When a Book Came Back

A digital gift, Claude Shannon, and the art of asking a question anew

A few weeks ago, I published an essay called When the Body Becomes a Communication Channel. One of its readers had co-authored a book about Claude Shannon, and he sent me a digital copy. An essay about signals, receivers, and replies had received a reply I could read for myself. A reader had recognised a question in my essay and sent me something to think with.

The book was A Mind at Play, by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. When I began reading, I was looking for the Shannon I had drawn on in my essay. Before long, I was just as interested in the way he could simplify a problem, play with it, and discover that it could be posed differently. I recognise this way of working from practical philosophy. There, too, we have to decide what to attend to. Judgement comes into play when we discover that something we set aside belongs to the matter after all.

What came through?

In the earlier essay, I described an experiment in which electrical pulses travel through bodily tissue to activate small implants. An implant can send back a signal confirming that it has been activated. Reading about Shannon's work, I am struck by how precisely we can ask about this. Did the signal get through? Could the receiver distinguish it from interference? Shannon framed a technical problem that could be investigated without settling what the message meant to the person receiving it.

I had also written about a parent beside a cot. A phone displays readings from a sensor on the baby's foot. The parent looks at the screen and then at the child. Suppose the measurement is accurate and the number has been transmitted without error. The parent may still notice something about the child that gives them reason to look more closely. The question then is how much weight to give the number in this particular situation.

I could say the book arrived when I received the file. Only when I began reading did I discover what the gift had set in motion. I had to return to my own essay and ask what I had set aside when I wrote it. That was how the book became a reply.

The mouse and the maze

One episode I paused over concerns Theseus, Shannon's mechanical mouse. It moved through a maze with the help of a magnet beneath the floor. A relay circuit recorded the route so the system could use it again. Seen from above, the mouse appeared to find its own way. Looking beneath the board, you could see what made the movement possible. Shannon turned the observation around. The maze was solving the mouse. In a film commissioned by Bell Labs, he explains that the mouse's “brain cells” were housed behind a small mirror.

I thought of the phrase listening state in the implant study. It describes a circuit waiting for particular pulses. Saying that the circuit “listens” gives us a simple way to talk about the device. The word can also invite us to attribute to the circuit something that belongs to conversation. When I fail to catch a word and ask, “What did you mean?”, the reply can change how I understand the whole conversation. I associate this experience with Gadamer. The other person can correct my understanding of the very question at issue.

I began by looking at what the mouse could do. The book drew my attention to what Shannon had built around it to make that possible. When a device today is described as detecting an intention, it can be worth shifting our attention in the same way. What physical change does it register? Who decided that this change should count as a sign of intention?

Making the problem simpler

In the chapter on what Shannon called constructive dissatisfaction, Soni and Goodman describe a lecture in which he explained how he tackled difficult problems. The phrase referred to a slight irritation when something does not look quite right. Shannon went through six approaches. The first was to simplify the problem by bringing it down to its essentials. What can I take away and still be left with the difficulty I am trying to understand? Soni and Goodman compare the ability to distinguish the incidental from the essential to the discernment required of a scholastic philosopher. No recipe can supply that judgement in advance. Sometimes we discover what mattered to a problem only when we remove it.

Another approach was to ask the question afresh. “Change the words. Change the viewpoint,” Shannon said. After working on a problem for a long time, we can become trapped in our own way of seeing it.

I recognise both approaches from social work. A case note may record that someone missed three appointments. That is a simplification that sticks to what happened. If we write “poorly motivated,” we have filled a gap in our knowledge with an explanation. Imagine that at the next meeting she takes out the appointment letter and points to two phrases she has underlined. She has read them several times and is still unsure what she is supposed to do. As she points to those words, the explanation “poorly motivated” begins to ring false. I may need to set aside the question of why she did not want to come. I now have reason to ask what we did to make the appointment clear.

From the case note, it looked as though she had lost her way. Beneath the board lay the letter we had written ourselves.

Simplification can help us see a pattern. It can also make it easy to forget what we left out and fill the gap with an explanation. Meeting the person concerned can show us what the simplification cost. In social work, this can affect the help a person receives and how the next practitioner approaches her. The new understanding therefore needs to go into the record. The next person who reads it should be able to see what led us to revise our assessment.

Room to try things out

The biography also describes Shannon's many unicycles. One had a hub set off centre, so the rider rose and fell as the wheel turned. Shannon even juggled while riding it. I like that the book makes room for such inventions. They show someone willing to spend time finding out what happens when you change something most people take for granted.

In work with people, that kind of play takes a different form. I can try asking a question differently and listen to how it is received. I may also discover that a question I asked to move the conversation along made it harder for the other person to tell me what happened. Trying again depends on letting their answer shape what I do next. There is a freedom in that, and it comes with a responsibility.

I think back to the reader who sent me the book. He could have simply told me that my essay reminded him of Shannon. He gave me the chance to read the book and make the connection for myself. Now I am posting another essay in the same place. I have just as little idea this time who will pause to read it, or which sentence might stay with them.

That is how this began, too.