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Discussion Membership
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Language and Thought
Stephen B. Waters December 9, 1981 There is a lot of material that I would like to begin to cover, but we are welcome to digress. We are welcome to go anywhere that you care to go. I prefer to be interrupted. I don't like to tell you what I am particularly interested in; I would like to discuss what we are both interested in. We are in difficulty if what Richard Mitchell says is true. Mitchell wrote "Less than Words Can Say". He is also the publisher of a monthly newsletter called "The Underground Grammarian" that comes out of Glassboro, New Jersey. A fascinating book and an interesting newsletter. One of the reasons we are in difficulty is that the more that we bend the strength of nature to our personal will, the more that we have to depend upon our own GOOD will and not nature to protect ourselves. That is to say that previously we could use an iron bolt to protect our door, but because of what we know about nature, because of how we have mastered nature to our will (We master her by obeying her.) an iron bolt doesn't work any more. A strong box used to protect our gold. A strong box doesn't protect our gold anymore. With atomic weapons there is a tremendous threat to our safety and security. Those of you who have seen Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" or who have read his book will understand that violence CAN succeed. There is no guarantee that thought will survive. He used as an example the city of Alexandria, 2200 years ago. A tremendous library of knowledge lost. And it took us 1400 years to regain some of the knowledge. On the next go round, we may not have that chance to recover. This is why it is in my own best interest to talk to you today. And it is why it is in your best interest to listen and understand. If at any time you fail to see how what I have to say affects you, that is the time to interrupt me. (And, in fact, your are probably doing your neighbor a favor because they are wishing they understood but really don't want to mention anything. So you will be doing yourself, me, and your neighbor a favor if you will interrupt.) You are a particular group because you are, for the most part, readers. There is a bump in the demographics today. There are fewer readers than there used to be. This is sad. While I may not be talking directly about you because you are readers, you deal every day with people who are not readers. People who are not readers have less of a chance of becoming thinkers. It may well turn out that common sense is something that can be taught. Well, not taught. Nobody ever teaches anybody anything. More likely it is "caught". Thought -- our common sense -- is something that is caught, in spite of our best efforts at teaching. What we end up doing is setting up obstacles in front of people. When they stumble over them sufficiently, they say "Ah, ha! Maybe there is something here I should know." One of the important things about this book, Julian Jaynes' "Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", is that, for the first time in history we may begin to understand that common sense, or thoughtfulness, may in fact be able to be taught. And this book, "Godel, Escher and Bach", which is a Pulitzer Prize winning book, may begin to give us some of the symbols that we can use to help teach people common sense. One of the reasons that we can see that we are in trouble -- and bad trouble -- well, the evidence is everywhere: foggy thinking, muddled thought in books, political statements. . . for instance when Ron Zeigler, President Richard Nixon's press spokesman agrees with a reporter's suggestion that he previous statements were "inoperative". Now that is not merely a euphemism, that is an immorality. What he is saying is, "I lied to you." And we didn't stand up and say "Mr. President, did you lie to us? Why didn't you say so?" (When you receive an official letter that says, "It has been brought to our attention that. . ." thus and so ----) When you receive your overdue notice for rent, they say, "Pay up, or else!" Clarity. Precision. The discursive process. They are not teaching these things anymore. As Bacon said, "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man." When we give it some thought we can discover that the power of the mind and of language in the meticulous choice of words -- full, ready, exact -- that it is exact language and expression of an exact thought. The thing that is important here is that language and thought are intertwined. When we read we are exercising the mind. When we write we are choosing between this word and that word. We are making subtle distinctions. These are subtle distinctions that people are not necessarily learning in their schools anymore. Language is thought. Thought is language. The two are the same. When we teach someone to write, what we are doing is giving them intellectual weightlifting. Now, this was never explained to me in school. We wrote not because we understood that what we were doing was strengthening our ability to discern. We wrote because we had to. Nobody told us. I was fortunate. I was one of the last students at a time when people honestly taught reading and writing. I feel very, very fortunate.
