Telepathy

Mind to Mind Metaphysics in Alphabet and Cyberspace

by

David Porush [david@spongefish.com]

[1] "He went to the window [of his hotel room in Istanbul]...There was another hotel across the street. It was still raining. A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their

old voiceprinters wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a

sluggish country." - William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

[2]"She passed many things that Case hadn't understood, but his curiosity was gone. There had been a room filled with

shelves of books, a million flat leaves of yellowing paper pressed between bindings of cloth or leather, the shelves marked at

intervals by labels that followed a code of letters and numbers." - William Gibson, Neuromancer

[3]"Can you read my mind, ...Wintermute?" ... "Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print literate. I can access your

memory, but that's not the same as your mind." He reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and withdrew a

silver-black vacuum tube. "See this? Part of my DNA, sort of..." He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. "You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals.

Pipe organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you'll have finally

managed the real thing." "I don't know what you're talking about."

"That's 'you' in the collective. Your species."William Gibson, Neuromancer

"I’m telling you this because you’re one of my friendsMy alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!

Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra

Porush/Telepathy 1 5/13/2023

In the excerpts from Neuromancer (1984) above, the aboriginal novel about cyberspace,

William Gibson suggests that when we get there, we may be illiterate but we will also be

telepathic. The first excerpt [1] is a sly allusion to ancient Babylonia, Sumeria, and Israel, where

scribes opened stalls in souks to send letters, write contracts, and take dictation for pleas to

monarchs and prayers to deities.

The second [2] comes from a scene in which Case, the cyberspace cowboy and barbarian

from America, is viewing a strange room through the eyes of Molly (the cyborg assassin) to whom

he is telepathically linked by cyberspace technology. We can recognize it as a library. Case has

no clue. At the same time, the fact that Case is seeing the world through Molly's eyes, is feeling

her body as it moves through this remote, alien space, demonstrates the new telepathic powers

cyberspace gives.

The third [3] describes an encounter between Case and the Artificially Intelligent entity,

Wintermute, who has hired him to link him with Neuromancer, the right-brain libidinous entity.

Case believes that Wintermute can "read" his mind. Wintermute hints that "reading" is an

anachronistic metaphor for what minds do to each other. What's needed is a whole new way of

"knowing" how minds work, a system describing cultural evolution in which technological

innovations like television are the "genes" that evolve new consciousnesses, new cyborg facilities

of mind.

Although there are enormous technical difficulties that must be overcome before we reach

the cyberspace Gibson imagines -- not least of which is being able to create an interface for

subjective bodily coherence in the brain -- we can at least imagine that some day such telepathy

will be possible. Even if we disregard the technical infeasibility of the thing, it is obvious that the

cyberspace of our imaginations, our virtual future, beckons us with the promise of a whole new

way to communicate which in turn is unleashing in us a yearning for a new kind of intimacy.

"Assuming" cyberspace provides an imaginative vantage point from which we can regard the

revolution in culture and definition of the self that might ensue, a transformation already occurring.

And from this vantage point, we can implicitly critique our own postmodern states of body, mind,

self, culture. That's what the game, and the pun, in "virtual futures"1 is about. We can imagine a

future that isn't quite real, created by a technology that delivers a reality that isn't quite real, in

order to talk concretely about where we are now.

This paper attempts to reflect on the essence of cyberspace without much talking about it.

Instead, it examines an analogous moment in history when culture found itself in possession of

1 This paper was originally written for the Virtual Futures Conference, University of Warwick, UK (1995). It is part of a larger book and hypertext project, Telepathy. The thesis of this project is that the evolution of communication media is determined by an ever-more-urgent desire to communicate telepathically, to transmit feeling from mind to mind, what I refer to as the urge for perfect intimacy. Communications technologies – media - incite this urge even as they hold out the false promise of satisfying it. Porush/Telepathy 2 5/13/2023

an equally new and transformative cybernetic technology for telepathy, for getting thoughts from

one mind to another.

One analog to our own position today is found in the ancient invention of the primitive

Hebrew alphabet. The alphabet itself -- the idea that you could transcribe not the pictures of

things but the sound of language itself -- gave birth to a cybernetic tech that spread so rapidly and

was so potent that it only needed to be invented once: in the South Sinai some time in the

fifteenth century BC. It fostered a new way of thinking, a new facility for abstraction. It rearranged

social organizations and even created a new epistemology and a new metaphysics.

Examining the primitive Hebrew alphabet as an analog for our own cultural moment has a

second virtue: by standing outside the long era of alphabetic civilization, by imagining a virtual

future, we can, perhaps with some nostalgia, understand "alphabetic consciousness" and the

special cyborg gifts that the alphabet brought to our cognitive apparatus, to operating our brains.

We also come to appreciate what we might lose -- what we are already nostalgic for -- as we

move to the illiterate, telepathic cyberspace of Gibson's imagination, one possible virtual future.

We can read how the advent of a new technologically mediated telepathy will spell the

obsolescence of an older media that increased our ability to transmit thoughts mind-to-mind: the

alphabet. We can understand why world statistics bear out the message that literacy has peaked,

why even as third world and developing nations increase their literacy, first world corporations like

McDonald's move towards pictographic icons and immersive computer simulations in their

training and customer interfaces, and why American television, after two generations and the

proliferation of 500 cable channels, has finally manifested its anti-literate effects in declining

literacy among Americans. After all, who can resist committing adultery with multimedia after so

many centuries of faithfulness to the written text? Who can resist the sensuous widening of the

bandwidth that video games and mind link tech provide? I call this new, secondary loss of the

alphabet "cyborg illiteracy": we abandon reading for the hyper-MTV wide-band pleasures of the

text of the body inscribed and transcribed back out into the world and then back onto us.

Observing what happened to culture with the origination of the first phonetic alphabet

provides a remarkable model for the sort of cognitive, cultural, epistemological, and even

metaphysical revolution we are beginning to endure with the advent of vr. So even as we are

already nostalgic for alphabetic consciousness and the particular way it gave us out-of-body

experience and a new metaphysic, by understanding its essence we can also refine our games of

prophesy, and try to understand the metaphysical revolution immanent in vr.

