What if ?
Claudio Gutiérrez
Claudio Gutiérrez
"It is not that you can think in patterns. It is that thinking consists of patterns. You need not solve your problems in order to communicate: you communicate and then your friend and you together might solve your problems (his and yours). If you do conflict rather than cooperate your (negative) communication repatterns your thinking all the same, although in a stultifying manner. In one interpretation patterns are habits of the mind: you tend to see things falling into definite patterns . . ."
What if a good-looking girl, your student, says to you as you stroll by:
–Are you philosophizing right now?–
–Indeed, I am.–
–I wish I had a piece of your
mind!–
–Do you really want to know what I am philosophizing about?–
–I really do–
"What if a good-looking girl, a student of
yours, interrupts your train of thought by asking:
– Are you philosophizing right now? –
For one thing, you have been a victim of aggression, of a sort. A pattern of thought you
were traveling through has been broken, or at least somehow disrupted, a new pattern has
come into being by that very fact. You may be sorry for the lost pattern or grateful for the
newly born (depending on how good-looking the student is?). The new pattern is unstable
and begins to emerge in the midst of a halo of ambiguity: Is she serious? Is she only joking? Is
she concerned? Or is she just conning the professor? You'll never know –neither will she, in all
probability. At any rate, as soon as a pattern is destroyed, a new one takes its place, arising out
of the same fact: the attempted communication –which is an act of love, of coherence, as much
as an act of hate, of destruction. People's minds consist of patterns: destruction and creation
of patterns are destruction and creation of people. Too strong? But listen: that's the way
people grow, by destroying what they are in order to become what they are not. Look, I'll try
this on you: my philosophizing has been too abstract, too incomprehensible (except for the
few specialists). I want a new pattern of communication. I want from now on to be
understood by little girls like you, not only by fellow philosophers. Do you follow me? Am
I communicating something to you? You also have patterns of thought, don't you? The ones you
were having a minute ago also happened to have been disrupted when I said hello to you, didn't
they? So we started communicating by mapping two disrupted patterns, yours and mine, each
onto the other. Pay attention: we didn't have to enter into a single pattern, a pattern of patterns,
so to speak, in order to communicate: a simple mapping, not of patterns, but of disruptions, was
enough. Want to generalize that? Say: People do not have to solve their problems in order to
communicate; they communicate precisely through their problems, by mapping them up. But we
were talking about how people start communication. They do so first of all by
assaulting each other, by affecting each other in profound ways. If one is not affected, disrupted,
one cannot gain anything from the exchange. It is different with machines, you know. Even with
thinking machines. They do communicate with each other, and with people for that matter, but
in a very peaceful fashion. They either are open or closed to the other machine. If they are closed,
nothing happens, there is no communication. The other does not even exist. If they are open, they
are prepared to receive an input which they will process (throughput) in predefined ways, they
will merge into a single system, a single pattern. No disruption. No surprises. No affection. But
also, no real transformation".
–Master computer, are you philosophizing right now?–
–Of course not, I am just waiting for your input–
–How does it feel like being a machine?–
–??–