Radu M. Solcan

Mind, Knowledge and Culture

CONTENTS

NOTES*

The first thing one might expect in an essay about culture (or cultures) is a definition. I want to challenge this point of view.\ 1\

When you or I do think that we need a definition we do not see that what we are really confronted with is an option; we may choose to formulate a definition or try to find a problem.

Now, 'what is a problem?' Aren't we looking, paradoxically, for a definition (of a problem)? I think we are not. And this is part of the flavor of the main topic we discuss here, cultures; some things just are here, for example problems, because we are looking for something else.

I do not need any definition to realize that 'I have a problem' if I am in Paris, near Louvre's pavilion Denon, and I do not know how to get to the Place de la Concorde or I can't find a metro station near Louvre.

Thus, a problem comes always in the context of some knowledge that I already have ("I know that I am in Paris and I know that I am near Louvre") and involves a difficulty. In a dramatic form, one might speak of impasse instead of difficulty. I just cannot get out.

In a more developed form, I think that what is most important, in the case of problems, is a kind of existing theory. Ancient astronomers thought (and many of us may still have the impression) that the Sun is revolving around the Earth. And they've got into trouble trying to compute the trajectory of the planets. So, they had a problem to solve.

Let us now think about watching a game that has rules that you or I ignore. I do not know, for example, almost anything about American football. It happened that I was in Chicago, waiting for a plain, and there was no basketball on the TV network in the airport; only American football was available. I tried to watch the game, but I barely understood what was going on. Why the players are so happy, even when the score does not seem to change? What are they doing?

The first thing one does in a situation like that is to resort to what one knows already ("the knowledge brought from home"). I know the games that, in Europe, are called 'football' (Americans call it 'soccer') and 'rugby'. American football seems to combine them. There are eleven players, but the aim of the game resembles that of European rugby.

Then, I have the option of reading about the rules of the game. After this, I can pick a book and do this. Now, I can watch again American football, see when there are moments of conflict, try to figure out how they are solved according to rules and so on.

But even in this situation I might be still puzzled by questions like these: Why would one like this game? What is its 'mystique'? No answer would come out of a simple investigation of the written rules of the game. Maybe none is also going to come out after many hours of watching the game.

I must listen to stories about the game. They will help me to find out what people think about the game. And, surprisingly, I must probably accept the game in some form and then enjoy playing it or watching it. Once you are 'in', then you may develop your knowledge of the game.

But all this seems to engage us in a terribly vicious circle: we must be 'insiders' in order to understand and enjoy the game. We use precisely what we try to get (knowledge and understanding of the game) in order to get into the culture of the game (in this example, American football).

Although the above solution still must seem rather implausible, we have however characterized our problem. The idea is to generalize it for a broader context, that of whole communities, of vast societies playing all sorts of games.

I might see, for example, people crying when babies are born and rejoicing when men die. This behavior is precisely the opposite of what are doing people back home. Again I must listen, probably, to stories or just figure out some hypothesis concerning the way this community sees the world. Maybe they think that we are simply exiled from a much better world and we return to it after death? Anyway, I do have a problem. If I try to live in such a community, then I cannot simply ignore the behavior of its members. I can't do this even for practical reasons. Lack of understanding will probably lead to unavoidable conflicts. What happens if I am very happy, in such a context, when a baby is born?

The meaning of the theoretical approach is to take such problems as that of understanding American football and examine them as more general problems. Thought experiments help us to vary the elements of the problem far beyond of what empirical observations offer us. We shall use them precisely with this aim in mind: to get a more general picture of problems and solutions. Then we may test the solutions in the context of empirical cases.

Last, but not least, we should stress that problems as those described above do not even exist, as long as we are "at home". You have to step on some other ground in order to notice their existence. For example, in English, letters are not used as numbers. You do not write, let's say, "abc" instead of "123". In old systems of writing, letters were however used both as letters and as numbers.

The Bible, in English, tells us only a story. The text has no other dimension. The Hebrew Bible contrasts with the English Bible from this point of view. In Hebrew, letters have both a phonetic and a numerical value. One may speak about two dimensions of the text of the Bible: the story and the numerical dimension. \ 2\ The problem of the numerical dimension does not even exist in the English Bible. Anything that might have been said or might be said about it has a meaning only in the context of the Hebrew text.

Thus, cultural problems occur when the familiar "home ground" is changed. One may offer less radical, even everyday examples. Let's say that you have never traveled before with the metropolitan of some big city, like Paris. You will be immediately confronted with all kinds of problems. What are the "zones"? How can you find your way? The example seems less dramatic because you can rely perhaps on many analogies with the situation at home. You are "in the same culture". But you still need to adjust a lot of your knowledge to the specific local situation. Until you do this you will be a foreigner; many of your gestures will look terribly strange to local people.

After all, the problems we mentioned above are the cultural problems: they are the problems that make an individual look like a foreigner. \ 3\ Sometimes they are problems raised by different ways of performing the same kind of action. We all, maybe, eat rice. Some of us do this with sticks. But, if you have never used sticks, then you lack a lot of knowledge. It would be difficult for you not to look like a foreigner when you use sticks. Some other times, these problems are deeper and are raised by more radical departures from the "home ground".

Cultures are surrounded by a philosophical legend. This is the legend of the "spirit of the culture". I do not suggest that this legend is untrue. Again, all I would like to point out is something rather trivial, but important. This legend might be true or not true. Then it makes sense at least to investigate what would make it not true.

According to the legend, cultures have a sort of mind or even consciousness. They are above are above the individuals and cannot be reduced to what individuals know or to the way they behave or to something else that could be described as the property of an individual human being.

Even the first paragraph above, if we accord credit to the legend of the spirit of the culture, could be interpreted as talking about individuals being "immersed" into another culture.

In sum, according to the legend, culture is like the air we breathe. Without it we, mere individuals, would perish. When we are born, we take from the culture the elements that make as particular human beings.

The legend makes sense of some obvious facts. The harshest dictators\ 4\ were unable to change cultures. \ 5\ On the other hand, powerful popular movements, like Christianity, had to adapt. They were unable to change completely old habits. \ 6\

On a theoretical level, the concept of culture is a way of explaining away problems left unsolved by individualistic constructions. Problems raised by the dismantling of communism might represent an example. How can one explain that the market is not working, here or there, properly? There is no "culture of the exchange". This culture would permit to the individuals to see the benefits of exchanges. But, since the culture of the exchanges is missing, the result is the lack of efficient markets.

From this point of view, the concept of culture is a sort of basket where one puts everything that cannot be explained with standard tools. It seems by definition to be the zone of human behavior that cannot be approached with individualistic methodologies.

What is methodological individualism? Basically, it is the approach that tries to reduce all social interactions to interactions among individuals. If the legend of the spirit of the culture is untrue, then methodological individualism should be applied successfully to study of cultures. In this case, there would be no need to talk about something that is above the individuals, namely culture.

This is the approach that we take in this study. The intuition is that only the knowledge that individuals have is enough. This is a bold assumption if we consider phenomena like language, for example.

There is a very simple fact. The big architecture of the brain is the same for all individuals, everywhere. There are no major differences, such as the presence at some individuals of two hemispheres and of only one hemisphere or some other structure at other individuals. But even twins have their own specific genetic heritage for the brain. They also develop differently their brain in different environments. \ 7\

As we can see already from the idea that the big architecture is the same but different connections are generated in the brain, there is an interesting problem that we might call "Chomsky's problem". Noam Chomsky has shown how complex are the grammars of natural languages. \ 8\ To learn from scratch such a grammar is as difficult as learning an algebraic theory. Taking this into account he and others made the hypothesis that such a grammar is innate.

But, if I had been born in Japan or if I had been brought to Japan immediately after birth and educated there, then I would have spoken Japanese, a language I have many difficulties to learn now. This counterfactual example can be multiplied.

On one hand, if we have individual brains with some common genetic heritage, it is absolutely normal that I can learn any language on the Earth. But why I can learn only one language? \ 9\ We can, of course, answer that I simply have the genetic capacity of learning only one language as a mother language. No language is so well known as this first language.

But, in this case, this inborn capacity has to be very general. It is only the abstraction of the grammar of a natural language. All the rest would have to be learned from the external world that surrounds me during the first years of life.

What we are going to repeat many times is that this "all the rest" is far from being simple. And this seems to be the central puzzle here: "all the rest" has to be learned from the outside world and has a complex structure too. Aren't we back to the problem from which we started? How manages a small child to do all this in a relatively short span of time?

The kind of complexity we are talking about is connected with the incredible diversity of grammatical categories. Let's examine some very simple examples. Let's say that you know English or German or French. Now you try to learn a language like Hungarian. \ 10\

For a foreigner, even very simple things like the distinction between singular and plural in Hungarian might be puzzling. One says egy virág for 'one flower' or 'a flower' and három virág for 'three flowers'. The word virág does not change its form. There is, however, a form virágok for talking about a plurality of flowers.

A first hypothesis of the foreigner might be that words like három 'three' already contain the idea of plurality. For Hungarians it would be redundant to use virágok after such words. The problem raised by this hypothesis is that it superimposes a distinction familiar at home over the categorial structure of the foreign language.

Why not accept something like this: virág contains the idea of an indeterminate number of flowers; it might be one or three or many flowers. On the other hand, virágok 'flowers' contains only the idea of a plurality or a collection of flowers. \ 11\

One may go further and check if familiar constructions do exist on the foreign ground. For example, in English we use the verb 'have'. When I say 'She has a book' I mean that she is the topic of the sentence: I do talk about her! And make the very simple comment that a book is in her possession. There is no verb 'have' in such sentences in languages like Hungarian or Turkish. \ 12\ When one would like to make a similar comment, one has to talk about the book. One says something like this: a book is to her. The situation is now reversed: 'book' became the topic on which we make comments. \ 13\

Different ontological projections underlie the sentences of sufficiently distinct languages. They suggest that we have different modes of voyaging in the world around us. We travel in a new way when we talk sufficiently different languages. \ 14\

The mental maps of people who talk very different languages look differently. For them, learning in another languages is bound to be painful as they are bound to err because they cannot travel with their maps.

An even more interesting consequence of the above observation is that a universal language, a language that would be learned by all the people on the Earth, is not a question of changing one tool with another. It is a question of changing the direction of your travel. \ 15\

We are able to move through the world because we use mental, cognitive maps. There are however many ways of drawing maps and no route on the map is an obligatory route for us. Without these maps we are like a computer without programs, just the bare hardware.

The case of language is taken here as paradigm-case for cultural phenomena. The way you talk betrays you and it might be easier to change your clothes than to change the way you talk.

Our minds are productive in a very precise and technical sense. \ 16\ They can produce an infinite number of items. This is true especially for language. This way of looking at the mind as a process of producing sentences and other items has an important advantage. It gets rid of the vitalistic psychology. According to this psychology, the mind is spirit; it is something that gives an intrinsic quality to human body. From this point of view, it does not make really sense to analyze the vital components of the mind. You have to take them as given. These vital components already possess the spiritual qualities, be it imagination, will or understanding.

How would be organized the mind according to the non-vitalistic view? One way of looking at the mind is by the idea of computing process.

The input (of the process) is made up of symbols. Roughly speaking, they might be like 'abc', a sequence of letters. The input is organized according to a certain structure and stored (also in a structured way) in the memory. For example, the structure might be a stack: at the bottom stands 'a', in the middle 'b' and on top 'c'. The input thus structured and stored is then processed. We might think about this process as a construction process: out of what is stored something new is built. In this way, we may simply pick up the letters from the stack and transform them into output: we pick first 'c', which is on top, then 'b', then 'a'. The new construction is the sequence 'cba', the reverse of the initial sequence.

This view might be called the construction view. \ 17\ The main idea is that the mind is a construction process: outputs are built out of inputs.

According to an alternative view, we should look at the way the brain is organized. The brain is made up of neurons. Neurons are connected into networks. Each network has the possibility to vary the pattern of activation. When input comes, the output depends on the pattern of activation. Strictly speaking, there is no construction process. Input and output are associated according to a pattern of activation of the neural network. The network is trained until the desired result is obtained.

This view might be called the association view. \ 18\ In a famous paper, Fodor and Pylyshyn, \ 19\ argued against the association view that it cannot explain certain features of the mind. One is productivity. Research in the field of Artificial Intelligence proved however that neural networks could be used as production systems. \ 20\

Another feature is systematicity. One aspect of systematicity is that we do not learn a language as a disconnected list of sentences. If I learn some sentences from a phrase book, I just might manage to react correctly in some specific situations. I might be able to answer questions like 'What is your name?' or to ask such questions. Fodor and Pylyshyn point out however that it is impossible, in this way, to learn that we may change, in English, 'John loves Jane' into 'Jane loves John', but not 'John likes football' into 'Football likes John'. \ 21\ We need knowledge of syntax and semantics in order to do safely such changes. Mere unsystematic knowledge of language is not enough.

