The Book Of Ian Watson, page 5
The origin of language in negation is discussed by Gregory Bateson, too. A simple affirmative statement about the world can only come about after the evolution of a simple negative, derived from animal displays of threat. The simple negative makes a degree of separateness of Thing from Name possible. Piaget points out that negation is possible because of the mechanisms of neural inhibition—for example, the withdrawing of one’s hand after one has stretched it only a certain distance towards an object. Also, we must build mental maps of the world we are born into, by means of contrast, comparison and the separation of elements; so that the syntax of negation is already latent, too, in the plan we are born with for acquiring internal conceptual maps of the environment. It is not, be it noted, a world of “raw” data that we are born into. We have a search programme for establishing patterns in our environment already given genetically—evolved through the pressures and constraints of our environment. As do kittens. As do birds. The environment dictates the permissible plans of itself that we can learn.
Another feature which may enforce the separation of Name from Thing, and the growth of Language, is the fact that we humans receive most of our sensory information in one mode, Sight, but articulate it in another mode, Sound. The biologist C. H. Waddington speculates that species which both process and articulate information in the same sensory mode might fail to achieve this separation; their world of conventionalized symbolic forms would for them have an absolute character of Moral Authenticity about it. Species-authority would sanction the order of the world, to as great an extent as it sanctioned social order. The world would have to be as it is. Since the dolphins and toothed whales are both highly intelligent and communicate about the world in the same mode as they perceive it, Sound, this may be one of the reasons why investigators like John Lilly have had such difficulty in proving that these creatures have a genuine language. Conceivably it may turn out that language is a blind alley if it does not operate in a different mode from the basic sensory input—because it cannot grow sufficiently abstract; cannot detach itself from the world far enough to be able to reflect on it. Alternatively, dolphins and cachalots may well have an authentic language—flexible, open-ended and sophisticated; and our difficulties in even knowing whether they have or not, after years of research (with all due respect to Robert Merle’s imaginative novel The Day of the Dolphin!) would be a fairly poor prognosis for any encounters with aliens. A third possibility is that dolphins are in a state of immense preparedness for true language—and remain stuck in that stage, locked in an ethical union of Name and Object, unable to abstract, deprived of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (in Saussure’s jargon) which makes abstraction possible. And perhaps this is a vital characteristic of any true language: the movement away from Representation to Arbitrariness, which is at the same time the separation off of Culture from Nature.
It should also be remembered that dolphins and whales did not evolve wholly in the sea, but returned to the sea, perhaps 125 million years ago, after a life on land where sight obviously played a much more important role than it does for whales today.
At any rate, whatever the answer to the dolphin and whale dilemma, we can at least say confidently that alien languages may divide up into same-sensory languages and different-sensory languages. And furthermore, that we may well find it much harder to come to grips with the same-sensory languages. Alternatively, alien languages do not divide up in this way; and proper languages are obliged to be different-sensory.
Octavio Paz remarks that while Language signifies the distance between Man and Things, at the same time it signifies the will to erase this distance. Elsewhere he says that Nature is not a substance nor a thing, but a message. Nature is a message which Nature both sends and receives; and Man is a moment in this message. These two remarks strike me as particularly interesting. For language, by this view, is no longer merely something that happens to exist in the world, and whose purpose is no more than this. Language, on the contrary, is something which has emerged from nature in order to return to the point of origin and illuminate nature. As Paz says, “Nature is structure, and structure sends forth meanings; therefore, it is not possible to silence the question about meaning”. Well, what is it possible to say scientifically about this idea that language is a functional part of the dynamic of nature? That it is a means whereby nature progressively illuminates and articulates itself?
Without deifying Nature, let us ask what it is in Nature that impels it to send a message to itself.
Here we come back to the problem of self-descriptive systems, which we have touched on in connection with arithmetic, and consciousness. We surely meet this problem too, when we consider the universe as a total system. It exists—but what sustains it? Why should it be as it is? What authenticates it? Is it possible to explain why and how a universe exists, within the limitations of this same universe? Can the universe legislate for itself, authenticate itself, describe itself—without our being forced to step outside it?
We are now compelled, as physicists are now being compelled—without mysticism or superstition—to introduce the fact of consciousness as a scientific necessity into our description of the universe.
A decade ago, the physicist R. H. Dicke pointed out that the right order of ideas mightn’t be: Here is the Universe, so what must Man be? but rather: Here is Man, so what must the Universe be? He based his reversal of the traditional way of looking at things on the argument that a Universe is quite literally meaningless in the absence of any awareness of that Universe. But awareness requires life—which requires the presence of elements heavier than hydrogen. These can only be produced by thermonuclear cookery inside suns over a time-span of several billion years. This length of time is only available in a universe the size of ours. Why, therefore, is the Universe as large as it is? Only thus, can there be life in it! So Dicke (and Carter) arrive at the idea of a “biological selection of physical constraints”. There appears to be a numerical relationship between the estimated total number of particles in the universe, the radius of the universe at its maximum point of expansion, the size of an elementary particle, the ratio between electrical and gravitational forces, and several other so-called “big numbers”. This relationship indicates a universe where total size, particle size, number of particles, strength of gravity etc., are all linked to one another structurally—such that a per cent difference either way in one of the constants would produce an uninhabitable cosmos. Why are these values as they are, in the first place? How are they chosen? They cannot be influenced or determined by any previous cycle of the universe—if we accept, as seems probable, that our universe will ultimately collapse into a Black Hole and undergo probabilistic scattering so that no laws or constants are preserved. Rather, according to John Wheeler’s remarkable suggestion, we must admit that in some strange way the universe is brought into being by the participation of those who participate in it.
