Let’s play name the author!

January 16, 2018 12:28 AM

Looking for where this idea came from. I can’t remember where. My Google-fu fails me. The idea: If a primitive man (maybe Bushmen?) came across the radio in the desert, and it starts transmitting voices, they would think of it as magic. If they broke down the radio into its component parts to try to figure out how it works, it would not come even close to explaining the radio. May have something to do with reductionism (??).

I went through Simulcra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, and the Origin of Consciousness by Julian Jaynes but it is not there.

Arthur C Clarke has a quote which has a similar flavour: “ Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

posted by anonymous to Grab Bag (5 answers total)

This doesn't match what you describe in a couple key aspects, but could you be thinking of Yuri Lazebnik's "Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?", discussed and linked to in this blog post? It seems to be more a critique of biological theory or research methods than the Clarkean angle you mention.
posted by col_pogo at 12:42 AM on January 16, 2018

Somewhat reminds me of the way Feynman talked about cargo cults, though other (more informed and specially educated) authors have contrasting takes.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:14 AM on January 16, 2018 [2 favorites]

David Eagleman in Incognito - Secret Lives of the Brain

"As an example, I’ll mention what I’ll call the “radio theory” of brains. Imagine that you are a Kalahari Bushman and that you stumble upon a transistor radio in the sand. You might pick it up, twiddle the knobs, and suddenly, to your surprise, hear voices streaming out of this strange little box. If you’re curious and scientifically minded, you might try to understand what is going on. You might pry off the back cover to discover a little nest of wires. Now let’s say you begin a careful, scientific study of what causes the voices. You notice that each time you pull out the green wire, the voices stop. When you put the wire back on its contact, the voices begin again. The same goes for the red wire. Yanking out the black wire causes the voices to get garbled, and removing the yellow wire reduces the volume to a whisper. You step carefully through all the combinations, and you come to a clear conclusion: the voices depend entirely on the integrity of the circuitry. Change the circuitry and you damage the voices."
posted by robocop is bleeding at 6:10 AM on January 16, 2018 [13 favorites]

This is very similar to something I remember reading in the late 1970s or early 1980s, which as I recall was written by children's SF author Nicholas Fisk and published in something released by the Puffin Club in the UK, possibly one of their annuals. He went on to ask whether a witch could take a TV set filled with eye of newt and make it work.

If this sounds familiar, it's possible I still have a copy.
posted by Hogshead at 5:07 PM on January 16, 2018

Can't find my copy right now, and I'm sure the Eagleman quote is on the money, but to add to the trope, I'm >90% sure Arthur Clarke made the analogy in Childhood's End, where he compared mankind's chances of understanding the forces the Overlords were marshalling to those of early scientists trying to understand television by poking around inside a set - what chance did they have of working it out, let alone not getting themselves killed? (TV sets back then, of course, had tens of thousands of volts floating around to drive the cathode ray tube.)
posted by Devonian at 4:58 AM on January 17, 2018