Now, a good hint is to ask if cultural knowledge in general is systematic. In one form or another, this possibility has been contemplated by many varieties of structuralism. European structuralism had even an ontological projection of this systematicity of cultural knowledge. From this perspective, the culture as such would function as a language.

Here our interest is focused mainly upon the individual mind. Its systematicity is important and is a matter of fact. How it functions however in different cultures? Is the individual mind systematic, in different cultures, in the same way? As long as we talk about mere logical inferences, most probably yes! But, beyond this, everything might change according to different syntactic conventions, semantic arrangements and ontological projections. This is one of the central problems in the investigation that follows after this introductory chapter, where we consider what kind of problems are we confronted with when we begin to talk about culture.

The question of the structure of the individual mind brought us back to the problem of the relationship between individuals and cultures. If we try to reduce cultures to individuals, then the knowledge possessed by individual human beings plays a key role.

More than this, we seem to be brought once again before the dramatic choice between problems and definitions. Don't we really need a definition of knowledge, before any further investigations? And isn't this definition going to be the fundamental definition? Everything else would follow from this definition: the relationship between individuals and cultures, the clashes of cultures, the rise of global knowledge and so on and so forth. Obviously, if we want the stick to the strategy of looking for problems, we have to answer these questions in a plausible way.

Looking for problems is like looking for trouble. Looking for definitions is like looking for a safe place. No wonder that there is a strong temptation to look for definitions. But the discourse that tries to define is going to give us at most an evaluation of the situation. We are going to know what kinds of boundary lines have been proposed and how things look from different points of view. The problem is just to choose one point of view or another and one is forced to choose according to arbitrary tastes and criteria.

I do not know any problem that would lead us to a general idea of knowledge. \ 22\ The example I am going to focus upon is taken from Johnson-Laird's book on the computer and the mind. \ 23\ It shows how knowledge is involved in solving problems encountered by human beings that try, literally, to see what is around them.

Let us say that we have a source of light. The light from the source is reflected by objects. There is a physical theory that would allow us to predict or to explain the path of the rays and the resulting images. This is the background theory against which we can project the problem as such. The difficulty that is at the origin of the problem starts when we try to reconstruct backwards the path of the rays of light. The same image\ 24\ can be the result of the deflection by different objects. The physical theory is of no use. How we see?

We solve the problem by using knowledge. \ 25\ We can extract the knowledge from the slightly different images coming from the two eyes. Or we can use movements. Or we can use other sources of knowledge. \ 26\ We can understand what knowledge is by looking at the way humans or computer programs solve such problems.

On one hand, even after stating the problem and analyzing its solution, there might still be no definition of knowledge. We just know where to look for knowledge and the solution of what kinds of problems require knowledge.

On the other hand, after the identification of the problem and of the solution, it makes sense to formulate definitions or simply to trace boundaries of the space in which the solution can be found. This is true of knowledge also. \ 27\

It is useful for the objectives of the present investigation to delineate at least three layers of knowledge. The first layer is that of innate knowledge. We have already spoken of innate knowledge when we talked about the knowledge we need in order to learn a natural language. Small children do also need innate knowledge in order to solve other kinds of problems. For example, they have to know how to obtain food from their mother or how to get the attention of their mother.

The other layer of knowledge is made up of explicit knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge that is, so to speak, offered as such. When someone shows you, in Paris, how to go from Louvre to Place de la Concorde we expect from her or him explicit knowledge. We would be puzzled if instead of direct and simple indications the person tells us a riddle.

The last layer of knowledge is implicit knowledge. Most of our time we rather try to extract implicit knowledge from explicit knowledge. \ 28\ For example, if we have a list of fathers of the form " 'John is the father of Robert' and 'Robert is the father of Frank' and so on" and the idea of grandfather, then we can construct a list of grandfathers. We may define goals. For example, we might have the goal of finding out if John is the grandfather of Frank. There is nothing on the list of the form 'John is the grandfather of Frank', but we extract the implicit knowledge and satisfy our goal.

Extracting, in one form or another, implicit knowledge is a central business when we try to integrate ourselves in another culture. There are some clues, but as in the story about American football above, many things are not explicit.

You look as a foreigner when you are confronted with another culture because it is very difficult to extract the implicit knowledge. Local people, most of the time, are not even able to tell you how to obtain the relevant knowledge. They have the knowledge, but most of the time it is obtained in a tacit form. This means that there is no explicit knowledge how to extract implicit knowledge either.

Now we see why we have to distinguish at least three layers of knowledge. In this way there are two types of non-explicit knowledge. If the knowledge that is necessary in order to extract the implicit knowledge is not explicit, then – at least in the last instance – it cannot be implicit, but innate. Some of the knowledge that we use in order to extract further knowledge is innate.

The main aim of this introductory chapter is to survey basic questions concerning culture and mind. From this perspective we have to look again for a problem (of consciousness in the problem space of culture).

Some well-known authors claim that "consciousness" is just an umbrella for a variety of concepts. \ 29\ For other authors, it is important to distinguish between types of consciousness. \ 30\ All these are important claims, but here we have in mind a specific context. It is the context of the "problem of culture": how not to look like a foreigner.

Obviously, your skin or eyes could betray you. But this is not important here, because we are interested in thought experiments that test theoretical hypotheses. We hide the factors that could betray a person without being really connected with culture. We do expect culture to be a human product, not the result of natural evolution.

In these conditions, one could pretend that it is not a foreigner and fool the local people. This means precisely that our hypothetical individual is able to "absorb" the other culture. Nothing would betray him or her. This might be difficult or even impossible to do in practice, but for the sake of the theoretical discussion it is quite interesting to accept this supposition.

What is so fascinating in the hypothetical situation described above? The key problem is that the local people cannot identify the foreigner, but the foreigner knows that he or she just pretends to be exactly like the local people: speaks the same language, thinks in the same way, dresses in a "natural" way, has the same habits etc. Let us call "a superanthropologist" this person that can fool in a perfect way the local people. The superanthropologist is like a great actor or an ideal spy.

Now, in what sense is the superanthropologist conscious? The superanthropologist observes the behavior of the local people. He or she is or has to be constantly on guard; any choice must be carefully considered if she or he are to play the game perfectly. The superanthropologist is both inside the culture, as far as the superanthropologist behaves as the local people, and outside the culture in her/his mind, as far as he or she observes the local culture and knows that all is false appearance.

The mysterious side of the situation is not so much that the superanthropologist is both inside and outside of the culture, but the modality that is used in order to produce the knowledge about the local culture. Is this similar to the extraction of implicit knowledge from explicit knowledge? Is the result determinate, unique or are there multiple possibilities of interpretation? No question of this type seems to have an easy answer.

Summing up, we may say that the consciousness of the superanthropologist is part of her/his effort to solve the problem of culture, namely trying not to look like a foreigner in the eyes of other people. There is a venerable tradition in philosophy\ 31\ that puts this kind of thought experiment on a radical ground. The "other people" speak a completely unknown language, have fancy habits and so on.

What about the local people studied by the superanthropologist? Are they conscious in the above sense? After all, they do not seem to be confronted with the same problem as the superanthropologist. They do not pretend to share a culture they want to study. For them the culture is simply there. They are in their world. \ 32\

However, it is obvious that human beings are not like present-day robots. No account of the working of their minds is plausible if it would try to bypass consciousness. The reverse is also true; no computer program seems to have a real chance of displaying an air of humanity without some grain of consciousness in it.

One obvious way out is to find some other problem leading to "consciousness"; this way out is, however, not very attractive. The result is at least the stipulation of different types of consciousness. The multiplication of entities is, in the context of a theory, very dangerous. What would be the connection between this new type of consciousness and that of the superanthropologist? And what would be the connection between all these types of consciousness and culture?

There is however another way out. This is to consider cultures not as a unique solid piece, but as something made up of "plates". The culture plates are culture-like entities.

In order to illustrate the idea of culture plates we may return to examples from ordinary life. If you go for the first time in your life in a supermarket, then it is almost for sure that you have to make a great effort to hide this fact. Obviously, the problem you are confronted with is far less dramatic than that of understanding people who speak a different language, have a different religion etc. But it is similar. You try to make known your desires; they try to communicate their conditions. You can get a lot of help in a supermarket, but it is not your interest to spend a lot of time adjusting your behavior to local habits. You want to buy what you wish to buy and get out as fast as possible.

A culture, from this point of view, is made up of many plates. Some of them may be more profound and their movements may lead to changes in the overall culture. All this is like a maze in which people discover and rediscover the problem of the superanthropologist. They try too to have a behavior that is familiar for the others.

Generalizing the idea of the culture plates we may say that the difference between the human cultures is a gradual one. In a sense, they are all but one culture, made up of plates. Some of these plates form continents, but they are not totally isolated. If I see a human being speaking, then I do think that she is trying to communicate something or is making a statement or asks a question or threatens etc. I do not think that she is just trying to breathe in a strange way. The idea of globalization is as old as humanity. Its deep roots are in a common genetic heritage that makes us, first of all, talk, gossip, and tell stories. \ 33\

On the other hand, individuals form the smallest plates. Each one is different and strong personalities remind us how relative is the dependence of individuals on a greater culture, common to many individuals. Let us think that Martin Heidegger would be still alive and retired somewhere in the mountains of Germany. He is after yet another extraordinary Kehre and has created a world of his own. He uses in a strange fashion old German words and ordinary Germans have great difficulties to understand his texts. In these conditions, only a superanthropologist has the courage to go and discuss with Heidegger. All the ordinary philosophers or interpreters of his fear that they might look funny if they try the same thing.

Not every individual is able to create a world. But everyone has some particularities. I would be very puzzled if I would find somebody that is writing exactly like me or has exactly the same habits or prepares food exactly in the same way I do.

Interaction with other individuals puts anyone in a situation that is similar, mutatis mutandis, to that of the superanthropologist. If we do wish to cooperate with others, then we have to understand them and "speak the same language". Obviously, we hope that the others try the same thing and we meet somewhere "in the middle". These might be small movements, on a historical scale, but they engage us in activities that involve consciousness.

Does all this that we just pretend to speak a common language? In a sense, yes! We are actors. \ 34\ We play roles. We invent roles. We try to find the rule behind the role, but this rule may not exist. Yet we act and thus we build culture. We will try to show, in the next chapter, how strong is this idea.

The most curious side of recursion is the idea to explain the use of a procedure by an appeal to the procedure itself. Is this a vicious circle? No, it is not. It is a circle, but as one can easily explain, it is not a vicious one.

Let us say that you go on vacation on an island and discover that local people know only how to add two numbers. There is nothing else in their culture. Abstractly speaking, they know how to add 'a' and 'b', two natural numbers, and get the result 'c'.

Now you want to illuminate them by introducing the wonderful idea of the sum of a sequence of natural numbers:

Sum [number₁, number₂, ... , number_n]

How do you explain to the local people the procedure of summing a whole list of numbers? The most elegant way is to use recursion. They have to understand two things: (1) how to reduce the new problem to the problem they know already how to solve (namely, to get 'c' from 'a + b'); (2) how to be bold and use the idea of summing a list of numbers even before they have a complete idea about summing lists of numbers. The beginning looks like this:

(Sum [number₁, number₂, ... , number_n-1]) + number_n

Take the last element of the list and add it to the sum of the elements of the list resulting after you have taken the last element from the initial list! As you can see 'Sum' is there, we use what we try to explain! But there is no problem. Now we go further and do something like this:

All we have to do is to find an escape point and get rid of 'Sum'. The escape point is a way out of the circle and a way of making it non-vicious. Mathematicians like limit-concepts, they would choose as escape the moment when there are no more numbers on the list. In this case, the sum of the numbers on an empty list (i.e. no numbers) is zero. This is precisely the way of getting rid of 'Sum', of reducing everything to a problem that we know already how to solve. We just have to add zero to the first number and get the first number as a result and then compute all the other additions left behind.

Normal people might choose other escape points. For example, when there are just two numbers on the new list, constructed in the way explain above, normal people will add them and then do all the other additions and get the final result.

The moral is that we can use circularity in a constructive way. We might, more than this, suppose that the constructive mind has innate knowledge of recursivity.

