La insatisfacción del crédito alimentario y su repercusión en el

represents not the infonnation actually carried by the

line, but the maximum amount it might carry, if it were to lead into proper terminal equipment. The amount of information carried with actual tenninal equipment depends on the ability of the latter to transmit or to employ the infonnation received.

We are thus led to a new conception of the way in which the generating station receives the orders. Its actual performance of opening and closing switches, of pulling generators into phase, of controlling the How of water in sluices, and of turning the turbines on or off, may be regarded as a language in itself, with a system of probabilities of behavior given by its own history. Within this frame every possible sequence of orders has its own probability, and hence carries its own amount of information.

It is, of course, possible that the relation between the line and the terminal machine is so perfect that the amount of information contained in a message, from the point of view of the carrying capacity of the line, and the amount of information of the fulfilled orders, measured from the point of view of the operation of the machine, will be identical with the amount of in­ fonnation transmitted over the compound system con­ sisting of the line followed by the machine. In general, however, there will be a stage of translation between the line and the machine; and in this stage, information may be lost which can never be regained. Indeed, the process of transmitting information may involve several consecutive stages of transmission following one an­ other in addition to the final or effective stage; and between any two of these there will be an act of trans­ lation, capable of dissipating information. That infor­ mation may be dissipated but not gained, is, as we have seen, the cybernetic form of the second law of thenno­ dynamics.

Up to this point in this chapter we have been dis­ cussing communication systems terminating in ma-

CYBERNETICS AND SOCIETY ₇₉

chines. In a certain sense, all communication systems terminate in machines, but the ordinary language systems terminate in the special sort of machine known as a human being. The human being as a terminal machine has a communication network which may be considered at three distinct levels. For ordinary spoken language, the first human level consists of the ear, and of that part of the cerebral mechanism which is in permanent and rigid connection with the inner ear. This apparatus, when joined to the apparatus of sound vibrations in the air, or their equivalent in electric circuits, represents the machine concerned with the

phonetic

aspect of language, with sound itself.

The

semantic

or second aspect of language is con­ cerned with meaning, and is apparent, for example, in difficulties of translating from one language to another where the imperfect correspondence between the meanings of words restricts the How of information from one into the other. One may get a remarkable semblance of a language like English by taking a se­ quence of words, or pairs of words, or triads of words, according to the statistical frequency with which they occur in the language, and the gibberish thus obtained will have a remarkably persuasive similarity to good English. This meaningless simulacrum of intelligent speech is practically equivalent to significant language from the phonetic point of view, although it is seman­ tically balderdash, while the English of an intelligent foreigner whose pronunciation is marked by the country of his birth, or who speaks literary English, will be semantically good and phonetically bad. On the other hand, the average synthetic after-dinner speech is phonetically good and semantically bad.

In human communication apparatus, it is possible but difficult to determine the characteristics of its phonetic mechanism, and therefore also possible but difficult to determine what is phonetically significant information, and to measure it. It is clear, for example"

80 THE HUMAN USE OF HUMAN BEINGS

that the ear and the brain have an effective frequency cutoff preventing the reception of some high frequen­ cies which can penetrate the ear and can be trans­ mitted by the telephone. In other words, these high frequencies, whatever information they may give an appropriate receptor, do not carry any significant amount of information for the ear. But it is even more difficult to determine and measure semantically sig­ nificant information.

Semantic reception demands memory, and its con­ sequent long delays. The types of abstractions belong­ ing to the important semantic stage are not merely those associated with built-in permanent subassem­ blies of neurons in the brain, such as those which must

play a large role in the perception of geometrical form;

_I

but with abstraction-detector-apparatus consisting of

parts of the

internuncial

pool-that is, of sets of neurons which are available for larger assemblies, but are not permanently locked into them-which have been tem­ porarily assembled for the purpose.

Besides the highly organized and permanent assem­ blies in the brain that undoubtedly exist, and are found in those parts of the brain associated with the organs of special sense, as well as in other places, there are particular switchings and connections which seem to have been formed temporarily for special purposes, such as learned reflexes and the like. In order to form such particular switchings, it must be possible to assem­ ble sequences of neurons available for the purpose that are not already in use. This question of assembling concerns, of course, the synaptic thresholds of the se­ quence of neurons assembled. Since neurons exist which

can either be within or outside of such temporary as-

_I

semblies, it is desirable to have a special name for

them. As I have already indicated, I consider that they correspond rather closely to what the neurophysiol- ogists call internuncial pools.

CYBERNETICS AND SOCIETY 81 The semantic receiving apparatus neither receives nor translates the language word by word, but idea by idea, and often still more generally. In a certain sense, it is in a position to call on the whole of past experience in its transformations, and these long-time carry-overs are not a trivial part of its work.

