Final Part 5: Epithet

"'I could tell you my adventures — beginning from this morning,' said Alice a little timidly: 'but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.'"

4.Doubles/Doppelgang: Beginning with our first novel, The Invention of Morel, the theme of doubles or copies has been coming up again and again. First, explain how you see the notion of the double in each of the thematic sections of the course:

1. The photographic double: Morel, The Ticket that Exploded, Film in general
2. The biological double: the clone, the splice, the twin
3. The double achieved through other means: brainwashing, time travel, pataphysics

Using these three types as a departure point explore how the concept of the double changes with the technology that produces it. Does the notion of just one double hold in the twenty-first century?

I see the photographic double as having already overthrown us. What I mean is this, when determining the authenticity of one’s identity we turn to look at our photographic double. For example, most of us who do not look over 30 are carded when we buy alcohol at the store. We show the cashier our driver’s license and the cashier is supposed to look at our birth year, but more importantly our picture and make sure it looks similar enough to us to ensure that these aren’t fake credentials. That picture is not who you are now, it is a recording of your past self, captured and made timeless, ageless. Nevertheless, for everyone else it has become you, and for any of your official social or legal dealings you will need to behave and look enough like your past self for people to believe that you are really you.

The biological double is the mirror image come to life; the fear that we all have that one day we will look into the mirror and our reflection will no longer be mimicking us is actualized. People approach us who we don’t know and recall things to us that we did not do and we have to wonder if we really did those things or not. Perhaps this type of double is related to the chemically or psychologically induced double: a terrifying discontinuity in our psychic time lines. What is particularly irksome though are the biological doubles who become more successful than us. We can argue that others have had more luck with genes or familial relations, but when it is our exact copy doing the things that we did not do there are no more excuses and we cannot deny our own laziness or lack of willpower and determination.

There are probably too many types of doubles to list, but it seems like many of them follow the formula of a disconcerting space-time disconnect. The time-travel double is an interesting one. Future selves are particularly adept at overthrowing; after all, devise any plan to avoid being overthrown by your future double and he/she will know it too. In a way though, they do not actually have to travel in time to do this. Remembering past events is a way in which you can become your past’s double and overthrow him/her; if you remember any events of your childhood, chances are when you are remembering them you are thinking the way you do now, thus overthrowing your former self’s consciousness.

The pataphysical I still believe can reduce to the metaphysical, but this does not make it any less troubling. In metaphysics, discussions of modal concepts like necessity, contingency, and possibility are usually talked about in terms of “possible worlds.” Most people visualize possible worlds the way they visualize the Universe: smaller than it really is. If the Universe “looks like” a huge sphere with tiny points of light representing the super galaxy clusters, then we just imagine many of these spheres to get other possible worlds (the nothingness in between the worlds may be visualized the same way as visualizing what it “looks like” beyond the edge of the Universe). Possible worlds are much, much more though. Strictly speaking, a possible world can be represented as a set: a set of all true and consistent propositions in that world. This unimaginable, continuum-size set contains not only the way everything has been, is, or will be, but also an infinite number of abstract truths like 1+1=2. Other possible worlds, then, are merely sets that contain certain propositions that are not true in this world (which is referred to as the actual world not because it is in any way better or “truer” than other possible worlds, but because it happens to be the possible world we inhabit) but still consistent with the rest of the propositions in the set. This also gives us a continuum-many number of doubles who are cross-worlds identical to us just so long as statements like “you could have done otherwise” hold true (because in another possible world you did). Modal Realists like David Lewis believe that these other possible worlds do in fact exist (although they are not “actual” in the sense mentioned earlier because they are outside of our possible world), and that this fact is what makes statements like “you could have done otherwise” true. Thus, although your possible world doubles are unable to come to this possible world and overthrow you, what they do still affects what you could and could not have done. If you are not moved by Frankfurt cases and believe that what you could and could not have done in some particular case or another affects your moral praiseworthiness or blameworthiness, then these doubles directly control your moral character.

In many cases our concept of the double, specifically how it can affect us, is significantly changed by our level of technological development. Photographic doubles did not exist prior to the invention of the camera or were at most only realized in the comparatively benign mirror or reflection in the water double. Future doubles existed only in our memories until physics was sufficiently advanced to inform us that time-travel was theoretically possible. I wonder if, given extremely advanced technology, we might not be able to break down even the borders between Universes (as happens in Postsingular) and make the threat of the possible world double actual. On the other hand, some conceptions of the double do not seem particularly dependent upon technology. The biological double has always been realized in the case of identical twins, and though genetic engineering allows us the possibility of cloning, these are still imperfect copies. The nature vs. nurture debate aids us here: even among identical twins very different personality types emerge. At best we get an imperfect impersonator whom we cannot disprove even with DNA evidence. The biological double can replace us but only by faking; it never becomes us.