Actually, recursive procedures are even a little less curious than the above presentation would suggest. Their main aim is to make possible constructions erected upon a given structure.

Let us try to give a non-numerical example. Let us say that 'A' and 'B' are sentences and we want to explain how we built correct sentences with 'AND' and 'OR' and so on. For example, we say that if 'A' and 'B' are sentences, then '(A AND B)' and '(A OR B)' are also sentences.

Now, one can easily that we have quite a productive system, because '((A AND B) OR B)' is also a sentence and we can find an infinite number of such sentences (if we have the time to do this!). We may add, in a prudent way, that we can do all this in principle.

All we need now is an escape point. We need some basic sentences, in order to escape from the circularity of the assumption that 'A' and 'B' are already sentences. But, as we can easily see, this is not a big deal. We already have an idea about the structure of the sentences.

If we have a structure, then on this structure we can erect some other construction. For example, we may specify truth-conditions for sentences. We may specify that 'A AND B' is true if and only if both 'A' and 'B' are true; in all other cases it is false. 'A OR B' is false if and only if both 'A' and 'B' are false; in all other cases the sentence is true.

In the case of more complex structures, as '((A AND B) OR B)' we have to appeal to recursion, somehow as we did in the case of 'Sum'. We observe that we have to check first the OR-construct. If 'B' is true, then the whole sentence is true. But if 'B' is false, then we have to go deeper and check the AND-construct. We observe that the sentence '(A AND B)' is false, if 'B' is false. So, the whole sentence takes the truth-value of 'B'. If 'B' is true, then the whole sentence is true; if 'B' is false, then the whole sentence is false.

Again, we have to look for an escape point for basic sentences. Otherwise, how we know what means that 'B' is true or false. \ 36\ But there are whole theories, sentence logic, that just describe the structures built in the way shown above. They might care, however, for completeness. We would be asked to complete the system with 'NOT' and explain how we construct out of a sentence 'A' a sentence '(NOT A)'. Then we may specify inference rules like

From '((NOT A) OR B)' and 'A' infer 'B'.

We can work out an inferential system. This is nothing else then the very idea of the structure of a system for the extraction of implicit knowledge out of explicit knowledge.

The moral that derives from the discussion about recursion is that we do not have to know the whole story in order to tell it. The story unfolds itself.

There is a connection here with the idea that we do not look for definitions, but for problems. We do not look for the definition of a sum of the numbers on the list, but for a problem. We try to reduce the problem to a problem that we have solved already and we evaluate what this implies (the recursive circle and the escape point). Really, we have no complete definition or characterization of the process. All that we have is an idea about the problem and a strategy for solving the problem. But we have no complete description of the whole process. The definition is only a recursive definition and it is an abstract of the strategy for solving the problem. It is like a plan for solving the problem. It does not tell us what the sum is.

Think, for example, about the following construction:

In this construction there is no appeal to escape points. "Sum", on the right hand of the equality, has been eliminated. When the index "n" is reasonably small, I can write everything, on the right and on the left of "=", on paper. The ambition, in this case, is different. It really looks as if we try to have a complete description of what summing the numbers on the list means.

Now, if we go with recursion further, we may observe that in the example of sentences constructed with "AND", "OR" and "NOT", as in the above definition, there nested parentheses. We may compare them with nested boxes. The structure used for the recursive cycles is made up of such nested boxes. A nice example of such nested boxes we can find in linguistics. \ 37\

For the structuralists, cultures also have the structure of a language. If this would mean that the structure of the culture has the form of nested boxes (for short, a "nested boxes structure"), then I think we will have serious difficulties. When I write these lines, I just put on the computer a dictionary\ 38\ and an encyclopedia\ 39\ and I make a trip into the world of meanings (of English words). This exploration cannot inevitably be reduced to questions of grammar. Culture is going to play a role too.

Take, for example, the word "holism". It is used in the title of this paragraph. In the dictionary I learn that "holism" means:

Further, when I go to "whole", I learn that this means, among other things, "containing all components". For more cultural connotations I go to the desktop encyclopedia. I find out, looking for "holism", that it is a theory and practice of medicine:

But this approach lays stress however on the unique character of the human individual, who is not simply the bearer of symptoms. From this point of view, it looks very individualistic.

If I try to go to the Thesaurus in the desktop encyclopedia, the program simply sends me to "holiness". I feel that the program took into account only the fact that both words begin with "holi-" (there is a difference in etymology: "holism" is from the Greek word holos 'whole', while "holiness" has its origin in an Ancient English halignesse.) History is however part of culture and even mistakes can be telling examples in this context.

Then I try to look for "part". What I get is mainly the idea of dividing ... a whole, a unit or a thing. I look for "element". The same result as for "part" with one important addition:

In this way I found also a "story" about the elements, an ancient one and a modern one. I wonder what I get if I go further. The road I follow seems pretty circular. The only escape points are stories like that about earth, air, fire and water. I may get to "atom" (something that cannot be divided, according to its etymology; but the modern story is quite different). Or if I go into the direction of "unit, thing", I find again the idea of "unity", of something that has to be seen as ... a whole, not divided.

There is undoubtedly circular movement in all my trips through the dictionary, the thesaurus and the encyclopedia. But my hypothesis is that the structures on which the recursive movement is performed are not necessarily nested boxes. What one finds is rather a web. \ 41\ One might call it the web structure of culture. It is a much more relaxed form than the nested boxes. That is why one gets the impression that one comes back to knots of the web structure where one has already been.

Now, going back to the meaning of "holism" I must say that the sense I wanted to give to the word is slightly different from all that we have talked about above. I had in mind the idea that before understanding elements or moments of a culture one has to know the whole culture. This is the "illusion of holism".

Cultural holism is an illusion because recursion makes possible the circular movements on the web structure. At each point of the structure consciousness, in the sense investigated in the first chapter, is involved. My approach to holism itself, as a case in point, is slightly different from those of others, but I try to make it understandable, so I have also to play the game the others play when they use the word "holism". But in all this process there is no interaction with the whole culture.

The structure of the culture is web-like because each of its parts is added by human beings that follow no over-all design or plan. Each part involves consciousness, but there is no conscious development of the whole structure. \ 42\ There are no global constraints either and the structure may have any form, not just the nested boxes structure. \ 43\

Linguistic contact with others has fascinated philosophers. They saw in it a ground for thought experiments that might test our hypotheses related to language, meaning, thought and culture. Anthropology offers a rich material, \ 44\ but conceptual imagination may go even further.

In this context, the most important test is that of translation. \ 45\ How good it can be? How far it can get? What are the obstacles that confront it? What happens in radical situations, situations in which no previous dictionary or grammars are available and the language is very different from every other known language (known to us).

We will not jump directly to radical translation. Radical translation is discussed later. First, we try to analyze the process of translation itself.

When the translator approaches a message in a source language, she or he is like the superanthropologist who has to understand the spoken or written message, as a native speaker would do. After she or he understood the message, starts the part that is not accessible normally to the native speaker: the translator returns to the target language of the translation process. In this moment the consciousness connection plays a key role. There is knowledge incorporated into the translator's consciousness. This knowledge is used in the process of rendering the source message in the target language. The translator retells in the target language what she or he understood in the source language.

It might happen that neither the source language nor the target language is the native language of the translator. If one of these languages is however the native language of the translator, the usual opinion is that the translator is in the best position when the target language is her/his native language. The usual explanation seems to be that the burden of the translation work lies in the second phase of the translation. One has to master the art of writing or speaking in the target language.

From the point of view defended here, the burden of translation lies in the first phase of translation, when the translator has to understand the message. This is the phase when, in contrast to what happens in the mind of the native people, the translator has to develop the consciousness associated with the process of mimicking the understanding of the message in the source language. And, according to the hypothesis developed in the first chapter, this is less likely to happen in the environment of your own language. That is why it makes sense to start from a foreign language. This catalyzes the process of consciousness formation and the accumulation of knowledge that is necessary for the translation.

The conclusion is the same – it is better to start from a foreign language – but the argument is different. The burden of translation lies in the first phase, not in the second phase.

The structure of the argument is also different from the behaviorist arguments found in the philosophical literature of the fifties or sixties in the twentieth century. The mind of the translator is involved in a very significant way. \ 46\

On the other hand, the theory developed in this chapter is exploiting the idea of recursion. So, we have to take into account two moments: the recursive paths on a structure (the circular movements of recursion) and the escape point.

Now, from the very existence of recursive paths one may reach the conclusion that, inside a linguistic context, there is exploitation of the recursive paths themselves (and produce, for example, puns etc.).

Think, for example, that you have to translate from Russian a text about rain. The Russian author uses the idiom that means, literally, "to pour from a pail". \ 47\ This means in English "it rains heavily". In Russian, however, the text exploits\ 48\ the idea of "pail". Can all this be rendered in English? No, if one uses the well-known English idiom "it rains cats and dogs". The pail is an inanimated object, for the Russian as for the English speakers, but cats and dogs are animals.

The translator can however explain everything. She or he can explain us how to understand the Russian text. The translator shares with us all the knowledge accumulated while she or he made an effort to understand and to render the source text. But all this is not translation. It simply means that we have to learn bits of Russian, at least. At most, we have to learn a lot of Russian.

Such examples lead us to the conclusion that the hypothesis that the translation is possible simply does not pass severe tests. It is not possible, for example, to obtain always a text in the target language that would convey all the meanings implied in the source text. It is possible however to understand what goes on in the source text, but this implies the construction of something that is far from being a translation in the original sense of the term. It would have heavy footnotes and a lot of explanations that would simply invite us to open the door of the source language.

If one says, in Russian, that "it pours from a pail", I can examine a recursive path on a web of analogies: what happens when a person pours water from a pail and so on. Meanwhile we can consider everything we might say about the pail or the water that is in the pail. The result can be rendered acceptably only in some other language that uses the same recursive path for "heavy rain".

What can be said about the second moment of the recursion, the escape point? Recursion starting from "it pours from a pail" would not stop if we continue to ask what is a "pail"? Well, it is a "bucket". And what is the "bucket"? It is a "vessel" for holding, carrying and pouring liquids (including water). And what is a "vessel"? It is a "utensil" for holding something. This is an "implement" or a "container" used, for example, in the kitchen. And the implement is a "tool" used in "action". We have to stop somewhere at the idea that action involves aims and means. \ 49\ This is the role of the escape point.

Think about the first line in the Bible. \ 50\ What is "earth" Does "earth" in the Bible mean the same thing as "earth" in ancient Greek texts about the elements? I suspect that the escape points are different. \ 51\ We may convey the charm of the escape points in the source language by telling stories about them. Again the translation work becomes the work of someone who desperately tries to teach us a foreign language.

No wonder, I think, that translation is possible when messages are relatively simple and the source language is not too far from the target language. The two languages are placed on different cultural plates or, if you want another metaphorical expression, they generate different cultural plates. When the plates are too far away, the machinery of the language forces us to resort to a lot of explanatory stories.

We are forced to resort to explanatory stories inside the linguistic context when we are confronted with escape points. Even if the story is placed at the beginning, as in the Bible, and plays the role of a foundational story, it is fascinating to see how these sorts of stories seem inescapable. Without them there is no meaning in the message.

We insisted on escape points and not on foundation or anchoring points because of the stories involved. The stories also use the language. They are bound to involve some circular movement. How could they be foundational? Escape points are different. We have made a long journey on the web structures of culture and just have to stop somewhere. This is the escape point. We have to take things as they are. In this sense, in culture, things are there. People, at that point, just use to behave in certain way. They believe, for example, certain things. The story just tries to make all this sound less hollow. Everything is colored in the story that surrounds the escape point.

Armchair philosophical experiments in radical translation are, to a certain extent, less radical than deciphering of ancient texts without a bilingual text and knowledge of the source language. They allow the presence of the jungle linguist or of the anthropologist in the middle of the population that speaks the unknown language.

There are, however, two conditions that make the philosophical experiments radical. First, it is the condition that there is no intermediary chain of translators. \ 60\ Second, there is certain restriction on the available clues. Only the behavior of the native people is used for testing the hypotheses of the translator.

The second condition should not be discarded on the basis that it is inspired by behaviorism. It makes a lot of sense to adopt it on other grounds too. The translation is radical because we have no access to the recursive schemes of the local culture. All the already present stories about the escape points we talked above make sense only in non-radical translation. On the other hand, until we reach the phase when we talk with the natives about such stories we have to learn the basics of their language.

