R e vie w Essay

The "Two Cultures" Dichotomy Reexamined Estelle M. Raben English Department, Queens College/CUNY, Flushing, NY 11367, U.S.A.

Recent discussions on the HUMANIST conference on Bitnet are but one manifestation of concern over the relations between humanists and technologists (including scientists and business people who use technology, especially computers). Focusing on the computer as an object that both unifies and separates these two communities, the discussants have broached a number of key topics, all more or less related to C. P. Snow's dichotomy of the "Two Cultures." Among the insights from this conference worth quoting is S. Richmond's distinction between the humanists' traditional concentration on the product of their research/ criticism and their new involvement with the (computer-related) process by which those products are achieved: This problem cuts across disciplines and professions. Corporate workers in government and industrial bureaucracies, teachers in educational organizations, artists, homemakers, private entrepreneurs - - [all] have this problem of how to cope with the new products, new world, created by computers. [It] is the world of software processing that functions quasi-intelligently . . . . In every technology, there is a process and a product . . . . lln] some computer systems . . . the products, or results, are in a sense by-products, a n d . . , the process is the real product. • . . [We] are quite familiar with this situation in our daily lives when interacting with people and other species. We are quite familiar with processes such as teaching, discussing, p l a y i n g . . , in the company o f . . . people and pets. However, undertaking these similar forms of interaction

Estelle M. Raben, who teaches in the English Department at Queens College/CUNY, has been working in interdisciplinary studies (science~medicine~humanities) under a two-year Mellon Fellowship. Computers and the Humanities 2 4 : 1 0 7 - - 109, 1990. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

with semi-autonomous non-organic entities is somewhat disconcerting. ( H U M A N I S T discussion: Scientists and Humanists, 6 Aug 1987)

Much the same question underlies three books: Turing's Man (1984) by J. David Bolter, The Second Self (1984) by Sherry Turkle, and Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983) by Andrew Hodges. Bolter's work, subtitled Western Culture in the Computer Age, optimistically offers an informative history of computers and a clear explanation of their workings. From his training as a classicist come descriptions of ancient technologies and their place within the cultural milieu. A modem humanist who has any involvement with computers represents, he argues, a synthesis of technology and humanism (228). Such as person is a "Turing's Man," a loose metaphor recalling the theoretical designer of computers, Alan Turing, the ill-fated Cambridge mathematician. The process by which a humanist becomes a "Turing's Man" is described in less than precise terms. Sometimes the only requirement is some use of the computer. At other times, the candidate for this epithet must believe that most intellectual issues "will eventually be computable" (52). In the light of the computer's binary yes/no functions, Bolter expresses concern that "humans may take on the qualities of digital computers" (190). Throughout the book he asserts that most questions in the humanities cannot be answered dichotomously, but he seems to lose sight of the difference between mathematical truth and the humanistic questions of why and what for. He ignores the shading of humanistic truth along the spectrum from white to black. According to Bolter, humanists must realize

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that, like scientists, "they were nurtured on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century values, not all of which can be preserved for the very different future we now confront" (228). Like Snow, he wants to "foster a process of cross fertilization" that will draw on this c o m m o n past and future. Interdisciplinary education and the exchange of ideas are the mechanisms that Bolter believes will synthesize the two cultures. (In F. R. Leavis' criticism of Snow, trust in these same mechanisms was characterized as romantic.) More effective is Bolter's argument that technology has always been a part of the entire culture in which it was developed. This element of his thesis was praised in The New York Review of Books: the book's "originality lies in the way it embeds the developments of technology in their cultural setting" (Ayer, 15). A major enhancement of this originality, which Bolter unfortunately does not explore, would have been to go beyond the simple statement that clocks regulated people's lives and to analyze such questions as why certain technologies emerge at certain times and not others. His overly determined approach led Christopher Lasch to state in The New Republic that this "classicist with a master's degree in computer science has no interest in politics and no conception of the political context of computer technology" (25--28). That very question is at the heart of another book published in 1984, Sherry Turkle's The

Second Self" Computers and the Human Spirit. This explicit discussion of the human problems that emerge from the interaction between people and the new technology tacitly supports Leavis' position that we have not yet begun to appreciate how much contact and education will be needed to integrate science and the humanities. At present, according to Turkle, both cultures have apparently discovered an illusory control over reality, an intriguing and clever machine which can in fact separate people further from themselves. But Bolter argues that computers will contribute "to a general redefinition of certain basic relationships: the relationship of science to technology, of knowledge to technical power, and in the broadest sense, of mankind to the world of nature" (9). The computer, he believes, will change people's concepts of time, space and memory. Because computer time is finite, people may

