What would a modern civilization look like if they aren't allowed to write? [closed]

Question

CASE: There is a sentient life form that is snake-like in appearance, and cannot have the means to write or perform elaborate body gestures due to a lack of fine motor skills. Their only proof of sentience is a means of verbal language and an ability to order obedient domesticated animals to construct their buildings, and in turn they get food and shelter.

How could a civilization's concept of technology, opinions and history be recorded without any form of books, and in particular an alphabet? How can information even be stored without the usage of a book?

How can a civilization that has the ability to write, yet not, further progress (important point #11 down below)

Let's say that they've all the resources that Earth has, and have no motive towards making their domesticated animals to write books as they can only comprehend simple tasks, and amazingly yet are highly skilled in construction after thousands of years of domestication.

Things to know about the Snake Aliens:

1. Photographic memories. Able to pick out the tiniest detail and comprehend complex rules of nature/physics/chemistry naturally.
2. Enhanced communication powers (due to lack of books). Can speak with two peers about different topics at the same time and also speak 100 times faster than us.
3. Matures at a young age, 2-3 years old.
4. At it's current state it is able to produce technology like video and audio signals and formulate audio files from worker animals using chain production.
5. They are not Humans! They have already built a civilization around not using writing! Even though it may have taken longer/shorter for them to do it, they have achieved what our monkey brains have a hard time to comprehend!
6. Their vocal language has different tones mapped to a vastly more in depth detail of the true intention of the speech, therefore they are 15 times more efficient in explaining what they want than us. This is also due to a lack of body language, as they don't have any limbs
7. Average Life span: 150 - 200 years
8. Architecture involves mainly wood/brick. closely resembles Maori architecture, with the exception of using bricks as materials
9. Planet is 90% Ocean, think Scarif from Star Wars
10. Mental Capacity over 200 Zetabytes. They remember everything in their lives.
11. The only form of a written language in their planet is ancient Runes (that they have translated) from an ancient alien race that tell them not to pursue writing, or else they face the same fate as they did (extinction).
12. They co habit with domestic, monkey like creatures that are similar in affection to each other like dogs are to humans. They both rely on each other to survive.

Answer 1

Songs.

Do you wonder why you, a not particularly musical person, can hum the tune of thousands of different songs you have heard on the radio or in church? Why an average person can remember the lyrics to hundreds of songs? Why is the human brain so thirsty for songs and song lyrics?

Humans are singers. There was a time when songs were how knowledge was passed down. Relics from that time exist: the Vedas is a body of myth and legend that was originally transmitted orally and then written once the Indian civilizations acquired writing.

Transmission of texts in the Vedic period was by oral tradition, preserved with precision with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques. A literary tradition is traceable in post-Vedic times, after the rise of Buddhism in the Maurya period,[note 3] perhaps earliest in the Kanva recension of the Yajurveda about the 1st century BC; however oral tradition of transmission remained active.

The Norse sagas were transmitted orally before there was writing. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are the culmination of centuries of oral transmission.

The ancient songs like the Vedas which were converted into script intact are the culturally important songs that describe myth cycles and religious events. But you can bet there were songs about just about everything else too. Our alphabet song has made it into the current day - a memory aid for the preliterate young.

So too your aliens. They would have songs which include in their lyrics and tunes the accumulated knowledge of the species. And with their vocal apparatus these aliens have, the songs would be awesome.

Answer 2

So my first question is how can either the master species or their domesticated animals be highly skilled at engineering and construction without writing? What would the impact of no writing be on the civilisation? It would literally (no pun intended) limit the advancement capability of that civilisation.

Writing is one of the advances that has allowed humans to advance so quickly. Without it, the ability to transfer information between minds is greatly reduced. The novice or trainee can only learn while around their master, and only from their master. They have to listen and watch intently, and the master also has to remember what he or she has told the novice, and what hasn't been communicated yet. Also, the novice has to remember it all. Bottom line is that even if the master has come up with a new advance, it doesn't mean that the novice has the same skill to understand that advance, meaning that there's a high probability that the advance in understanding will be lost.

Writing changes that. Writing is an efficient way of recording information to share with many novices, all through time. You can add to it as you remember new things, and the novices can always refer back if they forget something you've said. Most importantly, because you've written it down, the novice in his time doesn't just re-write what he's learned from you, he writes down the stuff that's new to the practice.

Mathematics for example is the cornerstone of engineering. It's also a cumulative subject. Mathematicians have been building on their knowledge for millennia and it's important to note that while every senior secondary student today who does maths is taught calculus for example, it didn't exist 500 years ago. Leibniz and Newton (depending on who you believe) created it in the 1600s and Principia Mathematica in particular became a treatise for cutting edge mathematics that we now largely take for granted in our lives. The understanding of math at this level (and the perfect transmission of this maths into so many new minds) simply isn't possible without writing.

The reason why the Information Revolution (as our modern times will be known as in history) is so important is because we're dealing with Gutenberg Mark II; where the printing press revolutionised the ability to disseminate written knowledge and spread it among a wider population, the internet is taking that to another level again. It is that very proliferation of knowledge that is driving the proliferation and advancement of key technologies at such a rapid rate. None of it would be possible without the ability to read and write, because before YouTube you have to be able to transmit simple text because of the early bandwidth requirements. Even if that wasn't the case, I defy anyone to tell me that they can truly understand deep scientific concepts through video discussion alone; text is still a crucial element to learning and will continue to be for a long time, if not forever.

Even if that isn't the case, the ability to record an individual speaking about a topic is just a more advanced form of writing in any event. It's still recording knowledge for easy transmission, just in a far less efficient way.

So without writing, your sophisticated building capability doesn't exist. The only thing you can rely on is the memory of the individuals within your species, and their ability to articulately and completely share all their knowledge verbally with others of their species.

Good luck with that.

Seriously though, writing is the cornerstone of civilisation because it's a low energy, highly effective manner for capturing information and spreading it to others so they can use it and build upon it in their turn. Without that capability you need another way of doing that (like telepathy) which allows everyone the ability to know what you know about a specific topic, otherwise you'll lose information with every generation, like a leaky long range pipe. Some of what you need to know will eventually get there, but what will you lose along the way?

To address edits in question:

Sure, it can be argued that writing was necessary to us as a species because of otherwise limited communication abilities and less than perfect memories. With that in mind, a more perfect species capable of disseminating and retaining information more efficiently than a human mind might have less requirement for writing.

Even for such a species however, writing would still make things easier. Albert Einstein was once asked how many inches were in a yard, and his answer was 'I don't know. If I ever do need to know, I'll look it up in a book. Why clutter my mind with stuff I don't need to know when I can use my mind to come up with new ideas?' (quotes probably not required here, this is from an anecdote so I can't verify the accuracy of the words, only the intent)

The point being, that even since Gutenberg human memories have become less adept, but our reasoning skills and analytical capabilities have significantly improved. While this also ties in with the ideas of specialisation in the OP edits, writing is a low energy way of storing data that allows anyone to access it if they're curious. So even with perfect memories, it's a great way to preserve knowledge from (say) natural disasters, plagues, or some other form of destruction that could remove minds with key knowledge from the population. If nothing else, it's a backup solution.

Answer 3

I would recomend you give a read about aboriginal Australian oral tradition, they had elaborated methods of crosschecking to assure their knowledge wouldn't be corrupted from one generation to the next.

Answer 4

Writing solves a few issues endemic to civilization that you'd need to get around.

1. Distribution: written information can be read by thousands of people, and each of those people will read the same thing. This scales up even more when you have printing presses.
2. Durability: as many other people have said, what happens if Joe the Accounting Snake gets hit by a bus? Does the company lose all of their accounting data?
3. Accountability: your aliens have perfect memories, but what happens when Joe the Accounting Snake decides to start taking a bit more for himself? Who's going to say he's wrong? An external auditor can't trace through his accounts.

Fortunately out in our real world we have something kinda similar to snakes who can communicate with multiple other people at the same time, can listen in on any number of conversations without engaging directly, remember everything that's ever happened to them, and might get hit by a bus at any time: distributed computers.

How do distributed computers handle similar issues? We've got various different ways, like gossip protocols to distribute and find information, transaction logs to keep track of what's happened and consensus protocols to figure out what reality is.

How would you map those concepts to a biological system?

• Make your aliens highly social - have them feel weird and alone if they can't hear at least three other snakes (and preferably lots more).
• Have every snake talk constantly, even if they're not talking to anyone; when they're not engaged in a real conversation with someone else, they're using both their voices to narrate their day and the important stuff that's happened to them.
• Have every snake work in at least triads on any knowledge-based task, with every snake cross-checking every other snake.
• Have snakes enjoy finding new and interesting people to talk to, in order to exchange full life stories.
• Have snakes get sick of talking to the same people for more than a few hours, which makes them go and find someone else to talk to for a bit (this includes work triads - they'll go take a smoke break or something and chat with other people, and this aversion generally means that they'll leave work at different times)
• Make it so that in snake culture, keeping any sort of secret is viewed as being deviant and wrong. They'll talk to anyone and everyone about literally anything and everything, including data other snakes have told them.

