Three Epochs in one: An account of contemporary India.

P.R.K.Rao, Visiting Professor, International Institute of Information:

I introduced myself  as an engineer, who now concerns himself with the humanities. I am basically going to look at the poser: Democracy or Technocracy from a philosophical perspective, because I think that the knowledge society debates will continue to prove to be inadequate in the kinds of languages in which the discourses are currently conducted, unless we have a radical re-conceptualization of the kinds of things that are involved in addressing the issues.

Quite often the debates are formulated as problems of the primacy of the political over the ethical or the primacy of the scientific over the technological and so forth. I would just situate my views   in terms of the both the anthropocentrism that animates the discourses about knowledge societies, and also the finitude and the agential limitations that are involved. I will use two quotes: one from  a Philosopher Lyotard and another from a computer scientist Minsky to illustrate my view, which is we need to look at this problem in a radically different way, because of the limitations of conceptual thought to adequately match the experience of life.

Indeed it is the logos-centrism or platonic tradition in which we continue to still harbor our ideas of liberation, progress, knowledge, knowledge being innocent of power and what have you. All those discourses are still conducted within the framework of determinate thought rather than what possibly is one mode in which we exist which is in the realm of indeterminate thought.

We start with the question: Can thoughts go on without a body? If, for example, you happen to be a computer scientist, you will think in terms of what a human can do, and then  see whether you  can dispense with this particular wetware called biological systems and think in terms of other kinds of ware which you will call silicon-ware or even idealise  in terms of the platonic thought. So that is the issue of “can thought go on without a body”.  And here is the limitation pointed out both in terms of anthropocentrism and as well as in terms of finitude in relation to the kind of agency which we as human beings can think of, or  are capable of projecting.

“You know the technology was not invented by the humans. Rather the other way round as anthropologists and biologists admit even the simplest life forms, infusoria (tiny algae) synthesized by light at the edges of tide pools a few billions years ago are already technical devices. Any material system is technological if it filters information useful to its survival, if it memorizes and processes that information and makes inferences based on the regulatory effect of behavior - that is, if it intervenes on and impacts its environment, so as to assure its perpetuation at least.  A human being is not different in nature from an object of this type” (JEAN-FRANCOIS LYOTARD).

The next quote is by Marvin Minsky, a computer scientist, who has written the book ‘Society of Mind’: “Which agent can be wise enough to guess what changes should then be made?  The high level agents can’t know such things; they scarcely know which lower-level processes exist.  Nor can lower level agents know which of their actions helped us to reach our high-level goals; they scarcely know that higher level goals exist.  The agencies that move our legs are not concerned with whether we are walking toward home or toward work. Nor do the agents involved with such destinations know anything of controlling individual muscle units”. 

So: you have a macro level of description and you have a micro level of description.  You also have  a cosmic level of description.  So these levels of discourses are conducted in various kinds of language frameworks.  If you now situate yourself within the frame work of the finitude of  homofaber, that is  the agential nature of homofaber, you exclude the non-anthropocentric way of looking at the problem of the knowledge production and transmission.

I am going to sketch out in charts, various kinds of engagement of any organism with respect to its environment in terms of history.

Here is one basic way in which an organism can go about interacting with a generic “other” - call it a machine, call it a man, call it any other human being or any organism. At the simplest level the interface between man or a machine is in terms of signals out from the environment, so to speak. That’s what we call  skilled-based activities.

As we advance in terms of the ability to cope with the environment,  we operate in terms of signs. There you have heuristic ways of doing about correlation  - namely ruled based activities. But these are not really systematic knowledge based when you consider conceptual thought.  That advancement to Knowledge based activities  came about when we are able to abstract out of (abduct so to speak) symbols – here I mean that various symbolic systems we go about creating knowledge like geometry, algebra or mathematics or what ever.  These symbolic systems also extends to computer  science, engineering, or even sociology for that matter in so far it claims to be a scienc. All these are currently concerned anchored in logo-centric frame work of  conceptual thought, but are inadequate to bridge the irreducible gap between thought and experience.