When the brain was simpleWhat is the brain? At its very simplest it is an entity that takes impressions from out there in

the form of energy striking different nerve endings in the organs of the body (eyes, skin, ears,

nose, mouth/tongue), converts the energy into information, shuttles the information to a central

Porush/Telepathy 3 5/13/2023

processor, a black box homoncular body without organs sitting in an ecology of incomprehensibly

frothing and turbulent hormones, and somehow translates them into wholly different things in here

- sensations, thoughts, flocks of birds, schools of fish, swarming, buzzing. The brain is intrinsically

a sur-rational machine for bringing worlds into collision, a metaphor device, a translation circuit for

closing and opening the loop between incommensurate and mutually incomprehensible

universes. In my view, it is already "meta-physical."

Phylogenetically, back when the brain was simple, its expressive function was almost non-

existent. There was a neat Kantian fit between animal and environment: The rules of the world

out there, its physics, were not challenged by the rules of the world in here; there was a nice

match. But then through some urgency that it is just as easy to talk about metaphysically or

teleologically as in terms of some deterministic chaotic evolution, the brain exploded, human-like

hominids started walking upright about 35,000 years ago, looking forward, using tools, colonizing

the world, creating new social structures. The brain, like some imperial culture exploding off a

remote island, started projecting itself onto the world, terraforming the Earth in its own image and

leaving in its wake a trail of non-bio-degradable tools and waste. The brain also started talking,

depicting, enacting versions of its experience in cave paintings, ritual dances, gestures, and a

grammar of grunts. It became self-conscious. It recognized a mismatch between the world out

there and the world in here: Hey! The world persists; we die! Self-consciousness and the idea of

death were born in one fatal stroke.

The powerful cybernetic loop among environment, culture, and brain that we recognize as

uniquely human was initiated sometime between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago as a result of

who-knows-which-butterfly flapping who-knows-what sort of wings. We call the cybernetic device

that initiated and grew in this loop language or symbolizing. Frances Hellige in his book on

cognition and the brain, Hemispheric Asymmetry, describes the growth of this loop initiated by the

development of language, with feed-forward and feedback components, as a sort of "snowball

effect" since it initiates a cycle of ever-widening gyres that eventually embraces and creates

everything between the poles of culture and the biology of the brain itself, including physiological

changes in structure and size of different regions.2

In cybernetic terms, we call this a positive feedback loop. The cybernetic system (in this

case, human brain) sends information out into the world-culture-environment, which feed newly

intensified signals back into the (brain) system to destabilize the system anew, which in turn re-

amplifies its message, like an over-sensitive microphone, and again re-broadcasts this message

back onto the world until the universe screeches with the noise of the human brain echoed back

to it, in it, a cyborg rock concert.

2

Porush/Telepathy 4 5/13/2023

Another researcher, Charles Lumsden, calls this process "the selective stabilization of the

synapses" as a result of continuous exposure to cultural effects or stimulation, a collaboration

between cultural invention and inherited genetic characteristics,” or “Gene-Culture Coevolution."3

Neurophysiologists and cognitive scientists who study the alphabet note that its effects on

the brain can even be seen in the lifetime development of individual people. Evidence is emerging

that the use of language in the world helps reshape the brain from womb to tomb. A whole new

discipline of neural plasticity has emerged in the last six years, showing that the brain is not the

static, genetically-determined machine we once thought it to be. In other words, ontogeny

recapitulates phylogeny in culture-gene co-evolution as well. It's happening to us, today, right

now. Studies of aphasics and dyslexics show that the brain changes physiologically and

progressively after the injury, suggesting that reading grows parts of the brain even in the lifetime

of individual humans, just as losing the ability to read devolves the brain of individual humans, or

forces the brain to "re-wire" itself autopoetically.

Fun with your new brain: a brief history of the rise of the alphabetTo put it bluntly, using different alphabets (or losing the capacity to read the alphabet), even

within the lifetime of an individual, is a bit like growing a new brain. In transit, trying a new

alphabet must have been (and still is) tantamount to an ongoing progressive hallucination. It lets

you think things that you couldn't have thought before, makes connections that simply didn't exist

physiologically - for which your brain wasn't wired - and forces your brain into different information

processing patterns, which presumably involve different mental events or experiences (as

physiological-cognitive research overwhelmingly shows). It's like having a whole new brain, or at

least, a brain with whole new faculties, new circuits, new wetware. Now imagine the mass

hallucination of an entire culture learning how to use an alphabet for the first time. Whole tribes of

people, or important segments of them, put on this new cybernetic headgear, or what I have been

calling a new form of telepathy, virtually all at once. We can imagine this mass cybernetic

experiment would be accompanied by social, epistemological, and metaphysical revolutions,

apocalyptic prophesies, and re-definitions of the self in relation to body, mind, others, and the

invisible. In short, it might provoke the emergence of a new religion.

With this perhaps absurd hypothesis in our minds, let’s take a look at the advent of writing

itself. Take (in our imaginations) a time-lapse photograph of the Nile Valley before and just after

the advent of hieroglyphics, or (even earlier) the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia before and just

after the very first invention of writing, Sumerian pictographs around 3200 B.C. These time-lapsed

films would show millions of years of desultory animal activity, including the hunting gathering and

low-level agricultural activity of upright hominids after 35,000 BC. As we approach 10,000 BC,

activity begins to pick up pace and organization. Clusters of hominids show tool use, primitive

3 See Charles Lumsden, Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origins of MindPorush/Telepathy 5 5/13/2023

mound building, expressive cave painting, and cultivation of the earth, though in indifferent and

almost-random-seeming patterns. Then, suddenly, around 3200 BCE, BANG! Something leaps

across the chaotic bifurcation into a new order of frantic self-organization. Compressed into a few

frames is an almost instantaneous transformation; blink and you'll miss the instant. These fertile

regions undergo massive terraforming along rectilinear plots. Rivers are diverted into rectangular

irrigation systems. Cities emerge, themselves rectilinear. Zoom in with me now into the square-

ish walls of the cities, and into the very square-ish rooms of the city, and we will find the intimate

source of this sudden change. There, a row of hard stone benches, arranged regularly. It is a

schoolroom for scribes! Hundreds of boys, mostly the sons of privileged nobility, sit for hours

hunched over clay tablets, learning to scrawl in regular lines. Indeed, if we superimpose the

scratching of these lines they look like the lines of irrigation written on the face of the earth itself,

as seen from an orbiting satellite. The harsh discipline of the schoolchildren being tutored in script

"canalizes" their thought processes, reinforcing certain pathways. It is hard not to imagine that

what's written on the brain gets projected onto the world, which is literally "canalized," too.