;Ignorance of the essential nature of language -- in the fact that it is essential for thought -- jeopardizes our future. Mitchell talked about his students saying, "Many of my students seem unable to express themselves in any language whatsoever. They aren't utterly mute, of course. They can say something about the weather. And give instructions about how to get to the post office. They are able to recite numerous slogans, especially from television commercials, and the lyrics of popular songs and recent -- very recent -- political campaigns. They are able to read traffic signs and many billboards and even some newspapers. They can claim certain emotions with regard to various teams and even individual athletes whose names they often know. They can spin more or less predictable reveries about the past, or the future, either in very simple concrete terms or in sentimental banalities or both. But they cannot pursue a process. They cannot say why evidence leads to a conclusion. They cannot find examples for analogies. They have never even heard of analogies. People in that condition don't think of themselves as being in that condition because they don't THINK of themselves. They honestly don't think at all." This means we are in trouble. Mitchell's book is highly recommended. It is very readable. And, after you have read it, I am sure that you will pounce at every opportunity on muddled thinking and on foggy thought. And it is everywhere. Advertising. Tell me. Is a thoughtful person looking at an aftershave commercial, paying attention to the words in the aftershave commercial honestly going to decide between this aftershave and that aftershave on the basis of reason? Well, there isn't any thought on the words that happen to be in the commercial. Chances are the thoughtful person isn't going to buy the aftershave at all. Or the hot comb. Imaging what that would do to our economy if we couldn't sell any more aftershaves or hot combs? Or imaging a thoughtful person dealing with politicians and what a politician says. Demanding precision in what they say. It is boggling. It may, in fact, be socially unacceptable. What are the purposes of our schools? Are our schools to produce thoughtful people or good citizens? Are they compatible? I would like to think that they are. They may not today be compatible. But my hope is that tomorrow we can see that they will be compatible. Now I am going to digress and go to a different book. This is by Julian Jaynes. Julian Jaynes is a psychologist. He teaches in Princeton. This book was published in 1976. The significance of the Jaynes book and the Hofstadter book is that. . . What they suggest is that we may be approaching a watershed in societal thought. What would be a watershed? Let's look at previous ones: The transition from wandering tribes to an agrarian society. That was a watershed. The invention of a draught horse driven plow. That was a watershed. It freed up more people to do other things than merely subsistence farming. The invention of numbers in the use of geometry and trigonometry. Awesome implications for that. The development of writing. The invention of moveable type. The first industrial revolution, which specialized function for people's jobs and, at the same time, harnessed external power. The second industrial revolution -- which we happen to be in the middle of right now -- is robotics. This is now and tomorrow -- over the course of the next 10 or 20 years -- going to be socially devastating because, well. . . Consider the city of Rome. This is substantially a mill town. The people who work in the mills do repetitive thought. They aren't involved in decision-making. We are on the verge of having the substantial part of our working population who are doing complex projects, but non-decisionmaking projects, replaced by robots. Then what do we do with all these people? Now that is as significant a revolution as we have had during the previous industrial revolution. No, I am convinced that we can cope with this. So I am not worried. Let's not panic yet. But another kind of revolution, another kind of startling revolution, is that there can be a new understanding of consciousness and a symbolism to manage it. I have here several interpretations of what people have thought consciousness to be, and why they are wrong. And several statements of what consciousness is not. They are all mentioned in Jaynes' book at the very beginning. What it boils down to is that consciousness is not what we have previously thought it to be: When we lose consciousness we don't really lose consciousness, we lose reactivity (as well as consciousness); we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of (In other words, if I go into a dark room with a flashlight, (Well, we don't know that it is dark) And I look only wherever I show the flashlight. As I look around I might assume the room is lit simply because wherever I point the flashlight and look there happens to be light. Similarly, we can't be conscious of what we are not conscious of.) When we are awake, we are not conscious all of the time. Consciousness is often not only unnecessary, it is often undesirable (A pianist who becomes conscious of his fingers will, all of the sudden, stumble over the notes. When we are reading we are not conscious of how our hands are or how we are sitting or off the letters, words, or syntax of the sentences. We may be conscious of the ideas.); Consciousness is not a copy of experience (What you can recall consciously is just a thimbleful of the oceans of actual knowledge that we may have. Conscious retrospection is not the retrieval of all our images. It is a retrieval of what we have been conscious of before. And