Being enveloped in language for the past several millennia, Homo sapiens have learnt to conceptualise time and space as definitive conditions of existence. The image-making ability acquired by the human brain enables it to make sense of the immense space surrounding us. The biologically given ‘natural’ memory allows us to weave together a pervasive abstraction named time. Both these ‘faculties’, first given to us by the ability to transact meaning through symbolic icons and then transformed into a myriad externalised forms, have come to be seen as being forever there, an apparatus that helps construct the peculiarly human ‘world view’. The externalised forms of imagination have been guiding man’s ideas of order, harmony and beauty, providing pivots to various civilisations.
These externalised forms of memory have come to form the very foundations of what we see today as knowledge in tangible and institutionalised forms. This progression in man’s cultural evolution leads humans to forget that they are a brief interlude in the natural evolution of species. Time, as we understand it — the human time — is not a natural phenomenon. It is but a convenient figment of the human imagination. Ditto for space. The space that the human eye sees and the space that the ‘seeing sense’ of millions of other species are, in all probability, 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 human imagination and memory are a kind of a dream that envelopes all our life, being and consciousness. It may be difficult to imagine but had humans not created languages with tenses such as the past and the future, and if we were yet to accumulate scientific wisdom, who knows, perhaps we would have spoken of the Big Bang as an on-going, ever present phenomenon with us right in the middle of it. How long back did this happen in human time? About 14 billion years ago. About 4.5 billion years ago, the system of planets that we like to call ‘ours’ settled down to its routine of revolutions and rotations, its gravitational pulls and pushes, its balance and fairly predictable motion. It is a little less than 3.7 billion years that matter started turning into life, later developing consciousness. And it is just about a couple of million years that an animal like man became distinctly like us.
This animal, the supposedly wisest and decidedly erect Homo sapien, picked up the skill of language barely seventy thousand 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 — are not much older than two or three thousand years. Scientific propositions, which, too, come in human language and thought and, therefore, are conditioned by the limits of the human ability to express, are probably not over a few centuries old. The human brain is constantly evolving and acquiring untold powers to comprehend complex realities. It is expected that human language/s and thought would go beyond the established logic of tense (time) and relation (space), beyond memory and imagination, so that a far more complex, multi-frame reality can be comprehended and expressed in the future by humans through whatever means.
This is, of course, no science-fantasy. It is the predictable logic of the evolutionary process of which the Homo sapiens have been a crucially important, though sadly a disruptive, link. The signs of the shift are aplenty. The shift this time is not just a matter of realigning various fields of knowledge and the re-drawing of disciplines. This one cannot even be fully described by the expression, ‘epistemic shift’, as was the case when the fields of knowledge started following the Newtonian world view in place of the Ptolemaic one or the previously held Aristotelian world view. In the current evolutionary turn, 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 an alarm about the sinking fortunes of natural languages through which human communication has taken place over the last seventy millennia. They have started noticing that the use of man-made memory chips fed into intelligent machines is making deep dents into the human ability to remember and handle natural languages. We are now moving from civilisation to netted-social formations. Collectively, for all nations, all ethnic and cultural groups, the vision of a life well beyond our imagination has started appearing on the horizon even if it has not become fully manifest, making a mockery of all that the human brain and the mind have so far held as being natural and permanent.
Homo sapiens are rapidly marching towards a post-human phase of natural evolution. 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 would collide seamlessly. 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 the economic fringes shall have to pay the cost of the transformation by having to face misery, deprivation and extinction. Just as the Industrial Revolution and the associated rise of capitalism in European countries placed traditional agrarian societies at risk, giving rise to the long-drawn conflicts between labour and capital, this great transition facing us globally will also create an unprecedented scale of strife and violence between the memory-chip rich and the memory-chip poor. Already, some linguistic laboratories have started publishing lists of ‘digitally dead languages’; over 98% of Indian languages are doomed for inclusion in the list. State powers all over the world seem to have already resolved that citizens without unique identities can be written off as non-citizens. Tragic though it is, the semantic universes of those on the digital fringes are being pushed towards extinction in the environmental era called the Anthropocene.
G.N. Devy is a cultural activist
