Cybernetics and Ghosts (1967) [pdf](jfki.fu-berlin.de)
jfki.fu-berlin.de
Cybernetics and Ghosts (1967) [pdf]
https://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/academics/SummerSchool/Dateien2011/Reading_Assignments/iuli_reader2.pdf
4 comments
Reasonably well written on combinatorics, but it's funny to see Chomsky and structural linguistics in there, when he's still around. We're still not quite at self modifying language machines though, due to the enormous computational effort needed even for fine tuning. The author says he perfectly well could be replaced by a mechanical device.
Fabulous essay. He mentions the Borges 1937 story “Ramon Llull' s Thinking Machine” about a poetry writing machine. Stanislaw Lem also wrote a story sometime around 1965 called “Trurl’s Electronic Bard.” I know Lem read Borges and Calvino, I wonder if there was any relationship between this essay and his short story.
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Voevodsky's last interview: https://justpaste.it/cc3ta
> - In 2006-2007 a lot of external and internal events happened to me, after which my point of view on the questions of the "supernatural" has changed significantly. What happened to me during these years, perhaps, can be compared most closely to what happened to Karl Jung in 1913-14. Jung called it "confrontation with the unconscious". I do not know what to call it, but I can describe it in a few words. Remaining more or less normal, apart from the fact that I was trying to discuss what was happening to me with people whom I should not have discussed with, I had in a few months acquired a very considerable experience of visions, voices, periods when parts of my body did not obey me and a lot of incredible accidents. The most intense period was in mid-April 2007 when I spent 9 days (7 of them in the Mormon capital of Salt Lake City), never falling asleep for all these days.
> Almost from the very beginning, I found that many of these phenomena (voices, visions, various sensory hallucinations), I can control. So I was not scared and did not feel sick, but perceived everything as something very interesting, actively trying to interact with those "creatures" in the auditorial, visual and then tactile spaces that appeared (themselves or by call) around me . I must say, probably, to avoid possible speculations on this subject, that I did not use any drugs during this period, tried to eat and sleep a lot, and drank diluted white wine.
> Another comment - when I say beings, then naturally I mean what in modern terminology is called complex hallucinations. The word "beings" emphasizes that these hallucinations themselves "behaved", possessed a memory independent of my memory, and reacted to attempts at communication. In addition, they were often perceived in concert in various sensory modalities. For example, I played several times in a (hallucinated) ball with a (hallucinated) girl and this ball I saw, and felt tactile palm when I threw it.
> [...]
> It should be said that despite many conversations with non-material "creatures" during this period, I completely did not understand what actually happened. I was "offered" many explanations, including hypnotists, aliens, demons and secret communities of people with magical abilities. None of the explanations explained everything I observed. Eventually, since some terminology was needed in conversations, I began to call all these beings spirits, although now I think that this terminology is not true. The terms "world system" (apparently control over people) and, especially in the beginning, "the game hosted by fear" sounded in this context.
---------------------------
Calvino's text:
> Now, some of you may wonder why I so gaily announce prospects that in most men of letters arouse tearful laments punctuated by cries of execration. The reason is that I have always known, more or less obscurely, that things stood this way, not the way they were commonly said to stand. Various aesthetic theories maintained that poetry was a matter of inspiration descending from I know not what lofty place, or welling up from I know not what great depths, or else pure intuition, or an otherwise not identified moment in the life of the spirit, or the Voice of the Times with which the Spirit of the World chooses to speak to the poet, or a reflection of social structures that by means of some unknown optical phenomenon is projected on the page, or a direct grasp on the psychology of the depths that enables us to ladle out images of the unconscious, both individual and collective; or at any rate something intuitive, immediate, authentic, and all-embracing that springs up who knows how, SOMETHING EQUIVALENT AND HOMOLOGOUS TO SOMETHING ELSE, AND SYMBOLIC OF IT. But in these theories there always remained a void that no one knew how to fill, a zone of darkness between cause and effect: how does one arrive at the written page? By what route is the soul or history or society or the subconscious transformed into a series of black lines on a white page?
> Literature gets to this point, I would add, by means of combinatorial games that at a certain moment become charged with preconscious subject matter, and at last find a voice for these. And it is by this road to freedom opened up by literature that men achieved the critical spirit, and transmitted it to collective thought and culture.
> The power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give a voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social or individual unconscious: this is the gauntlet it throws down time and again. The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
> At the height of the Enlightenment, Sade and the Gothic novel appear. At one stroke Edgar Allan Poe initiates the literature of aestheticism and the literature of the masses, naming and liberating the ghosts that Puritan America trails in its wake. Lautr6amont explodes the syntax of the imagination, expanding the visionary world of the Gothic novel to the proportions of a Last judgment. In automatic associations of words and images the Surrealists discover an objective rationale totally opposed to that of our intellectual logic. Is this the triumph of the irrational? Or is it the refusal to believe that the irrational exists, that anything in the world can be considered extraneous to the reason of things, even if something eludes the reasons determined by our historical condition, and also eludes limited and defensive so-called rationalism? So here we are, carried off into an ideological landscape quite different from the one we thought we had decided to live in, there with the relays of diodes of electronic computers. But are we really all that far away?