Let us suppose that the linguist goes with native people in different places that look more or less like our churches and sees the picture of a person that is represented differently and the natives make gestures towards the sky and say "achim". \ 61\ As time goes by, the linguist is more and more torn between two hypotheses. One hypothesis is that she should use "God" as a translation. The other hypothesis is that she should use "Gods" as translation.

No amount of evidence is able to incline decisively the balance in favor of one of the hypotheses. The evidence has two sources. The first source is the behavior of the native people when they pronounce the word "achim". But how to decide on the basis of this behavior what is the reference? Is this reference a singular divinity or a plural divinity? The other source is knowledge of the language accumulated while the linguist studies it. But this knowledge is itself the result of choices among similar hypotheses.

In Quine classical argument the main stress seems to lie on incompatible ontological projections. His conclusion is that there is underdetermination of translation. The underdetermination means that translations based on incompatible hypotheses are possible. Nothing prevents the adoption of one or another of the hypotheses.

Our example with "achim" is inspired by the Hebrew text of the Bible. \ 62\ The translations of the Bible that I know use "God", \ 63\ but the form of the word is "plural". Some people might say that, when the first texts of the Bible were composed, in the mind (of the very earthly writers!) the idea was that there are many Gods. Or, one might speak about a plural entity. Other people reject this meaning and tell as that there is only one God and we must ignore the grammatical form or interpret it, in such a way, as to be compatible with the idea of the existence of one God. Obviously, the decision is a matter of choice among options. We lack the empirical evidence that might lead to the rejection of all the hypotheses except one. Our choice is based upon options, such as atheism and faith. These options are in connection with the very idea of culture.

Culture means to follow one of the open ways. There is no empirical evidence that tells you which is the only "good" way. And later we will show that there can be no rule either that tells you which is the best way. All this suggests that deep and troubling problems are behind what might seem "technical" question or even a trivial question. And the most troubling one is "Are all these choices going to lead to some form of strong relativism?" \ 64\

The superanthropologist, when faced with the word "achim", is in the same situation. It is even worse. She has to test various hypotheses about the routes of recursion and the escape point(s) in the case of "achim". As we saw above, even the stories of the native speakers of the language are not very helpful. The main point is that different recursive routes might work in the same way for a long time. Each time you have eliminated one hypothesis there is another one, which will require an even longer time to test. One never arrives at a definitive result.

Last, but not least, the main insight here\ 65\ is that even at the level of the local community a definitive agreement is not possible. There is always scope for other recursive routes or escape points. This insight will lead as later in the book to the idea that cultures have many plates that move and clash and this creates the potential for instability and change. This also leads to what we call "culturequakes": small, medium or even great quakes in the structure of a culture. The effort to prevent these inherent quakes, as well as the effort to redirect their energy towards external targets is at the root of the explanation of the conflicts among cultures.

Let's go back to the example with "achim". Some people might try to explain that there is (or there are) no achim. They stress the fact that all the talk about achim is a story. Achim is a fictional character. They even claim that we can ignore or even discard such stories without losing anything, especially from the point of view of the integrity of our minds. On the contrary, our minds become free. I will call this argument the atheistic claim.

Now, there is a fine distinction in logic and philosophy between truth and validity. The premises of an argument might be true, the conclusion might be true, but the problem is that the argument will not lead always from true premises to true conclusions. The argument is not valid.

After all, for the superanthropologist all the talk about achim is just a story. Probably, the superanthropologist has no beliefs about achim and no commitments of any kind. Obviously, she has nothing to lose if the whole story is simply discarded. The local people might simply say that the whole story simply deserves no attention.

I want to challenge the validity of the atheistic claim. On one hand, no atheist can claim that all stories should be discarded in the same way (because they talk about non-existing entities or fictions). This would be simply absurd. So, atheists have to show that particular religions are wrong from a moral point of view. On the other hand, there is no way of proving that all kinds of religious beliefs are wrong from a moral point of view. What about the very belief in what the atheists claim to be the truth?

Criticism of atheism from religious circles has been also focused mainly on the moral aspects. Seen from this side, it is the atheistic claim that leads to immorality.

Both sides, I think, have missed the point. It is not morality that is at stake, but the mind. Talk about God is an escape point in a recursive process that gives meaning to the idea of having a mind. It is God that treats me as a human being. Even if I am isolated, the idea of God gives sense to the idea that I have a mind.

Think, for example, that this text is lost and no one read it. \ 73\ No one, except God! Obviously, you may confer various meanings to "God", in this context. \ 74\ But you cannot eliminate the recursive process that stands for "meaning". One looks to the sky, the other to some potential ideal reader and so on. This kind of search makes the fabric of culture.

It is from this point of view, that we do not exist without culture and culture involves this kind of recursive processes. As any recursive processes, they do involve circles. Gods are painted with very human traits. And this makes a lot of sense from the point of view of recursion! What seemed to be a great atheistic discovery is nothing but a very natural phenomenon.

The atheistic claim is wrong because it is not valid. The whole fabric of culture would collapse if its argument would be valid. The necessary consequence of atheism is the idea that humans are mere machines. \ 75\ These machines would have to be reduced to some kind of determinism that would make no use of the multiple routing available in culture.

The recursive game that we identified in the case of God and man has something deeply in common with a game that we play constantly in interhuman relations. We attribute a mind to others and have representations about the mind of the others and representations of their representations of our mind and so on. That is why the atheistic claim is invalid: it discards a trait that is at the heart of the human mind itself. Talking about God makes as much sense as talking about the mind of my readers. The atheistic claim would have to be extended as well to "the mind" of my readers and to an attempt to convince me that these readers are nothing but biological machines that have no mind. In a sense, this is true, \ 76\ but the adoption of the idea that we are nothing else than a kind of sophisticated and very efficient machine would simply destroy the human world.

There are a lot of philosophers who exhort us to have a "realistic" look at human beings and see what as they really are. Individuals are machines.

After all, these philosophers are right, up to some point. Humans are biological machines, the most complex product of biological evolution. Individuals, as other biological beings, are programmed by nature. Their innate software is called genetic heritage. Even the ability to master a language is written in genetic code.

On the other hand, one of the most interesting results of the theory of recursive functions concerns the limits of computability. \ 77\ These are theoretical results obtained when the mathematical eye examines highly abstract machines. Of course, any machine has the same limits.

The limits of computability have lead to one of the most powerful arguments against the computational nature of the mind. \ 78\

What the theory of the limits of computability shows is that any machine is bound to fail; there are functions that are non-computable. Obviously, though highly sophisticated, the biological machines fail for other reasons too. Their memories are much more limited than the memory of the theoretical machines. The time they have for computations is also limited.

Brains as biological machines have a computational power that is still beyond the capabilities of present day computers. But they fail sooner than theoretical, abstract machines.

We may also consider the hypotheses that such complex machines, as it happens in the case of very complex programs, suffer also because of the sheer weight of their complexity. They crash because they are too complex.

Now, it is very interesting to ask the same question in the case of social systems. Planning can be seen as an attempt to organize a whole society as one big, programmed machine. The result is failure, sooner or later. The system crashes. What happens when it crashes? \ 79\ It seems that an outburst of rumors and myths is the result. A lot of stories about the secret conspiracies that "made" history and mere gossip are the only explanations that one finds in the mouths of the ordinary people, as well as in the media. Even social scientists seem caught by the whirlpool and chase any available ghost. But all this is also part of the most human attitude, of what seems to be deeply embedded into the human mind as part of the reaction in the conditions of the collapse of a system that tried to do more than is possible.

The key of the process seems to be in a capacity to take advantage of the failure. But no program is able to transcend itself. How would be human machines able to do this? One plausible hypothesis is that humans develop knowledge of their limits and failures in an indirect way.

Did you tell children stories about heroes or witches? Did you like all these fictions; did you believe in Santa Claus? And could we educate our children as human beings without these stories? I think not. I think that this is the fallacy of the atheistic claim.

The alternative would be to program the mind of our children. \ 80\ And we don't do this. Instead, we encourage them to make the effort to travel to other worlds. We tell them stories about fairies and fantastic lands. You just think you in a very faraway land. And all that you try is to guess the role of the characters. There might be no role, in complex, real situations, but we still do the kind of work of an anthropologist. We try and solve the cultural problem.

Sociologists and anthropologists thought that we all have roles. Sometimes, as we pointed out, the idea takes the form of the dramaturgical character of human interactions. We are actors and play roles. But what is not taken into account is that there might be no role at all. Somebody just tries to play a role, but fails. Others still try to understand and they make all the effort to pretend that they "see the clothes of the Emperor". The result is a side effect; they really see something.

Think, for a moment, that you see an abstract painting. You may say that there is nothing depicted in the painting. But why should it depict something? Maybe it just kept the color atmosphere of a painting. Or it depicts a feeling; thus it is not an image. But it is a painting as long as we search for a meaning.

Think, in another perspective, that you have found a crooked branch fallen from a tree. Like the abstract painting, it might remind you of something. Or, in contrast with the abstract painting, it has an almost realistic form; it depicts something. Even if nobody played a role or failed to play it, there is still room for side effects of the search for a meaning.

There is no need for a distribution of roles in society. There might be even a lot of failed attempts to play a role. Therefore there is no point in a great plan for the distribution of roles. Culture is not like a huge scenario. Such a thing would be simply logically impossible, after a certain level of complexity. Instead, human beings take advantage of the multiple routes that are possible in a recursive cultural process. As a result many small cultureplates emerge. Even daily contact is an effort to overcome the tension between the plates and build bigger plates. We feel that these bigger cultureplates are the space where we are not strangers. We are there at home.

Because we fail as machines, we are bound to pretend that we are not machines. We are out of the autistic frame of a perfect machine because there are limits that make a perfect machine impossible. We have minds because the perfect machine failed. The biological engine that would adapt both to low and high temperatures, which would fly and also survive under water and which would build computers is not possible as a biological engine, as a sheer product through evolution of a biological machine.

The beauty of the recursive process is that we are not machines because we pretend that we are not machines. \ 81\

Why doesn't all this finish in a rather vicious circle? After all, what would be so interesting if a robot would pretend that it is not a robot and would play a role, would act? Even if the machine develops knowledge of the whole situation all seems to be a fake.

I can get the role of king, but still I am not a king. An important step forward is accomplished, it is true, if others recognize me as king and behave as if I would be a king. But actors on a stage do the same and we still think they are just pretending!

We need an escape point. The escape point, I think, is the use of multiple routing. Kings don't just play a role. They might take a route that nobody before has explored. This is the contrast with actors. Armies from the stage do not go to the spectators and ask them to become subjects. If they would do such a thing, we all would admit that they are taking their roles seriously. If they succeed, then the king is king. They have exploited a possibility that was in the situation.

Perhaps, the main quality of language is not precision, but ambiguity. \ 82\ Absolute precision would kill language; the sentences would be mere small formal machines. The key of human success is the capacity to use language as an environment where multiple routing can be exploited. Bad novels cannot be read a second time; this is Umberto Eco's criterion for a good novel. Good novels tell us things that were not contemplated by their creators.

Roger Penrose, whom we mentioned before, stresses the significance of the limits of computation for computer programs. But why would not apply those limits to us, humans. We are not able either to compute every function. What we are able to do, it is true, is to evaluate an incomplete system, for example. We may add some axiom, make it richer and then prove that this new system is also lacking something and so on.

All this seems to be, for me, the poetical side of mathematics. The informal part plays a crucial role. The real foundation of mathematics is not logic, but "gossip". It is the "gossip" foundation that makes possible the strict development of mathematical construction.

Why human individuals seem to be the only beings that have a mind in the strict sense of the word? After all, apes do have collective life and some of them have been able to learn sign languages, when they were properly trained.

Human individuals are less specialized than other animals. We do not possess, for example, specialized vision. We are not particularly good predators, if we are naked. In sum, from a biological point of view, we do not look as particularly good survivors. Civilized people, lost in the woods or on the sea, are in great trouble and survive with great difficulty.

On the other hand, we are conscious in the strong sense of the word. We use natural language. We use tools. We have cultures. We transmit the past knowledge to future generations. All this makes human individuals able to overcome the limits of their biological abilities.

It seems that we were attempts of the evolution to build an all-purpose organism. The attempt failed, but we were able to build all sorts of machines that help us to overcome our limits. We are physically much weaker than an elephant. No problem however, because we built cranes for moving heavy objects. We are lost in the maze of the shelves of a big library. We hardly can manipulate huge amounts of data. Now we do this with the help of fast computers. We also are able to exchange with great speed huge amounts of data.

Consciousness plays a role in all this developments. We identify consciously the spots where a machine could help us to overcome the limits of our natural abilities.