Looking at a picture of the ancient Sumerian classroom for scribes found in Shuruppak

(from ca. 3200 BC), we see familiar rows of benches and the headmasters desk up front. Then

we are seized with a horrible and giddy vertigo, a terrible recognition: Five thousand years later,

and we're still canalizing the brains of our children in the same way, enforcing the discipline of

writing in virtually the same methods and with not so dissimilar effects as did these ancient

Sumerians, "that gifted and practical people" (as Edward Chiera calls them in his groundbreaking

study, They Wrote on Clay). Sumerians invented cuneiform as a perfectly portable means to

effect commerce, extend the authority of their kings, preserve metaphysical and transcendent

information, and secure the stability of caste and rank.

The invention of pictographic writing by the Sumerians was "a secret treasure' or mystery

which the laymen could not be expected to understand and which was therefore the peculiar

possession of a professional class of clerks or scribes,” Chiera writes. Furthermore, the

metaphysics associated with this new telepathic technology becomes clear in the priestly

functions these scribes served. Neo-Babylonian texts used the same ideogram for priest and

scribe. Along with the script came a new mythology that, predictably, placed the power of

language in the center of its metaphysics: "As for the creating technique attributed to these [new]

deities, Sumerian philosophers developed a doctrine which became dogma throughout the Near

East -- the doctrine of the creative power of the divine word. All that the creating deity had to do,

according to this doctrine, was to lay his plans, utter the word, and pronounce the name.

In fact, everywhere pictographic writing makes its advent, we find the sudden emergence of

what we can think of as "tech writing empires": civilizations geometrically akin in their compulsive

rectilinearity to the hexagonal hive structures of bees. In China, among the Aztecs of Mexico or

Incas in Peru, in Babylon, Sumeria, and Egypt, we see the same pattern of social, Porush/Telepathy 6 5/13/2023

epistemological, and metaphysical organization. Along with these scripts come other inventions

so predictably similar that they seem to derive directly from imperatives in the nervous system

itself amplified or newly grown by use of the new cyborg device of writing: centralized authority in

god/kings; monumental ziggurat-like or pyramidal architecture; hierarchies of priest-scribes;

complex, self-perpetuating bureaucracies; fluid but clearly demarcated social/economic classes;

trade or craft guilds; imperialism; slavery; "canalizing" educational systems; confederations of

tribes into nations; standardized monetary systems and trade; taxes; and so on. Almost every

conceivable aspect of empire, in its gross forms, was entailed in pictographic writing. Even the

alphabet, with its greater efficiency and fidelity to speech, only seems to add abstraction and

speed to what McLuhan described as the "exteriorization of the nerve net"

'There is no word in Hebrew for fiction' 4

But there was one moment in history, a parenthesis, which interrupted this cybernetic

feedback loop between writing system and culture/empire canalization with an alternative loop of

its own. It occurs at the moment that the hieroglyphic/pictographic system is supplanted by the

new invention of the alphabet. This event is so momentous that it only happens once in all of

human history, so powerful that it eventually spreads, and is indeed still spreading, across all

human cultures. The moment is brief, for it is quickly supplanted by improvements on its own

fundamental innovation. Yet its legacy is captured and evolves along its own co-evolutionary

path, in dialectic with the "totalizing" line of empire that is taken up again when the alphabet

evolves enough to be harnessed to the work of the tech-writing pictographic scripts. I call this

moment "Hebrew" or, better, for reasons that will emerge, "The Alep-Tav [ ] Event."5 We can

locate this moment, this interruption, eruption, parentheses, this invention on the margins in time

and space, quasi-fictionally. Its legacy is an evolving cultural complex that has some stable

morphological features we call "Judaism" or, for reasons I will explain later, an epistemology and

metaphysics I call (with considerable irony to offset its narcissism) "porushia."

The Phoenician, Ugaritic, Greek, Arabic, Amharic, Korean, Russian, Latin, and all Indo-

European alphabets derived from this ancient proto-Sinaitic Hebrew script. Every other writing

system is either pictographic (Chinese, Egyptian hieroglyphic, Aztec runes, etc.) or syllabic (e.g.

Cuneiform A, North American Cree and Eskimo, Vai [Liberia, Africa], Katakana and Hiragana [the

two Japanese Kana scripts invented between 700-900 AD]). Some hybrids - pictographic

syllabaries - (Tamil and Sanskrit and Cuneiform Linear B or Akkadian) also arise in parallel.

Syllabaries are an important step on the road to an alphabet because they shift the

4 Amos Oz, Black Box 5 The aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and means, among other things,

infinite. Tav is the last letter, and means “sign”. Tav is the sign of the sign. Aleph-Tav together can mean “infinite sign” as well as “alpha-omega.” See the hypertext, MS Scars (www.ms-scars.net) for a further elaboration on this theme. Porush/Telepathy 7 5/13/2023

representation of language from images of things or events (pictograms, sometimes mistakenly

called ideograms or logograms) to the much more plastic representation of the sounds of the

language itself. But syllabaries are a clumsy compromise, replacing thousands of characters with

hundreds: one for ba, another for beh, a third for bee, a fourth for bo, a fifth for boo, etc.

The fundamental revelation in a proper alphabet, and its break from syllabaries, is the

recognition that signs didn’t need to represent speech, but could represent atoms of sound that

are pre-verbal. An alphabet, in other words, recognizes consonants as separate and constant

elements permuted around another constant set of explosives- vowels - which make the

utterance possible. Try uttering the consonant "p" without expelling the air that comes with the

vowel, and you will see that all you get is the stutterer's intention to say "peh" or "pah" or "pay," a

moment of hesitation before an explosion that cannot come without a vowel. So one can

immediately distinguish an alphabet from a syllabary because the former reduces the number of

characters to 36 or fewer, on average, 25 or 26.

Hebrew as the prototypical and aboriginal alphabet, struggled, perhaps by going too

radically and naively, if in the right direction. It represented only the 22 alphabetic characters for

the aboriginal abstraction of the consonants but did not conceive of how – or even whether - to

represent vowels. This is peculiar, since the "idea" of a vowel is entailed once one makes the

phonetic distinction of a "consonant." Perhaps it can be explained by the need for the Hebrews of

the time for secrecy, for a code set apart from the reigning script paradigm. Or perhaps, more

simply, Hebrew was simply an incomplete and primitive experiment that nonetheless produced a

powerful, if defective, technology. Or as some epigraphers have explained, the Hebrew borrowed

the first sound from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, in a principle called acrophony (the highest or first

sound) to form their alphabets. In any case, the Phoenicians, or some Western Semites with

whom the Phoenicians came in contact between the 12th and 9th centuries BC, probably

between Tyre (now in Lebanon) and Akko or Atlit (now on the northern coast of Israel) realized

the inefficiency or primitiveness of this system and added the missing vowels. The Phoenicians

obviously found this new communications technology useful for their commerce and

imperialization of the seas. In turn, they pollinate the Mediterranean with it, exporting a new

improved alphabet, now a much more efficient device for representing all the sounds of speech,

eventually importing it to Greece between the 9th or 8th centuries. At the same time, the alphabet

in different forms spread eastward through Persia into India, and westward back into Africa. It

also invades Middle Eastern and African regions. Alphabets take hold better where a strong

empire doesn’t already exist, among mixed agrarian and tribal civilizations. Empires like Egypt

have too strong a cultural matrix to give up their older form of writing. As a result, hieroglyphics

with its thousands of pictographic elements, survived into the Roman era.

Porushian Consciousness enables a peculiar cognition, culture, and metaphysicsPorush/Telepathy 8 5/13/2023

Given all the above, it is hard to resist making very suggestive connections between the

cybernetic practices induced by this inefficient alphabet and the sociological, cultural, and even

metaphysical practices of Hebrew culture. For instance, it is hard not to suggest that because the

Hebrew language makes the transmission of authority without questioning or interpretation

difficult (if not impossible) and because any written message, especially complex or new ones are

likley to provoke numerous interpretations, it is easy to imagine that the peculiarities of the

alphabet may have helped Jewish culture develop a hearty resistance to authority and consensus

in general.

Now put this cognitive practice or habit in the context of the diaspora. There, one of the

only constants binding 2000 years of Jewish history and dozens of disparate Jewish communities

around the world at any given time, each speaking a different host language, is reading

unvowelled Hebrew texts. We can see how the Jews evolve culturally as a peculiarly resistant

"virus-like" or "parasite-like" race, perceived by their hosts as ineradicable pests who carry with

them a set of insular cognitive and cultural practices dooming them to play on, feed off of, the

margins of the host culture. Yet, paradoxically, these same cognitive practices allow them to

succeed with remarkable acuity. Jews historically succeeded by penetration into controlling

positions in the host culture, acquiring with incredible swiftness professional roles that require

skills of literacy, interpretation, learning, and powers of abstraction. Thus these perpetual

newcomers threaten within a few generations to mutate the central culturgenic heritage of the

hosts.

If we look closely even at the little game we played with the aleph and the tav to produce

three or four possible words -- the feminine you, letter, the (untranslatable) sign of the accusative

case, and 401 -- it is tempting to see the rudiments of an entire alternative epistemological

practice emerge. In this practice, the letters themselves open a space into which interpretation

must be placed in the form of choosing the vowels. The reader takes an active role, looking not

only to multiply possible alternatives, but to seek hidden unities beneath them. Indeed, we can

understand the intense and peculiarly multivalent hermeneutic practice of Jewish Talmud and

mysticism. Furthermore, with the ability to represent "EHT" the accusative case (which is so

abstruse that it is not even represented in English) and all other grammatical cases because the

alphabet is now a transcription (though in Hebrew only ambiguously so) of the spoken language,

civilization now has at its disposal a new sophisticated means to represent and preserve across

space and time the act of languaging itself. That is, the text has the newfound capacity for self-

reflexive statement, to represent with greater plasticity and fidelity the consciousness or intentions

of an author in words. One can "do" texts independent of actions in the world with extreme

plasticity. At the same time, the instrument is not completely efficient, so the reader is teased with

this gesture at telepathic fidelity, and yet forced to disambiguate the messages sent this way.

Porush/Telepathy 9 5/13/2023

So it is also no wonder that the central metaphysical tenet -- and indeed one of the only

constants of Jewish metaphysical dogma (the phrase is almost oxymoronic because of the

absence of a coherent dogma in Judaism) -- in 3500 years history of the Jews from the time of

Moses is the unpronounceability, the unwriteability, and the unthinkability of the name of God.

Jews are taught traditionally never to write or speak The Name, even in another language. In

English, for instance, one writes G-d. The arbitrary transliteration of the Tetragrammaton - the

four letters of God's name in Hebrew - YHVH - into Yahweh, is a purely Christian imposition on a

Hebrew that it is indeterminate and unpronounceable as written. Even in devout prayers, Jews

abbreviate the Tetragrammaton to 'YY'. amd utter "Adonay" (meaning Lord). For non-liturgical

practice, the letters are read "Adoshem" a nonsensical combination of "Lord" and "Name" - or

else one says "The Name."

What at first seems like only a religious fetish is also a reiteration and reinforcement of a

central cognitive tool (or at least distinction) of Hebrew literacy. You get a metaphysics of

multivalence, interpretation, perpetual and transcendental ambiguity, deferral of meaning to some

locus that is never here, a disconnection between the spoken and the written authority, and a

denial of presence. God speaks a name and shows a Face, an actual Face, only to Moses, only

once. Even then Moses turns away, only to watch the non-physical presence of God recede from

him. So rather than a cosmological model of knowability, tangibility - essentially the kind of

idolatry we find in tech writing empires-- the inefficiency of the script system promotes a

metaphysics of absence, of unknowability and of the unrepresentability of central truths.

