If you have never heard of this thought experiment, look it up!
It seems to me that the probability of a monkey or group of monkeys writing Shakespeare would go down if we were to teach all the monkeys in the experiment a few words but not all the words they would need and, of course, not as much as they would need to know about the human condition or language to re-create Shakespeare's wit and insights on their own.
Really think about that. I think that if you do, then you will agree that teaching the monkeys a little will reduce the likelihood of one or a group of them writing a sizable passage of Shakespeare, let's say a sonnet or more.
Now let's extrapolate. The odds of a modern human creating a perfect communication (explanation, poetry, lyric, whatever you wish to imagine) goes down the more they are "taught," from the outside and take to be a kind of necessary ingredient. I mean "taught" as in beyond language, like about the importance of this or that. I mean...
That was perhaps a stretch. Instead, let's just say that if we all knew English but never felt any pressure to agree with each other on anything, we'd find more perfect forms of expression quicker, as a group, than in the situation we have now.
I believe that from this conclusion, we can salvage a new source to justify our ever-longed-for interdependence. Imagine if all we ever wished to accomplish by socializing was to understand what other people were trying to express. Not to agree, or start a club, or partially agree and then convince them of a slightly better formulation, but just to understand. And this will to understand, this desire to understand, would of course lead one to wish that they could be understood more easily. This would lead to general compassion and, as mentioned before and fortified by this will to understand, a quicker process of genuine intellectual, poetic, and perhaps all other forms of expression.
Let's cabin this "expression" concept to speech and imagine a conversation:
Person 1: "blah blah blah"
Person 2: "I understand, blah blah blah"
Person 1: "I understand, blah blah blah"
Person 2: "I understand, blah blah blah"
Person 1: " I understand, and... that is the most sublime way of putting it that I have ever heard."
Now let's try a conversation in the society we have now:
Person 1: "I was thinking the other day about that thought experiment with monkeys typing Shakespeare. Do you think they would type Shakespeare faster or slower if they were taught only a few words? I think slower."
Person 2: "Oh yeah. I learned about that in college. is it like the whole group is pressing keys and there is only one output? Or are there just a bunch of them with individual outputs. I think that makes a difference."
Person 1: "That definitely makes a difference. For my variation to make sense, it would have to be individual outputs, more monkeys just to make the process faster."
Person 2: "Yeah well I don't think there would be a difference. It would still seem random"
Person 1: "But don't you think that a monkey knowing a word would make that monkey have some weird preference for the word?"
Person 2: "No."
Person 1. "I don't understand how you could see it that way."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)

No comments:
Post a Comment