Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
I posit that communication is prerequisite to human consciousness. The two go hand-in-hand, with each always found deeply entangled with the other. For two creatures to communicate with each other, they must fulfil three prerequisites. First is abstract thought; the ability to imagine a thing which is not physically in front of you, without this ability communication becomes worthless. This is the "substance" of communication. The second is language; the system through which the said abstract thought is passed on to another creature. This is the "medium" of communication, and can take on basically any form (verbal/pictoral/gestural/etc). The third is a "dictionary" to convert the thought into a form conveyable through the selected language. This is the "symbol". To communicate we must first conjure up the substance within ourselves. We must then translate this substance into a symbol, and finally this symbol must be passed to the recipient through the selected medium. In order for this method to work, both parties must be "conscious", that is both capable of abstract thought and able to distinguish things such as the "self", "other selfs" and "objects" apart from the "world". Don't misunderstand me here. I am not saying that consciousness is a mere biological tool for communication, rather that communication is the activity through which we prove that we are in fact conscious. Without communication consciousness is just internal hallucinations akin to an animal's dream or the random convulsions of the northern lights, so you cannot separate the state of "consciousness" from the action of "communication".
Both concepts are so entwined with one other that it can often be difficult to even distinguish them. "Self-reflection" may be understood to be internal communication, and impulsive thoughts may be said to simply be words left unspoken. I recently watched this video about Julian Jaynes' "Theory of the Bicameral Mind", which hypothesises that prehistoric man had quite separate cranial lobes which could have independent thoughts simultaneously. Pre-bronze age peoples used this "second mind" to guide their actions (akin to the idea of shoulder angels/demons, or as Julian Jaynes puts it an "external god"). Over time this back-and-forth between the two lobes manifested as "consciousness" as an outcome of developing deeper communication between the two parts, leading to us now understanding them as one "whole" and being "fully conscious" as a species. I recommend the video, and although it left me with more questions than answers, it is leading me to read more on the topic (which I'm sure I'll write about again in the future if I continue to find it interesting). But one initial complaint I had with the theory is its dependency on recursive definitions, especially how it evades ever tackling what exactly "consciousness" is. Taking into account the series of intellectual developments described by Jaynes, it would seem that "consciousness" itself is simply the internal version of the definition of "communication" I used in paragraph one: thought>symbol>medium. In this case the "medium" is very difficult to understand as it happens within our biological brain (assumedly), somewhere I am unfortunately not equipped to enter into (basically neural nets?). But the initial process of mapping abstract thought onto "symbols" is one which readers of Plato or Jung might recognise as an emergence of "forms" (or perhaps indeed the revelation of a pre-existing world of forms into the mortal mind). These forms can be used as nodes around which to approximate a definition of an abstract thought, which can then be used as a token to either retain "intra-mind" or pass on to another person via "inter-mind" communication. I will use some examples later on to try and explain this idea with more clarity. But first we must talk about the Tower of Babel.
As normal men we are separated from heaven by the bonds of our mortality. We are creatures of flesh and blood, but with a soul of divine inheritance. We have an imprint of "the truth" within us; which, through our unique connection to the "Logos", grants us "rationality" and "self-consciousness". However we are burdened by "original sin", which trades a full communion with the "Logos" for the prize of "free will". This means that we are unbound by "natural law" and therefore able to act in contravention of it, unlike any other creature. For example a squirrel cannot commit "sin", for every action he takes is in accordance with the laws of nature. Therefore as humans we do not come pre-packaged with an inherent understanding of "the truth", just with the tools required to reach it. When God struck down the Tower of Babel he confused the languages of mankind. Before this (assumedly) men could perfectly communicate their thoughts to each other using the original "tongue of God", but afterwards even this connection to the divine was cut off, and the symbols we use to communicate have slowly drifted off from their original meanings (we see the return of this gift at the Feast of Pentecost in Acts, and as some Yanks believe in the hysterical jittering of witless housewives in suburban America).
At some fundamental layer, "society" itself is a framework contrived for us to build up a sensible common dictionary of symbols for use in communicating, an attempt to approximate the true "forms". Each "symbol" sits as a point somewhere within a many-dimensional field with thousands of characteristics that allow us to categorise each new object we encounter into an appropriate (yet always approximate) symbol-box. If you see a new type of chair you will still be (usually) able to understand it as a "chair" once you have worked out its purpose. In the "tongue of God" this process would be perfect and immediate, with every possible "thing" perfectly fitting into a symbolic slot like a child's playset. But the Curse of Babel means we do occasionally run into difficulties. For instance when I first came across a Japanese "nashi" fruit as a child st the shops with my family. We bought one and all tasted it, each being totally unable to decide whether it was an "apple" or a "pear", because it so perfectly bisected the two definitions like a broom standing on its tip, unstable but teetering on falling into one category or the other (we eventually decided on the moniker "papple"). Similar arguments about the boundary between green and blue are abundant. But these issues are of course society-dependent. In Norwegian there are 8+ words for "snow", just as in English there are a similar amount of words for "rain": our fallen tongues adapt to their environment to attempt to emulate the perfect language (unless you're French who have more pride than sense on this issue). This is one of the main reasons English has flourished as the lingua-franca: it is adaptable to no end and is more than willing to separate pronunciation from orthography to retain etymology (say that 10 times fast).
Another phenomena in the development of language has been the strange yet occasional collapse of the "form-instantiation separation boundary": when a chink opens up the wall of heaven which allows a form to realise itself in the mortal world as a symbol in and of itself. In English when this occurs we traditional denote it by using the definite article "the" and/or capitalising it like a proper noun. We understand the notion of a god, for example, but the world also understands there is (the) God. The world is full of various kings, but when we talk about "the King" it is the British Monarch. Just as "the President" is the American one and "the Pope" is the Vatican one (yes there are apparently other popes). Other forms have come to align themselves near-perfectly with "the catholic truth" too such as "the North", or "the Moon", even though we can also talk about lesser versions such as in "to the north", or "the moons of Jupiter".
If there is indeed any truth in the notion that this whole experiment of civilisation is in order to develop cleaner ways of communication, it leads us to the uncomfortable notion that it may all be in opposition to the will of God. The purpose of man, as I see it insofar as we have a purpose at all, is to use our free-will and rationality to live in accordance with natural law despite our separation from the Logos. And if so, then how do cities and complex civilisations help us achieve this? The fox needs no high-minded philosophical societies or light-rail transit networks in order to be a fox. Why do we need these things to be human? Maybe the grunting savage is a better man than us, or maybe its the silent hermits. But such misanthropic thoughts are abeyed in an instant whenever those "chinks" I mentioned earlier appear in the firmament and the light of heaven shines through to reveal the beauty which lies in human works. If the world I described last week (which apparently nobody can even read) was "beautiful yet terrible", our civilisation may be the opposite, "terrible yet beautiful".
