21st-century Christian Philosopher

We can talk about letters as drawings. That has some weight behind it. (see here).

But they’re not. They may have gotten their start that way. The letter ‘A’ might have taken its from a sideways sort-of ox picture and often have carried the sense of father, primary, power and authority. And the ‘B’ might come from a concept of a house. But we actually have to dig for this trivia and our former reliance on stylized pictures is no part of writing.

It’s pretty obvious isn’t it? Not many people draw that great of a ox, so as long as the ox-part is important, it just has to evoke a bull and not resemble it so closely that it requires artistic skill. Letters would take as long to draw as pictures. The resemblance between ox-symbols drawn by different people is more important than various people’s ability to draw.

Because it’s everybody’s ox that’s important.

Look how far we are from the animal tracking bitumen all over a nice, clean, bleached mash of papyrus? Or even the guy seeing it and trying to draw pictures as they appear to his eyes. And that’s the idea, the accidental is more like a dog tracking mud through the kitchen. You can tell it’s been there, just like the rabbit with oily paws. But that’s it.

Even if the media is revealed by accident, it cannot be an accident. Sure it doesn’t spring full form, because event and innovation are like two climbers back to back scaling a “chimney” (Think Pacha and the llama Kuzco in The Emperor’s New Groove, if it helps.) up the mountain. It’s just not like a dog tracking in mud from the back yard. There really is no way to innovate on that. New and improved mud tracks just aren’t going to appeal to anyone, even the dog–unless it gets him a slice of bacon or a spot on the bed–which again is not likely.

It seems that some people would prefer everything to be just a cascade. They would like to be able to fold intelligence into the mold of balls on a billiard table or rocks tumbling down hill. But the thing about media is that it has nothing (or very little) to do with its contents.

Media–media that’s fit to carry–carries intention. The intention might like to be better represented than it is–it could always be better, more complete, more transparent, more evocative. Sometimes we might wish that it didn’t resemble so much like stating the blindingly obvious or thinking out loud, like this post.

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I left off last time talking about the likeness between computers, and pencil and paper. I ended up trying to show that both are based on natural events that may have occurred by accident. But nonetheless, they are orchestrated and fitted to our purposes which are separate from the natural structure or events.

The intent stands apart from the facts. If we write The Great American Novel on a combination of ink and paper that causes the pigment to smear and bond when papers are stacked on top of each other, we cannot construe that we meant to create a paper brick. Our intent must be construed by what we thought optimal materials would do. We tend to think that the materials were unsuitable to the task.

Despite the tendency of paper to burn up, we do not intend to commit something to ink until it burns up. We get fireproof vaults for this. Despite this as the best we can hope for from all parchment known to man, our intention is not to accept only its best capacity.

So the intent is separate from incidental effects and even sometimes the features of the best material available.

The case with dried papyrus is again more analog of the forces involved: The heat of the sun, the fibers of the plant, the stickiness and opaqueness of the goo and the pressure from the animal do no more than their natural function. We might accept a trivial level of intention from the animal thinking it can scrape the goo off on this fibrous patch, but nothing motivates us to believe that it did it because it would be recorded. The contrast here would be likely unintended.

Now, I may have produce an unintended effect. I may have given you the idea that I believe that ancients use bitumen as ink. I can’t find where they did. I recommend it because it used to lay about in pools, it’s black, it’s gooey, and has capabilities for animals accidently stepping in it and tracking it across dried papyrus. That I don’t find bitumen used as ink, prompts me to think that a human inspired and trying to replicate the materials for writing would probably find it unsuitable for general purposes. Were this the model of observance, perhaps fine writing would have to wait for refinements in ink.

Once we had suitable materials, purposes and capabilities can feed off one another. Of course, it would be a mistake to make too strong a correlation as the hope of records surviving fires did not wait until people had seen papers that didn’t burn. We just needed them to. Just as nobody seeing lightning run down a lightning rod would probably wonder if he can somehow do his taxes like that. That would await an electrical circuit that would demonstrate that it can hold a state and represent a number reasonably well and maintain that state to the extent that it could be used.