16 – NatGeo Year Million

Comment on the National Geographic Program Year Million

Below is a self-explanatory comment I made on the NatGeo program Year Million, aired over the past several weeks.  But it is a much modified version of the original comment.  The reason for publishing it is that it relates to the central problem discussed on this blog – which relationship, though, is limited to the narrow area of the program identified below.  

The comment is specifically aimed at episode four of the program, which has six episodes.  The reasoning underlying the comment is that (the first part of) the episode was based on a fallacy – equating communication with being connected.  (In fact, the talks of several of the contributors to the episode – and to the program in general – inadvertently alluded to that discrepancy.) 

Communication is based on shared meaning and not on just being connected and the speed of that connection – though, obviously, connectivity is a necessary condition for effective communication.  (Communication Theory would classify talk that does not make sense to the connected parties as “noise” – also known as “gibberish.”)  The meaning we attribute to anything or event is shaped by the experiences of our interactions with the environments in which we grow-up, both natural and human, and will vary from person to person, even in the same culture.  It is such variation that is responsible for a large part of our humanity; it is also the basis for much of the misunderstanding and conflict of our messy world – for which deplorable outcomes we do not have an effective solution to-date; in fact, we don’t seem to be even aware that there is a compelling need for one.  

Further, today’s explosion of knowledge and the need to specialize into increasingly narrower fields to cope with that explosion** (which is a self-feeding and exponentially expanding process, like an uncontrolled nuclear fission or chain reaction) renders that we will have increasingly less shared meaning.  (Those who find the premise given here insufficient to reach the conclusion drawn from it may refer to the quote from the Preface of Professor Will Durant's book The Story of Philosophy at the end of posts #2 and #6.)  This means that people will have increasingly less meaningful communication (and thus would result in an increasing range of more problems and on a global scale, about the nature / scope of which we can only speculate) regardless of the increasingly sophisticated gadgets / means we may have at our disposal – unless a suitable mechanism is found to counter the downsides of increasing specialization, which is precisely what the recommendations of this blog aim to achieve, among other things (see the last two paragraphs of article #15).  

Naturally, the increase in connectivity leading to access to a wider range of information and more frequent interaction among people and nations would necessarily broaden shared meaning (they could also lead to information overload – render us unable to process and make much sense of the deluge***) but the extent to which it can better human mutual understanding remains to be seen. 

For more info along this line of thinking, please refer to my blog www.rifatafeef.blogspot.com.  I suggest you focus on articles #13 and #15 – which will provide an illuminating/sobering insight.  

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**  This is how complexity grows in nature – and societal evolution through specialization and increasing complexity is the natural process of its growth.  If we can't cope with its downsides, it is a problem, and a dire one, since evolution also leads to extinction, if objects of that evolution cannot cope with stresses induced by the process.  Mentioned in the article are symptoms of such stress, which we must reduce to survive – along with other downsides cited on the blog.  

***  The process began in earnest with the Scientific Revolution (Greek philosophy had paved the path) – after the world had been a simple place in which causes of events were assigned to higher powers, it had become an increasingly complex one by virtue of events began to be seen requiring logical reasons, the pursuit of which, after having wavered for a time, had finally gained traction over the past century and the momentum had been increasing at an accelerating pace ever since.  This is besides the technological proliferations it had helped spawn – from the Industrial Revolution to nanotechnology and the vast range of gadgets and processes in-between that embody them – at even a faster pace.