Thought, we construe it currently, to be nothing more than determinate thought.  But there probably could be forms of thought which are not quite all the time nothing more than conceptual thought. As of now we human beings seem to think( that is anthropocentrically construed), it is as good as setting goals. This means that the goals are set by us and then we create various kinds of knowledge’s engagements with the “other”. The other as I said could be nature, other organisms, other human beings or even machines for that matter.

Historically, once knowledge based activities became possible, we are no longer satisfied with mere rule-based activities or skill based activities. That’s the inaugural moment of the industrial revolution.   We now want to think in terms of doing things more efficiently. What ever the notion of efficiency, however limited in its conception, there is a notion of optimally controlling the environment or rather optimally controlling the other.

For example we are now thinking in terms of brain-computer interfaces which will allow me to map the whole contents of the 10⁹ neurons that the brain is  supposed to have, on to a computer and manipulate this and manipulate our consciousness.  The latest October 2008 issue of the Computer magazine will speak about building of interfaces so that the physiological ways in which we happen to be passing information can be side stepped, so that then we can go about doing things much faster – in terms of passing messages from the brain (at the neuron level) to the environment. This storyline  corresponds to the concepts in deutate’s story of the machines  intruding us and therefore we have to destroy those machines. In the story, the intrusion does not succeed because human were supposed to have gone to the higher level of knowledge.

At the moment, the logic is that  human beings should also be saved from the drudgery of the routine adding, subtracting, multiplying and that routine intellectual activity can now be done by the machine. We have artificial intelligence (AI) which advocates the idea that we can go about doing even conceptual thought, as long as it can be stated precisely and unambiguously. AI then works on so called single symbol system hypothesis and  sub-symbolic system hypothesis. Based on varieties of combinations of these two, the whole host of symbolic knowledge system can be created. Even then we still believe it is us who set the goals.

Now comes the transition.

We still have that skill based, rural based knowledge based systems,  well controlled artificial intelligence to replace routine intellectual activities. Even the goals can now be set by a machine or a man because, our idea of what a man is, our idea what a machine is undergoing radical reformulation within the frame work of conceptual thought. Therefore there is no reason to believe computers can’t do what we can do by way of arithmetical addition, multiplication, what have you. much faster. A variety of task can be done by computers much faster, much more efficiently, whatever that notion of efficiency be. You therefore need assign who should do which tasks.  We then move to a redistribution of  power or authority as you develop a meta- controller, which tries to acquire knowledge about the world through a variety of sensory mechanisms. The decision is defined by and learned from empirical  evidence as drawn from a whole elaborate machinery of record and surveillance. This therefore distributes authority among the men and machines. That’s the direction in which  knowledge systems are progressing as governed by conceptual thought.

In relation to this, now I describe contemporary India- a first order  description of what kinds of things are going on in this society called India- the idea called India. It is a first order description, we can about quibbling  about accuracy of one   item or the other that doesn’t really matter. I am willing to shift.

I would roughly characterize this in terms of the pre-industrial or the traditional, the industrial or the so called modern and  the post-industrial or post-modern.

In terms of this, I sketch varieties of  empirical & material practices of people in this country, in terms of agriculture, housing, clothing, fuel, communications, transport, politics, religion, defence etc. I have to bring out the different underlining philosophical constructs that animate those material practices.

You see agriculture is done in terms of  it being rain dependent,  flood dependent-affected, drought affected. It depends on the usage of bullock carts and the plough. That is the pre-industrial modes of practice. I am not making a pejorative  description, but I am giving you an account of the way in which you can, first order, classify. This is something equivalent of taxonomy so to speak.  Then you have the industrial ways of going about agriculture where you  the tractor, the thresher, fertilizers, and pesticides.  We have post-industrial mode of material practices –  bio-fertilizers, cash crops, corporate farming, and so forth. 

Take housing - thatched houses, mud houses, bamboo built. You have RCC multistoried, so on…

In terms of transport, you have bullock cart, rail, road, steam engine, airbus.