Already, Quantum Physics compels us to accept the concept of the Participator as a fundamental physical principle rather than just a difficulty in the way of making very small measurements. Perhaps, suggests Wheeler, this is only the tiny tip of a great iceberg. I quote. “Does the universe also derive its meaning from ‘participation’? Are we destined to return to the great concept of Leibnitz, of ‘pre-established harmony’, before we can make the next great advance?” The Universe is not legislated from outside. It is not a statistical average of other possible universes. It is unique—cut off radically by the physics of gravitational collapse from any other possible universes. Therefore, to be what it is, it must bring itself into being. It must legislate for itself; it must describe itself. To quote John Wheeler again, “Are we, in the words of Thomas Mann, ‘actually bringing about what seems to be happening?’ Are we destined to return to the deep conception of Parmenides, precursor of Socrates and Plato, that ‘what is … is identical with the thought that recognises it’?”
Perhaps we are. In which case, this cosmological idea is of vital importance to our concept of our own, and any alien, languages —since language is one of the prime means by which Nature transmits a message to itself. And what must this message be about? It can only be about the definition of Nature: which, being defined, is enabled to exist. So, will the various intelligences throughout the universe necessarily be compatible on some deep level? Will they all necessarily have the same general project for consciousness? Will the structures of their languages relate to one another, in some universal, general grammar, because it is the selfsame Nature that all are part of a message from, and to? Alternatively, can all the languages of the universe be regarded as representing different stages in the transmission of Nature’s self-defining message? Could there be a dynamic within languages, over an evolutionary time-span, whereby language, having divided off from Nature, returns to its point of origin to illuminate it? Can we expect a progressive revelation of the nature of language within language—a growing reflexiveness that mirrors the reflexiveness of the cosmos as a whole? This may be a necessary evolutionary tendency within languages; so that we might expect the languages of more advanced intelligences to be progressively less “subconscious” and “opaque”.
Well, this may be the case. However, talk of “necessity” in the context of evolution tends to make people nervous. But here is an even grosser example of Necessity. How can the initial value data of our cosmos, which later will make life possible, conceivably be determined by something which only arises billions of years later—namely life? For this is what we suggest, by invoking a “participatory” universe. Now, I think this problem disappears if we reconsider Time itself. Perhaps we are mistaken to think of the Universe as developing from some time in the past—where it all “started”—towards some time in the future, where it all “stops”. For one thing, we might be quite unable to locate a specific start or end-point—using Time as the measure. In his book Black Holes: the End of the Universe, John Taylor of London University suggests that time may be proportional to activity; thus time will distend enormously as we trace backwards to the first seconds of the universe—the time of the Big Bang, when the majority of activity occurred. Likewise, towards the end. Time will approach infinite duration at either end, from the viewpoint of an observer in our universe. Time will become meaningless, immeasurable. Indeed, time may be only meaningful within the processes of a Universe, but cannot say anything about the universe as a whole. For the total universe, there may be no passage of time at all. The Universe may best be regarded as a totality that is simultaneously, and permanently, present to itself. There can be no overall “arrow of time”. Thus the future and the past may indeed determine one another, reciprocally; and the Universe can be self-determined by its contents—even if these contents only manifest themselves at a specific local time in its history from their own point of view.
So we are approaching a “goal-directed” view of the Universe. Some kind of “goal-directed” view of evolution is implied, also. Now, this is an idea that Jacques Monod for one, in Chance and Necessity, finds offensive and unscientific. According to Monod, we must guard against the feeling that everything real in the world is also necessary, rooted in the very beginning of things; that Man is necessary, that life is necessary—even though life, being goal-oriented by definition, appears to carry its own inbuilt necessity. “Destiny is written as and while, not before, it happens,” writes Monod. The universe as a whole was not pregnant with life. Life exists by chance. Necessity may reinforce the initial lucky chance—but there was nothing necessary about that chance. A totally blind process can, by definition, lead to vision—purely by accident.
