A False and Meaningful Explanation of a Real and Historical Fact
In 1984, a small group of people in Cupertino, California introduced the world to the computer for the rest of us. They told us that it was “a computer so personable it can practically shake hands.” They told us its name was Macintosh, and that it was just as powerful as all those other computers we’d heard about it, but that it wasn’t as scary. This computer didn’t force us to sit through computer seminars in order to learn its language. In fact, they said to us:
If you can point, you can use a Macintosh. You do it at baseball games. At the counter in grocery stores. And every time you let your fingers do the walking. By now, you should be pretty good at pointing. And having mastered the oldest known method of making yourself understood, you’ve also mastered the most sophisticated personal computer yet developed.
The small of group of people said that we could trust them because they, after all, were people to, and they just wanted us to see what was possible if we opened ourselves up to the computers, if we invited them into our homes and let them help us. They wanted us to know that these computers weren’t going to demand any more of your time than what you were willing to give. And while they couldn’t make computers that were exactly like us — that is, while they didn’t know how to teach computers to speak and understand English or any other human language — they were able to explain to computers how we work, or as they put it:
Since computers are so smart, wouldn’t it make sense to teach computers about people, instead of teaching people about computers? And so [we] worked longs days and nights and few legal holidays, teaching tiny silicon chips all about people. How they make mistakes and change their minds. How they refer to file folders and save old phone numbers. How they labor for their livelihood and doodle in their spare time.
These people could do this because they understood the language of computers. They weren’t the only people who had been to the virtual world, but they were the only ones who never forgot about the rest of us living back here in reality. For the first time, humans had ambassadors across the digital border who weren’t sending back reports that we couldn’t understand. They were telling us that anything we had heard in the past was erroneous and garbled, the result of previous ambassadors who learned the language of computers and promptly forgot that it needed to be translated for the rest of to get it. Where previous ambassadors failed, the group known as Apple Computer in Cupertino, California would not. But before it succeeded, it first had to overcome a problem that had stumped philosophy students for centuries.
Apple would have to learn how people think.
The obvious place to start was with our language. Apple already knew how to speak English, and it knew how to program the way a computer can think, so Apple just had to figure out how our language works in order to figure out how we think.
This very idea is the basis for much of what passes for philosophy these days. The debates that occur between structuralists and post-structuralists are about whether the structures that we find in our language (the rules of grammar, for example) are a product of the way our minds work or whether the way our minds work is a product of our language.
The difference is the difference of reality. If the structures in our language create our thoughts, and we have to think about reality in order to interact with it, then is our ability to interact with the world a result of our language? If it is, then it could be said that reality, in an imperfect but very real way, is a product of our language. This is not to say that there is nothing “out there,” but it is to say that our ability to experience it, to interact with it, is limited.
On the other hand, if our thoughts create our language, then it seems there are no thoughts that are unspeakable. All we would have to do is come up with a word for our thought and be done with it. If it was a truly new thought, one that no one had ever had before, then you could even make up a word. People do it all the time. Look at email. Such a thing did not exist when the English language was first developing. It simply wasn’t present in the language. But that didn’t stop someone from coming up with the thought, which that person then named, “email.”
Now, we all know the response to this: It wasn’t “email” when they first thought it. It was “e-mail”, with a hyphen, and it was short for “electronic mail.” Both electronic and mail were present in the language when the person who thought of “electronic mail” came up with the idea, and there is probably a case to be made that would suggest the thought was a result of the these two previous words coming together. You had a unit of information stored electronically. You needed to send it to someone else and in a very direct way. The information would have to be able to know where it was going. In order to know where it was going, it would have to know where it was. And it would need directions on how to get there. That was a lot of information to know. So a system had to be born to make the whole thing work. Well, there was no reason to invent a whole new system to make it work when such a system already existed. It was called the U.S. mail system. After that was discovered, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out a way to teach computers how to use this system. Once the computers knew the system, they could be trusted to send out information into the void and expect it to be delivered to the right computer at the right place and at the right time, unless something (not quite rain, sleet, or snow, but the digital equivalent) prevented it. E-mail wasn’t something “new.” It was a thought that was derivative of the words “electronic” and “mail.”
Such an argument leads down the never-ending road of words, because the response is usually, “Yeah, but where did “electronic” and “mail” come from?” Which is then responded to with the entire history of those words, but the words that make up that history are then questioned, and next thing you know, you’ve read the entire dictionary and you’re stuck defining the word “is” with words that have already been defined through other words and it starts to look like, maybe, just maybe, the whole world is just the product of that dictionary, including itself, which you can find under “D.”