Roughly stated, the basic idea is that you have different knowledge systems that Sahasrabudhey was referring to. They were variously adequate and inadequate. There is a corresponding set of cognitive dispositions that go with them, and there is a consonance and there is a dissonance across & within. For example if I happen to a Brahmin and I have to go an office in a modern setting. I have to rub my shoulders with a Dalit.  I feel very uncomfortable but I have to do this because I am in the modern setting. But when I go back,  I will do my ablutions. Therefore I am something in one frame of reference here and  something else in another frame of reference and this creates a dissonance. Therefore a variety of consonances and dissonances animated  by embedding or by being embedded, simultaneously, synchronically as well diachronically across of these three modes of knowledge generation, transmission, and transformation.

So much so that an engineer like me could be feeling guilty about the kinds of things that are going on. This is by Gabor who is well known British Nobel Laureate, the technologist associated with the holograms has said:  “50 years ago, an engineer could have perfectly good conscience when he went to his job fully satisfied that he was a benefactor of humanity.  He can still have his good conscience if he happens to be a Russian or an Indian or a Chinese but in western industrial countries at the present time such a myopic self satisfaction amounts to blindness”.  This is what he said 50 years ago. I am not sure whether it can’t be said of the Indian or the Chinese now.   

I just want to suggest this as a way we as human beings can switch from one cognitive mode of being to another cognitive model of being. 

The outer one illustrates an instance where “I am not entitled to what I have, therefore everything I have is stolen. Everything I have stolen, because I am not entitled to it.  I am not entitled to it because I have stolen it. Therefore I am not entitled to what I have.  I can go around in this merry-go-round endlessly, which is some form of self-denial.

I can also have another form in which I can exist cognitively.  I do it because it is right. It is right because I do it. And you go on in this endlessly. We human beings have the capacity to objectively switch from one mode of being to another mode of being. Some times we say ‘please step into my shoes’ to see how it feels like. 

We have various kinds of biologically embedded capacities. One such capacity which we have seems that we are convinced that all conceptual thought, all determinate thought, which is thought from “?” onwards, seems to affirm that this is the only form of thought that it is possible. Modern science and technology is one manifestation of that conceptual mode of thought.

There is another kind of mode of thought and resistances to it. In my abstract that I have give, I said the human history is nothing more than a dialectic of transgressions and resistances and that is a mark of creativity. Creativity consists in seeing what is to be asserted as identity, what is to be asserted as difference.  The interplay of what constitutes identity and difference is the march of creativity we still seem to possess. And that creativity manifest itself in varieties of modes of being -- one of them is what I would call analogical mode of being or thinking.

I tried to highlight the distinction between the analog and the digital. If you ever wondered why is it that the world increasingly getting digital.  It is nothing more than our logocentric obsession with what is  a platonic tradition of conceptual thought, determinate thought. As opposed to this there is also another mode of thought, which you probably see but it cannot articulate itself. Every digital or conceptual thought allows of it being spoken about in terms of a meta-language. For example one computer language can be spoken about and described in terms of a higher level of meta language. Therefore it is possible to speak of a lower level conceptual thought, in terms of higher-level conceptual thought, and a language to articulate that.. 

But, there are other forms of  thinking which do not admit of this.  This is where humanities plays a role. Although I am an engineer I am quite sensitive to the role humanities plays and that is why ‘humanitas’ plays  an important integral part of that  mode of being,

It seems as if scientists and humanists are stuck with language. However scientists implicitly seem to believe that language can be perfected because we are first and foremost, at least quantitatively if not qualitatively, linguistic animals.

Linguistic perfection is what we aim at and the scientists somehow seem to think linguistic perfection is possible by way of continuously coming up with a variety of languages. If you see the proliferation of computer languages: They are nothing more than saying a language inadequate to the context in which its functions. Therefore the scientists somehow seem to believe in the implicit possibility of a language being a neutral carrier of thought. Without distorting what goes on in thought which is adequate to experience, scientist somehow seem to believe language can be perfected. The humanist on other hand the literary man in particular, seems to think that there is no alternative other than to think in terms of language. That is the distinction between folk-theoretical languages and scientific languages. Folk-theoretical languages manage to convey thought in different ways. The humanist somehow seems to think language is not quite adequate to bridge that irreducible gap between thought and experience but you can always subvert that language to indicate. That is what a poet does.