But, even ignoring the idea that such terms as “before” and “after” may be irrelevant for a simultaneously-existing, omnipresent universe, let us consider the genetic process itself. It takes 20 minutes to produce a single bacterial cell: from DNA to live organism. During this twenty minutes, about 4 million nucleotides have to be “read” and translated into proteins and so forth, with close to zero error. This is remarkable enough. But even more remarkable is the problem of how this gigantic sequence was ever arrived at. The DNA molecule that carries the code for the simplest bacterium represents one or few choices out of more than 10 to the power 1 million alternatives (101,000,000). Only the tiniest fraction of these could have been tested at random by nature during the total time-span of the universe to date. So there has to be some hierarchical principle of organisation at work: some dynamic of pressure and constraints on the basic physical and chemical level that leads, rather rapidly, towards living matter.
How do collections of matter produce their own internal descriptions? How does living matter describe itself, in order to perpetuate itself? Are genetic instructions simply ordinary molecules? No, they are more. They are ordinary molecules endowed with symbolic properties. It is not the structure of molecules as such, but the internal self-interpretation of their structure as symbols that is the basis of life. But what endows them with this symbolic property? What determines that they shall function as Language?
The answer, in the words of American biologist Howard Pattee, is that this is “a consequence of a coherent set of constraints with which they interact”. Recent developments in theoretical biology—in particular the work of Réne Thom, who has applied concepts from topology (the branch of mathematics which concerns itself with the connectedness of shapes)—makes it possible to begin to explain how the interactions of the universe can dictate symbolic properties to matter; and in so doing, bring it to life. The publication of Thom’s Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Outline of a General Theory of Models was reviewed in England as the only book comparable in impact to Newton’s Principia. And indeed, Thom’s theory of the necessary forms which are characteristic of our universe, and which will manifest themselves inexorably in any morphological process whatever (whether this is biological—or geological) is a daring and radical concept, that links up with the cosmological and linguistic questions we have been asking.
For Thom, language is an internal representation of space in the mind: a symbolization of the environment and of the phenomenological catastrophes occurring within this space. I quote: “It seems to me difficult to deny that before conceptual thought there once existed, and moreover still does exist in Man, a ‘spatial thought’ which controls all our movements in space. Now such a control necessarily implies that the brain makes a picture, conscious or unconscious, of the external space where mechanical activity occurs. In fact, to repeat this again, we can scarcely conceive of life without an internal picture of surrounding space, since competition for space is one of the most primitive of biological interactions. … What is the primitive function of language? It is to transcribe, in a form communicable by our organs, the phenomenological shifts in the external world.” Following on from this Thom elegantly analyses the geometry underlying various language structures, which in his view are open to the same kind of analysis as morphological events in biology, or elsewhere; for there are only a certain number of such possible events, as a universal topological principle. (These ideas of a restricted number of mathematical “mother structures” is, incidentally, one that the group of structuralist mathematicians who publish under the pseudonym of Nicholas Bourbaki is also pursuing vigorously.)
Thus Man reflects Reality. Language reflects the basic shapes of Nature—and these are even susceptible to mathematical analysis. Thom even goes so far as to say: “The old image of Man as a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm retains its value: he who knows Man will know the universe.” Elsewhere he writes: “I believe that in biology there exist formal structures, in fact geometric entities, which prescribe the only forms which a dynamic system of auto-reproduction can present in a given environment”. And the same is true, he maintains, even of the table of the elements. Sodium and Potassium exist because a formal structure already existed, corresponding to them.
So we seem to be moving in the direction of being able to talk of a topological grammar of the universe—which reflects itself in the grammars of actual languages. Dare we say that these same universal constraints, pressures, and necessary forms must reflect themselves in any languages anywhere in the universe?
Well, Thom is very careful to say that his “formal structures” or “geometric entities” only prescribe particular forms in a particular environment. How different, then, might be the forms—both morphological and linguistic—that might be prescribed for alien beings? Perhaps they might be so different that there would be no compatibility between us and them.
What is meant, however, by a “particular environment”? Does that mean a particular planet—a Jupiter as opposed to the Earth, a Mercury as opposed to Jupiter? Hardly! The particular environment we are concerned with is surely the particular universe we happen to be in, the universe whose mother structures prescribe the existence of Sodium or Potassium. We have every right to assume that these elements exist in the same form as we know them, in the furthest galaxies.
Now, to return to the point I raised earlier. I mentioned that all human beings possess a common market in meaning based on the biological systems of emotional and purposive behaviour they all share. I asked whether aliens would display emotional and purposive behaviour sufficiently similar to provide some community of meaning between us and them. Well, if language involves “a cerebral picture, conscious or unconscious, of the external space where mechanical activity occurs”—and if the pressures and constraints of the environment prescribe certain proper forms not only for biology, but also for intellectual structures, there may be a reasonable chance of compatibility on the deep level. The possibility, perhaps, of an Esperanto of the necessary forms involved in physical and intellectual development. These would determine the deep structure of knowledge of the Being. Deriving from this, in response to the particular environment, would be what Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger call the “biogrammar”: the hereditary biologically-based patterns of behaviour, including the plan for the acquisition of actual languages. Then, on the surface, would be the languages themselves, in whatever form they presented themselves: by sound, by gesture, by patterns of lights.