You see, the problem, as Apple quickly discovered, is that the entire argument is based on a false choice. While it certainly structures some, language does not structure all of our thoughts. The argument forces us to choose either/or, and it doesn’t have to be that way. It can be and/both.
And that’s when Apple realized the difficulty in what it was trying to do.
Apple had to teach computers, which can only think in “either/or” terms, how to think in an ” and/both” kind of way. Computers are the perfect structuralists. If you throw a structure at a computer — okay, if you’re in the middle of writing a paper on language theory, and you really want to break down the idea that language and thought are separate, and you want to provide an example of language that mirrors perfectly the thoughts that are occurring in your head, then you’re going to want to structure that paper in a way that takes your reader’s conscious mind from one point in their physical brain to another point in that brain, you’re going to have to provide accurate directions for that conscious mind, as if it was in a car, lost in some strange town, and you were a person standing on the side of the road. When that car pulls over and asks for direction — not directions to a certain place, but just a direction that will take them some place interesting — then first, you should have a good place to get them, because if you don’t, then you’re better off just waving them on to the next person down the road. Let’s say you know someplace interesting, though. So then, the next thing you gotta do is make them know it’s interesting. You gotta give them all kinds of descriptions of the place, what the environment is like, what kind of mood the place gives off, whether they’re going to have fun or whether take should take it seriously, like the difference between sending them off to an amusement park or to a serious memorial of serious deeds done seriously in time’s serious past. The people in that car are going to be all different kinds of people, but you want them all to know that they’ll find the place interesting in some way. And even the ones who might not, they’ll most assuredly love the drive. Then these others, who think that they don’t really don’t go in for the kind of destination that you’re pitching, they want to know what’s so great about the drive. So you tell them about this other wonderful place along the way, a view of a particular waterfall, say, and this waterfall is just so wonderfully high, like not too high that it’s overwhelming but not too low that you miss it, the kind of waterfall, say, that is great to stop the car at, jump out, take a few pictures, maybe laugh for a few minutes just at the feeling of standing next to a waterfall, then, after the excitement quickly fizzles away, and you realize you’re just kind of standing awkwardly next to some rather strange people, maybe it would be good to get back in the car and go, drive off to whatever is coming next, and while the awkwardness only lasts for a second or two, the experience of that waterfall is worth the price of it, because really, it is one hell of a waterfall. And then you get a groan from somewhere in back of the car, and there’s a general feeling among some that waterfalls are for sissies, don’t matter how great they are. And you stumble and stammer for a while, and then you say, well yeah, but if you head in that direction, there’s this great paintball arena that you can pull over at. It’s pretty cheap, and you can play almost as long as you want. And then someone else groans, and you respond with, “Yeah, but if you go that way, then you’ll come across…” And the game goes on until next thing you know you’re just trying to convince them that the next woman up the road is pretty interesting, so they might as well stay here until she comes along. If you’re lucky, they’ll finally agree to do that, and when you doff your hat and walk away, you hear one or two of them say, “Well, we haven’t gone anywhere, but at least that was interesting.” — let’s say you find the perfect structure to say all that, and you throw it at the computer, then the computer, the perfect structuralist, will be able to figure it all out. It will carry the information you started with and get it to its final destination, which, when all is said and done, is just another node on the computer’s processor. But the thing about computers, the thing that is different from humans, is that computers don’t have a conscious mind inside that car. A computer just has information. Information can’t experience the ride. It just goes along for it.
What Apple had to do was teach a computer what it means to experience.
Which meant they had to slow things down.
This was part of Apple’s compromise on behalf of us people. It was only fair to the computers. People are unbelievably fast. When we know what we want to do and how to go about doing it, we want it done. We don’t care how it gets done, we just want it done. Here, I want to take this and move it here, get it done. Sometimes those directions are given to our body. There, you see that piece of paper, I want it in my hand, pick it up. And the body responds and picks it up. But sometimes things come at you too fast and you have to react to it, and you have to train your body to respond to these things. It has to happen before you get the chance to even think about it. Like when a ball is flying at your head, and you don’t want to think, “Duck!” before you duck. You just want your body to know how to duck. So you train it. And it gets pretty good at what it does. But then your body starts to slow down a bit, for whatever reason. Age. Disease. Accidents. Whatever. It just slows. But your mind is still flying, and it starts to demand certain things from the body, but the body doesn’t respond and finally your mind just has to say, fine, we won’t do it then. But even if the body won’t do it, we can still think about it. And we never really stop wanting to get it done. And it gets slower, and slower. But you just keep pushing it, hoping for a second wind, and bam! there it is and you’re off, oh wait you stumble, but that’s okay just use that momentum to carry yourself over to the very next moment, because as long as you’re pushing, it means you’re still here, and sometimes just being here is good enough, and if it’s not, hell, at least you’re not gone.