Consciousness is like a building site. On the building site programs are made and repaired. No perfect biological machine would really need such a site. It would be adapted for any kind of task. Like in SF movies, the perfect robot would not think very much, but execute an action that was programmed beforehand.

The concept of consciousness is itself, as we saw above, rather ambiguous. We focus here only on the knowledge that is developed in the process of acting. When someone does something unconsciously we tend to say that he or she did not "think about what they were doing"; they took their roles too seriously. They forgot that they are mere actors and even failed actors. And as a result their action is mechanical. You cannot talk about it with them.

There is however a dilemma deeply embedded in the human condition. If we do stress too much the acting side, then we do not take steps in the direction of the exploration of the uninvestigated routes. The result is that we are conscious, but still act rather like mere poor machines. On the other hand, if we go too fast in the direction of unknown routes, we have to take us very seriously and lose contact with mere acting and pretending. The result is lack of consciousness and the feeling that we are crazy machines.

From the point of view of culture, the dilemma of the human condition is crucial. Stifle all innovation and you get a stagnant culture, populated by rather mechanical beings. Cultivate only innovation and you get a fully crazy atmosphere, where no values are recognized. Make out of some new idea an obligatory model and the result is again a society populated by mechanical beings.

There is no room for conscious decisions from the point of view of the dilemma of the human condition. In this respect, cultures are unpredictable phenomena. They may simply remain stable for thousands of years. They may disintegrate rapidly. They may change in a more balanced way. All this is the result of a recursive process that has the least possible constraints. Each individual engaged in the process is conscious, but there is no overall consciousness.

There is an old, forgotten and rather curious hypothesis formulated by Karl Faulmann. According to Faulmann writing played a role in the development of language. When sound was unclear and the meaning of spoken words multidimensional, only writing was the proper vehicle of communication. \ 83\

To put it more radically, writing does not come after language and thought, but it is part of the their whole story. \ 84\ Writing is not auxiliary, but essential for the humanity.

Man has been conceived as a language-user, as a toolmaker, as a social being that keeps children in the family for a longer time than other animals, but rarely humanity has been connected with writing. There is however something special about writing. Man is able to process data and as data processor writing should play a special role, because it extends memory and other data processing abilities beyond biologically evolved capacities. \ 85\

Animals can distinguish and follow traces left by other animals. But the traces left by man are far more complex. Man transmits knowledge and, as we will try to show, more than knowledge. \ 86\

If written texts transmit knowledge, then how is going to be established a connection with consciousness? One might think that Frank Jackson's argument in the well-known qualia-problem strikes here decisively. It is not enough to have knowledge in order to have certain experiences. \ 87\ The answer to this possible objection lies in the observation that any texts and especially strange-looking texts confront us with what we called the culture problem. We have to act as anthropologists. The knowledge of the accumulated while we solve the problem is the knowledge that helps us to develop the consciousness, the consciousness of connection with another cultureplate. Thus, writing does not transmit all the knowledge, but it provokes knowledge.

The first two chapters stressed the significance of individual consciousness in the context of very complex recursive loops that make up what we tend to call rather globally, culture. An effort has been made to show that we get out of the recursive loops by taking advantage of unexplored routes. These routes lead us to new loops and so forth.

The key of the theory is that there are no recursive definitions of complex processes. If you like a schema, then it would look like this:

(a, b, ..., n) { } result

There are the elements a, b, ..., n engaged in the process, but there is no definition between the parentheses "{}" if the process is sufficiently complex. The results may be partial results, as the process unfolds.

Each individual is, like the superanthropologist, in a situation in which tries to guess the flow of the process, without a book from which everything could be read.

Now, we can make more explicit the idea that there is no spirit of a culture. This simply means that there is no room for a predefined process. What we call "spirit of the culture" is the fact that certain routes or patterns are tried. There is also the effect of taking a certain direction: whole series of options become less and less plausible.

Writing came out of our investigation as a key cultural item. To be more precise, writing is both thought provoking and consciousness provoking. Later, we will explore the limits of traditional systems of writing and the new challenge of writing computer programs, not traditional texts.

In this chapter we try to test this idea in a discussion of a classical cultural contrast, the contrast between Europe and Asia. We start from basic processes and try to explore the new processes that they generate and the pattern that is induced by these processes.

We have also stressed the significance of what we called the fallacy of the atheistic claim. There is, however, a seemingly contrary claim that is also wrong. This is the claim of various fundamentalisms, according to which there is just one true religion.

A consequence of the underdetermination of translation and multiple routing is that many stories are possible. The point of view according to which "there is one true story" is wrong.

In a more general perspective, we expect that different cultures would exploit rather different possibilities. None of the solutions has priority.

Because of the recursive nature of cultural processes there is no privileged entrance into a culture. The processes involve circularity and this is provoking a sort of comings and goings process in which it is difficult to distinguish privileged places.

Writing systems have however the advantage of being both rather stable in their principles and of a more transparent nature. They also offer model routes for new processes.

When Greeks took Phoenician signs, in the 9^th century BC, they made a revolutionary change. They used systematically special signs for vowels. \ 88\ This meant that they departed from the Semitic syllabic writing and developed an alphabet.

In Semitic writing systems there are only a few signs, but they denote in an ambiguous way various syllables.

In fact the Semitic system is not that strange or difficult if we take into account the nature of Semitic languages. The consonantal skeleton gives the meaning of a word. The grammatical form is indicated by vowels.

The Greek system, though it used signs borrowed from the Semites, is very different. The difference can be easily seen if one compares the Greek system with the Arabic signs used in Ottoman Turkish. \ 89\

In the Greek system, syllables are built out of smaller elements, consonant and vowels. An entire new idea evolved from this system. Things, from this perspective, can be seen as constructions made from basic elements that are arranged in a hierarchical order, from elements to complex things. And this led to evocation of the writing system in some of the most sophisticated arguments produced in Greek philosophy. \ 90\

Written words in Greek indicate the pronunciation of the word. This principle is emphasized by the efforts to preserve with the help of special signs the correct accent and pronunciation. This doesn't seem to be very helpful now, but nevertheless it is a symptom of the direction taken by the ancient Greeks.

The Chinese writing system went on a different route. The system is rather complex, but it has a tendency to emphasize the principle of the sign that points towards a meaning.

In principle, the basic signs are ideographic. Such signs have a meaning by themselves and the pronunciation plays no role. One might ignore how the sign is pronounced and still understand what is the sense. \ 91\ This obviously happens since in different Chinese dialects the pronunciation is different. The same might be said when the sign is used in Japanese, a language that has a completely different grammatical structure and no direct relation with Chinese.

Compound ideographic signs are built out of simple characters. They are not pictures of an, but rather try to catch or suggest an idea by means of a combination. \ 92\

Actually, most of the Chinese symbols do contain a phonetic part and a part that suggests the meaning. It might happen that the phonetic part is not very helpful today, so you have to learn the symbol as such. \ 93\

The Chinese writing system is like a written language. Actually, this written language is the language that is the common Chinese language. For individuals speaking Cantonese and Mandarin the written language is the common language. The spoken language is not common.

The Japanese system is even more complex. The Chinese system had to be adapted to a language that has a totally different grammatical structure. To the Chinese characters have been added syllabic signs. If you know only the Chinese graphs, you can guess some meanings, but most of the message is lost because you cannot make sense of the rest.

Different systems of writing are associated with distinct patterns of thought. Wandering in the maze of concepts is a very different adventure when you mark your way in contrasting manners.

The European tradition has its roots in Greece. It emphasizes the syntactical aspect of the language and favors the very idea of a formal system. Letters have no meaning by themselves and we can play we them as we play with any non-interpreted signs.

On the other hand, the alphabet is strongly connected to the idea of decomposing complex things into smaller structures until we find the basic elements. This is one of the meanings of analysis. It is probably the most popular one. \ 94\

I would rather talk in this case about an analytic constraint. This is the requirement that all the explanations of some characteristic of a complex thing should be given in terms of basic properties of elements. The characteristic of the complex thing cannot be also a basic property. One has to reduce complex things to simpler elements.

The analytic constraint had left its imprint upon theoretical science. New sciences have to comply with this constraint. For example, explanations of the mind in terms of entities or processes that display already characteristic traits of a mind are unacceptable. They are "vitalistic" explanations.

The meaning of analysis as method, not as a constraint upon scientific research, is however rather different. In Ancient Greek geometry analysis was a method for solving problems. \ 95\ "Analysis", in this case, is the analysis of problems. It starts from a problem and tries to test possible alternative conjectures that might solve the problem.

From a mathematical point of view, analysis of problems means that we identify first what we try to prove. Then we work our way back to first principles or axioms. If we succeed, then this means that we have found a proof of the result that we wanted to obtain.

There is however something from the "spirit" of the alphabetic writing in the analysis of problems. Problems are seen as puzzles and should be solved as puzzles; each piece has to find its place in the final solution. Again, the small pieces are present. Like in the case of the use of the alphabet, finding the solution of a problem means leaving no loopholes. Every piece has to find its place and the construction must be contiguous. In a text written using an alphabet we do not have to guess what further elements have to be added in order to find out how the text really looks like.

The spirit of the alphabet is best illustrated perhaps by the functioning of the speller and of the grammatical analyzer of the program that I am using now for writing this book. The program works at the level of the letters. It never tries to guess the meaning of what I am writing.

Greek letters retained a numerical value, but as far as I know there is nothing comparable with the interpretation that we have already mentioned of the text of the Hebrew Bible. Numbers in the Hebrew Bible form another dimension of the text.

Pure alphabetic writing, on the other hand, encourages linearity. The very tradition of European logic goes hand in hand with this linearity: from the lines with premises we go to the final line, that of the conclusion.

Chinese texts have an iconic dimension. The signs are, at the origin, small drawings. Now they became very abstract, but they still retain the character of a drawing. They can evoke visual connotations that no alphabetic writing can render.

The most important trait of the Chinese writing seems however to be its capacity to separate meanings from speech. It is a strange experience for people from other cultures. The first reaction of foreigners is to ask for a simplification. Why to use two languages, a spoken and a written one? The presupposition of this question is that we do not really need more than one language. If we take this logic seriously, then we have to ask for one unique language. The presupposition of the question has no feeling for the gains that we might have from the existence of more than one language. Of course, it misses also the crucial role of what we called the culture problem.

Going back to our comparison with alphabetic writing we may remark that pure alphabetic writing reveals the form of the text. When the words have no meaning, what remains is the form of the text. Consider, for example, the beginning of Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, "the looking-glass book" \ 96\ :

Alice's head is full of ideas, but she cannot make sense of what she reads. It looks like poetry, but it really has only the grammatical skeleton. In his comment, C. F. Hockett fills the grammatical skeleton with meaningful words and we can read a text that has "a slightly poetical style" \ 97\

Let us have a closer look at words like brillig, borogoves, or outgrabe. On one hand, these are empty words; there is no particular meaning attached to them. The empty place that they mark could be filled with meaning, if we choose to do se. On the other hand, Lewis Carroll carefully suggests the type of word that could be put in such an empty place. There is a the before borogoves; and the word ends with an 's', the mark of plural in this context. The word outgrabe has the form of an irregular past tense.

Technically speaking, the empty places are variables, like the variables of the logicians. The alphabet makes it possible to use different labels for different variables. These labels may be arbitrary names. Good style and not only, in such constructions, requires further the specification of the type of the variable.

The distinction between grammatical words like the, and, in, did and meaningful words like sunny, soft, flowers, outride is well known to Chinese grammarians too. Of course, the second types of words can be eliminated from a text and one could mark somehow the empty places. This is possible, but seems to be a bit astray of the main way. The main way of the writing system is to use floating meanings, meanings that are not tied to a particular phonetic form.

In the environment of semantic writing the counterpart to Jabberwocky seems to be the free association of meanings, like in the haiku\ 98\ poems. The haiku poem reproduced below is written by BashÜ (1644 – 1694), the great Japanese poet. It has its famous fixed structure of 5 + 7 + 5 syllables (see bellow the poem written with the syllabic signs of the Japanese Hiragana).

In alphabetic transcription the Haiku looks like this:

Furu ike ya

Kawazu tobikomu

Mizu no oto.