So, let's run through a scenario. Joe, Jack and Jane, the triad in Accounting, just happen to accidentally get run over by the same monkey bus one day. Just from gossip, the rest of the company remembers most of the accounting data. They come together, check what they remember of the life-narratives, and discover that they're missing about 10% of the data. The company hires Aaron, Aron and Arron, a premier data recovery firm, to get the rest of it back.

Thanks to living in the general vicinity of the company, AAA remember about 2% of the remaining accounting data anyway - although none of them knew any of JJJ directly, they'd picked up a certain amount of data just from gossip.

The other 8% can be quickly recovered by talking to the grieving nest-mates of JJJ, who obviously have full dumps of the accounting data. Since this is the most common means of recovering data, AAA have experience diplomatically handling distraught family members while getting full data dumps out of them (hence why they charge a premium for their service).

Answer 5

If all they're doing is herding animals and making structures, they don't need a written language, non-literate people have done the same and more for millenia. You would see them having highly skilled members who memorize important details and events, most likely some kind of religious or teaching caste. Elaborate stories and songs will be the norm for passing on and sharing knowledge.

Depending on their domestic animals abilities, megalithic structures are possible. The Incas built a civilization with no recognized writing, although its debated if Quipu, knot language, was a language or a memory aid. The Aztec and Mayans had a logorams and syllabic glyph language, but all surviving copies seem to be for religious purposes rather than architectural or science based.

We can see similar things in Europe, North Africa and Asia, where large cities and temples were built pre-literacy or just as literacy was becoming known but before it was used for technical details. Cuneiform one of the earliest writing systems in Mesopotamia was first used to keep track of goods and religious events. So when it came to building structures everything was communicated verbally, and writing was used to track supplies, i.e. "Town A sent 5 large stones, 16 workers, 10 mules, etc"

The problem for this civilization would be advancing beyond this. It doesn't matter how good their memory is, if they can only pass on knowledge face to face, they're stuck. It will be like the secret societies of mages and alchemists during in Europe from the late Roman era to the 1600's, they didn't want to risk writing down information that could be stolen or used against them, so they used hard to crack codes and memory. Now all we have of their 'discoveries' are impossible stories and fragments of papers that we can't decipher. That will be what happens to the snakes society after a generation or two has passed. The masters will be remembered but their work will be garbled and lost.

Edit:

"At it's current state it is able to produce technology like video and audio signals and formulate audio files from worker animals using chain production."

This is not possible without some kind of written language. You need something for the sending and receiving device to decipher. Basic telephones, radios and even TV's are possible without a written language, but once you get to digital you can't get away from a written language or code.

Answer 6

What counts as "writing"?

If you're just looking at how to, e.g., replace books for the preservation and transmission of knowledge, that's relatively easy. Plenty of ancient philosophers thought writing was a terrible idea because it would lead to the degradation of memory and the loss of oral tradition. Which is absolutely true. And strictly oral transmission of knowledge could plausibly get you to the point of building very simple audio recording devices (assuming that they somehow are able to instruct their domesticated beasts in how to do that kind of fine work). Once you can record audio and make copies of the recordings--bam, you've got the equivalent of books for preserving knowledge, and transmitting it to far more people, over far longer time, than could've been done by a single person with their unaided voice. Large parts of our culture could then be copied over nearly wholesale, merely substituting every instance of "reading" with "popping a recording into the audio player". They just go straight to audiobooks, skipping the regular paper books stage.

But we use writing for so much more than that. The tricky bits would be all of the tiny samples of writing that would be missing. Labels on buttons. "Push" vs. "pull" signs on doors. Street signs. Traffic signals. Replacing all of those affordances with audio signals would be... impractical, at best.

So, are they permitted to have iconography, as long as it isn't a code for their spoken language? If so, a modern civilization without writing could look pretty much like any of our modern civilizations, just with all of the books replaced by audiobooks and signs populated solely with well-known icons, and no actual words. Are they prohibited from having any sort of written communication at all? Then I doubt any such civilization could actually exist.

Answer 7

A lot of posters here are getting hung up on the concept that it is only TECHNOLOGICAL advancement that is relevant. We have been so brainwashed by materialism that we consider the only measure of intelligence and superior intellect is based on an ability to make increasingly complicated and complex stuff.

We modern humans have become so hung up on making bigger and better technology, that we have forgotten many of the really important things that make humans great.

Music, for instance, as has been pointed out. If this race had an excellent ability to perceive pitch and to memorize music just by hearing it once, they don't need to transcribe it. A civilization can be founded on musical greatness, as opposed to building stuff. Bigger and better musical compositions as a sigh of advancing intellect.

Story telling can be done through oratory. Shakespeare's audience could neither read nor write, but they still enjoyed the play. It was written down only because of the limitations of our memory, but I am sure many of the actors were as illiterate as the audience.

Philosophy does not need a written record, as long as the beings have perfect memory. A great deal of our modern science originated from the musings of philosophers. Plato and Socrates developed and taught their ideas by speaking and listening. Philosophical debate is done much more effectively orally than when written.

You would, of course, have to give them the ability of 'idiot savants', that is, the ability to do complex arithmetic in their heads. I doubt if it would be base ten, but a really good mind could process arithmetic faster and more accurately in binary than in decimal. All arithmetic operations can be done in binary, for instance, just by doubling and halving. Most logic can be reduced to truth tables, and these can be memorized. There is no reason an advanced mind could not visualize an entire truth table at once, yet communicate it line by line, entry by entry. Same with a logic diagram. A mind that is good at visualization could build up a very complex system of gates, one gate and one connection at a time. People really good at logic gates and logic diagrams can go between visualizing gates and the Boolean expression at will. Once the Boolean equation is memorized, and visualized, there is no reason to believe there could not be a particular mental structure that could process it. Computers are, after all, nothing but logic gates and logic expressions.

Stephen Hawking, because of his physical limitations, has developed mathematical mental symbolism that he can manipulate in his mind.

Humans generally are, in fact, hamstrung by our dependency on written language. We have an absolutely vast ability to imagine and manipulate very complex patterns in our minds, yet we do not use it. It is the limitations of written speech and its requirements on structure that limit our ability to communicate these patterns. But poets and artists have the ability to speak in holistic images and paint mental pictures rather than sequential thoughts.

In fact, spoken English is a completely separate language from written English. You can SAY 'There are three ways to spell the English word two' and retain its meaning, but as I just proved, there is no way to write it down accurately. If you read a transcription of a conversation, the meaning can be completely lost. Tone, intonation, pauses, emphasis, are all important in spoken communication but simply lost in written communication.

TL:DR

With a society of beings that had a mind capable of advanced visualization using complex mental structures, and an oral language sufficiently developed to translate and communicate these visualizations, there is no real impediment to them developing a very advanced body of scientific knowledge. They just wouldn't be able to BUILD it, or design practical experiments and apparatus to prove it.

They just wouldn't have the great quantity of materialistic stuff we 'advanced' humans have.

Answer 8

The question seems a bit ramshackle.

On the one hand it asks what would a society be like without writing..and on the other.. how would it write.

On the one hand, pictographs, nor any form of writing actually has fine motor control as a basic requirement. It's not like they'd be judging each other for neatness, their standards would be entirely different.

On the other, dictation between humans and from humans to machines is a well established mechanism for turning words into visual aids. A species that can train animals to build structures for them can teach animals to translate verbal commands into physical actions ('painting by proxy,' i believe it's possible to teach elephants to paint using torture.)

We can also consider more fantastical means. Phenomenal pheromones..whatevz!

I wonder what modern means, in the question, also.

Humanities approach to the use of abstract visual informational exchange aids has and continues to change, as does the verbal. One would assume a species for whom the act of writing/painting or any kind of visual communication is awkward at best, would be encouraged to develop far more precise, logical and capable verbal languages to aid in both shorthand and precision...

Answer 9

They don't have hands, but that's not a showstopper.
There are humans who don't have hands, but still create art just fine:

If the snake people have prehensile tongues or mobile lips for instance, then they could use them to hold a pen/brush/stylus, as well as other tools, or just used to make imprints directly on a soft surface. Likewise, the tip of their tail could be used as a writing instrument in clay tablets given a bit of fine muscle control, and could have tools designed to fit it if you need more force than a tongue can provide.

Another option, if the language allows for it, it rhyme.
To quote the Daniel Suarez book Freedom(tm):
They were the ones who invented rhyme and meter—the programming language for human memory in preliterary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum—a mnemonic device. You couldn't f with the code or the rhymes didn't work; and if the rhymes didn't work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact. It was a shamanic code. If you f'ed with the code, then society lost its collective mind.