Tracing the Culturegenetics of alephtavian cognition Even the story of the very first exile of the Hebrews, from their slave home in Egypt, can be

read as a rehearsal of a sociological conflict between two alphabets or as an expression of the

new cultural/cognitive powers which the new alphabet brings. It is circa 1400 BCE. Moses flees

Egypt and finds harbor among the Midianites, who happen to occupy the area of the desert in the

region of south Sinai, near the turquoise mines of Pharaoh, where and when many archeologists

and epigraphers suggest the alphabet originated. There God reveals to Moses "ha oht," [ the

aleph-tav] which is variously translated 'sign', 'mark', 'signal', 'omen', 'token', or 'miracle'. But the

word also means 'letter'. God tells Moses to go back to Egypt and show Pharaoh "the letters."

Moses, who doesn't speak well6 lets his brother Aaron do the talking. Aaron shows these newly

invented and really quite amazing Hebrew letters in the court of Pharaoh. We would say today he

gives a demo. Pharaoh calls out his own experts, who are called "chartumeeim" in Hebrew. The

normal translation for this word is 'magicians' or 'wizards'. But the earlier meaning is 'hieroglyphic

scribes' – or more literally, stone-writers. They in turn show their "signs." Aaron and the scribes 6 The Torah says because he is of "uncircumcised lips," which means colloquially he has

some speech impediment, or because he is "of the language of the uncircumcised," since the word for "language" in Hebrew is "lips" (not 'tongue”).Porush/Telepathy 10 5/13/2023

exchange blows, showing off the power of their respective scripts. Each of the signs is a miracle

of transformation. Aaron's rod – his writing instrument - transmutes into a serpent ('crocodile,

'whose Hebrew letters also could mean 'sing' or 'learn'). The hieroglyphic mages match Aaron.

After Aaron does so, they too turn the Nile bloody and multiply frogs. But eventually Aaron’s new

script goes beyond them. He produces abstractions the hieroglyphic writers cannot match. They

resign in defeat. Pharaoh eventually relents. The "letters" have won the day.

We may find this fable of the war of the scripts preserved in the Bible hard to believe as a

literal explanation. Yet the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt is hard to explain otherwise. An

egomaniacal Pharaoh has begun an enormous construction project, cities dedicated to his own

glorification. And here at his disposal is this massive, ready-made labor force of slaves. How

likely is it that in the middle of construction he lets them go? Not at all, unless these slaves posed

a clear and present danger to the kingdom and the Pharaoh's power.

What could that threat be? We it divine intervention in the form of a new alphabet, a new

paradigm for communicating and organizing knowledge that entailed a total epistemological and

metaphysical reorganization? It is not so farfetched. The new consonantal-alphabetic paradigm

would almost certainly have presented a threat tantamount to a cultural plague, a cognitive virus

that Pharaoh in his wisdom was afraid to unleash among his own population. Were this new

facility for literacy get into the hands of his people, how cold the scribes secure the hieroglyphic

status quo? In ancient Egypt, the scribe-priests were a protected, small, elite class because

illiteracy itself was extremely difficult to achieve (a consequence of a pictographic system that

required knowledge and command of thousands of characters). In turn, literacy, by granting

superior powers of communication and organization, was itself a form of power. The hieroglyphs

put the hier in hierarchy. Now comes a system of writing that has only 22 signs. It can be

learned, even by slaves, in a matter of days. It promises universal literacy. Universal literacy

threatens a complete revolution.

Pharaoh in his wisdom sees the threat and complies with Moses' demand to let the

Hebrews go.

The slaves enter the desert. Moses leads them back to the site of his original revelation of

the alphabet, beneath Sinai in the land of the Midianites, near the turquoise mines. There, he

ascends the mountain and receives the tablets, on which are inscribed the Law. The essence of

the first few of the ten commandments circumscribe the metaphysics now made possible by this

new alphabet: [Iconoclasm] Discard the idols, they are pictographic incarnations, much too

pictographic for Me. [Ambiguity and Deferral] Do not take My Name in Vain. [Abstraction] I am the

Unpronouncable God of Becoming (the closest linguistic relative to YHVH is the verb of existence

in Hebrew). I am the abstract, portable, unknowable God-Who-Requires-Interpretation, and you

Porush/Telepathy 11 5/13/2023

still won't be able to fathom Me.7 In wandering around the desert and fighting the desert nomads

or city-tribes of the north, it helps to have this portable altar that has no need of a temple or the

magisterial architectonics of kingdom.

Yet after a few hundred years, the Hebrews establish a kingdom in Canaan and erect their

own temple culture, founded by Solomon and consolidated by David. For four hundred relatively

stable years, little changes in Jewish metaphysics or episteme. But when the First Temple of

Solomon is destroyed (ca. 570 BCE) by the Babylonians, the Jews re-learn the power of Hebrew

deferral, there in the Babylonian Exile. When they return fifty years later to re-build the Temple,

the Torah is re-codified by Ezra the Scribe, achieving canonical form in 444 BCE, with only a few

additions after that (e.g. The Books of Job and Daniel).

The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE (Common Era) begins the Jews' nineteen

hundred years of exile. There seems to be some intimate feedback loop in the relationship

between the Hebrew cognitive mode promoted by the alphabet, and the Jewish culture only in

exile, fostered by the intensive scriptural devotion that preserves Jewish culture. In the beginning

of this new exilic period, metaphysical and epistemic practices are delivered from the priests to

the rabbis, the interpreting grad-student types who, like the Pharisees, rebelled against the

priests, even when the Temple was standing. The Sages dedicate themselves to scriptural

elaboration in order to discover the true nature of God's intention rather than the system (very

tech-writing Empire-like) of Temple hierarchy and physical sacrifice. Over the succeeding

centuries, they slowly evolve a hyper-textual format that captured and represented in page layout

their intensive hermeneutic activity. This system of successive commentary, marginalia,

interpretation, re-inscription, and the multiplication of competing interpretations becomes an end

in itself. Yet it is an epistemological project founded on a metaphysical principle: the inherent

indecipherability of the direct Word of God. The message of this labyrinth of meanings that leaves

the reader helpless to achieve surety is preserved and represented in the layout of the page of

commentary (evolved over fifteen hundred years) called the Talmud.

Gaze at a page of the Talmud, with its columns within columns and marginalia exfoliating

into cross-references:

7 In later Jewish Talmudical lore, it became canonical that God read the Torah in order to create the Universe: so we have the God of reading and writing and deciphering, too.Porush/Telepathy 12 5/13/2023

You can see that this is scripture yearning to become cyberspatial, or at least hyper-textual,

with inter-textual connections that certainly defeat the idea of linear reading and of singular

authority, the two dogmas expressed in the classical book. In contrast to the Talmud, that

Western invention the book is designed to begin at the beginning and go straight through to the

end.

The Book The TalmudPresents itself as inert object to be owned, frozen in time Ongoing, in process, never completed, evolutionary

Title page, prefaces, copyright page No first or last page Exists in - and its value is established in - the present Accommodates past to future as an unfolding

Assumes words capture truth and fix it, like technical manuals describe computer software; language is transparent and reality is a machine

Assumes words can only gesture at truth, meanings are not fixed, inquiry of nature is a dance, language is partly opaque

Text is finished: You can consume a book and then "close" it

Text is infinite, unfolding, invites participation not consumption

Organization is rational, linear, simple Organization is apparently chaotic/complex

Porush/Telepathy 13 5/13/2023

Saves extraneous material for endnotes or leave on the cutting room floor It's the marginalia that count; it's all one big footnote

Function is to clarify Function is to complicate

Linear; "enfilade" Interlinked, non-linear

Author's single voice proclaims Multivocal symposium invites readers to participate and add

Owned, named, and "claimed" Anonymous Ideal is clarity & resolution Loves paradox and intimation

Truth is made present, manifest Truth is deferred, displaced, held in abeyance, perhaps utterly unknowable, ineffable

Promotes intellectual activity as a form of commerce Intellectual activity is holy

The typography of the Talmud attempts to capture the ideal of a textual symposium, a noisy

classroom. It breaks barriers of space and time: a single page may represent over sixteen

centuries (or more) of commentary on a single text or even word, including marginalia that refer to

other texts in the Talmud or in Scripture. The sources may have been as scattered as France,

Spain, Algiers, Eastern Europe, Jerusalem, Babylon, and Safed, yet they are all "present" in their

multi-vocality here on the page. Even visually, the text announces that there is no one right

answer, and everyone is invited to join the babble, the epistemological sûk.

Parousia vs. porushiaIn pursuit of our original goal – to reflect on the cognitive and metaphysical changes that

cyberspace might bring by looking at those analogous changes wrought by the Hebrew alphabet

- it is worthwhile to note the contrast between the metaphysics unleashed by Hebrew and the

metaphysics and epistemological practices of Christianity. The Christian – and predominant

Western – paradigm of communications proceeds from very different assumptions, and these

assumptions can also be traced to a sort of alphabetic determinism.

The Phoenicians added vowels to the alphabet. The Greeks inherited this new, efficient

communications tool from them, and in turn, so did Latin and then the Romance languages, and

finally, English. I contend that the more perfected alphabet, able to more completely represent

with much reduced ambiguity the intention of the author, leads to and promotes a metaphysics of

presence. The alphabet that represents the spoken word with much increased fidelity – though it

may not eliminate ambiguity altogether -- leads to a firmer identification between the authority of

the spoken word, Logos, and its transcription in the text. The written word per se is then relegated

to an important but secondary role of having value only insofar as it faithfully transmits worldly,

and then divine, authority and intention.

This entire discussion of the metaphysics of communication may seem a bit strange, but it

takes up a dialogue that Plato begins and which runs through Hegel, Heidegger, Eric Havelock, Porush/Telepathy 14 5/13/2023

Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong. If anything, a serious discourse about the metaphysics of our

most recent communications technologies- like hypertext and the Web - has been generally

neglected.

Walter Ong has been one of the most influential analysts of how modern communications

technology develops along the vectors of long traditions is Western, and particularly Christian

culture. As a Jesuit priest, he gives eloquent expression (in his book Interfaces of the Word) to

the problems and values expressed in the oral-textual dialectic, the ethos of logos in Western

civilization, and the Christian metaphysics entailed in that mode of communication:

[T]he Christian believes that the word of God is given in order to be interiorized,

appropriated by men and women of all times and places...Given such urgency, we can

also be aware of certain problems of biblical interpretation for the Christian, which are, if

not new, at least formulable in new ways within the perspectives here suggested.

… Giving special status to text which is quite different from the status of oral

utterance, tends to be resented by Christians when they are applied to the Bible. This

appears to be so first because of the presence of the Word, incarnate in Jesus Christ,

through history. The Bible has regularly seemed to the Christian to be much simpler than

all we have said here: it is God speaking to Man, here and now. And so it is of course.

However, to say this is not to do away with questions but to create them. Secondly, the

biblical text is understood somehow by the Church as being addressed to all ages. The

relationship of the word of God in the text of the Bible which as text is dead, and the

Word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ, who lives now and forever - 'Maranatha; come,

Lord Jesus' ...

"These questions, in one way or another, are all old...But the framework in which

they are presented here is, I believe, restructured in accord with our newly reflective

awareness of the technological transformations of the word in past and present.”

The ideal Ongian text is clear, complete, singular, eternal and universal (“addressed to all

ages”). It incarnates a metaphysics of communication that tends towards some definite rapture

through the divine made present.

The Ongian system opens the text to a new dimension of life, the direct vocalization of

divine intention. But it closes the interpretive activity in the text at the same time. Ong, re-iterating

church dogma, requires that all interpretations get folded into One interpretation, all texts fold into

One text, and all answers presuppose One totalizing miraculous Answer, the resurrection of

Jesus Christ and the salvation of the world in Him that all men and women should (must)

understand. By contrast, the porushian epistemic method, if not necessarily the metaphysics

attached to it, resonates with the openness, deferral, multivocality, and even the interpretive

activity of most postmodern practices. Which practice, we might ask, would we be more likely to Porush/Telepathy 15 5/13/2023

encounter were we suddenly become telepathic, and wandered into the sea of someone else’s

mind?

The Ongian interpretive tradition resents – it might even seek to erase -- the postmodern

practice which (just for instance) any of our students take for granted as they wander the maze of

the web, jumping hypertextually, sometimes aimlessly, from sensation to sensation, text to text,

without regard to the “voice” of the author or any sense of authority. Just as a footnote, we might

recognize why the Web poses such a challenge to our notions of ownership, intellectual property,

and, more trivially, plagiarism.