And therefore I am trying to point out some futures of that mode of thought which is non conceptual, non-determinant form of thought. I would like to highlight some futures.

The analog deals with the concrete, as opposed to the abstract which is digital. The analog deals with the territory, the digital deals with the map of that territory. In analog, there is no negation. There is refusal. An example of this- if you ask me, have I stopped beating my wife, if I say yes, means I have been beating her before. If I say no, I continue to beat her. The only thing I could do is refuse to answer the question.

Therefore language in terms of determinate thought but which must indeed engage with negation, if we don’t have negation there is no closure to the discourse that you are carrying out. All axiomatic systems are necessarily closed. That is the reason why if you see, increasingly the mathematization of the universe is taking place. The mathematization of the universe necessarily requires the negation. If you have “A” you must have a complement to “A”. Without those two, there is no closure possible. In analog you can speak of ‘more or less’. In digital it is not possible to say that. It has to be either or or. If you see in analog you have only difference and similarity. In digital you have opposition & identity. In analog you need not have logical typing. In digital you must have a logical typing to be able to communicate at all. And this is an important feature -- Analog cannot communicate about itself.  Digital can communicate about itself but in terms of a meta language. In analog, it is semantic pragmatic. The digital is syntactic.

In analog you have meaning, and this is what used to be called mythos.  You have logos and mythos. We are now increasingly being driven by logos rather than the importance of mythos which plays a crucial role in our meaning. Why are we here? Why do we do this? These are important things as human beings even if my axiomatic system does not require this. You have in analog it is always able to pre-category. It is the pre-categorical which is made into categorical in order to make signification. Finally analog does not admit the observant participant dichotomy whereas every science knows this that is what we mean by beingobjective. Objective-subjective I cannot be simply divided into two parts – the objective part and subjective part. Analog systems are necessarily open. The other is necessarily closed. In analog you have context, in the digital you have text.

Indeed our brain structure also admits of the right cerebral hemisphere and the left cerebral hemisphere. There is a corpus callosum which connects these and in those unfortunate cases of accident where the corpus callosum is cut, quite often the functions of the left can be overtaken by that of the right, or the other way round. But those two function essentialy independently and therefore all forms resistance to the oppression unleashed by this present form of conceptual thought we must devise various ways of resistances to the forms of translations evoked by the kind of conceptual thought. Thank you.

Without that our knowledge debate will continue to be saying the primacy of the political over the ethical, primacy of science over technology, the primacy of communities over the individual.  In fact if you see now there are only three forms of political practice currently possible -- The communitarian. What does the communitarian politics say? Return to those set of traditional values which have been chosen but that is already a failed position because if indeed it is sustainable we would not have ended up in the present position. The other form of practice is the Universalist like that of Rous or that of Habermas. This too is not sustainable because it is procedural by definition. By procedure it increasingly identifies with the digital, while it ignores the analog. The third form of political practice is the so called post modern which does not engage in the live practices that are going on but advocates either estatic celebration or a total ascetic withdrawal rather than engagement with the world.

And that is the reason why I said that the current stalemates that you have in terms of political practices’ emphasis on returning to certain ethical values, is necessarily doomed to failure unless we re-conceptualize our ways of going about thinking not in terms of determinate thought but indeterminate thought. Because determinate thought will always lead you to a situation analogous to taking all my neuronal states and map them on to a memory , go about doing same things.  Thank you.

Sastri: I was wondering whether sociology is a science at all..

Rao: I am only referring to Popper  who made a distinction between sciences, sociology and psychology… I don’t have time to elaborate on that…

Sastri: I think on behalf of the sociologists who are here, I would like to say something…

Rao:I did not say sociology is not important… (No-no this is only in a lighter vein)…I am saying whether it wants to become a science. In fact I thought you should resist it from becoming a science.