I'm not enthralled by words anymore. "Why do we expect that 26 letters can rearrange themselves in such a way as to unravel the mystery of life and the universe", asks Anand Gandhi in an old TedX talk. For a long, long time I assumed that would happen, hoped, wished. It wouldn't be too far-fetched to say I prayed at the altar of language, although like most people I see with their deities, something loving and awe-inspiring devolved into a more transactional, desperate relationship. Appropriately enough, this realisation strikes me after having a long, and surprisingly deep, conversation with ChatGPT over the last couple of days. Venkatesh Rao once wrote that we're all LLMs. That maybe true, but we're also more.
A few years ago one of the Chief Data Officers at Westpac had a presentation which opened with the following quote: "Data is not the new oil. It is the new water". The insight she was trying to drive was that gone were the days when just having more data gave a company tactical advantage. Now we were drowning in it, data of varying quality, coming in from so many sources that forget leveraging it, it was becoming hard to manage and not drown in it. And in such a climate, how does one make best use of the resource? Obviously I don't remember anything about the solution because I was so awed by the opening gambit. "If you can talk well about a problem, it can give the wrong impression that you've solved it", says Stanley Kubrick somewhere and despite my repeated affirmations to myself about the same, I keep stopping at the first sign of elegance without continuing my thought-journey and getting to the bottom of things. I make peace with the local maxima without asking if its stopping me from something else. Although now it seems futile to phrase the problem a certain way or to engage in shallow self-psychoanalysis with the hope of improving oneself because I don't even know what to optimise for, or have a strong enough why. "There is such a thing as englightenment but its not under your control. It'll happen when it'll happen", says UG Krishnamurthy. I don't know if its a copout because I have no way of disputing it; But I know my thinking tools are proving inadequate for the task.
Words are tools too- they're incredible, incredibly sophisticated, surprisingly fecund, quite often emanating light to guide us, perhaps the best mechanism we have to connect with another human being, and for all their versatility as a potent civilisational tool, they have their limits too. Perhaps I've always known language has its limits as a user but I don't think I imagined the effect they would have at a social level. Words, for all the romance and the intellectuality and class I associated them with, are, at the end of the day, simply, and as I write this a part of me still really hopes there's something more, a technology- like photography, or fast, conventient, long-distance transportation, or the global communication network called the internet. It is supremely powerful, and while by virtue of its inherent characteristics can nudge and shape you sub-consciously- the medium being the message and all that- at the end of the day, it itself is purpose-agnostic. What you want to use it for is left to you. Ofcourse, it can have a profound effect in defining the horizons of your imagination, and others around you can wield it much better to make you do their bidding, but the technology in itself is a spotlight and a workspace, a stage more accurately?, and doesn't in itself hold secrets you're chasing. Now maybe the time to mention two differing views: One is what Venkatesh Rao has been more or less building since the advent of LLM-era- that intelligence itself is a latent property of language, and information more broadly. And the other is the Brahminical, prevalent across all liturgical communities presumably, view I grew up with a sense of- that Word is infact the most fundamental reality, and architecture, both material and psychological, is birthed by it. Perhaps I've arrived at a more materialist position but something interesting I discovered while answering some of ChatGPT's questions is that my axiomatic position is that knowledge is pre-language, pre-cognition, even pre-consciousness (pre here referring not to before but beneath), almost biochemical, and so I don't know if that makes me a hardcore materialist or an idealist; For I'm unable to get past this chicken-and-egg problem.
Anyway, so what is the prospective effect of this revelation? Its that finally I can stop compelling myself to reading and listening, gluttonously consuming information, in the hope that one of those words will light a spark that'll illuminate everything. There is no mystery to be unraveled, even if there was one I don't think it'll happen like an epiphany (incidentally, the other day ChatGPT taught me that the difference between bildungsroman and catharsis is that the former is a slow accretion and the latter a sudden transformation), and even if that's the case it might not happen through language, and even if it does, I want to stop playing this game for a while. Its tiring to be on a constant lookout, swimming blind in the hope that the next dip is going to lead to the master switch. Especially in an era where not just humans but also machines are secreting such copious amounts of words. The anxiety is driving me nuts; Ofcourse the unfortunate side-effect of this abandonment of this mode of living is the slim possibility that I'm stopping the search just before the discovery. It's a doubt I can never assuage. The possibilities and opportunities lost of every road not taken, the counterfactual combinatorial explosion of which can you drive you nuts. No wonder people find comfort in believing in destiny- if this is the way things turned out, this could be the only way things could turn out. But I also have lived with myself enough to know I'll come back to this, that I'm too much of a lost, confused romantic to ever take all of my life into my own hands.
Until then, until then though, I have to find a way to live as consciously, deeply, and agentically as I can. And that means treating words like water- They're essential and life-giving, but there can definitely be too much of it, not all are drinking-grade, and that I should be able to use the right kind appropriately for the right need. Which brings to the final question: Why do I want to keep contributing to this flood? Why do I still feel compelled to write, publicly all the more? Because it needs to come out, I need to, for the lack of a more suitable word, excrete it, even at the cost of some bugger somewhere having to be burdened by it ("Your brain is the society's dustbin" -Sadhguru), just like we drink water from a river and then our sewage enters the ocean (have I taken the water analogy too far?), so too is this a social activity. Words are the OG interpersonal technology and I'm beginning to realise that the more I talk to myself, the more I distance myself from being. I hope I'm not suggesting we all revert to a bygone, primitive evolutionary epoch but I guess what I'm trying to arrive at is the feeling that constantly being in conversation with yourself is not always a sureshot way to gain more self-knowledge. I am a social being who is trying to find a better way of yielding a tool. Now, to what end, again, is to come from a place deeper than the most available, proximate use of the tool- which in my case is usually trying to impress/ bombarding people with factoids woven into micro-narratives, or signal my noble intentions- which is what makes the search for a purpose all the more necessary but infuriating. The tools can help and even shape the purpose, which also can keep evolving, not just changing, but the point is not to master the tool for its own sake or use it for circus-feats.
It sounds too Zen/ Yogic/ Mystic for my own liking too but if it helps me reclaim agency and live better with those around me, then maybe I should try walking down this path for a while atleast. If nothing else, I hope it'll puncture the arrogance I have for being a reader and make me more open. Perhaps that old economic principle does have a deep truth- that it is scarcity that creates value- and in a world where words are in unbearable abundance, it is the ability to use them wisely, sparingly is where value accrues.