> Writing systems are the fundamental way through which we can do this
Writing systems are āaā fundamental way to pass down large collections of facts, and my personal bias. We are prejudiced and naive though:
- Those knotting systems in China and South America that preceded writing for millennia are also persistent and intricate
- Cave paintings are quite dense, drawings and art are direct visual representations with compound meanings (seasonal behaviour, hunting strategy, creation myths)
- Iconography of all forms persists a rich visual language, hieroglyphics and equivalent which carry deep social instruction with verbal reinforcement
- Stories with self-correction have many-tens-of-millennia consistency categorically outstripping any other medium we have tested, the aboriginal dream-stories capture humanities shared storage during its global expansion
- Music is math. Song and dance captured all of the above in self-verifying and correcting fashion for hundreds, hundreds of millennia before that.
And before we hit any complexity arguments, like a hard specification:
a) those formats leveraged human pattern recognition and meat-based compression (ie āevery chunk in the 4,000 page OOXML specification is as simple as do-as-Word-didā¦ā)
b) find video of African dance/drumming ceremonies ā density is not the issue ā a special hoot, a known drumbeatā¦ there were continental signalling networks that terrified Colonial explorers.
There is an argument that writing allows for corrosive decontextualization. Jesus cursed a fig tree. No one learning that tale the old ways would snicker. And, thus, history becomes not a tale, but a grab bag of a childās letter blocks, you can spell anything you want.
_verandaguy
today at 8:44 PM
While I agree that those are all ways of preserving knowledge in a somewhat inter-generational way, a few thoughts.
- None of these are as flexible as writing. They're more expressive, more engaging (arguably, at least to some), and might even be good at succinctly saving certain specific types of knowledge.
Knot systems typically parallel the abacus, having been used for accounting and to keep a record of tax levies. Certainly this isn't the *only* thing they were used for, but this was the case in a number of indigenous civilizations in the Americas, as well as in some Asian civilizations. Certain dances might be good at representing the motions you have to go to while working fields or performing other societal tasks, sure. But a good writing system, in its relative blandness, is incredibly versatile, and can encode not just a wide breadth of information, but also include information about *why* the information is what it is, to the extent that the authors knew.
- Many of these systems tend to either disappear or change over time while relying on largely-unwritten rules, implied social context, and other informational artifacts that themselves don't have a very long shelf life in the event of significant social change. Where destroying the written word (especially in the wake of the invention of the printing press) is a long-term, conscious, coordinated action; dances, songs, and stories can fall victim to everything from fashion, to counterculture, to human migrations, to hostile invasions.
- I don't understand what you mean by things like "stories with self-correction." In many cultures with an oral tradition, the stories do get distorted because of people misremembering, or through conscious changes in response to social conditions at the time of a retelling; if a 1,000-year-old story with no written record backing it is told today, it's almost certainly not the original story, but the culmination of a thousand years and dozens of generations of sometimes-subtle, sometimes not reinterpretation.
programjames
today at 8:17 PM
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