Milli mála - 01.01.2012, Page 205

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PÉTUR KNÚTSSON
answer, the pause that follows the lie. For I had in any case been
talking to myself whenever I found breath in the climb, hearing
only my own silences. Wind in me and me in the wind. And so a
perilous question arises: if silence is a feature of language, when
does language ever start, or ever stop?
The questions What? and Where? and When? are not clearly
differentiated: one may supplant another. A studied reply to the
question What is language? may be to indicate its time and lo-
cation: Here it is, at this time. The question means: Where/when
does its form and matter reside? Where is its body, and its struc-
ture? Does it reside in us, or we in it? (And what would be the
bearing of any difference between these two?)
Let us put aside for the moment the problem of location of the
human mind, and disregard the story of its peregrination, with
Aristotle as travel guide, around the human body.20 For the sake of
the argument we will assume that, as modern science tells us, the
mind resides in the brain. And let us similarly put aside the fact
that the story of our understanding of human consciousness has not
achieved closure either, if it ever will.21 Let us accept for the sake of
the argument that the human mind is a result of bioelectric activity
in the neurons of the brain, with a range of semi-autonomous cir-
cuits in the spinal chord. This is no worse a metaphor than many;
we have turned our back on the vapours and humours of medieval
mental science, and on the valves and furnaces of the industrial
revolution. Today our technology offers us electronic circuits, and
so the late twentieth and early twenty-first century human brain is
visualised as a computer: this is at least no less fitting than a
crucible. We can perhaps see hints of future brains in the writings
of scientists such as Roger Penrose, who would allow the principles
of sub-nuclear indeterminacy to make quantum computers of our
mental processes (Penrose 1990); but we must wait for the next
undreamt-of technological paradigm before we can start sneering at
the naivety of the computer metaphor. For the present, then,
language flickers in the synapses of the brain. But only there?
20 See for instance Gross 1995.
21 See Þorsteinn Vilhjálmsson 1996 for a rational-scientific approach to the problem of scientific
metaphor which takes a similar tack to mine.
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