Series:
Essay #10:
Synopsis:
Self
Analog Digital
To be human is to step back from the flow of experience and think about it; we’re an analog system with a digital application called language
Consciousness pays attention, it experiences a flow of here and now. I believe consciousness is analog, and by that I mean it’s a continuous and changing experience that isn’t segregated into discreet bits. Experience flows and I’m in it right now while it passes on to something else. It’s like being in love: I’m either in love right now or I’m out, and remembering past love is not like being in love, nor can I copy-and-paste the experience into some other application.
To be human, though, is to step back from a prior flow of experience and think about it. People are an analog system with a digital application: our consciousness is analogue, but through it we access a virtual world of stored information. I can focus my Sauron’s Eye on memories or on a book, in fact, every morning I sit at the breakfast table with my 90+ year old mother-in-law, while I read a book and she lives in memories. Both of us direct our attention into a virtual world of stored information. Or, if I want to visualize a sports technique, I direct attention to my memory of the technique, feel the footwork, then rewind and do it again. I visualize, in the here and now of consciousness, information that’s stored as memory.
I believe language is the key to our digital application. Language is much more than a tool for communication: it’s a tool for abstracting and analyzing the world around us. With words we people break reality down into parts, analyze the parts, compare them, move them around, recombine them, and just as important, remember the analysis for future use. Jacob Bronowski said, “speech is also a way of organising the world into its parts and putting them together again like movable images.” Mr. Bronowski thinks that language and our hands come from the same place, in that both help us manipulate and control reality. We make tools with our hands, and we analyze reality with our speech.
With language we think about the future. We step outside the here and now, and take action in preparation for the future. We decide today to decide later: think of a young couple who postpone marriage until they're older. That's layer upon layer of abstraction, and every layer gives distance from the world around us and helps us control it. We can think of the past too, and analyze our memories just like we analyze other parts of experience. We reflect on things past. That's why the past is easier to change than the future.
We use language to translate a flow of analog experience into bits of data. I might see a leaf and remember its color in that strange way that memories work. I might translate the experience into the words, “darkish red,” or find something similar in my computer’s palette of colors and write down the numbers that the computer uses to express the color. By this time, I might be far from the color as experienced, but no matter: I’ve created from analog experience a bit of data that I can build into higher levels of abstraction.
Once translated from analog, digital data is great for analytical processes. Digital data (like language, DNA, computer code) permits exact storage, recall and recombination of data, in multiple layers of complexity. We store and recall digital data without change to the data, and then build the data into strings of abstraction, where the conclusion doesn’t suffer from data degradation along the way, and then we go back and double-check the abstraction by drilling down to its constituent bits of data, all of which haven’t changed. Lastly, we bring the data back into analog experience, which is what happens when we listen to digitally stored music.
Yes, the digital representation is always less than the analog experience, but we’re pretty skilled at expressing the translational interface between analog and digital. If I have an unpleasant encounter with someone, I can describe it as, “he spoke imperiously to me,” which will convey some of the analog experience, maybe 20% once stripped of voice tone and body language. What if I describe it as, “he spoke imperiously to me, like he was holding a stone tablet with Commandments #11-15 on it.” Although we’re still in language, which is digital, we’re getting closer to the original, analog feel. That’s how parables work: the depth of meaning is in the experience of the story, and abstracting the story to theory strips away the meaning.
Now it’s time to get back on topic. Analog experience flows and goes… until I convert it to digital, which exists in fixed form apart from the experience. I laser focus my consciousness on the digital information, taking it apart, turning it over, understanding it, then coming back into analog experience and applying what I learned. That’s what a dancer does when he sees the essence of a technique, then he thinks about it, changes it, performs it-- and it goes viral! An analog base with a digital application gives power of focus. I focus my present flow of consciousness into a digital representation that was derived from the flow of consciousness of a prior me or somebody else. That is, I focus on the digital product of someone else’s attention, and the next person focuses on the digital product of my attention, and together we build a civilization.
Imagine a living being who can work in analog and digital together, using analog for experience and digital for abstraction. That’s us! We freak out about artificial intelligence but never stop to marvel at ourselves. We’re an analogue mind that can operate in digital. I can’t wait for the coming war with robots, because our brain is better than theirs. We’re gonna kick their robot asses.