The Science of Discworld IV

because he famously divided the world into two separate aspects,
res cogitans
and
res extensa
, mind and matter. He needed
res cogitans
, the mind, to be freewheeling, so that it could instruct the body,
res extensa
. In contrast, he thought that little of the body’s influence, if any, went the other way.
    Consider the accidents of history that converged on Descartes, making his world a divided one and resulting in all kinds of anomalies in the present intellectual scene, from Arts and Science departments in universities, barely considering each other to be intellectually proper, to descriptions of minds and souls in popular parlance that are, to say the least, irrational.
    In
Essential Readings in Biosemiotics
, Donald Favareau presents a fascinating story that makes a lot of sense. He starts with Aristotle, who wrote some twenty-six essays, only six of which were translated into Latin by Boethius in the sixth century. Two (
Categories
and
On Interpretation
) were about the material world, one (
Prior Analytics
) was about the mind, and the other three (
Posterior Analytics
,
Topics
and
Sophistical Refutations
) were about law and argument. The essay that joined up mind and matter,
De Anima
– Life, or Soul – was not translated until the thirteenth century, so it got left out of the western world’s traditional ‘works of Aristotle’ for a thousand years,based entirely on Boethius. It was, in fact, translated from the Arabic in 1352 by Jean Buridan; all the great libraries then were in Arabia and Spain, and the Muslim religion was in the ascendant. But despite that, it was not then added to the standard ‘works of Aristotle’.
    In particular, Descartes had access to
Categories
and
On Interpretation
, but not to
De Anima
or
On Sense and the Sensible
, which provided a series of beautiful bridges between mind and body. So, believing himself to be free from preconceptions, but in fact carrying only part of Aristotle’s weighty arguments in his memory, he divided mind from matter. That laid a secure foundation for this intellectual separation, right up to Norbert Weiner and
Cybernetics
, when feedback and machinery met.
    That accident, that
De Anima
was not available to Descartes, or to Francis Bacon when he published the
Novum Organon
in 1620, which was based on the six essays translated by Boethius, changed the whole European intellectual climate for the next four hundred years. From Newton through to Einstein, physics was delimited with no thought of information. Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, all the way to Kingsley Amis, John Betjeman and Philip Larkin – everyone talked about machinery and industry, but only from outside.
    The two worlds, mind and matter, only began to come together with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, who were in neither world, nor by any means in both. And then, after the Second World War, during which many scientists had been involved with communication issues, Claude Shannon began to publish papers in which information was treated as a quantitative concept. Soon after that came cybernetics, in which feedback of information interacted with amplification and other physical changes, resulting in changes to output. The safety-valve on a boiler was an early example: when the pressure got too high the valve released some steam. Weiner added room thermostats, which turned the heat off and on. Nearly all amplifiers for sound use ‘feedback’ to send the output back to the input, improving the sound quality.
    Here information is used to control mechanical systems, which introduces a whole new dimension of technological magic. Hidden inside every laptop, iPhone, and for that matter, refrigerator, is a long, complex series of ‘spells’: the software instructions that make all of the general-purpose electronics carry out the specific tasks needed to make the gadget work. Programmers are today’s sorcerers.
    However, no one yet thought of linguistics as having anything to do with that kind of information. Only at the turn of the millennium did Steven Pinker, a linguistic psychologist, write
How the Mind Works
from a neurological
and
linguistic viewpoint. The two sides met, productively, after three hundred and fifty years.
    Pinker later wrote
The Better Angels of our Nature
, arguing that today’s humans are significantly less violent than they used to be. The book presents a wealth of data to support this contention. Nearly all of the reviews disagree; all of these are by people who