Memories of the 28th Century

In Medieval times literacy was for clerics and few others. Umberto Eco quoted one thinker of that period as saying something along the lines of Paintings are the books of the illiterate was a commonplace. I have looked for this a few times but without success. I have also thought about it and the implications of those two types of perceiving and communicating.

I believe that the difference still exists. I don't know what the official literacy rate is, but it probably overstates literacy by a considerable amount. I have even known college graduates who were only slightly literate. The difference seems to relate to more than just how one takes in information. Written language is a completely synthetic semiotic system. Even though there is supposed to be a close correspondence between the spoken and written languages; in practice the difference is quite large, and that difference is a hurdle that some people can’t get across. There are people who are intelligent, capable of understanding complex things; even people who can design complex things, who can’t put those same concepts into written words, and often they can give an oral presentation that is thorough, but they can’t use notes.
The human brain handles written language indirectly, because it isn’t an old ability. Writing was only invented less than ten thousand years ago; although there were drawings that appear to have been symbols as much as a quarter million years ago. But even that is not very long in evolutionary time, and the ability to understand symbols is not uniformly spread among humans. And the more removed from physical something is the smaller the percent of humans that can understand it.

Now there are two kinds of people: those who use and understand abstract ideas, and those who do not readily understand abstract ideas. As an illustration there are people who watch television to get their information and entertainment, and there are others who are informed and entertained by reading words, whether on paper or on a computer monitor. Some abstract ideas can be shown through visual metaphors, pictures of things that demonstrate the results if an abstraction in the concrete world. That works for things such as charity, love, or freedom, but there are concepts that are more abstract, such as “consciousness” that can’t be demonstrated in pictures.

There are some very intelligent people who simply cannot understand purely abstract ideas. I suspect that the situation is analogous to how things are said to appear to people with red-green color blindness. They simply have no concept that certain things exist in the world of thought. They wouldn’t be able to conceive of imaginary numbers; philosophy would be largely incomprehensible; beauty would be different; religion would be different, and so on.
Some of the characteristics of non-abstraction people would be like people with Asperger’s Syndrome, but I’m not sure that the two situations are the same, but I may be mistaken. The brain doesn’t handle abstract ideas the same way as concrete things are handled, and the connections between the two kinds of thinking appear to be in the left frontal lobe, where thoughts are channeled to Broca’s region for conversion to speech.

We all know some people who would rather watch a football game on TV than read a book, and others who would rather read a book. Some of those people watching the game couldn’t read the book without a great deal of effort, if at all. If civilization doesn’t collapse, then eventually those who can’t read well will be bred out of the species, but that will take a very long time. Until then we will have to deal with people who believe conspiracy theories, because they were in videos, and people who swear by some book that they have never read, and the same is true of other strange ideas. Apparently there are Muslims who try to learn what the Koran says from videos, and I had thought that reading the Koran for oneself was required, but I have never studied Islam.

Personally, I am comfortable with abstract ideas, and I find pectoral entertainment dull and shallow, but I know people who think that film is the most wonderful thing. I wonder if they would appreciate a movie version of “The Ship That Sailed The Time Stream”.

I suspect that people on this site are quite comfortable with abstract ideas, but I may be mistaken.


Neanderthals used ochre 250,000 years ago
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue...-000-years-ago
Symbols on ostrich egg shells 200,000 ybp
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/0...mbolic-Thought

Neanderthals jewelry, 50,000 ybp
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/1023.full.pdf+html