With hieroglyphics, the wedding of language and knowledge began its inevitable evolution

The marriage of language and knowledge spawned libraries. Increasingly, the written word represented more specialized knowledge—logic, mathematics, natural philosophy, astronomy and algebra. From hieroglyphics on stone, to words on paper, and now to computer language on a monitor, humans are driven by a need to chase and capture ideas, to write them down and to pass them forward.

If, indeed, written language began as a tool of economic need, the development of an alphabet catapulted it into something more concrete—an intellectual and even spiritual necessity. Human beings, with their restlessness and endless attraction to new ideas, suddenly had a way to create, communicate and preserve their journey through time.

Writing rose above mere record keeping. Ancient philosophers and historians began to write about their ideas and observations. Gradually, the marriage of language and knowledge spawned libraries, and increasingly, the written word represented more specialized knowledge—logic, mathematics, natural philosophy, astronomy and algebra. By 1100 and 1200, the stage was set for the birth of the first universities in Paris, Oxford and Bologna.

While there is a world of difference between the years 1100 and 2001, certain things haven’t changed. As the stock market rises and falls today, a global economy hangs on the knowledge conveyed on electronic ticker tape, a communication tool no less important to daily life than tax records recorded on stone were in 3000 B.C.

And human beings continue to chase ideas. From hieroglyphics on stone, to words on paper, and now to computer language on a monitor, humans are driven by a need to chase and capture ideas, to write them down and to pass them forward.

Take Doug Hofstadter, for example. College Professor of cognitive science at IU Bloomington, he is best known for his 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, which incorporated many fields to show how consciousness, free will and a sense of personal identity emerge in systems that enjoy a specific type of self-reflection. But in a more recent activity, a 1998 art exhibit For the Love of Line and Pattern: Studies Inspired by Alphabets and Music, he introduced “Whirly Art.” Whirly Art is linear, with each work approximately six to 10 feet long and only five inches wide.

Hofstadter does each piece using felt-tip pen, with no premeditation and no erasures or changes. He calls it a fusion of contrapuntal music, the calligraphy embodied in the various alphabets from the Indian subcontinent and the art of improvisation. To the uninitiated, Whirly Art looks suspiciously like hieroglyphics.

Just as in the time when humans first began to manipulate written language around huge abstract concepts, another crossroads presents itself. Gregory J.E. Rawlins, an IUB computer scientist, writes of today’s tangle of technology and society.

With a shift not unlike the one that took us from hieroglyphics to alphabets as tools of knowledge transfer, Rawlins says that increasingly we will see technological advances produce societal changes. As he said in an on-line interview as MIT Press’ author of the month, the past predicts the future.

"In fact," he said, "it is the only reliable predictor we have."