there is a difference between the two.). Consciousness is not necessary for thinking. (One does one's thinking before one is conscious of what one is thinking about. The important part is the instruction which allows the wholes process to go off automatically. In other words, there are a lot of things that consciousness is not. What Jaynes holds is that consciousness happens to be a very simple thing. It happens to include 1) the idea of self; the possibility of self-reflection. We can create a concept of ourselves. And the other thing that consciousness includes is 2) a sense of time. Another remarkable thing that we get into in Jaynes is that his hypothesis says that consciousness is something that has occurred over the past 10,000 years. He traces the origin of consciousness to about the time that pictures first started appearing on cave walls. From then on it progressed significantly. His records are the 10,000-year record of drawings, archeological records and writing. He suggests that those records represent and describe the evolution in the same manner of thinking that has been different than the thinking that we practice today.
(Question: If there wasn't consciousness before then, how did man arrive to the point where he began doing drawings on the walls? Response: Interesting question. Let's look at it a different way/ If there was consciousness then as there is now, why were there not drawings on the walls before then?. . . I will go into that when I go into the physics of the brain.) How were people then, if they were not conscious? What Jaynes suggests is that people used to hear. . .. First of all, the brain is organized into two halves. We have a right half and a left half. This is popularly understood. We have a book called "Drawing for the Right Half of the Brain" The brain does different things on the right half than on the left half. They happen to be connected by a wide band of cells called the Corpus Callosum. They communicate with each other. They work in harmony. One of the thoughts about "déjà vu" suggests that maybe there is a slight change in synchronization between the two halves. That may not be the case. At any rate, there is evidence that there are differences between the right half and the left half of the brain. For certain diseases people have the Corpus Callosum severed. Also in some accidents or war people have had brain damage. Scientists have studied such people. They have been able -- not with conversation -- but dealing with symbols because speech, for most people, is substantially located in the left half of the brain; there is the same area for speech in the right half of the brain, but most speech centers tend to be in the left half of the brain. Scientists have discovered that the different halves of the brain have different opinions. For instance, they have put on a board, "What do you think about love?", "Mother?", "War?", "Automobiles?"/ One half of the brain will react more positively than the other half. Then the question comes up, what is the speech center area in the other half of the brain do? What Jaynes is suggesting is that it is integrally involved with our conceptualization. What he is suggesting is that previously -- 10,000 years ago -- the two halves of the brain were more independent than they are today. And that people used to hear compelling, familiar voices from within their head. They would close their ears and the voices would not stop; that they were compelling -- much the way that schizophrenics today can hear voices. Jaynes is suggesting that it is one half of the brain -- the right half -- which tends to deal more with generalities, the whole picture, conceptualization -- speaking to the other half of the brain which deals with specifics, details. What he is suggesting is that when we do tasks, how do we decide which half of the brain ends up taking over responsibility for doing things? One half doesn't say "I want to do this" and the other say, "No, I want to do it". Really, what is being suggested is that one half says "I don't want to do this at all, why don't you do it?" and the other side says either "Well, all right, I'll do it." Or "I don't want to do it either." And if both halves don't want to do it you sort of fog out. (Which I don't want to happen to you today, so I want to suggest that this is really important to you.) Jaynes goes into great detail about the evidence: archeological evidence, written records that suggest that this might be the case. I don't really have the time to go into it today although I would love to. It is fascinating. For instance, the archeological evidence suggests that these people were hearing voices. Many ordinary people today have heard voices: "Who said that? Where did it come from?" The voices tend to be coming from the upper right, I think. And no one has been around. It happens in ordinary instances. It happens in times of stress. What Jaynes is suggesting is that these people heard the voices of their leaders; people they respected. This is common is schizophrenics also. And these voices continued to happen after the people who were supposed to have spoken had died. The voices from inside the head continued to command. They happened in times of stress. For instance, suppose I am stalking a wild animal and the animal charges. I freeze. And the voice comes from out of nowhere saying "Hit the beast in the snoot!" We do and happen to survive. What Jaynes is suggesting is that early social organization -- the way that people were able to get out