Research topic: Am I just a line of code?
“I had the consistent urge for a reality check each time I encounter uncertainty in life, later on, I developed a feeling of disconnection with the world‘s rapid changes, where I feel nothing actually has been fundamentally changed, it is more like a moving pattern within a frame, or like a ripple on the surface of a pond. “
Chapter 0. Time: 11.30.2021
I had brainstormed with Summer just like we used to do every time we met, she once found an interesting comparison on Word’s definition in the Bible in English and Chinese translation.
Here is how Word is described in John1:1 NIV:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him, nothing was made that has been made.
In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.”
*In Chinese, the Word is translated as Dao, meaning “way,” “road,” “path,” “course,” “speech,” or “method” also a Chinese philosophy called Dao, Confucius can be said to be “Truth”. The first sentence above translated in Chinese is 太初有道，道与神同在，道就是神. Referring to Dao is God.
Where did the language come from? How did it shape the environment and the culture around us? Is there anything beyond human beings’ imagination?
Later I dig deeper in the religious explanation, and it reminded me of the Tower of Babel, (מִגְדַּל בָּבֶל，Migdal Bāḇēl), in Genesis 11:1–9:
At first, the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they started to work and build the city together, then Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower that humankind was building. Then he decided to scatter people in different languages so they won’t understand each other.
For this part of the story, language is a curse to mankind, it is invented to divide them into groups with different ways of thinking, with different ideologies, or even more confusion which caused the misunderstanding and the segregation. However, as a communication tool or cultural medium, why did we need so many different languages?
I shared this question with Youssef, a friend who studied Arabic and he threw his doubt: “Did the opinion about the old culture come first or the new culture was invented first?”
We question and critique, thus more diverse ideologies are generated during the process. The study of Alexander R. Galloway, Language Wants To Be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology, simply addressed ideology has two natures:
“Ideology was always about two things at the same time: the representation of one’s lived social relation (following Althusser’s definition), but simultaneously ideology is implicitly a matter of critique, for as Fredric Jameson said once about capitalism, simply to utter the word ‘ideology’ seems to indicate one’s disdain for it.”
Often the invention of a new culture and ideas are embedded with disbelief and doubt in the old ones at first, then it is collected and formed as a shared common idea within a small group of people, then it touched other people and involved them to participate into more rounds of discussions. With more discussion, the idea and belief start to construct concrete rules and borders, from the point it comes along with opponents and segregation, then more layers of ideas and belief will be born based on the involving disbelief and doubt. The ideology will keep evolving in an algorithm format.
If we see religion in different societies, we can find the pattern of history and culture inside, the religion is the mirror and archive of the social movement and evolution. Religion rides on language into broader publications and attracts more followers.
Language serves as the foundation in the genesis period of humankind, in general, communication consists of words, which are organized in a conventional way, which could be expressed through writing, speaking, and gestures. It is also very identical in each group, community, and nation. I found the fascinating part of language is when I try to fully understand it, I have to embrace the entire entity that a language carries, combining with culture, history, an essential spirit that is deeply rooted inside of it, that is what glues the individual in the community tightly. The language could be regarded as the spirit of a community, the roots of a tree, the blood of life.
Through my study journey on French literature, I’ve been told by many “pragmatics” that language is just as a tool, it is truly undervalued in many cultures than a science major. Language itself has such a permeability, human breath and sleeps with it, without it, we probably will be soulless numb creatures, although most of the creatures have their own way of observing and expressing. Also, language is like water, the sentence formation is like a spontaneous art performance, in a discussion or a speech, we would feel the words flooding into our brain and constructing in a certain way and simultaneously being produced from our language system.
According to Wikipedia, it describes the communicator simply encode and decode the message during the process of communication: “In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication channel or storage in a storage medium.”
System of rules, which refers to the underlying code. Does it sound familiar?
Language basically serves as a system of rules in its nature, Ludwig Wittgenstein once stated “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” - The words of this language are referred to what only the speaker can know — to his immediate private sensations. The language here, therefore, marked one’s frontier of knowledge and defined the border of one’s known and unknown. It is the system of rule, it is the law.
Back to the statement on language is a curse. As a natural habitat for human’s innate and acquired behavior, language seems an environment setting, to constrain people’s way of thinking and expressing themselves, I always feel the language itself has too many constraints and I had the urge to study another one to fulfill my needs of accurate expression, but it is quite impossible to reach the ideal way to express myself correctly and completely, the more we study on languages the more sense of unfulfillment it will accumulate in a person.
If language is a rule, what if we don‘t want the conventional rule? We break the old one and reconstruct a new one. We build a new system, a new border, a new law.
So in this context, the word represents the rule, language represents the system of rule, then code serves as an invisible but strong role across the systems, what we might call order or even law.
Nothing can better explain this new emerging order as the concept from The Complexity:
“At each level of complexity, entirely new properties appear. At each stage, entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one.”----Anderson 1972.
Reference:
https://journals.openedition.org/factsreports/4518
https://newn.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Mary-Osborne-3.pdf
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement