A remarkable change is underway in society — steadily the written word is taking over from speech in our social interactions — and as we become increasingly bound up in writing, the way we understand each other may be fundamentally altering.

In the space of a generation or less, writing has briskly become the primary way society interacts — from email to text messages, twitter to whatsapp we increasingly prefer to send a message than to speak. Even the U.S. president now primarily seems to interact with the world via 140 character posts.

If we consider the sheer number of interactions most people have every day that are mediated in one way or another by text it is truly staggering, especially considering that 80% of the world’s population could not read or write only five generations ago.

Whether it is short social messages, writing a word document or self-publishing a work of fiction, an increasing number of us send our thoughts out into the world as text, creating a vast continuum of written words.

While writing has been central to clerical and theological roles since antiquity it is only relatively recently that we have witnessed this displacement of spoken language by the written word in social situations.

What this means for society is yet to be fully understood but it seems certain that it represents a significant change in the way we relate to each other.

Source:: Our World in Data based on OECD and UNESCO

Weird cryptography

One big difference between writing and other forms of communication is the double-remove from reality of the written word. Whereas most other means of communication involve some direct interaction with our senses the meaning of words is only apparent once we “decode” the text.

To watch a theatre play or listen to a song in a language is to see or hear something out there in the world. The body language of an actor, the tone of voice, the pitch of instruments all give an immediate sense of meaning. Our senses are directly engaged in understanding the feelings that are being expressed.

If a play or song is in a foreign language one might not get the full significance but the meaning is never completely obscure. If you contrast that with reading text on a page, there is obviously a huge difference. For an english speaker a page of Japanese is completely indecipherable until they acquire a significant level of understanding of the language.

There may be a tactile element to a book — I may like the layout, the typeface or the texture of the paper it is printed on — but that tells me absolutely nothing about the contents if I do not understand the symbols on the page.

Literature is a weird cryptographic-artform whereby you stare at a page of symbols and ‘something’ appears.

“The word acts not as an ideal force but as an obscure power, as an incantation that coerces things, makes them really present outside of themselves.” ~ Maurice Blanchot

While there are similarities between reading and listening to a story the difference with oral storytelling — which has dominated most of human history — is that we are still tied to our sense of sound and sight, through body language.

When we listen to a storyteller in a foreign language we still get some sense of the flow and the emotion behind their words even if we don’t understand them fully. While this can be used to mislead the listener and give false emphasis, if they don’t understand the language, there is nonetheless a direct connection between the viewer’s emotional response and their senses.

Writing in contrast has none of these sensory clues to ‘flesh out’ the story.

The Image In The Mirror

Other art forms may be at one remove from reality — a reflection of reality created by the musician, painter, etc, — but it is this double remove of writing, this process of deciphering hieroglyphs, that gives truly great literature its unique lucid quality.

It is this tenuous relationship between reality and the shadowy realm of words that also gives such power to symbols and language and can allow words to motivate large swathes of society to both noble and ignoble causes.

“How can we talk about Pegasus? To what does the word ‘Pegasus’ refer? If our answer is, ‘Something,’ then we seem to believe in mystical entities; if our answer is, ‘nothing’, then we seem to talk about nothing and what sense can be made of this? Certainly when we said that Pegasus was a mythological winged horse we make sense, and moreover we speak the truth! If we speak the truth, this must be truth about something. So we cannot be speaking of nothing.” ~Willard Van Orman Quine

Pegasus is not ‘real’ yet we make sense when we talk of it being a winged horse. It is a fictional horse and yet we can identify truths and untruths about it.

We are relatively comfortable accepting this strange disassociation when we talk about mythical creatures such as Pegasus and in fact it seems something of a pedantic word game to ask “to what does Pegasus refer?”

Nobody stays awake worrying how Pegasus can be be ‘something’ and yet ‘nothing’ but this question, or a variant of it, has profound implications for how we view ourselves, since it is equally valid to ask what it is we refer to when we consider our own sense of self.

We tend to think that mythical creatures such as Pegasus are quite different from us, since we have physical bodies, we are ‘real’, but modern neuroscience shows that much of what we base our idea of self on — the idea of consciousness and the concept of free will — are essentially as fictional as Pegasus, simply illusions that do not exist in any real place.

Our ability to measure and understand the processes that occur within the brain is now better than ever but the more we discover the less likely it seems we will ever find evidence of free will or a conscious self.

According to neuroscience, our brain is a complex pattern of interacting chemical and physical processes, no different from the rest fo the natural world, all of which can ultimately be explained by mechanical interactions.

A lot of the time, we are quite comfortable with this description of our brain and accept that regulation of our body’s temperature, instinctive reactions or control of our heartbeat are all things the brain controls automatically.

If we consider the visual cortex for instance, it seems natural to describe the eye in terms of light hitting the retina, signals passing to the optic nerve and so on into the brain without recourse to anything other than the mechanical interaction of atoms.

The actual act of ‘seeing’ may be a lot more complex than the simple act of recording photons that but most people would nonetheless closely identify ‘seeing’ with ‘having eyes’ and would be happy to accept that sight is largely dependent on physical processes in the eye.

If I were to cut out my eyes I am fairly confident that I would lose my sense of vision and, though the loss of my eyes might cause some practical issues, otherwise I can imagine carrying on life much as before, only with four senses instead of five.

When it comes to our sense of being conscious however it is clear that for most people it is something far more central to existence and that in nearly every way it is more akin to our use of the word Pegasus than of the term eyesight.

“Why do physical processes give rise to conscious experience? This question might equally be phrased as “why aren’t we zombies?”. If any account of physical processes would apply equally well to a zombie world, it is hard to see how such an account can explain the existence of consciousness in our world.” ~ David Chalmers

I can imagine being more or less conscious of specific events, or more or less free in my choices, but the idea that I could cut out some part of the brain to remove my consciousness and then carry on life much as before (as a philosophical zombie for instance) seems unimaginable.

Countless people, through accidents or genetic bad luck, end up losing their sight and we take it as normal that blind people exist in the world and interact with us.

If free will and the self are truly no more than an illusion then where are all the people who have had an accident, tragically lose their consciousness and yet carry on their life regardless?

Many people claim they can overcome the illusion of self through meditation but this is normally a process which takes years of dedicated study. Where are all the unfortunate people simply born without the capacity for consciousness?

Even if we are told that the narrative our mind is creating about who we are is an illusion it seems impossible to shake the feeling that is alive to us, that the process of living is equated with the telling of our own story. We instinctively feel there are truths we can uncover about both ourselves and others.

When we ask ourselves what is ‘real’ we do so in language and by so doing our discussion of what is true or untrue must be one that takes place in that realm. If both Pegasus and our sense of self are fictions, then is it not our duty to learn how to understand the realm of fiction as thoroughly as possible?

“As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. One is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign.” ~Ludwig Wittgenstein

It was language that allowed us to first spell out the idea of a self and then of society. A handful of early humans started creating stories and myths and those narratives would go on to shape grand civilizations.

As we move towards ever greater levels of literacy what future is in store as the power to create and share new fictions grows?

Thank you for reading.