Page 123 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

EtheRealization

through the ages, leading to another disastrous attempt at usurpation
of authority at Babylon. In Genesis the integration of humanity was
thwarted by the cultural and linguistic difference engendered by the
diaspora of Noah’s descendants, a phenomenon needing no divine
intervention to be understood historically as underlying the spiraling
genocide and ecocide culminating in our willingness to surrender all
difference in order to survive. The computer facilitated that atrophy
in its asymptotic approach to human levels of mental processing. We
should not focus on the possibility of an electronic system attaining
consciousness, said Knox; Turing long ago proved the futility of
chasing the ghost in the machine or the homunculus in our minds.
The important point is that our biological brains are descending into
a state of minimal consciousness, abetted by the disintegration of the
means of achieving and maintaining independent thought: language.
The first condemnation of this proposal came from English
professors in his university. It’s easy to imagine why they wouldn’t
appreciate any poaching on their preserve; it had never even occurred
to Knox to get them involved in some sort of interdisciplinary study
of his theory. They issued a tart rejoinder, printed in the journal’s
correspondence section, pointing out that English was alive and well,
adding hundreds of neologisms and idioms every year as it spread
and branched into new geographical and social realms, being
appropriated as much as appropriating. It also triggered attacks from
both sides of the prescriptive-descriptive keepers of the flame of the
“real” English language. Clearly the artificial intelligence expert had
broken stated and unstated rules of academic propriety and had to be
disciplined.
He then made it worse by answering his critics with a salvo of
statistics supporting his hypothesis. Combative to the end, he
maintained that language was being dissolved at both ends: its
speakers losing all sense of syntax, idiom and orthography while
computers were busily boiling down every possible meaningful
expression to a standardized symbolic statement implicitly
demanding worldwide compliance in order to establish intelligibility
between mankind and its machines. Meanwhile the sheer volume of
babble and chatter generated by electronic media was reducing
communications to acronyms and simple-minded catchphrases, a
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