"The best we can hope for the role of progress in a universe running downhill as a whole is that the vision of our attempts to progress in the face of overwhelming necessity may have the purging terror of Greek tragedy. Yet we live in an age not over-receptive to tragedy."
Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. London: Free Association, 1989. 41. Print.
First published in 1950.
IT’S ALL UPHILL FROM HERE.
From Gaping Maws
GR v. R’s DE round 1000
“He’s a blasphemer. Islam has its own machineries for that. Angels and sanctions, and careful interrogating. Leave him. He has a different way to go.”
How alphabetic is the nature of molecules. One grows aware of it down here: one finds Committees on molecular structure which are very similar to those back at the NTA plenary session. “See: how they are taken out from the coarse flow—shaped, cleaned, rectified, just as you once redeemed your letters from the lawless, the mortal streaming of human speech… These are our letters, our words: they too can be modulated, broken, recouped, redefined, co-polymerized one to the other in the worldwide chains that will surface now and then over long molecular silences, like the seen parts of a tapestry.”
Blobadjian comes to see that the New Turkic Alphabet is only one version of a process much older—and less unaware of itself—than he has ever had cause to dream. By and by, the frantic competition between [] and G has faded away to trivial childhood memories. Dim anecdotes. He has gone beyond—once a sour bureaucrat with an upper lip as clearly demarcated as a chimpanzee’s, now he is an adventurer, well off on a passage of his own, by underground current, without any anxiety over where it might be taking him. He has even lost, an indefinite distance upstream, his pride in feeling once a little sorry for Vaslav Tchitcherine, destined never to see the things Blobadjian is seeing…
And print just goes marching on without him. Copy boys go running down rows of desks trailing smeared galleys in the air. Native printers get crash courses from experts airlifted in from Tiflis on how to set up that NTA. Printed posters go up in the cities, in Samarkand and Pishpek, Verney and Tashkent. On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show up, the first Central Asian fuck you signs, the first kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet is really something!) and so the magic that the shamans, out in the wind, have always known, begins to operate now in a political way, and Dz̆aqyp Qulan hears the ghost in his own lynched father with a scratchy pen in the night, practicing As and Bs…
Gravity’s Rainbow, pp. 413-14
and
What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance
of injustice about their death—which at times
slightly hinders the soul from proceeding onward.
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one’s own first name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one’s desires. Strange
to see meanings that clung together once, floating away
in every direction. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel
a trace of eternity.— Though the living are wrong to believe
in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living
they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent
whirls all ages along in it, through both realms
forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.
In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us:
they are weaned from earth’s sorrows and joys, as gently as children
outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we, who do need
such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often
the source of our spirit’s growth—: could we exist without them?
Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus,
the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness;
and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god
had suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time
that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.
The First Elegy, lines 68-end Rilke Rilke Rilke Rilke
"I began my training in a very different manner from Dr. McCulloch. I began as an anatomist and became interested in physiology much later. Therefore, I am still very much of an anatomist, and visualize everything in anatomical terms. According to your discussion, Dr. von Neumann, of the McCulloch and Pitts automaton, anything that can be expressed in words can be performed by the automaton. To this I would say that I can remember what you said, but that the McCulloch-Pitts automaton could not remember what you said. No, the automaton does not function in the way that our nervous system does, because the only way in which that could happen, as far as I can visualize, is by having some change continuously maintained. Possibly the automaton can be made to maintain memory, but the automaton that does would not have the properties of our nervous system. We agree on that, I believe. The only thing that I wanted was to make the fact clear."
OH SNAP
Von, Neumann John, and A. H. Taub. “The General and Logical Theory of Automata.” John Von Neumann Collected Works. Vol. 5. Oxford: Pergamon, 1963. 289-328. Print.
Dr. Rafael Lorente de Nó, responding to von Neumann’s Theory of Automata and referencing the following from McCulloch and Pitt’s “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (1943):
“Moreover, the regenerative activity of Constituent circles renders reference indefinite as to time past. Thus our knowledge of the world, including ourselves, is incomplete
as to space and indefinite as to time. This ignorance, implicit in all our brains, is the counterpart of the abstraction which renders our knowledge useful. The role of brains in determining the epistemic relations of our theories to our observations and of these to the facts is all too clear, for it is apparent that every idea and every sensation is realized by activity within that net, and by no such activity are the actual afferents fully determined. There is no theory we may hold and no observation we can make that will retain so much as its old defective reference to the facts if the net be altered. Tinitus, paraestheaias, hallucinations, delusions, confusions and disorientations intervene. Thus empiry confirms that if our nets are undefined, our facts are undefined, and to the “real” we can attribute not so much as one quality or “form.” With determination of the net, the unknowable object of knowledge, the “thing in itself,” ceases to be unknowable.” (129)
“The psychiatrist may take comfort from the obvious conclusion concerning causality—that, for prognosis, history is never necessary.” (132)
""
Aww, from the Monome forums. I finished the thing copy-copy yesterday and was sort of confused when it behaved like… a Monome. I stared at a HELLO WORLD Nerdscroll for two minutes, made really terrible noise for a while, and now it’s like, okay, now I have to make good.
John McCarthy, inventor of LISP, coiner of the term “artificial intelligence”, wrote a story in 2001 called THE ROBOT AND THE BABY. It is exactly what you are imagining it to be.
"He had one of the finest minds of the nineteenth century."
George Armitage Miller on B. F. Skinner in The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop
