Anyone who is at least moderately alert will listen to King Charles speaking about climate change knowing well enough that he does not understand the issue in any meaningful technical sense. He speaks from a climate echo chamber, not even a specifically royal echo chamber.
The metaphor ‘echo chamber’ where people merely echo the words of like-minded people is a good one, although it tends to be misused by being relegated to a term of abuse. A pity because echo chambers are an essential aspect of how we all acquire and maintain our ideas.
Whereupon I may proceed laboriously to create and modulate my opinion, groping perhaps to a final epigram, which I say expresses just what I think, although I never thought it before.
Such is my discourse when I am really thinking; at other times it is but the echo of language which I remember to have formerly used, and therefore call my ideas. It is clear therefore that even in expressing my own mind when I conceive what I have felt, I have never really felt just that before. My report is an honest myth.
George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)
Ideas are almost always remembered language, usually the echoes of echo chambers. We think and as we think we talk to ourselves with or without speaking while mulling over remembered language. This is what thinking is. There are no ideas in the sense of facts and analytical structures lodged in the brain.
We recall images, feelings and emotions too, because remembered language doesn’t come without baggage. Yet this remembered language is the intellectual basis of what we experience as an idea, there is virtually nothing else. To say so is no more than a change of perspective, but it can be useful.
When activists chant their radical ideas in the street, they are almost always chanting remembered language, nothing else apart from the baggage which can be equally prominent. No carefully structured reasoning, no facts and analytical structures lodged in radical heads, only remembered language inserted via an echo chamber.
Nobody is immune. The MP who stands up in the House of Commons to pontificate about Net Zero is almost certainly repeating remembered language and nothing else. Given the composition of the House technical understanding is unlikely anyway.
Similarly, most UK voters vote for red, blue or yellow echo chambers. Unfortunately, the voter’s echo chamber is not the MP’s echo chamber, still less the government’s echo chamber.
This is the point to be made - nobody is immune from echo chambers. It’s what we do. We use the word ‘idea’ because we must, but ideas rarely have any depth to them, they are almost always remembered language. As is this blog post, built from the remembered language of B.F. Skinner, George Santayana, King Charles and a host of others imperfectly remembered.
This is the point to be made - nobody is immune from echo chambers. It’s what we do. We use the word ‘idea’ because we must, but ideas rarely have any depth to them, they are almost always remembered language. As is this blog post, built from the remembered language of B.F. Skinner, George Santayana, King Charles and a host of others imperfectly remembered.
7 comments:
I very much agree that we are all susceptible to other people's ideas as our minds are like sponges that often soak up beliefs without us always being fully aware of it. However, deeper reflection can cause revision, and further knowledge of events can contribute to disbelief in previous assumptions. That's what the scientific method is supposed to represent. This is where the assertions about human caused global warming by co2 emission come from. Some researchers have noted that co2 is a 'greenhouse' gas, that humanity is emitting it, that levels of it in the atmosphere are rising and hence there is man made 'climate change'. More accomplished scientists would have questioned this seeming logic with any number of investigations (that their logic might not be able to carry them far enough to their conclusions), before releasing the ideas as 'holy writ' upon a gullible world.
"Ideas are almost always remembered language, usually the echoes of echo chambers."
Indeed. Amusingly the Large Language Model AI programs are just 'automated' echo chambers, and as we have seen, relying on 'echoes' sometimes produces nonsense.
Tammly - yes and it's it's that deeper reflection which is so often avoided, that extra effort which can be considerable, so many don't do it and stay in the echo chamber. It's possible to tell when people only watch BBC news or read the Guardian because it comes out almost word for word but they don't notice. People have other interests I suppose, so news and current affairs are just add-ons.
DJ - yes they are and at the moment it seems as if they can't be anything else. Sceptics are the oddities who appear to be essential for progress, so AI researchers may have to work out what it is that sceptics do. I'm quite sceptical about their ability to do that.
I see Charles's opinions on climate change and the like as being similar to earlier monarchs sounding off about patriotism, empire, religion, etc. As you say, we just absorb words and phrases and how they fit together, and regurgitate them when we feel moved to do so. If Charles has a problem, it's that he does it on the public stage. As I type this on my phone outside a cafe in Chichester, I can hear some old boy sounding off to his friend. It's just a series of stereotyped catch-phrases and phatic noises. Luckily for him, he's not on the telly, or surrounded by courtiers, or looked up to.
You're so right about BBC Guardian regurgitated beliefs, I know people just like that.
I always say that the reason so many scientists believe in man made global warming is because other scientists have told them.
"There are no ideas in the sense of facts and analytical structures lodged in the brain. "
I am not so sure. Is 'the language of mathematics' a language of words (oral, aural, or literate? I tend to think in patterns and visually; the thinking of the right words and writing-up comes after. (Can write well, I know I can, but it is still a slow painstaking process, trying to keep up with the kaleidoscope, just to say what has been thought.
As for LLM-AI, yes it reveals what most conversations are, twitter, babble, making the noises that belong to the herd.
Sam - yes it's like a secular language for elites and their minions and as you say, it replaces patriotism, empire, religion and so on. It's created an odd situation where the language has built-in failures and isn't something ordinary people can live by for long.
Tammly - and the mortgage pushes scientists in a don't rock the boat direction.
djc - when I explain maths to our grandson, it's a mix of maths symbols and ordinary language. In that sense, the equations we write down are my remembered mathematical language which then become his remembered language. Visual thinking feels like remembered patterns to me which can be part of an echo chamber.
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