Today I changed my blog's name to "Every Mile but the Last" in reference to a particular conceit, based on what's called the "last mile" in the telecommunications industry. In this usage, if the last mile of wiring or means of relay or whatever is down en route to customers' neighborhoods or houses, the whole telecommunication system fails.
Another very similar problem is that of how we get software onto machines. Computers only understand binary. The central task of programming languages is thus to bring commands from a human-manipulable language like Java to the level that specific computers, many with different architectures or operating systems, can understand. Here we have another "last mile", which is the translation of commands into the basic code that a specific computer understands. The last mile in both cases effectively symbolizes the importance of establishing infrastructure.
If you learn about the development of telephone communication as a viable service, you learn that the first problem The Bell Telephone company had to solve in trying to commercialize their stunning new product in the 1880s or so was how to provide reliable telephone wiring on a truly mass scale, and do so cheaply. Their problem was that they had to make cities and rural communities alike connected on a scale that they never had been before. This is the problem of infrastructure in telecommunications. For software, the original problem of infrastructure was just as difficult. Modern-day software developers benefit massively from the existence of the C programming language. Most software today is written in extremely "high-level" language--basically, those that do a lot of your work for you--which are in turn inevitably based on C. But scarcely does anyone use Assembly Language, or, heaven forbid, an even lower level language. This is because we've already built systems of meaning that do a lot of our work for us.
Most generally, specific things, places, people are different from each other. The virtue of "looking closely", as I once referred to it, or "narrowness", as the Bayesians over at lesswrong.com term it, takes advantage of just this fact. And it is only through looking closely at specific situations and experiences that we can achieve any relationship at all with capital 'T' Truth. But the purpose of creating an infrastructure for large-scale communication or for manipulating machines is in essence to streamline each process, taking advantage of the inherent structure of the information that needs to be disseminated, so as to do it most efficiently.
Finally the conceit. In naming my blog "every mile BUT the last", I'm effectively saying that I can't deliver meaning straight into your cortex. I can only bring you most of the way--present you with evidence, make a connection or two. At that point, the rest is up to you, and whether or not you have established through your habits of thought the proper infrastructure to receive what I have to say.
But you may not completely know the last mile yourself,
ReplyDeleteAnd my first mile may or may not be your last mile ...
I concluded my metaphor by saying that an individual's "last mile" is that person's habits of thought. What, then, is the entire system of which the "last mile" is simply the ultimate track?
DeleteAs I said, the purpose of any such system is one of information-gathering. That the ending place of this system is the meaning and weight your consciousness assigns to all of this information suggests that, unlike a telecommunications system, which is sending out information from a centralized locale to any number of decentralized milieu, thus creating the problem of the general, decentralized last mile (which is actually what makes it difficult), the structure of the human's information-gathering system as I have laid it out is reversed--that is, is taking in information from any number of decentralized sources, and marshaling it all in some fashion before their own individual, yet centralized, in a sense, last mile of interpretation. Thus the human's interpretation is "centralized", basically because of the phenomenon of intersubjectivity--that at least from each person's perspective, the world as perceived revolves around them.
In other words, I'm describing the subjective experience, so from an objective perspective--of course everyone has their own "last mile". Your habits of thought and methods of information/meaning extracting will, of course, be radically different from my own, or even from those of best friends or family. If that is all you meant, then I fully agree.
However, if you are suggesting that your "last mile" and everyone's are unique and thus there is no standard for judging my last mile or yours, then I disagree. This is not the same thing as the realm of ethics; this is epistemology, which comes before. The process of gathering, extracting, and interpreting information serves the same purpose no matter what. If you believe there's an objective reality that exists outside your experience of it, then you'll want to faithfully represent or at least anticipate that reality so as to be able to react as you see fit. Even the strongest relativist claims to want to achieve his or her own values. Thus there ought to be best methods or heuristics for getting at the crucial information that allows one to act on their values.
Thanks a lot for commenting and forcing me to make a bunch more connections!
Just to be clear, I don't claim to know all "best methods or heuristics" that one ought to use, as I say, "for getting at the crucial information". However, I do think there are some objective standards one can try to approach.
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