A Meditation.

There were three way to get remembered. High medieval windows allowed limited light to illuminate large oak boards bearing the remembered names. In pride of place, prominently visible behind the Head’s rostrum, was the list of Oxford scholars. Down one side of the hall that served both for assembly and as a dining room was a melancholy inducing sequence of boards listing the old boys who had “fallen”, mostly in the Great War, but also in the other end of empire conflicts. A third space near the door held two more boards. There was a longish listing of each year’s Victor Ludorum and a very new looking bright board with the short record of those named Victrix Ludorum. The school was established sometime in the 1200s. Girls were admitted in 1967. 

The school was originally established as an act of charity by the tradesmen who made and built the useful stuff that a town needs, in order to provide an education for the boys of the town. Both in the wallboards and the school there is the retrace of an ancient Hindu teaching from the Bhagavad Gita: There are three paths to enlightenment; the path of reason, the path of action, and the path of devotion. The first two meanings are obvious; devotion is the observance of ritual and the unconditional acceptance of the ritual. The Guildsmen worked and created their wealth which in an act of religious selflessness they used to endow a school to teach reason. Sportsmen and women are action embodied. The Oxbridge wranglers were masters of reason, and those who voluntarily gave their lives for the greater good offered the ultimate act of devotion or duty.

For a short while I am lucky enough to inhabit the academic space that is the University of Cambridge. It was said that at interview for certain colleges a rugby ball was thrown at the interviewee. If he caught it then he was half way to his place. My father in law went to a school that had a long standing relationship with Clare College. He was called for interview, asked to do some exams and then went in for the interview. “I was thinking that I might like to study French” said the father in law. Surveying the exam paper the tutor looked up and asked “Hmm. Have you considered theology”. Thus three years of privileged scholarship was repaid with a lifetime of service to inner city congregations. I am sure that the enduring success of the colleges is down to the way that intense academic selection and high intellectual standards were leavened by the sportsmen and the clergymen. Action, reason and devotion when mixed do seem to endure.

My mistaken understanding of the Hindu text was that I should choose the path that suited me, as an individual, best.  I now don’t think that is the case. It seems more likely that at each step all three pathways were always there, out in front, but I could only take one.

When I was in the gloomy high halls of my ancient grammar school, none of them seemed available. I was disorganised and distant from the social and ritualistic fabric of the place. I routinely came in the bottom five of the class, and being nearly the youngest in the year, was never in the running for the high status sports teams. As a coping mechanism I learned to look for the easiest path rather than the one that we were set on by the school. I stopped trying to get to where we were supposed to go and instead took the biggest step that required the littlest effort.  What I did not notice at the time was that many of the things that I did because I found them easy, others avoided because they found them difficult.

The upshot is that I went to Sandhurst and later passed selection for the SAS. After leaving the Army I went a good university and am now, eventually, a Masters student at Cambridge. It is hard to think of two experiences which are better exemplars of the paths of action and of reason, yet I chose neither. Not many people will have done both. I just took one step at a time. Sometime it felt that it was the same step over and over, but every so often I would look around and realise that I was a long way from where I had started.

Thoughts on language.

I am distracted by having to write a 6000 word essay that is supposed to be good. We'll see. As I work through the mountain of academic writing I have had to think through my own perspective on language and communication. I promise never to write anything this serious in a blog ever again, except that there is a similar understanding of theory of mind and Asperger's to be explored at some point.

Claude Shannon published a scientific paper in 1948 called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The principals outlined, and the mathematical proofs demonstrated by Shannon in the early 1940s provided the foundation of the major communication developments in the second half of the 20^th Century. It was the scientific step that enabled the digital age. Shannon’s key discovery was that information is lost into the background noise and categorical ambiguity by exactly the same set of mathematical rules that govern the loss of energy in the process of entropy.  

We live in a world in which entropy must always increase and the amount of available energy in the universe will constantly, irreversibly diminish. That is an iron law of nature. Yet at the same time in our everyday lives we do allow the law of the conservation of energy. In standard practical physics calculations of energy, mass and temperature need take no account of empirically tiny amounts of entropy. Shannon demonstrated that the same was true for information. In any communication system there was a threshold below which the effects of information entropy could be ignored. Below a certain rate of communication,  usually expressed in bits per second, a means of communication could be found that was effectively error free. Above this rate errors were inevitable and would increase exponentially, and without bound, as the communication rate went up. Shannon was the first person to realise that it should be possible to send a billion bits of date to the moon, and have them bounce back, and on their return find that that not a single bit had been lost. The key to this was the understanding the only upper limit on error free communication was speed.

It is the common assumption that we can communicate exactly what we want to another individual and that if individual cannot understand our normal speech and read out standard shared writing, they have something wrong with them. Shannon’s work suggests that, provided it is only their communication ability that is impaired, then there should exist a communication paradigm such that they can communicate normally but more slowly. (In these terms a smaller vocab would be "slower")

Theorem:

There exists a language paradigm for any setting such that no individual will be disadvantaged for reasons of communication alone.

In communication disorders such as dyslexia, SLI, and pragmatic impairment disorder, auditory and cognitive function are expected to be normal.  In a rigorous application of the science of communication one would expect these disorders to be the consequence a communication rate that was too high for the individual concerned at their particular state of development and general ability. If the communication paradigm were changed these communication breakdowns should disappear and be replaced by (simpler and slower) error free communication. What many young boys  discover, is that as soon as they can get out of school and into the Army, or into a building site, or factory, or more problematically, into a gang then they no longer feel disadvantaged by language.