There is a third level of communication, which rep­ resents a translation partly from the semantic level and partly from the earlier phonetic level. This is the trans­ lation of the experiences of the individual, whether conscious or unconscious, into actions which may be observed externally. We may call this the behavior level of language. In the lower animals, it is the only level of language which we may observe beyond the phonetic input. Actually this is true in the case of every human being other than the particular person to whom any given passage is addressed in each particular case; in the sense that that person can have access to the in­ ternal thoughts of another person only through the actions of the latter. These actions consist of two parts : namely, direct gross actions, of the sort which we also observe in the lower animals; and in the coded and symbolic system of actions which we know of as spoken or written language.

It is theoretically not impossible to develop the statistics of the semantic and behavior languages to such a level that we may get a fair measure of the amount of information that they contain. Indeed we can show by general observations that phonetic lan­ guage reaches the receiving apparatus with less over­ all information than was originally sent, or at any rate with not more than the transmission system leading to the ear can convey; and that both semantic and be­ havior language contain less information still. This fact again is a corollary of the second law of thermodynam­ ics, and is necessarily true if at each stage we regard the information transmitted as the maximum infor-

82 THE HUMAN USE OF HUMAN BEINGS

mation that could be transmitted with an appropriately coded receiving system.

Let me now call the attention of the reader to some­ thing which he may not consider a problem at all­ namely, the reason that chimpanzees do not talk. The behavior of chimpanzees has for a long time been a puzzle to those psychologists who have concerned themselves with these interesting beasts. The young chimpanzee is extraordinarily like a child, and clearly his equal or perhaps even his superior in intellectual matters. The animal psychologists have not been able to keep from wondering why a chimpanzee brought up in a human family and subject to the impact of human speech until the age of one or two, does not accept language as a mode of expression, and itself burst into baby talk.

Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, most chimpanzees, in fact all that have as yet been observed, persist in being good chimpanzees, and do not become quasi-human morons. Nevertheless I think that the average animal psychologist is rather long­ ingly hoping for that chimpanzee who will disgrace his simian ancestry by adhering to more human modes of conduct. The failure so far is not a matter of sheer bulk of intelligence, for there are defective human animals whose brains would shame a chimpanzee. It just does not belong to the nature of the beast to speak, or to want to speak.

Speech is such a peculiarly human activity that it

is not even approached by man's closest relatives and his most active imitators. The few sounds emitted by chimpanzees have, it is true, a great deal of emotional content, but they have not the fineness of clear and repeated accuracy of organization needed to make them into a code much more accurate than the yow lings of a cat. Moreover ( and this differentiates them still more from human speech ) , at times they belong to the chim­ panzee as an unlearned inborn manifestation, rather

CYBERNETICS AND SOCIETY

than as the learned behavior of a member of a given social community.

The fact that speech belongs in general to man as man, but that a particular form of speech belongs to man as a member of a particular social community, is most remarkable. In the first place, taking the whole wide range of man as we know him today, it is safe to say that there is no community of individuals, not mutilated by an auditory or a mental defect, which does not have its own mode of speech. In the second place, all modes of speech are learned, and notwith­ standing the attempts of the nineteenth century to formulate a genetic evolutionistic theory of languages, there is not the slightest general reason to postulate any single native form of speech from which all the present forms are originated. It is quite clear that if left alone, babies will make attempts at speech. These attempts, however, show their own inclinations to utter something, and do not follow any existing form of lan­ guage. It is almost equally clear that if a community of children were left out of contact with the language of their seniors through the critical speech-forming years, i

they would emerge with something, which crude as it might be, would be unmistakably a language.

Why is it then that chimpanzees cannot be forced to \ talk, and that human children cannot be forced not to? Why is it that the general tendencies to speak and the general visual and psychological aspects of lan­ guage are so uniform over large groups of people, while the particular linguistic manifestation of these aspects is varied? At least partial understanding of these mat­ ters is essential to any comprehension of the language­ based community. We merely state the fundamental facts by saying that in man, unlike the apes, the im­ pulse to use some sort of language is overwhelming; but that the particular language used is a matter which has to be learned in each special case. It apparently is built into the brain itself, that we are to have a pre-

84

TIlE HUMAN USE OF HUMAN BEINGS

occupation with codes and with the sounds of speech, and that the preoccupation with codes can be extended from those dealing with speech to those that concern themselves with visual stimuli. However, there is not one fragment of these codes which is born into us as a pre-established ritual, like the courting dances of many of the birds, or the system by which ants recognize and exclude intruders into the nest. The gift of speech does not go back to a universal Adamite language dis­ rupted in the Tower of Babel. It is strictly a psycho­ logical impulse, and is not the gift of speech, but the gift of the power of speech.

In other words, the block preventing young chim­ panzees from learning to talk is a block which concerns the semantic and not the phonetic stage of language.

The chimpanzee has simply

no

built-in mechanism

which leads it to translate the sounds that it hears into

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