> The literature machine can perform all the permutations possible on a given material, but the poetic result will be the particular effect of one of these permutations on a man endowed with a con- sciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society.
---------------------------
A. Grothendieck "The key to dreams":
> Discovery of the Dreamer
> We ourselves are blind, so to speak, we don't see a thing in this mess of forces acting in us and which, nevertheless, govern inexorably our lives (as long as we don't make the effort to take knowledge of them...). We are blind, yes - but there is in us an eye that sees, and a hand that paints what is seen. The sleepy silence of sleep and night serve as its canvas, we ourselves are its palette; and the sensations, the feelings, the thoughts that go through us while dreaming, and the drives and forces that agitate our waking moments, here are Its tubes of paint, to brush this living painting that It alone knows how to brush. A parable painting, yes, thrown together on the fly or skillfully composed, farce or elegy and sometimes inexorable and poignant drama... - graciously offered to our attention! It's up to us to decipher it and to learn from it, if we want to. Take it or leave it!
> And almost every time, certainly, we "leave". Even among those who nowadays (following a recent fashion and in good part) talk about "being interested in dreams", is there one or other who has taken the risk of going to the bottom of even one of their dreams - to go to the bottom, and "to learn from it"?
> [...]
> From the very first dream that I scrutinized, revealing myself to myself in a moment of deep crisis, I felt well that this dream did not come from me. That it was an unhoped for, prodigious gift, a gift of Life, given by a greater one than me. And I understood little by little that it is He and no other who "does", who creates each of these dreams that we live, we, docile actors between His delicate and powerful hands. We ourselves cut figures as "dreamers", even as "dreamed" - created in and by this dream that we are in the process of accomplishing, animated by a breath that does not come from us.
> What I know about my work on dreams, what is most precious, is to have met the Master of Dreams. By scrutinizing His works, I have gradually come to know Him to some small extent, Him to whom nothing in me is hidden. And quite recently, as it were the culmination, surely, of a long quest that ignored itself, I have finally come to know Him by His name.
> Perhaps in scrutinizing your dreams of a thousand faces, you too will find the One who speaks to you through them. The One, the Only.
As for the combinatorial game Calvino's mention, this makes me think of Saussure's theories of hypograms (~= anagrams). More about this at the bottom of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37730428
This is the real danger with AI: its power of seduction. Imagine what will happen when you every media (not just news, but movies and books) is tailored to your own experience.
Related: https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-proof-shows-that-expander...
Voevodsky's last interview: https://justpaste.it/cc3ta
> - In 2006-2007 a lot of external and internal events happened to me, after which my point of view on the questions of the "supernatural" has changed significantly. What happened to me during these years, perhaps, can be compared most closely to what happened to Karl Jung in 1913-14. Jung called it "confrontation with the unconscious". I do not know what to call it, but I can describe it in a few words. Remaining more or less normal, apart from the fact that I was trying to discuss what was happening to me with people whom I should not have discussed with, I had in a few months acquired a very considerable experience of visions, voices, periods when parts of my body did not obey me and a lot of incredible accidents. The most intense period was in mid-April 2007 when I spent 9 days (7 of them in the Mormon capital of Salt Lake City), never falling asleep for all these days.
> Almost from the very beginning, I found that many of these phenomena (voices, visions, various sensory hallucinations), I can control. So I was not scared and did not feel sick, but perceived everything as something very interesting, actively trying to interact with those "creatures" in the auditorial, visual and then tactile spaces that appeared (themselves or by call) around me . I must say, probably, to avoid possible speculations on this subject, that I did not use any drugs during this period, tried to eat and sleep a lot, and drank diluted white wine.
> Another comment - when I say beings, then naturally I mean what in modern terminology is called complex hallucinations. The word "beings" emphasizes that these hallucinations themselves "behaved", possessed a memory independent of my memory, and reacted to attempts at communication. In addition, they were often perceived in concert in various sensory modalities. For example, I played several times in a (hallucinated) ball with a (hallucinated) girl and this ball I saw, and felt tactile palm when I threw it.
> [...]
> It should be said that despite many conversations with non-material "creatures" during this period, I completely did not understand what actually happened. I was "offered" many explanations, including hypnotists, aliens, demons and secret communities of people with magical abilities. None of the explanations explained everything I observed. Eventually, since some terminology was needed in conversations, I began to call all these beings spirits, although now I think that this terminology is not true. The terms "world system" (apparently control over people) and, especially in the beginning, "the game hosted by fear" sounded in this context.