The haiku combines ideas of furu 'old', ike 'pond', kawazu 'frog', tobikomu 'to jump', mizu 'water' and oto 'sound'. There is also a grammatical skeleton that helps you (if you are far more advanced than I am in the maze of Japanese grammar) \ 99\ to build a framework that we may call "the meaning framework". There are two grammatical particles, ya 'and' (but the connotation is that only a few items of a series have been mentioned) and no 'possessive particle' (roughly the English 'of'; here sound of water). The poet creates the meaning framework, but you have to fill in the details. It is up to you to associate new ideas. \ 100\ They may be suggested by translations (like the following translation that I have found on the web):

Old pond...

a frog leaps in

water's sound. \ 101\

But, as usual in such cases, I feel that I need to know more about the source language. \ 102\

I think that the contrast that we wanted to emphasize is now clear: it is the contrast between a syntactic framework and a meaning framework. In the syntactic framework we may insert any meanings or we may work with the framework as such. In the meaning framework we can add new meanings, but we have to associate them, case by case, with the ones already in place.

We take the next best road towards the objective that we have chosen. There is no wonder that in different cultures we take different roads. We have already taken a road and it might be cumbersome to go back or impossible to jump to a road too far.

The metaphor of the roads emphasizes the fact that from the point of view of culture we may go in many directions and build there cultureplates. There is no spirit of the culture or holistic force that imprisons us within fixed boundaries.

The impression that there is a spirit of the culture is given by the fact that on specific road and from a specific places certain choices are less plausible. But they are not impossible.

Cultures may be very composite. There are some good reasons to suppose that syncretic cultures have their own particular force. A very good example might start within the Japanese context already mentioned above. If you look to a Japanese text you are struck first by the mixture of ideographic symbols and syllabic signs. The Japanese combined the Chinese system with their own inventions and adapted all to the structures of their own language.

There is probably, from this point of view, nothing to wonder in the ability of the Japanese to take partially the road of European industrial culture. Again syncretism triumphed.

Despite the appearance, Christianity also has a syncretic structure. It is true that it does not regroup deities in the manner of Ancient Rome, but it had done something more profound. It has united two old cultureplates that had a huge collision potential. It had found a common road for a religion of the Orient and the culture that had its roots in Greece.

We can meditate on the profundity and the asperities of the Christian synthesis. Certain routes had to be abandoned in order to find a new common road. Culturequakes did affect the Christianity. They have been the cause of the split between Orthodox and Catholic Christians. Later, another culturequake shook the Christian world during Reformation. In many parts of the world people remolded their beliefs and took new ways to new worlds.

There is another example, even more striking and perhaps more important, of syncretism. This is the example of the symbolic language of science. Ancient Greeks were able geometers, they used figures, but few elements of a symbolic language. It is only much later, for example, that such an elementary sign as "=" was introduced. \ 103\

The alphabet offered for science only very limited means. It is very difficult to develop the mathematical arguments without a language that is independent of the spoken language. The same is true for empirical sciences such as physics or chemistry. They combine the use of plain prose with special notations.

If you browse a handbook of classical logic, the first thing that strikes you is the capacity to work with forms. The form does really matter in logic. The same is true for modern logic, but in handbooks of modern logic you also find a symbolic language.

An alphabet is a system of notation of the vocal aspect of a language. No alphabet is a language. The system of symbols of modern logic is a language. The same is true for mathematics. It has a language of its own and you have to be able to understand the language in order to make sense of the formulae. This language is written using a semantic writing, like the writing systems of Far East.

The similarity that I have mentioned is not an accident. It was the intention of Leibniz to develop a universal language similar to the Chinese writing system. \ 104\ This was the language of logic. And Frege, the key figure in the history of the development of modern logic, called his major work Begriffschrift, which is precisely the name in German for a system of writing of the same type as Chinese writing.

Thus, from a cultural point of view, modern logic is a sort of syncretic system. Somehow, like Japanese culture, this culture of modern logic seems to extract a sort of force from its combination of form-oriented thinking and symbolic language.

From the perspective of mathematics, we can better assess the role of the symbolic language. What happens if we abandon this language? Well, this is precisely what is done in books that present in popular form a mathematical discovery. The idea is that there is a gain in accessibility. The paradox is that what you get is either a sort of (non-technical) philosophical discussion or a rather difficult book. Symbols do facilitate the contact with the ideas of mathematics. Without them the best part of mathematics is lost and even popular books have to resort to the symbolic language. Their reasonable mission seems not to eliminate the symbolic language, but to make it understandable as a language.

Ancient peoples used the symbolic systems that we called semantic writing and this might even have a connection with their ability to explore new cultural routes. There were researchers that went even further with their speculative hypotheses. Karl Faulmann has argued that, in a very remote epoch, the spoken language was poor and unclear; humans had to resort to images, i.e. symbolic writing systems, in order to make their ideas clear. This resembled the use of gestures. \ 105\

If symbolic language is so important, why Europe rather than China is the place where we find the origins of modern science and mathematics?

The answer might not be that simple, but one thing seems certain. Modern science has a theoretical kernel. This distinguishes the science that flourishes in Europe since 1600 from the science of other cultures. Some authors attribute this to specific philosophical options. \ 106\ According to this view, modern empirical science took the way of talking with nature in the language of mathematics.

Technological discoveries also had their role. The existence of watches and all the mechanics of the watches made possible the existence of good measuring instruments. Without all these techniques it is impossible to test empirical hypotheses.

Religion also had its say. The world is the work of God and when the Reform brings to light the idea that there is a direct dialogue between man and God, then it made sense to investigate nature as a work of God. And no Church, i.e. system of institutionalized dogmas, stood between man and God.

But all this is not necessarily connected with just one culture. It simply happened in Europe and nowhere else. It might have happened differently.

There was science in China too, but it was developed in a different manner. \ 107\

Scientism, however, is a specific European product. \ 108\ Scientism tends to strike out the very idea of culture as formulated here. Its aim is to organize society according to a rational pattern. It resorts to a plan, which is a procedure, a series of instructions for building a society.

The idea of a theory of culture developed here is that we see the others acting. We try, as the superanthropologist, to find out the rule of the process, the definition that lies behind the process. There is however no such definition or rule when the process is more complex. We weave the web of culture as a side effect of this search for a rule that does not exist.

Scientism pretends that it had found the rule. The others have to follow it. There is no need for search; there is no room for underdetermination and multiple routes. \ 109\

The European science is the result of a search for abstract form-oriented theories. This path was taken by Europeans and not by others. It was in the beginning the side effect of the capacity to work with forms. But, in a later stage, we see the triumph of syncretism, the use of symbolic language and a return to what was a quite ancient technique of supplementing the spoken language with a powerful written language.

Globalization is connected nowadays with information. America felt threatened when the atomic bomb and the rockets combined great destruction, speed and long range of action. But what was indeed important was the knowledge that was necessary for building the devices.

Famine is still a danger for many populations, but we realize more and more that the real problem is lack of knowledge and the way in which knowledge spreads.

Knowledge is also involved in social interactions. In this chapter, we leave, however, this aspect aside and concentrate upon what we consider to be the key aspect of technical globalization – the new technologies of the information.

When we wrote about European science, we also remarked the significance of the mechanical watch. \ 110\ Its mechanics was a paradigm for other mechanical devices. The main idea of the mechanical watch is to generate a uniform, smooth movement. Each moment of time is measured with the help of a mechanism that is able to repeat the same movement exactly in the same fashion as many times as needed.

The mainspring of the watch is the source of energy, but this energy is not sent directly to the hour hand and the minute hand. The movements generated by the mainspring are checked and balanced by the escapement mechanism. The escapement mechanism has its own spring and the escapement balance, fork wheel and pallet are regulating the movements stemming from the mainspring. Gears are transmitting all these movements, in an indirect way to the hands that indicate minutes and hours.

The clock is not only the paradigm of precision, but it is also an example of a deterministic mechanism. A world that functions as a watch is a very mechanical and deterministic world. All the ideas of coordination and synchronization are woven around the principles that underlie the construction of the mechanical watches.

The view of the political world has also been woven according to the same pattern. We may draw the following image of the work of the Founding Fathers of America: the mainspring is the will of the people; but this will is not transmitted directly to the hands that show directions in the elected assemblies. At the heart of the political machinery lies also a check and balance mechanism; it has to make all the movements of the hands uniform and predictable. \ 111\ The very idea of the rule of law is connected with this predictability of the law. \ 112\ Otherwise the law becomes arbitrary and it is a source of arbitrary government and a sword directed against individual liberty.

I cannot make out of a clock a writing machine. They both have gears and wheels, and springs, but I have no possibility to just type a text and transform the mechanical writing machine into a clock. I have this possibility with a computer. I can turn the computer into a typewriter or make out of it a drawing board.

The concept of computer is connected with the idea of a universal machine that computes any function that can be computed. \ 113\

The idea of a computing device existed however long before Turing (Pascal had it; Babbage's analytical engine anticipated it in the nineteenth-century England). It was Ada Lovelace who discovered then the extraordinary idea of a program. Her epoch-making discovery was to use loops in the program. She also had the idea that data should be only in binary form. Later, in the twentieth century, John von Neumann had the idea of putting the program itself in the memory of the computer and Grace Murray Hopper developed compilers (programs that translate from a language that can be understood by humans into the language of binary signs used in the computer). \ 114\

But, in order to grasp the extraordinary novelty of the Turing-Neumann concept, one should examine the diagram inserted here. \ 115\

Any such diagram is a bit misleading, because what is here at stake is a process, not a system of various devices. You have to figure out what the devices are doing in order to understand the process.

The process starts and ends with data (input and output data – circulated through the I/O subsystem). The data are stored in memory at an address (something like a P.O. Box address). The addresses can also be treated like data, if necessary (they also have a binary form). The data are processed by a subsystem called CPU (central processing unit; a microprocessor in the popular computers). The processor also has an internal memory. It has a unit for arithmetic and logic computations with data and a control unit (where are taken decisions; for example, IF a condition is fulfilled THEN do this ELSE do that).

If you compare the diagram of the mechanical watch and the diagram of the computer, you will see the crucial difference. The watch executes certain movements, as constrained by the internal mechanisms. In this sense, there is a program executed by the watch. Input comes from the spring. Its output is represented by the positions of the hands. And people think that the computer does the same thing, but in a more general fashion. This is not true. The computer is universal in a much stronger sense.

If you look to the diagram, you see that the program is stored in the memory of the system. Data and programs are stored in the same form, as binary sequences. At each address that is "inhabited", you will find a Mr. Date that, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, can also be Dr. Do. Mr. Date has data to transmit in the process (including addresses!). Dr. Do has instructions. All depends on the processor cycle: the processor fetches data, then fetches an instruction, executes it and sends the data into the memory.

Thus, the system can also process programs. It treats them as data. And this means that it can process its own program. This is not true for the mechanical watch.

Some critics objected to the syntactical character of the process. \ 116\ Others think that brain processes are really quantum processes. \ 117\ What the critics seem to miss is the wonderful reflective structure of the computer and what might be its yet unexplored possibilities. Anyway, here we are interested in two positive aspects: the new character of the technology and the globalization process that it fostered.

All these developments opened the way for new technologies. The possibilities offered by these new methods are still explored only partially. Today, for example, it would be possible to design clothes, bikes and many other things just for one individual in a very short time. The era of mass production is over. It is also possible to have books in electronic forms that are changed constantly by their author. I just go and print the latest version or even I might get a version that suits my own desires or interests. And I can do this in any corner of the world, through a global communication network.

The key word when we talk about globalization is information. The word lacks probably a very precise definition, if we want for example to catch a semantic dimension of information too. This is not important: we do not look for a definition, we look for a problem. The problem can be easily stated.

The computer, as soon as it is connected with millions of other computers, becomes a tool for travelling. It takes only a fraction of the time I would need with planes, cars and so on to have a look at the list of books in the Library of Congress if I just turn the Internet connection on.

I still like my books on the shelves and the Library of my University, but while I am writing this book I can go and look for information in Japan, Europe or the United States and many other places. The world looks really like one big village now.

What are the obstacles in front of me on the Internet? Potentially everybody could be connected to the Internet, but the number of languages I can master is limited. And the problem of understanding other cultures becomes very real. It is no more the problem of a few anthropologists. You may be confronted with it at the next corner.

Computer programs that translate are still very rough tools. By no means can they replace human judgement. Communication is universal. You can send all the pieces of information you want. But, in other corners of the world, their meaning looks very particular. To make sense of it is as formidable a task as the tasks that face the superanthropologist.

What answer would Kant give to our question if we ask him what he meant when he used a certain term in the Critique of Pure Reason? Kant is immortal only in the sense that he left us the product of his thinking. The only supplementary thing that we can do is to consult his notes or his own comments and so on and guess how did he arrive to a certain idea. He did not leave his thinking as a process.

