Neal Stephenson Quote

So which theory did Lagos believe in? Therelativist or the universalist?He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they areboth somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought hadessentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning.But it seems to me there is a key difference, Hiro says. The universaliststhink that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- thepathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits.Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning alanguage is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret.The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips, Hirosays. When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and onlyonce, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- theinformation, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes intohardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out,but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that thenewborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- andthat as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itselfaccordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanentpart of the brain's deep structure -- as the universalists would have it.Yes. This was his interpretation.Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers,what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between languageand the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowingthe secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it -- digital namshubs?Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of languageand see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gavehim power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter thefunctioning of the brain and of the body.Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there any namshubsin English?Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages arebetter at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lendthemselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: Palestinehad Qiryat Sefer, the 'City of the Letter,' and Syria had Byblos, the 'Town ofthe Book.' By contrast other civilizations seem 'speechless' or at least, as mayhave been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative andtransformational powers of language. Lagos believed that Sumerian was anextraordinarily powerful language -- at least it was in Sumer five thousandyears ago.A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking.Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional languagecalled the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men tounderstand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was thelanguage of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word.In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quoteSteiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth likea dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; alight of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a secondFall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote GershomScholem's translation, 'The speech of men is connected with divine speech andall language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the DivineName.' The practical Kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem,meaning 'master of the divine name.'The machine language of the world, Hiro says.