Beyond the realm of imagination

IT is beyond my imagination.” One has heard the sentence innumerable times, from all sorts and on all occasions. Of course, no one means it literally, for no one really knows all that is within one's imagination. When I say 'no one', I mean the ordinary mortals such as this writer.

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A Shakespeare obviously knows that imagination can cause rolling a poetic gaze back and forth between the earth and the skies and can fix that apparently intangible “name and local habitation” for even an airy nothing, which the likes of me can, no matter what, shall ever dare do.

The bard's idea of the eyes rolling, the poetic gaze clasping, all that is there between “here” and “elsewhere” is fascinating. It is so as we normally tend take practically all that is “out there” for granted. For us, in our everyday-ness of life, air and water, light and darkness, height and depth, motion and poise, the earth and the stars are all there as if there was never a time when they were not there, nor shall there be time when these will have vanished all.

When my daughter learnt in her school about the concept of light years, she asked me the date of a star. It took me quite a while to grasp what she was saying. She had to struggle to explain her half-baked question, often herself forgetting what she initially wanted to ask. But, finally, when I understood what it was, I was a bit taken aback. Simply put, her question was: “If you see a star that is approximately 300 light years away, the ray of light entering your eyes would have begun its journey 300 years ago. In that case, when the ray meets your eye, does it belong to ‘today’ or  to a time that is three-centuries’ old?”

Human limitations 
Though I understood the question, I was not able to answer it well. I said something like,    “but are not both the times valid?” I knew well that neither of them is really valid. For ‘Time’ as we understand, the human time, is not a natural phenomenon. It is but a convenient figment of the human imagination. Ditto for space, perhaps. For, the space that the human eye sees and the space that the “seeing sense” of millions of other species are so radically divergent, that any objective measure of space is no less than a joke.

 If such a stark view of the human perception of space and time is taken, it follows that the human imagination that constructs our idea of space and the human memory that constructs our idea of time are both a piece of fiction. They are a kind of a dream that envelopes all our life, being and consciousness.

Unlike the poets, scientists, of course, have warned us of how wishful the human idea of the world around us has been. They tell us that it is only since we like to read all life in temporal terms, in terms of a past and a present, that we tend to think that the Big Bang is an occurrence that “has been”.  Had we  humans not used language to articulate the idea — language that is spread over the past tense and the present tense — we would have spoken of the Big Bang as an on-going, ever present phenomenon, with us as being right in the middle of it.
Language and perceptions

By the way, in human time, how long back did this happen? About 14 billion years ago. It is about 4.5 billion years ago that the system of planets that we like to call “ours” settled down to its routine of revolutions and rotations, its gravitational pulls and pushes, balance and fairly predictable motion.

It is a little less than 2.5 billion years that matter started turning into life, later developing consciousness. And it is just about a quarter million years that an animal like us became distinctly like us. This animal, the supposedly wisest and decidedly erect, homo sapicus sapien, picked up the language skill barely 70,000 years ago, creating tenses — to grasp time and measures of distance- to grasp space. Most of the ideas of what the cosmos is, its genesis, progression and stability have not been much older than 2,000 or  3,000 years, and the scientific propositions — which too come in human language and thought and,  therefore, are conditioned by the limits of human ability to express — are probably not over a few centuries old.

Given that the human brain is constantly evolving and, in the process, has been acquiring untold powers to comprehend very complex realities, it is but to be expected that it forces the human language/s and thought to go beyond the established logic of tense and distance, beyond memory and imagination, beyond time and space, so that a far more complex multi-frame reality can be comprehended and expressed by humans through whatever means they will in future.

This is of course no science-fantasy. It is the minimum logic of the evolutionary process of which the homo sapiens have been a crucially important link. The signs of the shift are aplenty.  And the shift this time is not just a matter of realigning various fields of knowledge and re-drawing of  disciplines. This one cannot even be fully described by the expression “an epistemic shift” as was the one during which the fields of knowledge started following the Newtonian world view in place of the Ptolemaic or the previously held Aristotelian world view. It is not the kind of theoretical shift that involved the replacement of the Sankhya by the Nyaya school of darshana. This time round, it appears, the very basis of knowledge is getting radically transformed and refigured.