become more ecologically minded as they return to the "ancient view, in which the cyclic rise and decline of societies seem more reasonable, and even more natural than any promise of indefinite progress for mankind" (123). In this new computer-dominated world, memory will once again be valued as it was in classical times (159--64). On this point, Turkle warns against easy definitions of self which are not new at all, and function only as new escape routes from the problems of society and nature. It is in the ongoing debate over artificial intelligence that the conflict between the "two cultures" is most apparent. Turing predicted that by 1986 a machine would have judgment as well as memory (Hodges, 348--49), and be able eventually to imitate the processes of the brain (Hodges, 324-27). While unable to accept this prediction in its entirety, Bolter nevertheless conceives of computers as "capable of a vast range of responses that mimic, although they do not match, human abilities" (40). Unwilling to accept the concept of "artificial intelligence," he still is attracted to the idea of an electronic brain. Turkle's definition of AI is the same as Marvin Minsky's: the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men. Bolter seems in the same camp, as would appear from his assertion that "there has never been more evidence for regarding a human being as a vastly complicated machine . . . . They say that human brains and computers are two examples of 'thinking systems'" (42). This equation between the brain and an electronic machine, based on some brain functions which depend on yes/no decisions, still defies what little we already know about neuroscience. New methods of examining the living human brain have clarified many relationships between brain structures and behavior. In particular, we understand better the precise molecular changes underlying synapses, the electric transmissions that most closely resemble the passage of electrons through microprocessors. This new knowledge shows that we are still very far from an electronic model of the brain/mind. In the interaction of between 10 and 100 billion neurons (we do not know how many there are), something we call intelligence occurs, but it is more than a more complex version of what happens in a computer. We hear the

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authority of neuroscience in the judgment of James W. Lance (in his review of Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind): "the summation of mathematics and psychology and philosophy still does not approach the complexity of neurology" (10). Another oversimplification is Bolter's assertion that "Turing's Man" is inclined to analyze natural language as if it were a code for storing and retrieving information (244). This inclination, he believes, has resulted from the computer's forceful lesson that symbols are arbitrary until the programmer assigns meaning to them. Ignoring the relationship between culture and natural language, he states that "the ambiguity that is so important to human communication is fatal to the computer" (131). He even seems to admit the possibility that natural langauge will change to fit the computer's requirements. Turkle's theories of natural language acquisition, more consonant with those generally held, seem to contradict Bolter's mechanistic approach to this problem: . . . potential for language is present at conception, but whether the child will speak Chinese or French is not in the 'program,' but results from the complex and still undetermined nature of the interaction of encoding with the environment. No computer program, even on theoretical grounds, no series of multiprocessors, will ever be able to change itself. (283--84)

As functions of the environment that shapes language, ambiguity and connotation form both the culture and each individual in it. Bolter's limited concept of language ("it is only that we live in a certain culture with a certain language that we use the names we do") implies that we could readily learn a new set of names that would suit the computer. But he does not follow Turkle in recognizing the vast gulf between the human who controls the computer and the computer's potential for controling the human. Some of the inadequacies of Bolter's conception might have been eliminated by his reading Andrew Hodges' biography of Turing, which was published the year before his book appeared, but apparently not in time for him to make use of it. As portrayed in this biography, Turing is the prototype of Turkle's computer enthusiast, carried away by the excitement of technological discovery. Like the "nerds" at MIT, he could not put the

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demands of conventional society before those of creative science. His homosexuality (which constituted criminal behavior under British law of that time) isolated him totally from almost all social contacts, and perhaps was a factor in his preoccupation with what today is called computer science. But even among his scientific peers he was an iconoclast. No one of his generation (and few of ours) was prepared to accept the notion of thinking machines. The originality of his vision thus made him a misfit in both worlds, that of science (where he outdistanced his colleagues in anticipating the computer) and that of general humanity (where his preoccupation with arcane matters created an uncrossable gulf). Such a man is a less than perfect representative for the belief that computers can synthesize science and the humanities. If Turing's life and work pose any substantial questions for our generation, they must concern the role of technology in the general culture, where it functions like politics, social forces, and the other numerous and conflicting elements of a heterogeneous matrix. The likelihood that any of us, living in the age of the computer, will become Turing's man (or woman) is not very great. References Ayer, A. J. "Let Us Calculate." Review of Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age by J. David Bolter. The New York Review of Books, 31 (1 March 1984), 15. Bolter, J. David. Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. London: Burnett Books, 1983. Lance, James W. "If I Only Had a Brain: A Computer's Guide." Review of The Society of the Mind by Marvin Minsky. The New York Times Book Review, 22 February 1957, p. 10. Lasch, Christopher. "Chip of Fools." Review of The Second Self" Computers and the Human Spirit by Sherry Turkle and of Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age by J. David Bolter. The New Republic, 13 (20 August 1984), 25--28. Levine, George. "Darwin and the Evolution of Fiction." The New York Times Book Review, 5 October 1986, pp. 1,60. Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures: A Second Look. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963. Turklc, Sherry. The Second Self." Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.