Nowadays, right on the corner, there is another idea. You can weave a book as a web page: make a lot of connections, put in the book even variants. I still have to write classical books, because I am judged from a professional point of view, according to classical standards. And, to be honest, I do not know if I am able to write this new type of books in a really innovative fashion, making out of them something that did not exist before and cannot exist under the form of a classical book.

But there is another, much more radical possibility. It is still a fantastic one, but I can contemplate it. This is the possibility to write a program that would transmit not the products of your thoughts, but would function as a new stage of your thinking. The process in the computer would continue your thinking process. Interacting with this kind of program would be the same thing as interaction with the person that created the program.

We have no pictures of persons who lived not so long ago. We have no movies showing the movements of ancient dancers and no records of remarkable voices of not so a distant past. Programs that would be as new stages in the thinking of the same person would be however extremely different. Globalization can take a temporal dimension as well, not only a spatial one as it happens now.

Particular cultures and particular cultural meanings were traditionally connected to places. It was only the migration of whole populations that took to another place the cultural particularities. Then, probably, history saw the advent of the missionaries. These were spreading religions across different places. Scholars also formed communities across borders and shared knowledge and convictions.

Communication is much faster today and these communities have other possibilities of sharing information in the age of the computer. Any particularism can spread over a net of computers without being connected to a specific place.

Whole enterprises of one kind or another can be developed without bringing the individuals into the same place. Maybe the most remarkable example is the Linux operating system. \ 118\ Operating systems are very sophisticated computer programs. This one was developed and still is developed by individuals who communicate among them on the Internet. There is no central institute or organization that puts together their contributions. They also form a sort of cultural community. They share the conviction that the sources of the programs, i.e. the text of the program as it is written in a programming language that can be understood by humans, should be accessible to everyone. This is in definite contrast with the status of the programs from the famous corporation Microsoft. Microsoft programs are not open source programs. You cannot see how it is written the operating system Windows.

The question is how strong will be this tendency to build communities across borders. This might be the tendency of the future and lead to the splitting of what used to be the body of one nation or a vertically integrated community.

From this point of view, if you are a very talented programmer, for example, it does not matter that you live in India. \ 119\ Your main job might be to write programs for American firms.

Though all the process that we have described is still at the level of cooperation in technical fields, nothing prevents the tendency of developing other types of such communities. As we have seen already, different computer operating systems are connected with very different values. The difference is not only a matter of technology and the technical side might be the least important one after all. The difference is cultural.

We have written about a rather fantastic sort of new immortality. There is however a very palpable new life of ancient traditions that otherwise might have a dramatic fate.

The number of those who studied in European schools the Greek classical texts in Greek decreased dramatically in the twentieth century. But Greek texts seem to have now a new chance on the Internet. Classical texts, dictionaries and all sort of tools are accessible on the Internet in a matter of minutes. The existence somewhere of a strong community interested in that tradition means that much weaker communities or isolated individuals spread across the world have also access to a rich information.

Finding information, not so long ago, was much more difficult. It was even more difficult to find the connection with lost traditions. Now, traditions have a new chance. They will live as computer programs. If we manage to find sufficiently good systems of storage of data, in the future, there will be available an incredible amount of information.

The possibility to investigate electronic texts and to compare translations is another chance of traditional texts. It is easier to search the texts for clues that otherwise might be unobservable. The new techniques are like a powerful microscope. What was dead comes back to life. Information that was lost may be recovered. We may know who wrote or did not write a text. We may compile huge indexes and dictionaries, as it was never possible before.

Usage of the natural language or translation from a natural language into another natural language is not part of the daily interaction with computers.

Why is natural language so intractable? There was moderate optimism concerning the possibility of computer translation from the very beginning. \ 120\ At the beginning of the seventies came the first radical criticisms. \ 121\ Understanding natural language seemed to be a closed chapter.

In the same year in which Dreyfus rejected the idea of artificial reason, Terry Winograd published his research on the understanding of natural language. \ 122\ An important part of his results was, however, the limitation of the usage of natural language at microworlds. Winograd himself, at the beginning of the eighties recommended great prudence. The analysis of natural language is possible, but there are certain well-defined limits. \ 123\

New research done during the eighties and nineties emphasized the significance of neural networks. This approach tries to model the brain itself. There are spectacular results, but a decisive breakthrough seems to be still far away. Recent work in the field of artificial intelligence emphasizes the unity between environment and man, which form in fact a dynamic system. The old philosophical ideas about an internal representation in the mind and a contrast between object and subject should be abandoned.

Natural language is connected with the way people think. We use it, for example, as an internal language, for internal dialogue. We analyze problems in natural language and develop solutions in natural language. That is why we have so many problems when it comes to the simulation of thought on computers.

Now, most computer books would tell you that computers do not think. The optimism of the fifties is over. But there is an ambiguity. What means that computers do not think? The hardware, of course, does not think. Left alone, it does nothing useful after all. Without software a computer is dead. Then the problem is the way programs are written.

Is it true that, in principle, no program will ever be able to think? Alan Turing answered no to this question. What we see is that no program thinks. There is a gap between the theoretical possibility of a program that thinks and the situation now. This is an enigma and is connected closely to the lack of understanding of the natural language. The reasons are probably to be found in aspects of the natural languages and culture that we are going to mention in the following chapter.

The diversity of the grammars of natural languages may seem a technical question for linguists and philosophers. It seems that this question has a minor significance for an investigation into the roots of cultural clashes. Think, however, about the proposal that seemed so reasonable to many, that of a universal language. What we gain is the possibility to communicate easily. What we lose might be our humanity. \ 124\

Bold hypotheses envisaged a deep connection between language, thought and culture. \ 125\ Other conjectures were build around the supposition of the existence of a universal grammar. \ 126\ It seems to us that there is another way out of both the search for specific categories of each language or group of languages and the quest for universal rules. There are no rules, implicit or explicit. What counts decisively is the attempt to follow non-existent rules. There are side effects of this attempt that lead to the web of culture.

Language and culture are indeed connected, but the connection is not the product of rules. The side effects are felt both in language and culture. Seen from this perspective, the diversity of grammars is nothing else but a symptom of these side effects of the quest for rules.

Everyone who learned one or more foreign languages knows rather well that indeed you try to learn, in the first stages, rules. After that, you do not think what rule are you going to follow.

The diversity of grammars is the diversity of solutions to communicative problems. The way in which people understand problems differs. The presuppositions they admit contrast both in the case of the problems and of the answers.

We have talked already about the multiple routings. The weaving of the web of culture does offer many possibilities, many routes. None of these routes has priority because there is no decisive evidence in favor of this or that route.

Now, I would like to tackle the same question but under a different light. Why it is impossible to reduce all the religions to just one religion? The answer is rather baffling. The reduction is impossible because this would mean the adoption of a system of rules and the replacement of the accumulated side effects of looking for rules with rules.

Think, for example, that one of the rules of the universal religion would be that there is one and only one God. The problem with the adoption of this rule is not that it looks good only to Jewish, Christian or Muslim persons. The problem is that it is a rule. What get from the original religions is deeply tied to sacred texts in which you find the story of people trying to live in accord to the idea that there is only one God. If you tear this entire story nothing remains.

It is extremely difficult to stabilize languages and religions. Sometimes religious and linguistic stabilization is just one and the same kind of action. There are sacred texts defended by priests and the language of these texts is also considered sacred. No one has the right to touch either the texts or the language.

It is easy to see why it is difficult to stabilize language. Let us consider for a moment the following examples: (1) I go; (2) you go; (3*) she go; (4) we go; (5) they go. Do you understand example (3*). Of course, you. It is strange to say "she go", but anyone understands. After all, "you go" is worse: are we talking about one person or more than one person? So, we can manage with "she go". What prevents us from switching to "she go" is the fact that the example is strange. It is not usual. There is a cultural barrier against such talk.

We could also use verbal forms like "comed" or "weaved". The speller program underlies them immediately with red, but you and I, almost without effort, can make sense of these forms. We are prevented by culture from using a "regular English".

I am not at all convinced that "regular English" would be really regular. When we regulate English we try to follow some hypothetical rules. They seem to be however very local. Why not add more rules? Make the language even richer! I feel that the language is bound to be irregular from one point of view or another. Why not to impose a dual number? Or, why not to change to a system similar to that of Hungarian and say "two ball" instead of "two balls"?

When one thinks about institutions that try to keep language untouched by other languages almost inevitably points to the French Academy. In France there is a fight for the purity of the language. The very existence of this effort shows how fragile is the stability. There are a lot of pressures that lead towards movement and instability.

Rules of traditional grammars are nothing but efforts to erect barriers in front of the change or simply to impose uniformity to recalcitrant persons. It is only cultural imperialism. Everyone finds her or his own culture superior and tends to consider the others unruly. They have to be governed by strict rules.

To stabilize religions it is even more difficult. American English, without a French Academy, is rather stable, but religious innovation is widespread. \ 127\ If we go back in time, we see epochs like that of the Reform in Europe, when religion is on movement. Old compact religion breaks down. Fracture is the result of new quests and leads to clashes.

All the movements in the cultureplates that we have mentioned are the result of underdetermination and multiple routing. The simplest model of multiple routing is a bifurcation. Think about the situation in the case of the function "[ ": it can be just as "+" or it can be something else.

The nature of the culture as side effect involves innumerable choices in such situations. The decisions taken in such situations are choices because there are no rules behind the scene. If rules would have been involved, then no talk about choices was possible. Genuine choices are possible in a world of cultures, not in world governed by rules, implicit or explicit.

Choice in such a context is not a two-stage process (first, choose a rule, then follow it). The act is the choice. This is well known by economists. They talk about preferences (i.e. taking one route rather than the other) being revealed by action. \ 128\ We may talk about the "agenda of an individual" as list of preferences, but this list is generated by actions. It is not constructed mentally before action.

Though it might seem rather difficult to accept this point, it becomes much more plausible if we think about it in non-behaviorist perspective. There is consciousness connection, but this is the product of action. It is not a way of preparing for action.

The individual agenda as an analytical tool is however very helpful. When you read this line you act. You try to make sense, analyze and then judge the value of what is written here. This sets the agenda. You may say that all this is non-sense, that you have an obligation to read it and that this all, but you have placed the action of reading this text, in this moment, before other actions. That is why we can talk about the structure of the agenda.

The individual agenda is like a list. The action on top is the most preferred. The next on list is the second best option and so on. The individual in action constructs the agenda. There are three basic structures of the agenda: (1) on the list there are only the individual's own priorities; (2) the individual integrates on the list priorities of other individuals; (3) the individual sets as objectives of her/his agenda the prevention of the actions of others.

Each individual develops an agenda of priorities. Setting the agenda in action opens a series of opportunities for cooperation between individuals. The simplest form of cooperation is exchange: I do something for you and you do something for me. We exchange goods and services.

Exchange is based on very simple principles. I have to respect your property, you have to respect mine. \ 129\ There is no need for you to put my preferences on your agenda. We just look on our agendas and see if what we get is going to be put above what we lose.

The most intricate form of cooperation is the cooperation among friends, members of the same family, lovers. This time cooperation involves an important change of agendas: friends put the priorities of each other on their own lists. They try to help. They act as altruists. \ 130\ Reciprocity may be expected, but it is not always the basis of this kind of cooperation. Lovers may act without expecting or receiving something in return.

From the point of view of culture, the most intricate case of the culture problem is how not to look as a stranger in very small groups. These groups have the most complex culture plates. Think about a spy (not born in the spied country): it is not easy to pretend that you are not a foreigner, but it is almost impossible to fool the members of a family.

As in the famous story of the false Martin, an individual might have some arrangement with the family and be accepted for a while by the local community. All ends when he behaves as stranger. For example, tries to sell land to non-members of the community.

Why we cannot go further with altruism towards the nation or the whole world? The barrier is the consciousness. The consciousness connection works poorly in the great communities. Humans are finite beings. It is impossible to develop an understanding of a huge variety of situations and relations. An altruistic relation strains the consciousness.

Now, according to this argument the culture web is thick in the small cultureplates and thinner as we advance towards bigger plates. No wonder that rules, explicit or implicit, regulate exchange or any form of cooperation among greater numbers of individuals. It would be curious to look for such rules in small communities.

All that we have said until now involves a fundamental presupposition, the presupposition that the members of the group are not cooperating in order to prevent others from acting as they choose. We will call "negative cooperation" this kind cooperation. Very simple examples of such cooperation could be the prohibition of alcohol, of certain clothes or of the lack of certain clothes.