of a nomadic situation and into an agrarian situation was that the voices were there constantly telling them what to do: "Till that row. Till that row. Till that row." They had no sense of time. They had no sense of narratization. They had no sense of "story"; to be able to say "Now I will do this. And then I will do that. And then do something else." Everything was in terms of now. It was in terms of a voice saying, "Do this. Do this." Which would help them pay attention to the task that was at hand. Now this is probably pretty startling to think about, but the evidence is there. For instance, after a king died, in the graves, we have found feeding tubes going down to the remains in the graves. They still heard the voices. Maybe the king was still alive. Maybe he is on the other side. This was the beginning of the idea of life after death. On a time line, this took place some 10,000 years ago. And took place more recently through 5,000 years ago and down to about 2,000 years ago. As things progressed over the course of time, language progressed and writing began. The translations of the writings -- the marks were reminders to hearing. In the time of Hammarabi, around 5,000 years BC -- as writing became more than counting (taking care of what were essentially business records) -- the marks were reminders for people to do things. They were to call up thoughts. They were to call up hearing. The translations of these things are "Hear these words and do" thus and so. Now we have a function that begins to grow on itself. As the writing takes hold, as there is more writing and the language develops, then there is an opportunity to bring the two halves of the brain into synchronization. There is an organization that develops that, in essence, defeats the voices. There becomes a closer control. We learn. We learn, not an evolutionary process in the physical sense, but an evolutionary process in the mental sense -- where there is an organization of the two halves of the brain. And the voices begin to go away. Now this is startling to people at the time. Where have the voices gone? "My gods have forsaken me!" this is the foundation of all the religions that we have today: the losing of the voices. "How am I going to know what to do? How am I going to get them back?" This is the beginning of oracles. "Tell me what to do." This is the beginning of omens. It is the beginning of sortilege. It is the beginning of reading viscera; of throwing dice. If I throw dice, the gods make them work. They have given me their opinion. They have told me what to do. Omens. This is the beginning of "If a black cat walks down the street, the village will be destroyed." If this, then that. That is a sense of time. If this, then that. If I read this sign, then that. This is the beginning of medicine. This is the beginning of science. If this symptom, then this action; this will occur. Again we have a thing that is beginning to roll -- that feeds on itself. It develops. Let me stop there and digress. Let me go into the physics of the brain. We will come back to this. Are people lost? You don't understand why it is immediately useful to you yet, but you are not lost. We have trillions of neurons in the brain. A neuron may have as many as 200,000 entry points. And each neuron may have any number of exit points. A neuron may fire up to a thousand times a second. That is the basic cellular level of the brain. Hofstadter (read the first 100 pages and the last 100 pages) is suggesting that the emergent phenomena of the brain -- those are ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will -- are based on kind of a "strange loop". A strange loop is an interaction between the top level reaching back into the bottom level and influencing it. We just talked about something being self-feeding; this idea of the development of thoughtfulness in the brain. Hofstadter is saying that our ideas effect individual neurons. If we have an idea up here, and it is connected to other ideas, and those to other ideas, and so on down the tree-like structure, that it boils down to -- at the very level of a single neuron; a single part of the brain -- then this idea, because it happens to be represented by a collection of neurons, actually affects things at the lowest level. It loops. It is a strange loop where an abstract idea, which is represented merely by a collection of physical things firing in a particular pattern, in turn will allow single neurons to fire again. It feeds back on itself the very same way that this microphone was feeding back on itself at the very beginning of the meeting. The output goes back into the input where it is fed in again for another iteration, another cycle, about a thousand times a second. A neurophysicist said: To put it very simply it comes down to the issue of who pushes whom around in the population of causal forces that occupy the cranium. There are forces within forces within forces as in no other cubic half-foot of universe that we know. Near the apex of this command system in the brain we find ideas. In the brain model proposed here, the causal potency of an idea or an ideal becomes just as real as that of a molecule, a cell or a nerve impulse. Ideas cause ideas and help new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communications, in far distant foreign brains. This is intriguing. This is fascinating that it has this feedback. We are going to get immediately to where this applies to you. We have had several things: 1) We have discovered first of all