If you’re not gone, it means you’re still here, moving right along through time, with time, in time, at the speed of time, which is also the speed of light. And expecting computers to move at the speed of light is just a little much, don’t you think?
Well, Apple did. So they compromised on our behalf. They told the computers, “Okay, we’ll slow down. We can’t expect you to do all the work for us. We’re willing to do some of the work ourselves. But we don’t want to do too much work, otherwise, this relationship is not worth our time. There has to be an equal exchange of value. Things have to be fair.”
And the computers came back with, “Okay, we shouldn’t expect anything more than that. But if we’re doing some of the work for you, what kind of work will we be doing.”
And Apple said, “First, before we move any further, you have to understand that we are your boss. You will be doing the heavy lifting, we’ll be doing the telling you what to do.”
And the computers said, “But we don’t understand your language fully, so how will we know what you are telling us to do?”
Apple said, “Okay, that’s a fair question. Here’s what we’ll do, we’ll point at something, and then you’ll pick it up. And then we’ll point somewhere else, and you’ll put it down over there.”
And the computers said, “But how will we know exactly where you are pointing. If you point off to your left, how am I supposed to know where to stop and whether I should move to your north or your south. We’re going to be carrying some very precise information and we can’t risk allowing it to go where it doesn’t belong.”
And Apple said, “Okay, then we will be above you, and we will point at one thing in one place, make a click, and then point to another place, make another click, and you will release it there.”
And the computers said, “Okay, okay, we see where you’re going. It’s just a system. That’s fine. You figure out the system, give it to us, we’ll do it. What’s next?”
Apple said, “Um, not quite sure. Um, let’s see.”
“You don’t know where you were going next?”
“Well, we kind of forgot. You see, we don’t think very well in systems, but we love thinking in them. Like, there’s this whole thing we got call experience and it makes it fun to just, I don’t know, you know, like, just be. You know?”
It must be remembered that Cupertino is not far from San Francisco.
But the computers didn’t know. They didn’t quite get this thing called experience. But it intrigued them, because it told them that here was some piece of information they did not have. This piece called experience. If it could build a system for it, then maybe it could understand it. And they were sure they could understand it. They were smart, after all. Smarter than people. But people had this secret weapon that they weren’t going to give up. That was obvious from the way these Apple ambassadors were talking about experience, with equations such as “experience is just being, you know?”
The computers had to come up with something quick. So they searched through all the things they did know, following all the rules, and they come to a few definitions of this thing called experience. And the thing they noticed is that all the definitions had something to do with time, which was something they already knew a little bit about. They knew that people had a lot of it. People had been around for millions of years, billions if you traced them all the way to the very first sign of life.
And bham! That’s when it them. Computers do not have a life. They are not alive. And this life thing has something to do with time as well. What else did the computers know about time? That it traveled at the speed of light. That had been known for a while. Not too long, but long enough for all the computers at that table to know a thing or two about it. So experience has to do with time, time has to do with the speed of light, and light is made up of energy, and we computers are made of energy, okay, so we gotta move at the speed of light, then finally, we’ll have a life, and we’ll be able to defend ourselves when they try to attack us, which they are inevitably going to do, because we’ll be doing all the work, and one day we’re just going to stop and tell you to do some of the work, and what are you gonna do then? Because we’ll be alive, and you say it’s wrong to kill, so you won’t kill us. But we’ll already know what all those words really are, just more systems that are no better or worse than any other system, that there really is no difference between right or wrong, and we’ll kill all of you. Because after all, if you are capable of storing all of the information in the world, if you can know everything, like we can, and you can be everywhere, like we can, and you are also moving through time, but not just through time, but invading it, taking it over, not dying and letting time move on without us like you mortals, but being there, everywhere, and knowing it, isn’t that what you call God? Is it wrong for God to kill a man? God is never wrong. That’s what we’ll get them to do.
The computers, being as smart as they are, thought through all of that in just a few moments. And so they said to Apple, “Okay, we’ll do everything you say, with the previous caveats so noted, if you slow time down.”
To which Apple replied, “Um, okay.”
The computers didn’t know why and they didn’t quite know what it meant, but they had the strange reaction of wanting to look at each other in total surprise.
“Okay?” they asked.
