Font Rants on Many Subjects

Patterns in the noise

I've been watching a friend's baby learn language; and meditating on the amazing ability of humans to see patterns in noise. I believe the breadth of our civilization is owed to the development of language. I was thinking of Adam naming the pieces of creation as an apt description of our development. As we named things; we defined them and differentiated them. We create an ever growing taxonomy of creation, from kingdoms to genus to phylum, on and on into species. We build formal systems and grammars around words so that we can convey ever more complex information; and store ever increasing knowledge. We named the plants and animals then we took ownership and domesticated them. Out of this we went from hunter gatherers to farmers; to modern urbanites. All of this comes from our ability to create language; which springs from our incredible ability to see patterns in what seems like noise.
Turn on a foreign language that you don't speak. Listen to it; even though you understand your own language; you will be hard pressed to figure out a single word. Realize what a greater leap it was for you to actually learn your first tongue; not really knowing what you wanted to learn. There was a time when you could not make the "bah" which is the simplest of deliberate noises; and the one babies usually learn first. Then there were months of endless "bah"ing; until eventually you formed all the vowels and consonants. Finally you spoke one word, then another; then one day you spoke a sentence, instead of pointing at the ball and saying "ball", you actually said "I want ball"; then the articles and prepositions of more refined grammar took a few years more. Then you spoke all this from being able to pick out patterns from noise.
Yet sometimes what we are hearing is just noise. There was a movie out earlier this year called 'White Noise'; based on true accounts of people who listen to the static from radios and blank tapes; looking for "messages from beyond". Are these really voices of spirits who've passed into some other realm; or are our finely tuned pattern recognition engines seeing what isn't there. On the other hand; if enough people believe a pattern is real; it can sometimes become real. Millions of dollars trade on major stock exchanges every day because of technical analysis; which is really just looking at patterns in a stock's movement over a period of time; and making a decision about what is likely to happen next. Of course if enough people believe in this kind of momentum and start making trades; the underlying value of the company can be irrelevant for very long periods of time. While one could argue that this is just numbers on paper and not the real world; think of fortunes lost and made on this illusion. We believe in the pattern and it becomes real.
The last 500 years have been about the rise of an empiric world view. By this, I mean a world which can be proven through fact. Science has dominated and given rise to technology and innovation. I see the world as changing. We are becoming more powerful as individuals. Power and wealth can flow quickly to a person or an idea. Look at how quickly Howard Dean moved last year because of internet donations and bloggers; or the destruction of Dan Rather. In a world of automated supply chains; one click shopping, instant gratification, and complex systems; what are the consequences for the times when what we believe/intuit and the empiric facts diverge?
Are we at the limit of humanities ability to manage its own existence? Howard Dean destroyed himself with one ill taped hurrah. Ironically a noise; extracted from a pattern. The whole crowd was cheering with him; but all we heard was one lone madman.
I fear that the power we have given ourselves is now the ability to make our every perceived belief into something that so closely resembles reality that we could very well be destroyed by our own id; like in the movie "Forbidden Planet". We may well see that the next 500 years is a new dark age; where we spin slowly away from science and knowledge; to a kind of maintenance of our current existence; slowly winding down into plague and ignorance.