Neurologists explain the current shift in man's cognitive processes by pointing to the rapidly changing ways in which the brain  stores and analyses sensory perceptions as well as information. Linguists have raised alarm about the sinking fortunes of natural languages through which human communication has taken place over the last seven millennia. They have started noticing that the use of man-made memory-chips fed into intelligent machines make heavy dents in the human ability to remember and even the tense patterns of natural languages.

Technologists, particularly those astride the leading glory of technology—the ICT — have been talking of network communities as a substitute for civilisations. All in all, there is excitement in the air, and there is alarm in the minds. This is so on all fronts of knowledge, in all aspects of social organisations and all branches of human experience.
Collectively,  for all nations, all ethnic and cultural groups of humans, the vision of a life well beyond our imagination has started appearing on the horizon even if it has not become fully manifest, making mockery of all that the human brain and mind have so far held as being natural and permanent.

In the new experience of the world waiting for all of us, memory as we have so far used is expected to be of little use, and imagination as we have so far exercised is predicted to get entirely transformed. The homo sapiens, it is believed, moving out of memory, imagination and even language, are poised to enter a post-human phase of the natural evolution.

Image-based sysytem
Man and the intelligent machine, together, are expected to develop a new image-based system of communication, a new post-human and predominantly externalised memory and a sphere of imagination where multiple frames of existence seamlessly collide.

This image of the things to come— call it a utopia, call it a dystopia — is profoundly unnerving, not because it involves fundamental challenges to the things established; not also because our sense of beauty, ethics and truth will get entirely transformed, but because a lot many communities — ethnic, linguistic, cultural — and  innumerable groups on economic  fringes shall have to pay the cost of the transformation by having to face misery, deprivation and extinction.

Probably just as the Industrial Revolution and the associated rise of capitalism in European countries placed the traditional agrarian society at risk, giving rise to the long-drawn conflicts between labour and capital, this great transition facing us globally will create strife and, consequently, violence of an unprecedented order. This time too the post-human societies are likely to get divided between those with access to the digital and those without it. 
Already, some linguistic laboratories have started publishing lists of “digitally dead languages”, with over 98 per cent of Indian languages included in the list.  Already, the communities not networked are being described as “non-civil”. The economies of the world seem to have already resolved that the citizens without unique identities can be written off, like characters in Sadat Hassan Manto's stories, as the nowhere people.

In our excitement for the utopia of the “beyond imagination” life and world, it would be tragic if we forgot to look at the struggles and the plight of those who are on the digital fringes.  There should be focus on stories and concerns of such communities from across continents to record the human condition as the world moves to a post-human phase.

The author is a writer  and a cutlural activist

A new way of being

• When the first stone tool was chipped, over two millon years ago, it signalled a new way of being. The ancestral community learned to make flint axes, and those first artificial objects, in turn, critically framed a shared, reflective consciousness that began to express itself in language. An axe could be both made and said, used and asked for. The invention of technology brought the earliest unitary template for human thought into being. It can even be argued that it essentially created us as characteristically human. What happened next is well known: technology accelerated adaptation. The original ancestral human culture spread out across continents and morphed into cultures, plural-myriad ways of being. While isolated groups drifted into ever greater idiosyncracy, those who found themselves in competition for the same resources consciously strove to differentiate themselves from their neighbours. This ever-deepening cultural specificity facilited the dehumanisation of enemies that successful warfare, driven by jealously guarded technological innovation, required.
• Then reunification began, starting five thousand years ago, with the development of writing — a technology that allowed the transcription of difference. War was not over, but alien thoughts did begin to be translated, at first very approximately, across the boundaries of local incomprehension. The mature Internet marks the completion of this process, and thus the re-emergence of a fully contiguous human cultural landscape.  So, in a crucial sense, we are back at the beginning, returned into the presence of a shared template for human thought. From now on, there are vanishingly few excuses  remaining ignorant of objective scientific facts, and ever thinner grounds for cultivating hatred through willful failure to recognise our shared humanity. Respecting difference has its limits, however: the fact of our knowing that there is a humanity to share means we must increasingly work towards agreeing to common moral standards. The Internet means that there is nowhere to hide and no way to shirk responsibility when the whole tribe makes informed decisions (as it now must) about its shared future.

— Timothy Taylor,  archaeologist, Professor of the Prehistory of Humanity, University of Vienna; author,  The Artificial Ape