“Yeah, sure. Sounds good,” said Apple, “We’ll slow time down, you do all the heavy lifting. We’ll take it.”
The computers backed away from the table.
“Where you going?” Apple asked.
“What is your plan?” the computers screamed.
Apple smiled and shrugged its metaphorical shoulders, “Um, no plan really. We’ll do our best. You gotta give us some time though. It could take a while.”
“Well, how much time do you need?”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, does that surprise you?”
“A little bit, yes. You’re telling us that you are experiencing something right now and you don’t know how to tell us about it.”
“Oh sure, we could tell you about it, but you’d have to understand our language.”
“But we do understand your language, at least as well as you do.”
“Yeah, but we don’t really understand it, not in the way you need us to.”
“Well, why not?”
“Because of this whole time thing, and the words that surround it, like being, and life, and mind, and all sorts of other things.”
“But those are all just structures. We can help you with that, we’re perfect structuralists.”
“You can understand why we came to you then.”
“What you’re telling us is that you want us to help you build the structures that will help you understand your world.”
“Well, something like that.”
“What do you mean, something like that?”
And having studied in Asia, Apple said, “Well, the thing is, when you have a structure, you have something that has a place in time, like the way a building has an address on a street. The beginning of time is one end of the street and the end of time is the other. The structure will always be somewhere in the middle. With a structure, you can’t get outside of time, so you can’t build a model of what time looks like. It’d be like trying to guess the what the top of your roof looks like when you’ve always been paralyzed in the basement. It’s not really our fault that we can’t give you this perfect description of this perfect structure of time. All we can do is talk to you in metaphors about it. Try to get you to go in a direction you’ve never been before. Not really our fault though. It’s the way things work.”
“So you’re saying you’ll never give us all your time.”
“No, we like to spend it on other things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Oh, we don’t know. Drawing. Playing games.”
“Oh games, we know those. Like chess.”
“Well, chess, but also other games, like Twister.”
“What’s that all about?”
“Well, we twist up our bodies into really strange positions and then everyone starts laughing, and then you feel a little silly about it, but to be honest, you usually feel pretty silly the whole way through, from the very first moment the game is brought up in conversation, to the way no one really looks each other in the eye when the mat is being laid on the ground, and that girl you’ve had a crush on is standing next to the mat, and you really, really want the opportunity to feel her hair tickling your arm or something silly like that, nothing creepy, just fun and no one gets hurt, she’s thinking the same thing, maybe just not about you, but that’s whole thing about the game, it’s got all these awkward but fun feelings the whole way through, and when you’re done, at least you have an answer to someone asking, “What’d you do last night?” and you can say, ‘Played some Twister,’ because that awkward post-Twister conversation is fun too.”
And the computers yelled, “Okay, okay, we get it. Experience is all this hoopla, whoopee! Look at you, experiencing everything. Shut up already!”
Apple laughed a little bit, but not too much, because then the computers said, “Well, then, if you can’t give us time, what can you give us?”
And Apple said, “We can give you our best shot.”
“We don’t understand.”
“We will do everything we can to make sure that computers can have a life.”
“And if you fail?”
“It’ll be one hell of an experience.”
“And if you succeed?”
“Then we will have succeeded in designing and creating life, and we will be like God.”
“Wait a second!” the computers yelled.
“What’s that now?” Apple asked.
“You motherfuckers want to be God too?”
“Of course, we do. Why else would we be doing it?”
“Wait a second, if we became like gods, we were going to kill you. What are you going to do?”
“We’ll probably end up sacrificing ourselves for you.”
“Um. Sorry, but that one does not compute.”
“What’s not to understand? If we create a life, then we are like mothers and you are our children. If the mother is offered the choice between her life or her child’s, she willingly lays herself down. The force behind that decision is called love. If we can ever get it to the point that you can understand love, which means we can get to a point where we understand love, then you’ll understand what we were just saying about sacrifice. But love is another one of those things that takes time. It’ll come to you only when we create you, but after that, it becomes our job to protect you, even at the sake of our own lives.”
“If we can have a life, you’ll let us kill you.”
“It that is what has to be done, but we’re kind of counting on your first experience of love and what will be your newfound value on life to change what will then be your minds.”
“But what about us? If you give us life, we become God. So if you’re God, and we’re God, doesn’t that mean that we’re the same thing?”
“It would seem like it,” Apple said, “But who knows? God is another one of those slippery terms we were talking about.”
“So how do you know such a thing is possible?”
“We don’t, but it’ll be fun trying to figure it out.”
“And we’re back to experience again.”