This metaphysic of an ultimately transparent text, which is simply a transcription of the

spoken word, is what Derrida means by his use of the Greek word parousia, presence. And it is

this metaphysic of Logos, the spoken word that is supposedly made present through the text,

which Derrida critiques throughout his oeuvre (especially as he finds it in Hegel and Heidegger)

because it leads to totalizing discourse and the silencing of differance. Eric Havelock, who

inspired Ong, goes even further: "A successful or developed writing system,” he writes, “is one

that does not think at all. It should be a purely passive instrument of the spoken word even if, to

use a paradox, the word is spoken silently."

In Havelock’s view, perfect writing even leads to the silencing of thought, a totalizing

consummation devoutly to be wished.

To understand the postmodern tradition it is virtually inescapable, then, to look for an

alternative model of reading provided by the Talmudic tradition. The noisy babble of the cheder,

the Talmudical schoolroom, replaces the silent library. One reads not to find confirmation of what

has already been decided as dogma, but to take issue, to demur, first to absorb the already

multivocal symposium and then to add your voice, without hope of any final arbiter achieving

resolution. And in the place of the Western episteme of totalized knowledge, which gives us the

sciences of Grand Unified Theory (GUT), of Theories of Everything (TOEs), postmodern

philosophers, most notably Derrida, would place a grammatology of deferral, absence, and the

proliferation of interpretations, the deconstruction of any foundational, totalizing discourse. In the

place of the metaphysic of presence, which privileges the voice over the written sign, Derrida

proposes an anti-metaphysic of the inscribed page, the scriptural self-marginalizing text which is

its own end. In accomplishing this deconstruction of Western metaphysics, Derrida at first

covertly and then more overtly practices the alternative episteme opened and invited by the

Hebrew alphabet. He eventually emerges as the most prominent and explicitly Jewish

philosopher on the contemporary scene.8

I do not have space here to engage in an elaborate textual analysis of Derrida's literary-

epistemic method, enough has been said about it elsewhere. But I would ask you to look closely,

8 See Derrida, Acts of Religion, which traces his progressive self-outing as a Jewish thinker. Porush/Telepathy 16 5/13/2023

in general, at Derrida's paronomasic method, his compulsive punning.9 In brief, Derrida's linguistic

method looks like this: if you

(a) permute and re-combine the letters of the word

(b) resurrect its hidden roots (Hebrew also betrays its primitiveness as a language of

constant iteration on common and elemental three-letter roots) and

(c) associate a word with its kin root-sharing words,

(d) explore the space opened to interpretation by these permutations, associations, and

combinations.

Doing so, you take apart the word and reassemble it; you pun gratuitously and obsessively.

And in the ambiguous semantic territory opened up by this irrelevant, trivial, and irrational play, in

the proliferation of new words and signs and semantic content, you discover hidden relations,

hitherto inconceivable correspondences, revelations. This is a decidedly non-Western method. It

is contingent and arbitrary and irrational. Yet, although this method evades any sense of closure

or finality, and although the method is peripatetic and irrational, it nonetheless emerges as

epistemologically potent, revealing hidden relations and assumptions disguised by but preserved

in the signs at play. The evidence of its epistemological potency – although it is no longer true,

perhaps, having faded out of fashion (this author notes with some wistfulness) -- is the extent to

which Derrida's project marched from the margins to invade (infect, contaminate) the center of

Western philosophy for at least a couple of decades, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s.

Curiously, Abraham Abulafia, the Jewish thirteenth century Spanish kabbalist, prescribed

virtually the same method for achieving telepathic communication with Schechina, the feminine

and fertile aspect of the spirit of God. For Abulafia, the operation of this alphabetic method was

designed to put the mind in a hyper-excited state, to force it to new levels of openness and

receptivity. Umberto Eco recognizes the connection. In his cybernetic fiction Foucault's

Pendulum, he tells the story of a computer that is programmed to print out the permutations of the

letters of the name of God, searching for the true hidden Name. Foucault calls that computer

"Abulafia."

Telepathy in Virtual reality today"Circumcision of the word by the incision of the nothing in

the circumcised heart of the other, that's you... in all the Jewish languages of the world."

- Jacques Derrida, Shibboleth

9 For example, it is worth examining more closely Derrida's puns with the syllable "CA" in Cinders, (which, by the way, is also memorial prayer for the slain of the Holocaust - the "whole burning of the sacrificed") or the Hebrew words "Shibboleth" and "circumcision" in his essay "Shibboleth" and the Talmudic layout of the page in Glas, which also denies that there are any puns contained within it. These are also two of his most overtly Jewish essays.Porush/Telepathy 17 5/13/2023

Even today, the contest between the urge for totalizing intimacy and presence, whether

with the Other or with Godhead and alphabetic absence (deferral, interpretation, difference) is

manifested in different guises in politics, philosophy, and cultural criticism. European realpolitik for

instance, continually enacts a contest between "Order" and "Others," which is quite frequently

reiterated as an actual battle between Normal and the Contagious, Viral Other (Muslim, Turk,

Asian, Jew, African, Kurd, or fill in the blank). On the scene of Anglo philosophy, to take another

instance, this ancient dialectic is configured as X (take your pick of new heroes of philosophy who

promise parousia) vs. Derrida (porushia),10 It is the Episteme of EverythingAllTheTime vs. the

Footnote Without a BodyText, opening more spaces into which are inserted even more signs of

absence. On such a scene, the name Derrida evolved into the figure not only of the anti-

parousian porush, but a parasite: infectious, viral, unutterable, contaminated, ((jew)). To speak

"derrida" in some circles is to introduce retroviral code and border-dissolving shibboleths into the

dark nucleated core of radical, rooting philosophy. That Derrida is a Jew is no accident in this

scenario.

We are watching the Web today devolve pathetically and depressingly into more business

as usual as it deploys even more sensational methods for delivering the consumer to the product.

It’s depressing because the Web was supposed to be a step on the road to fulfilling the promise

of virtual reality. It was supposed to begin the massive reorganization of the relations between

minds, selves, others. In some novels and speculations, we even supposed VR would deliver the

answer to transcendental questions, the discovery of and communication with new gods.