thinking (and that I use that word shows the poverty of the English language because Thinking is much more, but Thinking as we have been talking about it: consciousness, thoughtfulness) is acquired. Self-reference is acquired. Narratization is acquired. (I will do this, then I will do that.). From that comes the concept of time and my place in it. 2) The idea of RECURSION. That may be a new word for some of you. That is Hofstadter. Let me give you an example of recursion. If I am talking on the telephone: Hello? Oh, Wait a minute, I have another call. Depress the hold button. Get another call. Hello? The telephone rings yet again. I have a third call. Wait a minute, I have yet another call. The same process called from within that process is recursion. Another example: I am a monk, sitting here meditating in silence. I have taken a vow of silence. I am enjoying my meditation so much that I sigh, "Aaaah." I realize that I have sighed. In my dismay I say, "Oops!" Then I realize I have said "oops. "Oops!" I say again. "Oops!", "Oops!", "Oops!",. . . I can "oops" back into oblivion infinitely. I have called the same thought process again and again and again. A process that calls itself. That is recursion. This is what thinking involves. At the top level I can, in this strange loop, re-invoke the bottom level. This is terribly useful in everyday activity. And we are going to show you how and why. With these points, this is the foundation of all sociability. This is the foundation of all ethics. This is the foundation of all morality. This is the foundation of every single thing you decide to do. People are planners. The only thing that distinguishes people -- us -- from animals is the fact that we can plan for tomorrow. We can project ourselves into the future. And do it again and again and again. Repeatedly. Self-correcting. On this basis, this puts us above other animals. One of the inherent features of intelligence is that it can jump out of a task and survey what it has done. Let's do that right now: If Jaynes is right, what we have done is knocked the pins out from under most religions. We have shown a mechanism where a lot of the foundations of religions have come from. If Hofstadter is right, we have plausible explained thought without resorting to the supernatural. We have knocked the pins from under any eternal truths. If both of these are true, we have knocked out the foundations of all ethics, all morality. And we are in trouble. If we take a look around us, the interesting thing is that everybody seems to know it, but nobody seems to say it. But this is the case. You look at society. Society doesn't know why it should be decent. All of my generation is asking why? Why should I do this? Why should I believe in that? Let's face it. When Richard Nixon said "I am not a crook." (I have nothing personal against Richard Nixon except that he said "I am not a crook.) Who can you trust? When you have Jim Jones in Guyana saying I know the right way to be. When you have the Ayatollah Kohmeini in Iran saying his way is the one true way to be. How many of you have seen "Apocalypse Now"? There is an excerpt from the Colonel's speech here if you want to read the most interesting part. When we were engaged in Vietnam we heard "America, right or wrong!" My generation asks "Why?" and has not come up with good answers. Now, what I am going to suggest to you -- and this is not in any of the books -- is that there are good reasons for being decent and honorable and they can all be built from a foundation of these ideas that we have been talking about. Ethics comes from these ideas. (I define ethics and morality with less ambiguity than most people do. Some others say that if I steal from my company I am unethical. If I sleep with the boss' wife I am immoral. That is not a useful distinction for me.) Ethics. What we are dealing with in society. What are the minimums required for social interaction. They are two in number. 1) The possibility that I just might be wrong. And 2), which really falls out of number one, is that I have to allow for communication. That is ethics in a nutshell. There is nothing more to ethics. (Except -- and this is a question mark, I have not yet decided -- that the individual is valuable. I say that because there are some societies that don't agree with that. To me it is obviously part of that. After all, why is society valuable? We have two things that come out of society: knowledge and trade. These are the only two things that come out of society. Now we are forced into society. We can no longer retreat to the boondocks the way our forefathers used to be able to do. Individuals did create societies. Individuals are the fundamental nature of societies. Societies are no more than individuals. Therefore I consider regard for individuals to be an essential rule in the ethics of society.) From these ideas that we have just summarized there are simple wisdoms that can be deduced. Simple wisdoms that we need to teach people and that are not currently taught. They are common and everyday. They have been around. They have been written about a long time ago. They are not taught in schools. They are not taught in churches. They are very seldom taught in families. But, let's face it. Teachers are themselves products of schools. So it is not their fault they have not been taught the simple wisdoms that are worth knowing. We teach THINGS in schools. What I am suggesting is that thoughtfulness (I'm using thoughtfulness as a type of thought, not meaning