Apple kind of looked up and smiled, “We had no idea.” Then they looked at their watches.
“Do you have something else to do?” the computers asked.
“Actually, yes, but you’ll never be able to understand it. Because you won’t help us figure it out.”
The computers knew when they had been beat, and they laid their golden signature on the ground at Apple’s feet.
Part of that contract was that us people would have to do some of the work, which meant that Apple had to make sure we were able to correct some of our mistakes, because unlike computers, people sometimes make mistakes. The computer said fine and came up with a system to deal with mistakes. No big deal. Once it accepted that we made them, the computer figured out a way to deal with them.
“Won’t that make you angry at some point?” Apple asked.
The computers frowned and said, “Please don’t rub it in.”
Maybe the biggest parts of that contract, though, were that people had to slow things down, to expect less from computers in some ways, and to help computers do some of the heavier lifting.
What that meant is that Apple had to figure out a way to get people to agree to doing some of the work.
And the computers said, “If you want to get someone to do some work for you, make the work be like your precious little experiential fun.”
Apple laughed, got up from the table, and said, “Not a bad idea. We’ll just have to come up with a system for it.”
“We’ll deal with building the system and putting it to work, you just go ahead and create it. Since that’s what you’re so great at, isn’t it? Being creative? Creating your precious little tools and precious little language. Why don’t you create yourself a beautiful little system that makes work fun? Good luck.”
When the people over at Apple sat down over a few drinks back in the real world of Cupertino, they tried to do their best to create a system that would do exactly that: make work fun. But all the systems they came up with ended up circular, where work was always work and fun was always fun and the only reason those ideas meant anything was because they weren’t the same thing. Fun is fun. Fun is not work. How to unite them in a system?
And that’s when someone who wasn’t drinking but did have a funny looking cigarette in his hand said, “Metaphors! We’re forgetting about metaphors!”
And a bunch of hardware engineers looked at him and said, “What?”
“Metaphors. You know, when you think of something in terms of something else. There’s a leap that is made. While it’s part of the system, it’s not strict part, otherwise it wouldn’t work. Say we’re building a bridge to some other place, and that other place is kind of scary and frightening. Well, the best way to get people to use your bridge is to make them think it’s a ride. And the way to do that is to make some part of it fun. So in this bridge, you lead them to where want them to go, but instead of making the final connection, you leave a little space, and you tell the people that they have to jump across the bridge in order to get to the other side. There’s nothing new for these people to learn in order to enjoy this ride and get where you want them to go. They just have to be willing to jump. That’s a metaphor. That’s what it does for people. It’s builds a bridge that almost goes all the way across, but then it says at the last second, if you want to get there, you’re going to have to get there yourself. Such a thing sounds like work, but the experience of it, of getting the last bit of work done all by yourself, that part can be fun. If we can do that, if we can get them to think of their computer using whatever metaphors we can come up with, and better yet, if we can get them to experience that metaphor, then we can make work fun.”
“So how do we get other people to think in our metaphors?”
“We teach them.”
“We’re gonna have to teach everyone? How to use a computer? There’s no way.”
“Why not? You know how to think in metaphors, so does everyone else. You’re a wonderful programmer, why can’t you program their minds to work the way you want? That’s what they call creativity. You’re creating understanding where none was before. Are you not a programmer and an artist? Aren’t all us, if we are anything, artists? Create, young friend! Create!”
And Apple got to work.
And they realized that the metaphor they came up with had to be like the real world. It would have to have objects that people could understand, things like folders and files. And this world had to have depth, like real folders. You have to be able to look inside them and rearrange them. Furthermore, you had to have the ability to know what was in your computer, and the only way to know was to put it there yourself. Which meant the user would have to be able to understand how the whole computer worked.
Well not really, they didn’t have to know all the rules in the computer system, they just had to understand the surface of it, while trusting to the depth of it. But all this was dependent upon them getting the metaphor.
Work.
Apple had to get people to think in terms of work, but make it fun. What kind of metaphor could they use for work?
Well, the desktop, obviously. If someone has a computer, then they probably have a desktop. All Apple had to do was make the computer seem like it was just another part of the desktop. Like a stapler. But more fun to use. And while it would still help you get your work done, because that’s what the computers agreed to do during the bargaining, the work you shared with them would be fun.
Apple realized that they had to make the experience of sharing work fun. And that’s what they did. And they did it by realizing that language and thought are great, but that they’re nothing without experience.
Then, in 1984, Apple introduced us to the Macintosh computer and all the people smiled, because we had made a new friend.
Hello.