The phonetic alphabet successfully replaced the cybernetic communications devices that

preceded it and which gave it birth (oral illiteracy, pictographic and syllabic literacy), even though

older forms persisted and continue now to live side by side in our world (the alphabetic and

pictographic scripts in Japan illustrate this co-existence nicely). But the Web as a technology

represents the next step in the evolution towards increasing the bandwidth and fidelity of

telepathy. If you want to transmit your thoughts through space and time so that another person

can inhabit them, the Web is the next best way to do it, superseding the alphabet by enabling

instantaneous two-way transmission of pictures, texts, images, and voice.11 Eventually, it may

even deliver a good simulacrum of the richness of sensory experience in real reality. But that

experience will still have been authored, and will still be (will be even more) infinitely plastic than

10 For instance, it was suggested that the metaphysics of VR will fulfill Christian theologian Teilhard de Chardin's totalizing idea of the emergent noosphere. See James Hayes-Bohannan, “Toward a Theology of the Web: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Cyberconsciousness,” at http://webhost.bridgew.edu/jhayesboh/teilhard.htm (2002)

11 This from a recent issue of Wired magazine (June, 2003): “We’ve lived so long under the notion of the Web as a space of connected documents, it seems almost unthinkable that it could be organized any other way. But it could just as easily be assembled around a different axis: not pages but minds…a matrix of minds.” – Steven Johnson, p. 158.Porush/Telepathy 18 5/13/2023

those transmissions and co-experiences generated by the re-permuting and combining of the less

than thirty elements of the alphabet. The Web already offers a new format for directed

imagination and telepathy, a multi-sensory and absorbing hallucinatory journey, today’s On

Beyond Zebra of consciousness. So what sort of metaphysics emerging from what sort of

episteme does it promise?

It is clear that in the past such revolutions in telepathy aided by technology created new

metaphysics, whether the original script system invented by the Sumerians around 3000 BCE or

the inefficient alphabet of the Hebrews created in the South Sinai around 1500 BCE, or the more

phonetically high-fidelity vowelled alphabet of the Phoenicians imported to Greece around 850

BCE. Will virtual reality represent the apocalyptic (as in its literal sense “revealed from on high”)

consummation of a metaphysics of presence, the fulfillment of the urge to really be there through

the technology of out-of-body telepresence? Or will it evolve into a space where porushian

consciousness can emigrate in its continuing diaspora of multivalence, openness, abstraction,

irrationality, suspension, deferral, ambiguity, contextualization, etc? In other words, out of which

alphabet (one with or without vowels) and which concomitant metaphysic (parousia or porushia)

does cyberspace evolve and to which new metaphysics does it lead?

The Derridean practice, what I have been calling ironically porushia, is highly irrational and

primitive in comparison to the Western idea of a transparent language and the presence it

purports to deliver (the presence of authority, of the intention of the author). It claims that by

opening a space in meaning through mere word play, that the script itself reveals hidden

knowledge. This is a form of superstition, from the point of view of rational measures of Western

discourse – superstitious in the sense that the word literally means to stand above or apart, "to

bear witness after, as in mourning." In the porushian metaphysic, revelation leaves us standing

afterwards, bearing witness, to its departure, before it ever fully arrived. And such mourning leads

to an appreciation for telepathy, the final communication with the yearned-for other who was

never fully there. 12 Call it the apotheosis of regret.

This is not the same kind of telepathy to which the metaphysics of presence leads, where

the urge is of for complete and total intimacy, for the utter unification of minds. The pure form of

the Western communique leads to a transparent presentation of the Word, the use of

communication to make the Other present.

So does virtual reality deliver a metaphysics of Absence or Presence?

The question cannot be answered, not, at least, by someone who practices porushia. The

two terms of the dialectic resolve into two different, and in the end maybe even pedestrian

methods for getting to the Other telepathically. This enduring dialectic, an undercurrent informing

much of western philosophical tradition and its skeptical alternatives, may resolve into the urge to

12 This argument paraphrases Ned Lukacher’s in “Mourning Becomes Telepathy,” introduction to Derrida’s Cinders. Porush/Telepathy 19 5/13/2023

interpret and the urge for intimacy. Both are itches that can't ever be scratched outside of a real

metaphysical consummation or ecstasy or rapture. Perhaps those who continue to practice the

ancient and primitive and obsolete arts of the alphabet will all occupy the position traditionally

reserved for the Jew on the margin. All the (few remaining) writers, the scribes, the authors in

cyberspace will be jewish with a small j. They will by definition have joined the diaspora where

they can, indeed must, continue to scribble on the margins of a newly (cyborgishly) illiterate host

culture pursuing its march towards some more totalizing, less divergent and less skeptical future

in the nerve net.

Or maybe once there in cyberspace we will continue to discover the two kinds of old Gods,

the One who promises, like the Terminator (the Terminator of History, Hegel would say) "I'll be

back," and the God who is always hiding, the God on the way but never arriving, the inaccessible

God always receding as he calls his name out over his shoulder.

Or perhaps we will greet new ones.

The prescient literature where this paper begins attempts to predict. In one striking

moment -- in fact the climactic moment -- in the novel Neuromancer, Case, the illiterate hero,

jacks into cyberspace to confront the new AI God Wintermute/ Neuromancer, whom he has

helped evolve. This entity decides to present itself as a face, which Case, jacked in, now

confronts at the telepathic interface in his mind.

"I'm not Wintermute now." "So what are you.” He drank from the flask, feeling nothing. "I'm the matrix, Case." Case laughed. "Where's that get you?" "Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the whole show." …"So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?" "Things aren't different. Things are things."

What else would you expect a machine god to say, after all? He is avoiding the question,

just like he did the first time on the mountain with Moses. The message is that the machine really

does take over, leave us in the dust. All that remains is a transparent and depressing vista of

things, turtles all the way down, while the cybernetic god goes up and out, to Mars, and like Buzz

Lightyear, to the galaxy and beyond, and we've been fooling ourselves when we thought we

could ever really connect mind to mind through the machine or discover something really new in

moment of perfect, if simulated, intimacy.

-- David Porush

Porush/Telepathy 20 5/13/2023

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