Older blog entries for cdent (starting at number 482)

A simple object can be generated — or computed, or described — with just a few bits. A complex object requires an algorithm of many bits. Put this way, it seemed obvious. But until now it had not been understood mathematically.

But why do we say π is not random? Chaitin proposed a clear answer: number is not random if it is computable — if a definable computer program will generate it. Thus computability is a measure of randomness.

This pair of questions — how random and how much information — turn out to be one and the same. They have a single answer.

Ideas have "spreading power" he noted — "infectivity, as it were" — and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are "just as real" as the neurons they inhabit.

She devised a process, a set of rules, a sequence of operations. In another century this would be called an algorithm, later a computer program, but for now the concept demanded painstaking explanation. The trickiest point was that her algorithm was recursive. It ran in a loop. The result of one iteration became food for the next.

Unfortunately the written word stands still. It is stable and immobile. Plato's qualms were mostly set aside in the succeeding millennia as the culture of literacy developed its many gifts: history and the law; the sciences and philosophy; the reflective explication of art and literature itself. None of that could have emerged from pure orality.

Havelock focused on the process of converting, mentally, from a "prose of narrative" to a "prose of ideas": organizing experience in terms of categories rather than events; embracing the discipline of abstraction. He had a word in mind for this process, and the work was thinking. This was the discovery, not just of the self, but of the thinking self — in effect, the true beginning of consciousness.

Writing, as a technology, requires premeditation and special art. Language is not a technology, no matter how well developed and efficacious. It is not best seen as something separate from the mind; it is what the mind does.

The extra drumbeats, far from being extraneous, provide context. Every ambiguous word begins in a cloud of possible alternative interpretations; then the unwanted possibilities evaporate. This takes place below the level of consciousness.