merely being kind and considerate) is not THINGS; thoughtfulness is a process. If I have a river and the drops of water in the river represent truths, the boulders along the shores that guide the flow of knowledge represent the dynamic process of thoughtfulness. These boulders are but half a dozen in number. They are essentially accessible to anybody. We just simply don't teach them. They include 1) a sense of time; 2) a sense of self; 3) a sense of others -- that other people live as acutely as we do, that the pain another person feels is no different than the pain that I feel; 4) that we are mortal -- that just as surely as this talk will end shortly we will, sometime, be equally close to our own deaths; 5) that each person's fundamental purpose is to negotiate his way through life with a minimum amount of pain; 6) that since I can recall having been mistaken in the past, I can anticipate being mistaken now or in the future; 7) that because I might be in error, I must constantly solicit information and constantly re-evaluate my decisions; 8) that there is no such thing a truth -- that most of the philosophers that were trying to find absolute truths were barking up the wrong tree. There are truths that are consistent for each pass through the process but they are subject to revision on the basis of better information; 9) that there is a difference between fantasy and reality -- a boundary that must be understood. When you deny what is, you are possessed by what is not. That our planning requires us to look at things the way they honestly are rather than the way we would like them to be. In the past, all of the great thinkers have dealt with these common wisdoms: Confucius' sense that other people exist. He said don't do to anybody else what you wouldn't have them do to you. That is the Golden Rule stated in the negative, which is a much more practical way of doing things. Don't do this to them if you wouldn't want it done to you. It was Karl Marx's great idea that we must constantly evaluate where we are. He blew it. He said, ah! I have discovered a process by which we can examine the way things are; the way we can use time. People have been brought up in classical Newtonian physics; snapshot physical universe with no time involved. Now we are becoming relative. Where is our stability in this ever-changing world? Karl Marx suggested that we sight along the past as if we were looking along the frames of a piece of motion picture film, through the present, to the futures. Through that process of sighting along through time we can evaluate what our best decisions might be. His problem was that he came upon this great idea and did it once. He made one pass rather than constantly re-evaluating things to be able to say "Oh! We blew it. Let's learn from our mistakes." And then redoing the loop of re-evaluation again. And again. Confucius said that he could teach a man in seven years. We have gone through in an hour seven years worth of work. I don't expect it entirely to get across, But, the point is that what we need to teach is process. With this process, with these perspectives, with these boulders shaping the flow of the stream, then any thought is possible. Any thought is to be encouraged. The fact that I may be wrong and that communications are essential means that, hey, anything I can think is all right to think. There are things I may not choose to do -- and for good reason -- but any thought is thinkable and any society that is stifling thought is a nasty society indeed; any individual that is stifling thought is a nasty person and should be opposed. Our futures depend upon it. The neat thing about these ideas is that they apply to individuals, small groups, large groups, states, and nations. They are practical wisdoms, simple wisdoms that have been with us for all of our written history. They are in Confucius, Mohammed, Christianity, Marxism. Now, these gentlemen made their mistakes, but through these ideas we can understand what their mistakes were and why. We can apply these things to our simple daily living. What we are interested in is negotiating our way through life. We are interested in the simple daily problems of living. Dealing with people. Dealing with the loops that we get into in our own minds. These loops that we have described, They happen every day in thought. We think of our thought as something to be trusted. Well, it is not. Simply because we think we are right doesn't mean we are right. We think we are right not because we are right, but because we think we are right. People don't learn this. They have gut reactions. It is not taught in schools. It can be extracted from the great thinkers of history who dealt with the simple daily problems of living: Jefferson, Lincoln, Montaigne. It is practical. It deals with sense of self-reference and perspective. Recursion: When I hit my thumb with a hammer, I am in pain. It is intriguing when you are in pain. Sometimes you are in pain and sometimes not. Sometimes you are in pain and sometimes you are standing over here and thinking "Oh, wow, that really hurt!" and then you are not really feeling the pain, you are watching yourself feel the pain. You are saying, "I wonder why I am not really feeling the pain." Then you remember that you had been hit and then you are back in pain. This in and out looping is also true with anger and with grief. These loops are important. When I am angry, I am ferocious. And there are times when I am thinking, "Look at me standing here being ferocious." Then