definition of every word can be traced back to personal experience. Imagine your life as a timeline, like a video, from birth up until now. You can seek that timeline to find the moments/clips that contributed to your definition of any given word or even mathematical symbol. To give an example, when I say "apple", the corresponding idea in my head is based on every apple I've seen and every instance of the word "apple" I've seen being used or being taught to me in the past. Even when we try to define the phrase "this specific apple" while looking at the same apple on the same table in the same room, the light bounces off of it slightly differently from my angle of view vs yours, and we did not see the same sequence of "video frames" about the apple, and so our mental models of that apple would necessarily be slightly different.
This is probably why the hard problem of consciousness / unified theory of physics appear forever out of reach. If no two observers/observations are fully identical, then you cannot even define what an ideal observer is. But we tend to assume such an ideal definition exists.
This seems almost trivial in hindsight because "identical" can be defined as 1) "one and the same", based on one thing OR 2) "mostly similar", based on pairs of adjacent things one has seen in the past.
And to sort of echo the original post, it seems to me that a lot value comes from the interactive nature of argumentation. But I think the specific medium/modality of those interactions don't matter for most things, and even when it does, like in this case, valuable insights can still fall out of a discussion in text. I derived the precursor ideas which led to this conclusion of definitional non-equivalence in past offline arguments as well as simulated discussions in my head. And I derived the actual conclusion by arguing with people here on HN, which helped me truly internalize the idea that even the definition of consciousness/observation differs from one person to another. That comment thread can be seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338029
It's worth mentioning that I am not too proud of that specific interaction because I got needlessly defensive and adversarial, and lied about my subjective experience of having undergone general anesthesia even though I haven't really, and it was especially egregious in a discussion about consciousness. My original reflex/motivation was I felt that many other people would likely prematurely dismiss some of those ideas if I admitted that one of the tangential premises were wrong. And regretfully, by lying that time, I've introduced a cancer in my mental pathways when considering the problem of consciousness and adjacent philosophical problems because I'd always have this nagging feeling to try to justify that past mistake, even now. But in truth, I was just being an intellectually dishonest little shit trying to win an argument. And yet, something valuable came out of that interaction.
"The words of the sages," said the duke.
"Are the sages still alive?"
"Dead long ago," said the duke.
"In that case, what you are reading there is nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old!"
"Since when does a wheelwright have permission to comment on the books I read?" said Duke Huan. "If you have some explanation, well and good. If not, it's your life!"
Wheelwright P'ien said, "I look at it from the point of view of my own work. When I chisel a wheel, if the blows of the mallet are too gentle, the chisel slides and won't take hold. But if they're too hard, it bites in and won't budge. Not too gentle, not too hard - you can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind. You can't put it into words, and yet there's a knack to it somehow. I can't teach it to my son, and he can't learn it from me. So I've gone along for seventy years and at my age I'm still chiseling wheels. When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn't be handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old."
The question then becomes one of cultural stability over that length of time. I personally can't tell you anything about the cultural and technological stability of of the aboriginal cultures, all I can assume is they were far more stable than europe, north africa, and the middle east. These later groups I listed had an absolutely massive amount of cultural exchange, and other things like mass genocide over the centuries. The exchange of new concepts and ideas is a powerful force in shaping the stories we tell. When two groups of people exist together over longer periods of time with conflicting sets of stories one of the stories tends to fade and die, and most likely a mixed story is created (Christianity ate a lot of Pagan mythos this way).
Depends on how many of the old ways are faithfully recorded in more permanent records. Language, and by follow up, reading are the most important technologies ever. As long as I have your language and instructions in writing almost anything can be accomplished.
All of that translating written material from one culture to your own and then implementing it is by no means a trivial task and shouldn't be taken for granted
Yea, this isn't one that is proven from empirical data. The oral instruction path not more complete by any way possible. The combination of reading + writing at the same time is super powered in comparison. It stops the human brain from becoming a hallucination machine about the actions it took in the past, and allows more truthful retrospection.
Spoken Q&A sessions are not neutral.
The origin of rhetoric is oral persuasion, not the transfer of objective information. Oral conversations are noisy AF, easy to dominate, allow speakers to lie with "I didn't say that", and to use persuasive rhetorical tricks to confuse and persuade instead of enlightening.
We've all been in meetings where people talk at each other, or everyone says their part with no connection to the rest, and previous points are forgotten almost immediately even if they're valid, true, relevant, and important.
Likewise lectures - good luck teaching anything scientific without allowing notes.
Writing gives the recipient time to stop, ponder, understand, and - on a good day - disagree and criticise.
It doesn't prevent questions at all. It encourages them, and gives them time to mature and deepen. You may not be able to ask the original writer - especially if they're dead - but you will always be able to find comments and opinions from others.
If you put all of these together you get an argument from status, not from effectiveness.
Being a teacher/philosopher was a career, and writing endangered that.
Superficial in-the-moment wit and memory were always better for entertainment than expanding human knowledge.
Comparing the lax and informal communications of our modern experiences, it is no wonder that people cannot imagine the environment a community a quality communications creates.
Our collective communications experiences are argument from status, not from effectiveness, but that is not to say effective communications and the completely other environment it creates does not exist. Socrates speaks of that environment, not our modern failure to communicate above 5-grade levels.