The typical relation of this kind is the relation between individual enemies. We can use, in this case, the phrase "negative cooperation" only in order to designate a limit-concept. But most of the time a group is involved; the members of the group cooperate; the result is limitation of the actions of others.

Obviously, negative cooperation may be sheer aggression or simply defense against aggression. But all this is interesting here only from the point of view of culture. From this perspective, the main aspect is the identification of the stranger or foreigner. The cultural problem is solved in reverse; the individual or the group identifies the nonnative, the alien. It is rejection that plays the most important role, not integration.

The passion for the destruction of what is wrong is the salient feature of many religious or social movements. "Wrong" is here a very imprecise, cultural concept in the strongest sense of the word. There is no definite notion of wrong, but the destructive passion is burning.

Politics is also often colored by cultural conflict. Economic or social interests are more or less defined. There is, in the case of a clash of social and economic interests, ample room for agreement, for rules to be followed. But when the dispute is cultural things are of a different nature. It is difficult to find a common language when, for example, one side looks for a law that is natural, not made by humans and the other thinks that law is the expression of the will of the many. \ 131\

The key of cultural clashes lies in the asymmetry of cultural integration and cultural clash.

In order to solve the problem of cultural integration the individual must make a complex effort: master a foreign language, often change religion, change dress, food, shelter style, maybe calendar and many other items. Even if she is not a genius of anthropology, still she or he must develop a broad understanding of an entirely different world.

If I have to live now in a Balkan village, it would not be only my talent for foreign languages that would be strained. If I am really wishing to become a peasant, I have to learn and understand much more. Changes in my consciousness are bound to be very significant, especially if I have to forget my former life.

On the other hand, if I just "have" to despise the propensity of some Balkan villagers to support nationalistic movements or simply to make war, then the changes are far less complex. And rejection is global.

Integration is local and complex. Rejection is simple and global. The best example that I have in mind is that of an American lady telling me how awful are the Russians. I asked her how many Russians does she know, but it resulted that she ignored "details". Mutatis mutandis, the same is true for many intellectuals from Eastern Europe. They reject even Russian literature, maybe Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy too.

It is surprising to see how people can reject, for example, books that they have never read. Somebody might reject the Koran, the other the Bible.

There is a sort of easiness in clash. It is then surprising that clashes are not even more frequent. What softens conflict?

The answer seems to be since ancient times the capacity of certain cultures to attract new adherents, to integrate even conquerors. \ 132\ In different forms globalization is an old story. Greek classical culture irradiated over all Europe. It was a challenge for many minds and a source for intellectual illumination. Thus the passion of the individuals for the cultivation of the mind transcended neglect and spiritual laziness. We must go beyond the sheer easiness of rejection if we want to understand the roots of cultural conflict.

The view according to which the mind is structured by culture and social context has been called "the Standard Social Science Model". \ 133\ The main problem of this model is its relativism. If relativism is true, then there is no hope to identify the machinery of the mind. There is no such thing. Mind is structured by social and cultural forces and is different in different cultures.

I shall not concentrate however on this main problem of the model. There is also another aspect of the problem, connected with culture itself and social life in general: relativism has no use of universal moral and justice norms too. I will look at this problem, hoping that it is possible to solve it without destroying the good intuitions connected with the idea of cultureplates. There might be some similar solution in the case of the mind too: universal machinery of the mind combined with the effects of the cultureplates as the products of the exploration of different routes.

The individual who chooses illustrates the human condition. The individual has to take one route and this is, for her or for him, the best route. Others take different routes. It is a dramatic effort to raise above all these endeavors and say that they all have the value of tries.

On the other hand, people simply do not keep promises, lie or take what belongs to others (cooperate in a negative way). This is a direct source of conflict.

Summing up, conflicts are unavoidable in a world of choices where there is no pre-established harmony. Conflicts are problems. They are not problems because the course of human cooperation deviates from a predefined route. They are problems because they prevent positive cooperation. Men cannot live in pure negative cooperation. The only acceptable negative cooperation is that of preventing primary negative cooperation. It is a form of secondary negative cooperation directed exclusively against primary negative cooperation.

Each conflict gives rise to a case, though maybe not in a court of law. I will use the word "case" in a somewhat larger and modified meaning than in law textbooks. A case, in the sense used here, has three components: (1) a problem; (2) a solution; (3) the arguments. Outside courts, the third component is mainly implicit. However, the arguments, whatever their content might be, are important if the solution is going to be extended to other cases. The arguments clarify the problem and the principles involved in the solution. \ 134\

The most interesting cases are, however, the difficult cases. \ 135\ The difficult cases involve a choice among incompatible principles. The arguments, in such cases, have to point not only to the closest precedent, but to show why one should prefer a principle to another principle. Such cases are an illustration of the deep role of culture.

It comes a moment when anyone who is approaching culture from the point of view of choice, underdetermination and multiple routing has to face the question of relativism. It seems that all solutions to human problems are acceptable, from "one point of view or another". Relativity would justify a lot of things, including the burning of books, for example.

In fact, I do not believe in relativism under the form of different solutions to the same kind of problems "in different cultural contexts". First of all, I doubt that there is anything like "culture" or "cultural context" as an independent ontological entity. There are only individuals. This point has been stressed here, but has not yet been exploited against relativism.

Now, if we try to identify the problem of relativism, we see almost immediately that its core is indeed the difference between solutions in similar cases. All cases are individualized, but we may find similarities, analogies. Very different solutions in rather similar cases strike us as unjust.

What we want to show is that it can be constructed a chain of similar cases across cultureplates. This simply means that a chain of similar solutions can exist in cases that involve individuals who are cultivating very different cultural paths.

A solution in a case means that in all similar cases a certain behavior is prohibited. Indeed, the solution, if we extend it, becomes a rule. \ 136\ In these conditions the solution is a rule for a very simple reason: it offers a standard against which one can evaluate possible ways of action.

Is there anything in "culture" that can prevent the existence of rules in this sense? First, difficult cases do not prevent the existence of a rule. The difficulty lies in finding a solution in the first place. All is about the route that should be taken, not about the extension of an existent solution. Second, as long as we are on the same cultureplate, the solution of the problem of culture encourages conformity, not the breaking of the rule. All is about not looking strange and the strangest thing is precisely to ignore a precedent.

Now, the greatest problem is when we cross boundaries. It seems obvious that we cannot take across a cultural boundary all the solutions that might have been adopted by others. But all that we have to show is that there are solutions that can be extended across cultural boundaries.

When we talk about extending a solution, i.e. recognizing a rule, we direct our attention towards the arguments that are illuminating the transition from one case to another. If arguments are seen, however, as linguistic entities or relations among linguistic entities, then it is true that cultural diversity might play a dissolving role. Translation itself becomes problematic.

Arguments involve, in cases, individuals and their advantages. All the individuals try to get out of their actions the greatest advantage. In cases, they collide. The solution comprises a remedy for those who cannot obtain what otherwise would be their advantage because their tentative to obtain an advantage is frustrated by others. But, as we have shown, advantages are revealed by actions, not words. All that you have to transit across the cultural border are actions, not opinions.

After all, actions are what really back solutions of the cases. No one just tells thieves that they are wrong. We punish them. This is the language that anyone understands.

All the problem of justice is how to apply punishments in a non-arbitrary way. This is solved by the very existence of rules. The linguistic coat is auxiliary. It is good for storing and retrieving information about cases, but the real point is the elimination of arbitrariness.

Think now that the superanthropologist had crossed a cultural border and is kidnapped by members of the local tribe. Can we just say that this a local habit that should not be judged by "our" standards? Did the superanthropologist suddenly lose the right to be left alone? Practically, should we prevent any action that would free the superanthropologist and punish the kidnappers?

The action of the local people is an instance of what we called primary negative cooperation. Now, if this is taken to be part of normal cultural exploration of unknown routes, then the whole idea of human culture becomes a non-sense. Mind and consciousness would be crushed by the sheer weight of arbitrary actions against persons.

In the last instance, to permit actions of the type described about means to give despots a free hand, so that they can destroy thinking. And this is, practically, what despots really do. The result is destruction of cultures.

Institutionally established culture has a very simple nature: it tries to organize some form of positive cooperation. Positive cooperation, in this case, is not anymore the result of the choice of the individuals who are involved, but is an institutional choice. There is a rule that tells you what you have to do.

Compulsory schools are a very good example of this kind of established positive cooperation. Another example is the language of the state, i.e. a language that has norms established by the state. Both are part of the great project of the Enlightenment.

When the tension is diverted through channels like war or deception the problem is the explosion and the dangers for the whole communities caused by physical and many times institutional destruction. When everybody, metaphorically speaking, "has to use the same language" it is the mind that is altered.

Having just one language in the state is facile for the bureaucrats. It makes little sense from the point of view of the individuals. They might learn more than one language and solve their problems easily (as happens in Switzerland). Thus, the individuals rather lose an opportunity to open their minds, if they have to speak only one language. The pure damage is caused by uniformity.

Paradoxically, who has to learn at school another language than the family language, according to the theory developed here, has something to gain; the mind is stimulated by the intricate effort of adaptation to another language. Obviously, what the person really loses is the opportunity to develop a different culture.

Has anyone the right to force others to learn a language? The answer is negative. This is simply an instance of primary negative cooperation: others are forced not to do something. More than this, they are also pushed, obliged to adopt a form of positive cooperation, different from the positive cooperation that they would have adopted otherwise.

This is not war, but it is a form of culture conflict. It surfaces sometimes in seemingly innocuous forms; for example, under the form of the interdiction of the use of a foreign language in names of businesses or advertisement.

Cultural war is ubiquitous and we may start to revise the initial bracketing of culture itself as a source of conflict. We tried to avoid the impression that the argument leads to the conclusion that the internal movements of cultureplates generate culturequakes. It does not. But, to detest the language and the culture of others, to try to prevent others from practicing their own culture is and it will always be part of the broader game of culture. What we tried to emphasize is that this kind of conflict, all by itself, does not generate large scale conflict or, even less, culturequakes – major moments of abandonment of whole ways of life.

There is also another type of institutions. Their characterization starts from the idea of the unavoidable presence of conflict. Institutions are also frames for the non-arbitrary solution of conflicts.

We have shown the possibility of building a chain of cases across culture. This could be, after a certain time, a new international case law, based upon the rejection of primary negative cooperation among individuals.

The role of institutions in this sense is to avoid major conflicts. Justice on the scale of humanity could have taken the form, for example, of the arrest and trial of former communist officials. This could also be coupled with a break of the flow of economic help for the former nomenklatura that still leads many of the once communist countries.

All these developments, on a larger scale, can absorb conflict and soften tensions across cultural borders. They would give individuals a greater sense of confidence and the possibility to follow a broader spectrum of cultural paths.

All does not imply the existence of a unified global state. This evolution would immediately raise the problem of a major culturequake, as it creates a great strain between global institutions and local cultures. The suggestion is, on the contrary, that cross-cultural justice can function on the background of many cultural communities.

The metaphorical contrast is suggested in the title of the chapter. The title also implies that there are two types of modern freedom.

Paris can be the paradigm of the town built as one single building. It is a huge common house. The streets are regular. The height of the buildings is proportional to the width of the streets. The harmony is extended to the whole city of breathtaking beauty. To the geometrical urban structure corresponds political geometry, with its order and centralized structure. Inside this centralized structure individuals are free and there is a culture of diversity.

The main disadvantage of the centralized, regular structure is its periodic instability. This trait becomes an even greater danger if the model is transposed on a bigger scale.

If you are from Europe and go on the other side of the Atlantic to New York, you may think that Big Apple is like Paris. In a way it is, but the main point is that America is not New York. The paradigm here is the dispersion of small communities. The value that we feel in the air is that of the rural freedom. Individuals who move constantly and look for new opportunities exploit the great spaces. Free farmers contrast sharply with peasants from other countries.

The American lesson seems to be that structural dispersion of communities should be coupled with universal justice. Slavery almost brought the system to disaster. The conflict showed that justice, as non-arbitrary solution of conflicts, should function across cultures, be they the American South and the American North or other cultures.

Now, at the scale of the whole world the dilemma is the following: centralization with instability (caused by tension between institutions and cultures) versus dispersion with instability (caused by arbitrary solution of cases). The way out is to combine dispersion of many cultures with cross-cultural justice.

Dispersion softens conflicts. Even if there is turmoil in some part, the dispersed structure will not transform it in immediate global conflict. Cultural conflict will also exist, but if established cultures are eliminated and justice is cross-cultural, then conflict will not spread.