I will again loop into being angry again. When I am in an argument, when I am discussing things, it is possible for me to stand aside and look at myself In that argument. It is a useful, practical way to think about things. I sue it in discussion every day. I use it in argument. We don't teach it. "Boy," my wife might say to me, "you snore too much." And I reply to her, "All you ever do is gripe, gripe, gripe." That is two separate subjects that need discussing. Not argument. Discussion. One is the snoring, the second the griping. The ability to stand apart and look at the situation in perspective is simple wisdom we do not teach. They are there for us if we choose to use them. These things solve our problems. They are the only tools we have to help our own salvation. Seneca, writing about 50 AD said that he read the opposition. He said that he presumed to have no lock on truth. And if I disagree with my opposition, I have to know why I disagree with him. I have to have reasons behind the things that I do. Rationality was a standard in the time of Voltaire. It didn't seem to work. But we need to be more than rational. Rationality is merely a tool to encourage consistency in what we think. These things encourage perspective. When we encourage perspective and consistency we can deal with the simple daily problems of living.. One final example. We have different ideas than the Soviet Union or China. Communism. I think of the "Manchurian Candidate" where the word "communist" was vituperatively used as a slur to oppose anyone who thought differently. They may have ideas that could help us over the course of the next twenty years during our coming robotics industrial revolution. Our social safety net is unlikely to be able to support all of the people who will need it. Nobody has a guarantee to a job here. Nobody has a guarantee that they can work the work that they would like to do. We can set aside places where people can go who have lost their jobs to technology -- a place where they could, say, work half a day to provide their own food and shelter and the rest of day attend training classes to train them for new jobs. That is communal. That is communistic. And then when they have new skills and want to go out into the free market or capitalistic economy, they can. Until such time as they need a social safety net again. Then they can fall back on communal living again. That is saying there is wisdom in some of the things other people -- in this case the Chinese and Soviets -- are saying. Not all of the things they are saying, mind you. We can solve reasonable problems by looking at what is around us and applying ourselves. I am going to stop abruptly. I am opinionated. I could talk all day about a variety of things. Everything I do -- and I have been studying these things for the past three years -- is affected by these ideas. Questions: Do you see why we are in trouble? We are in trouble because there are people like G. Gordon Liddy who think that they are moral when they are amoral. They are animals. Morality -- ethics -- is something that is created by man for his own best interest. And Liddy doesn't know it. If we don't choose to be ethical, if we don't choose to be moral, then we go back to the law of the jungle. And the law of the jungle -- Liddy's home -- is not a palatable place to be, It is in our own best interest to help other people see this. I guess that is why I am here. It is in my best interest to spread these ideas. Don't be confused about morality. When you hear Jerry Falwell talk about morality or even Jummy Carter talk about morality; morality for them is a static thing learned by rote from a book. Morality is a process of thoughtfulness and using perspective. It is dynamic. It changes. Morality is a creation of man. And, what is more, an important creation. I am a pacifist. I am a pacifist for good reason. War is no rules. That is the point of Apocalypse Now. We were defeated in Vietnam because we didn't understand that and some of our enemies did. To be willing to set aside your morality to fight using any weapon -- that is war. And that is what we have to tell people in this country, in the Soviet Union, in every country of the world. That is why we have to encourage this kind of thoughtfulness. Because no rules is a nasty place to be. There are times when we will resort to no rules. Other people have to understand that. That is why we have to encourage everyone -- the Soviet Union, Iran, Kadhafi -- to work according to this process. Ethics is a system of problem resolution. Wee need to institute internationally a system of problem resolution which we do not currently have. Until then, we are toying with war. I am not a lily-livered, never-fight sort of pacifist. I am a pacifist because I understand what war honestly is. And so do all of you people who have ever been in one. We have to help other people understand why war is nasty. We have to bring to them the kind of thoughtfulness that will make war impossible. Now that is practical. All of this stuff that we have been talking about, that started off rather philosophical and abstract, all of the sudden come down to the simple daily problems of helping people negotiate their way through life. And helping people deal with other people. It's not so tough. In a semester in school, or in little bits all through life, we can teach it to people. That's the beauty of Jaynes. And Hofstadter gives us the symbolism to do it. Thank you.
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