Today,
systematization is the foremost issue of interest in science, the locus of
sophistication in the lively sciences of physics, genetics, and computing. In all of them, code seems to be a crucial
element, in two respects. First, nature
seems to be a code of laws underlying all phenomena, which research aims to
discover, and in effect decode. 
Secondly, the use of generalizations is essential in science, and
amounts to an encoding, or what would be called in computing a
"compression algorithm", with the corresponding decoding or
decompression amounting to application, or technology. And to wrap it all up, we can see that this
is the way the mind works, forming thoughts and applying them, in the same
manner. Primarily we are interested in
this as a theoretical proposition, to be pursued in basic research, or what has
been know as "metaphysics", to establish a foundation and unification
of all science, and reconstruct scientific culture in a more coherent and
efficient form. While doing so, we may
be interested to take a backward glance at some early efforts toward this
purpose, which will of course seem a clumsy adolescence in comparison to our
thinking today, though at the same time showing the natural impetus to discover
the code of all codes. The book, Logic
And The Art of Memory, by Paolo Rossi, published in English translation
from the Italian, gives us just such historic background, in a thorough
scholarly research of the literature, though without more than minimal inquiry
into the theory, and leaving that most valuable part for us to develop. Study
of means of encoding thought and science was actually much more extensive in
the 13th through 17th Centuries than it is well-known today to have been.

The ancients Aristotle and Cicero had written about
methods of aiding memory, which can be afflicted by forgetting. They suggested association, such as to
remember "Peter Albert" is somebody’s name, think of someone you know
named Peter shaking hands with someone you know named Albert. By making dramatic images it is possible to
put memory of facts in some form that is easier to remember. Many authors wrote books on this "ars
memorativa" which were eagerly read by the public and widely discussed and
taught.

Then came Ramon Lull, about the year 1300 give or
take a decade. He added a startling and
brilliant enhancement of the art. If
you associate things with an "ars combinatoria" which gives a
rigorous structure to information as in sciences which are structured from
fundamentals on up to many peculiar facts which are not fundamental, you can
not only remember better, you may advance the science, too. You might discover things by calculation, as
well as improve your memory. This can
be done by representing the empirical data you want to remember and understand
by short symbols like numbers and letters of the alphabet. By putting those
symbols in combination according to a simple but strict grammar, thousands of
combinations can be represented by only a few symbols. This greatly reduces the requirement for
learning symbols, from a large vocabulary, to just the few letters and numbers.
Too, it would work as well in any country, since the symbols stand for ideas
and things, not for speech sounds which vary according to spoken languages.

This breakthrough idea became known as
"Lullism" and occupied the best minds in all of Europe for four
hundred years. Francis Bacon, Jan
Comenius, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, Rene Descartes, Robert Boyle,
G. W. Leibniz are some of the famous participants in the discussion, most of
whom wrote about it in essays and books on the subject, not to mention hundreds
of others who are not so well known today. 
Through Couterat and Russell, the idea lives on in the Logicist school,
through their backward glance at Leibniz’s "Ars Combinatoria", and
the aspiration to find a universal science, involving code symbols and symbolic
expression.

As I read,
I was struck by how suggestive of the truth writers can be, without fully
saying what they are talking about. It
seemed to me as if they had found the stone of wisdom, that had been buried,
and was covered with soil, and they couldn’t quite see it cleanly, and were
discussing the dirt as much as the stone itself, and weren’t sensitive to the
difference.

Science as
a social affair tends to be like that. 
Not only are many like Rossi interested more in what other people have
said than in facts of reality, but among those who are scientists and not just
academics, there is an alternative to speak of empirical data unanalyzed and
unsystematized but just as it is commonly experienced and let that be the
ground of science. The world can be
depended upon for that, to be a reliable reference, to everyone, in common. Thus everyone knows what velocity is, even
if it is not analyzed into distance per unit of time. So discourse tends to remain in such terms as are sufficiently
known to everyone, without the final analysis.

But this is the veil of sufficiency of knowledge
that Lull was proposing to penetrate. 
We have not just an amorphous collection of data but also a "tree
of science" with the data arranged on branches with leaves on them, and we
should see this tree, and the branches coming out of a trunk, not just a
balloon of leaves. In seeing the
tree-structure is the wisdom and the power of our thinking. Every time he reminded them of this they
agreed, but they kept forgetting and going back to relying on apparent
phenomena as being sufficient.

In the end it was just that, which was the fault and
the undoing of the whole effort. While
they could all see, as Lull had argued, that a calculable system, made of a
concise code, was the ideal form of science, and they all proposed lists of
elements and symbols for the purpose, none of them had any way of constructing
those primitives, but only asserted them as their best guess at what the
elements of nature might be. Lull
himself had done so, and no one did better. 
They formed systems that were calculable from the point of the primitive
elements on up, but the primitive elements were not in any calculable relation
to each other. The systems then were
not constructed from the ground up in a consistent, uniform way, but were
ambitious castles resting on the sand of personal intuitions, which were
obviously various and all disputable and imperfect.

One declared proudly how the type of fish, salmon,
could be expressed in a few letters and numbers, in his universal language.
Another declared that the thirteenth element was "the One". All this
they said would make thinking easier. 
But there seemed to be a lack of soundness in it, and you might wonder
what it was that was being made easier. 
Eventually the idea lost momentum, because of this poor use to which it
had been put. The soil, so to speak, on
the stone of wisdom, had been replaced by dirty fingerprints that still defiled
it, as if it were impossible to clean and see it for what it really is.

Reading of that history today is a revelation. They were talking about something we know
very well. Scientific generalization is
an encoding of the over-abundance of facts in the world into a concise and
universal language. Mind itself has
that virtue. That is so, at any time,
but today we can see it even more clearly in regard to computers. There is an art of memory in computers, which
has been perfected technologically and is running on all of our Pentium class
home desktop machines. If you know anything about cache and virtual memory you
will recognize that they were talking about it in the XIV Century. "The
Art of Memory" indeed! The
construction of ideal, artificial languages, likewise — if only they knew what
our experience has been, since the invention of assembly language, FORTRAN,
LISP, Algol, Pascal, BASIC, and C.

There is of course an excuse for their not thinking
of these modern developments. They
could only wish and anticipate what we have now in the age of computers. But there is no excuse for their talking
about universal language and efficient use of symbols without remembering,
except for fleeting moments, mathematics, which they had possessed since the
beginning of philosophy. Someone ought
to have said, "You memory experts, there is something YOU are forgetting!
Remember this — mathematics!"

The omission in their thinking can be expressed in a
simple principle for the generation of the primitives, for the universal
language. That is the unit
increment. The origin of all things is
the unit increment, and the origin of all things is nature. That supplies the single elemental starting
point from which to construct the primitives for a unified systematization of
science, mathematical from the beginning, and entirely calculable and natural.

©
2002 Ronald Jump

Ronald Jump runs The Institute of Formal Social Sciences

Categories: Philosophical