---------------------------
Calvino's text:
> Now, some of you may wonder why I so gaily announce prospects that in most men of letters arouse tearful laments punctuated by cries of execration. The reason is that I have always known, more or less obscurely, that things stood this way, not the way they were commonly said to stand. Various aesthetic theories maintained that poetry was a matter of inspiration descending from I know not what lofty place, or welling up from I know not what great depths, or else pure intuition, or an otherwise not identified moment in the life of the spirit, or the Voice of the Times with which the Spirit of the World chooses to speak to the poet, or a reflection of social structures that by means of some unknown optical phenomenon is projected on the page, or a direct grasp on the psychology of the depths that enables us to ladle out images of the unconscious, both individual and collective; or at any rate something intuitive, immediate, authentic, and all-embracing that springs up who knows how, SOMETHING EQUIVALENT AND HOMOLOGOUS TO SOMETHING ELSE, AND SYMBOLIC OF IT. But in these theories there always remained a void that no one knew how to fill, a zone of darkness between cause and effect: how does one arrive at the written page? By what route is the soul or history or society or the subconscious transformed into a series of black lines on a white page?
> Literature gets to this point, I would add, by means of combinatorial games that at a certain moment become charged with preconscious subject matter, and at last find a voice for these. And it is by this road to freedom opened up by literature that men achieved the critical spirit, and transmitted it to collective thought and culture.
> The power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give a voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social or individual unconscious: this is the gauntlet it throws down time and again. The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
> At the height of the Enlightenment, Sade and the Gothic novel appear. At one stroke Edgar Allan Poe initiates the literature of aestheticism and the literature of the masses, naming and liberating the ghosts that Puritan America trails in its wake. Lautr6amont explodes the syntax of the imagination, expanding the visionary world of the Gothic novel to the proportions of a Last judgment. In automatic associations of words and images the Surrealists discover an objective rationale totally opposed to that of our intellectual logic. Is this the triumph of the irrational? Or is it the refusal to believe that the irrational exists, that anything in the world can be considered extraneous to the reason of things, even if something eludes the reasons determined by our historical condition, and also eludes limited and defensive so-called rationalism? So here we are, carried off into an ideological landscape quite different from the one we thought we had decided to live in, there with the relays of diodes of electronic computers. But are we really all that far away?
> The literature machine can perform all the permutations possible on a given material, but the poetic result will be the particular effect of one of these permutations on a man endowed with a con- sciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society.
---------------------------
A. Grothendieck "The key to dreams":
> Discovery of the Dreamer
> We ourselves are blind, so to speak, we don't see a thing in this mess of forces acting in us and which, nevertheless, govern inexorably our lives (as long as we don't make the effort to take knowledge of them...). We are blind, yes - but there is in us an eye that sees, and a hand that paints what is seen. The sleepy silence of sleep and night serve as its canvas, we ourselves are its palette; and the sensations, the feelings, the thoughts that go through us while dreaming, and the drives and forces that agitate our waking moments, here are Its tubes of paint, to brush this living painting that It alone knows how to brush. A parable painting, yes, thrown together on the fly or skillfully composed, farce or elegy and sometimes inexorable and poignant drama... - graciously offered to our attention! It's up to us to decipher it and to learn from it, if we want to. Take it or leave it!
> And almost every time, certainly, we "leave". Even among those who nowadays (following a recent fashion and in good part) talk about "being interested in dreams", is there one or other who has taken the risk of going to the bottom of even one of their dreams - to go to the bottom, and "to learn from it"?
> [...]
> From the very first dream that I scrutinized, revealing myself to myself in a moment of deep crisis, I felt well that this dream did not come from me. That it was an unhoped for, prodigious gift, a gift of Life, given by a greater one than me. And I understood little by little that it is He and no other who "does", who creates each of these dreams that we live, we, docile actors between His delicate and powerful hands. We ourselves cut figures as "dreamers", even as "dreamed" - created in and by this dream that we are in the process of accomplishing, animated by a breath that does not come from us.
> What I know about my work on dreams, what is most precious, is to have met the Master of Dreams. By scrutinizing His works, I have gradually come to know Him to some small extent, Him to whom nothing in me is hidden. And quite recently, as it were the culmination, surely, of a long quest that ignored itself, I have finally come to know Him by His name.
> Perhaps in scrutinizing your dreams of a thousand faces, you too will find the One who speaks to you through them. The One, the Only.
As for the combinatorial game Calvino's mention, this makes me think of Saussure's theories of hypograms (~= anagrams). More about this at the bottom of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37730428
This is the real danger with AI: its power of seduction. Imagine what will happen when you every media (not just news, but movies and books) is tailored to your own experience.
Related: https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-proof-shows-that-expander...
https://www.finestresullarte.info/en/exhibitions/today-is-it...