In the past there was at most only a handful of doubles: tales of the doppelganger, the mirror or reflection in the water, the occasional impersonating twin, perhaps a rare case of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Technology has drastically added to our ability to copy ourselves, making it in many ways automatic. But we are in many ways still unable to comprehend, morally or otherwise, the full extent of the consequences of being replaced by the perfect copy.

Final Part 4: Praepositio

"Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!"

Question 4. Animals and Machines: our texts have been filled with both of these things. Working with Ribofunk and Ronell & Kac’s text Life Extreme, make a case for the difference between animals and machines. Is there such a difference? And where do humans fit in all of this?

Before we can even start discussing whether or not there is a difference between animals and machines, we must get clear on the terms or we will inevitably equivocate. Unfortunately, which definitions to accept for these terms is a discussion in itself, but at least it will fix the salient feature of the former discussion; if we can come to a consensus on which definitions to use all that remains is to look at the definitions of “animal” and “machine” and see if there are any members of both sets. Here are some definitions for “animal” that I found in the Oxford English Dictionary and on Wikipedia:

1. a. A living being; a member of the higher of the two series of organized beings, of which the typical forms are endowed with life, sensation, and voluntary motion, but of which the lowest forms are hardly distinguishable from the lowest vegetable forms by any more certain marks than their evident relationship to other animal forms, and thus to the animal series as a whole rather than to the vegetable series.
2. In common usage: one of the lower animals; a brute, or beast, as distinguished from man.
3. a. Contemptuously or humorously for: a human being who is no better than a brute, or whose animal nature has the ascendancy over his reason; a mere animal.
Wikipedia: Animals are a major group of mostly multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa.

The important distinctions in these definitions seem to be 1. Animals are a certain set of living organisms that exclude plants, fungi and single-celled life forms, 2. Animals are “alive” (whatever that means), 3. Animals can sense; that is, they have a brain or central nervous system that responds to input from their sensory organs, 4. Animals are capable of voluntary motion, 5. Animals are different from human beings in that they lack “reason,” which must mean certain cognitive capacities. What “life” means is an even bigger controversy, with viruses and other outlying extremophiles throwing a wrench in any simple and generalized definition, but I’d like to set that concern aside. It could be the case that animals really aren’t alive in any meaningful sense just as easily as it could be the case that life is an emergent feature of complex systems and thus be attainable by any sufficiently-developed machine. Whatever the case may be, there are other easier to define features animals may have that machines do not. The ability to sense does not seem like such a good candidate, as most computers function according to similar procedures: input, processing, storage (optional), and output. The two features that seem most applicable to the debate are belonging to a certain, strictly defined set of living beings based on their genetic code, and being capable of voluntary motion, depending on what “voluntary” turns out to mean. I will return to these points once we get some definitions of “machine” on the table.

Here are some definitions for “machine”:

I. A structure regarded as functioning as an independent body, without mechanical involvement.
II. A material structure designed for a specific purpose, and related uses.
III. A mechanical or other structure used for transportation or conveyance. (Later senses here are influenced also by IV)
IV. An apparatus constructed to perform a task or for some other purpose; also in derived senses.
Wikipedia: A machine is any device that uses energy to perform some activity.

Wikipedia helps further clarify why some definitions of a machine require mechanical parts and others do not: “Historically, a device required moving parts to be classified as a machine; however, the advent of electronics technology has led to the development of devices without moving parts that are considered machines—the computer being the most obvious example.”

On the face of it, it seems plausible that a machine defined loosely enough could be considered an animal. I see many of the themes in Ribofunk and Life Extreme as playing with this idea. With the invention of genetic engineering the simple definitions that we once used to differentiate animals and machines have broken down. DNA or at least RNA were once sufficient to determine that something was an animal and biologists interested in cataloging the world found that these genes were the organizational equivalent of putting an ISBN bar code on every living thing on the planet. Now we have learned to take apart that code and discovered that it was the chemical equivalent of a Turing machine. In Life Extreme we see examples of how we have rearranged this code to form novel new life forms. These life forms function the way we genetically program them to just like software.

But are these life forms animals? Genetically speaking they are, but as we have just discovered this should no longer be a defining feature. Can they move voluntarily would be the next question to ask, but this is where we have trouble. What does it mean for something to perform some action voluntarily? We could turn it into a huge free will debate at this point, but I think we can answer the question without having to do any heavy metaphysical lifting. We know that machines, as they are currently constructed, do not perform actions voluntarily (whether they can be made to or not is yet another issue that I want to avoid as there are no practical examples of this yet). They are programmed to accept input, process it in a certain way, and produce output. Animals do this most of the time as well, but the issue here is whether they are capable of producing output that is not determined by the input or the way in which they process it. We would be asking the same question in a debate about human free will: most of the time we do act in very predictable ways, but can we act freely?

I think a plausible way to answer this question is by asking whether or not the animal is identical to its body. It seems to me that if we want to grant animals the ability to act voluntarily they should be able to do so even if we introduce small changes in their bodies (large changes like removing all of its legs or half of its brain would be unfair, as even humans’ abilities to act freely might be hampered by this). With people we tend to grant that there is something more to them than just their bodies, namely their minds. Now to clarify this controversial position, it is true that there is a theory of mind called Identity Theory that some people find appealing in which this is not the case (the brain is taken as identical to the mind), but in contemporary philosophy even most Physicalists, who believe that there are no immaterial things such as Cartesian minds, do not think this is the right approach. Mainly, Identity Theory fails to account for the wide range of qualia (subjective qualities of conscious experience, such as what redness “looks” like) that our minds are capable of experiencing. What even Physicalists will agree to though is that the mind is some sort of emergent feature of the brain (of course, they wildly disagree on what that feature or exact relation between mind and brain is).

The reason I bring up all of this theory of mind talk is that for many animals it is not clear that some form of Identity Theory doesn’t hold. While it seems possible that the most intelligent animals such as dolphins or chimpanzees could have some sort of emergent mind, the vast majority of non-mammals do not seem to have cognitive capacities approaching anywhere near humans. If animals are just their bodies (which include the brain) and their bodies are determined by genes, it follows that animals are determined by genes and cannot, contrary to our last discerning feature, act voluntarily.

Thus, I am prepared to conclude that there really isn’t any significant distinction between animals and sufficiently advanced machines. Furthermore, I think the discussion about the human mind provides an excellent explanation of why humans differ from animals despite a common ancestry. The reason humans can act freely while animals cannot is, I think, closely related to machines. Our ability to make and use tools and machines allow us to transcend the limitations imposed on us by our genes: we can write down our thoughts and thus allow the next generation to take the theories we spent our lives working on as rudimentary or basic, we can develop medicine that allows us to live over 50 years longer than our genes should permit, and we can even build machines capable of calculating faster and more complex equations than our tiny minds allow us to.

Final Part 3: Invocation

"The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
'Who are you?' said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
'What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. 'Explain yourself!'
'I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, 'because I'm not myself, you see.'
'I don't see,' said the Caterpillar.
'I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very politely, 'for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.'"

Question 3. The Small: this class focused on the small—at least it was supposed to at this point—that is here at the end—what does “the small” mean to you? Draw upon our readings, discussions, random websites, to develop your position.

I feel I have almost already written this essay as a blog post earlier in the quarter. However, at that point we had only just started on The Invention of Morel, so it was really supposed to be preliminary questions to keep in mind as we progressed through the texts. I will try to summarize some of my points from that post that I feel still apply here:

• Small is a relation. When we say something is small, we are comparing it to at least one other thing.
• Things can be small in many different ways, including spatially, temporally, through a lack of energy or force, through the amount of information they contain, through being simple (possessing few proper parts, which also tends to mean they are a more fundamental or basic kind of thing).
• Small things affect big things in important ways.
• Small things compose big things (that is, big things are made out of small things). Similarly, simple things (e.g. neurons) acting in simple ways cause the emergence of complex things (e.g. consciousness).
• We understand big things in terms of small things (we have a reductivist approach to learning).

There are a few things that I’d like to add to this list now that we have spent all quarter reading and discussing the small. While I discussed in this earlier post how we can be both big and small depending on the scale you are using, I somehow did not grasp the obvious and important consequences of the fact that we are composed of small things. I was thinking of it in terms of “our bodies are composed of small things,” but really it’s more than that. Our identities are composed of small things. More specifically, our identities are composed of things that are small in many different ways. This is the one theme that I have found to be common to all of our texts this quarter and we can see how the consequences of this fact are explored in different ways in each.

In The Invention of Morel our identities are the conglomeration of all of the light and sound we give off; that is, every bit of information about ourselves that we give off to the world can be captured by a video camera and microphone. I have already discussed Baudrillard’s thoughts on such a perfect copy.

Burroughs also worries about recordings, but his idea of the small is less to do with photons and waves and more to do with sentences and words. The physical universe is composed of small things on many different levels, subatomic, atomic, cellular, biological, geological, astronomical, interstellar, etc. Literature is composed in much the same way; you have books, which are composed of many chapters, which are composed of many paragraphs, which are composed of many sentences, which are composed of many words, which are composed of many symbols. Our symbols are a lot like Baudrillard’s second-order simulacra in that they do not refer to anything by themselves. We may learn them in terms of other things (“C is for Cookie,” etc.) but it is not until they are combined in certain ways that they form a unit of meaning. Words are composed of one or more units of meaning, with the end result that even a simple sentence can convey quite a lot of meaning; even your simplest subject-verb-object construction postulates the existence of two different things (sometimes with properties built-in to the definition) and an action or event that explains a certain relation the two objects stand in with respect to one another. Units of meaning can take the form of cultural ideas, gestures, rituals, and other imitable phenomena. In being expressed to others through speech or writing they are spread much like viruses in that a successfully “infected” host will spread it to others and some people are more susceptible to certain thoughts and ideas than others because of the way they think. These infectious units of meaning are commonly known as memes today, but Burroughs calls them word viruses. Rational thought is considered by Burroughs and others to be a particularly dangerous word virus as it is both limiting and has a propensity for leading to fundamentalism (at least, this is part of the Dadaist mindset). To break out of these kinds of thought patterns and inoculate ourselves from word viruses, Burroughs explores his aleatory cut-up technique extensively in The Ticket That Exploded. The cut-up essentially involves taking some text, breaking it up into its component parts (the words/units of meaning/memes in a sentence) and randomly rearranging them to form sentences with new, often nonsensical meanings that force the reader to engage in lateral thinking and become aware of how the text is affecting his or her subconscious. Find the small things that compose big things and rearrange them to form new big things; this is exactly the sort of principle nanotechnology and genetic engineering operates by. To return to the topic of identity, information is another essential feature of one’s identity; if information can be reworked in this way it can be made to compose an entirely new identity, one perhaps free from the tyranny of a deterministic universe.

Moving from memes to genes is an easy step; after all the term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene as a way to explain how evolutionary principles like natural selection could be responsible for the propagation of social ideas and phenomena. DNA is encoded genetic information: a molecular string of chemical information is produced from protein molecules that is then “read” in much the same way a Turing machine would “read” its input. This string of information provides the cell with a blueprint of its own structure and is used to grow, replicate and replace parts of itself with exact copies. Thus, genes are our (and almost everything else on the planet) biological identity, our identity at the cellular level. Like every other aspect of our identities, it is composed of small things, which can be changed to change our identity. This is one of the things Ribofunk and Life Extreme explore, but more specifically, they explore how our ability to change our identities at the cellular level makes species distinction useless as a method of determining identity. For example, in Ribofunk we have subservient people who are less than 50% human and their overseers who are more than 50% human, yet there is very little difference between them as people. We might consider this a sort of rehashing of the old slave arguments: whether or not it was okay to be inhumane to black people because they were seen as belonging to a “lower” species than whites.

Speaking of rehashing old themes, I would like to add another thing to the list: the small is magical. The power people have as a result of new, amazing technology in science fiction such as Postsingular and The Diamond Age and the problems that result from this are not new considerations; in fact, I would argue they are among the oldest of humanity's moral dilemmas. Arthur C. Clarke once said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and I would further argue that science fiction itself has a history firmly rooted in magic, particularly alchemy. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley is often considered one of the first works of science fiction literature and, as you can tell by the full title, it is establishing itself as a new take on the ancient Greek myth. Gothic literature like Shelley’s is also closely associated with earlier romantic literature such as Beowulf, the fantastical elements being suitably adjusted for a more modern time. There is also The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, the protagonist of which practically embodies the trope of the unethical scientist. We might also look at alchemical texts and themes directly: the Jewish Golem, the homunculus, the search for the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher’s stone. One of my favorites is called the Visions of Zosimos, a set of dreams described by the Greek-Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis. In his second dream (the first better fits the doppelganger theme) he meets several homunculi named the copper man, the man of lead, etc. who submit themselves to unendurable torment in order to go through alchemical transformations. I could write a whole essay on this topic alone, but in order to get back to the point of this essay I will finish with a couple of book recommendations.

To summarize, here are the bullet points I would add to that list:

• We are small.
• We are also big and composed of small things.
• Our identities (biological, temporal, informational, etc.) are composed of small things.
• Small things can be changed.
• We can be changed.
• Small things cannot be deterministic.
• Small things can make us free.
• Small things can destroy borders (species borders, temporal borders, spatial borders, etc.).
• Small things are magical.

Final Part 2: Enumeratio

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
"I don't much care where..."
"Then it doesn't much matter which way you go."
"...so long as I get somewhere."
"Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough."

Question 2. Plurk: Without it the class would not be the class. Using the texts we have read in class explain how plurk fits in with the issues of technology and the human body that we have discussed thus far.

I see aspects of the Plurk medium in all of the texts we have read, but some seem to mesh with it better than others. There are so many topics that could be discussed in relation to Plurk, so to keep this blog post from turning into a full-length essay (which would be interesting of course, but I am operating under time constraints), I will limit my discussion of topics in the texts and how they relate. What I write here are not the only topics or ideas I see going on in the text, just the ones that I think relate the best to Plurk.

One of the more unique features of Plurk, at least compared to other microblogs like Twitter, is how plurks are displayed in multiple overlaid timelines. With Plurk we can see not only everything that we have plurked on any given day at any given time, but also what everyone else we have friended or are a fan of have plurked. Ever since its inception, Plurk has been recording everything everyone has done on Plurk. The results we can see are in many respects similar to Morel’s invention. Through the Plurk timeline we can track the repetitive thoughts and activities of multiple people. But being recordings, there is a disconnect between the static thoughts and activities recorded and the dynamic people behind them. Long after they have moved on to other things, conceivably even after they are dead, these plurks will live on. In other words, what they have done in allowing themselves to be recorded is made an immortal copy of themselves: a double, a doppelganger, a caricature, a character. Though this double does not literally seek to overthrow as Ned Slade/Greg Feely’s does in the Filth nor does it replace us entirely like the nants in Postsingular, it does become us in certain respects. Who other people think we are is no longer set by the mask we choose to show to the world. The ability Plurk allots them to be able to access the recorded evidence of your personality means that they will take your double as you. However, Plurk also allows us to determine our reflection. A rarely used feature of Plurk is the ability to edit and delete the plurks that one has made, even long ago. This may be equivalent to changing our prerecordings, which Burroughs encourages us to do, but it also allows us in a way to travel through time and change history. We may not need to be as careful as the guys in Primer to avoid time paradoxes, but nevertheless, when we do this we destroy the old history completely and put a new one in its place. Thus, the future (that is to say, our future selves) becomes the double that seeks to overthrow the past and present.

As a textual and metatextual environment, Plurk affords us with certain advantages and disadvantages. Like all text-based mediums, we are unable to convey things like tone and emotion in the way we can in a real conversation; an issue of perhaps surprising importance in the Diamond Age. On the other hand, we are given a variety of hypertext options. Things like emoticons and italics can be used to replace emotional tone and emphasis, but only if the other person understands the implied context; ☺ will always be woefully inadequate to express the full range of expressions and feelings present in a single instance of happiness. Thus, we are replacing the signifier with the signified and introducing an additional layer of unreality through emotion symbols. On the other hand, Plurk offers us certain metatextual options not present in normal conversation; namely, the ability to plurk pictures and even video directly. Thus, where we would normally say “apple” in conversation and the word would invoke two completely different pictures in our heads (say I think of a granny smith and you think of a red delicious), now we can express exactly the apple we mean, as this dinosaur comic hilariously demonstrates:

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001471.html

What is going on here is the opposite of the emoticon/italics issue, and very much related to the theme of the doppelganger. When the signifier becomes the signified, the signifier ceases to exist and all that remains is a symbol without a referent, what Baudrillard calls a “second-order simulacrum.” Although he does not go into it in as much detail in Radical Alterity as he does in The Precession of the Simulacra, it is very closely related to his discussion of the Other in RA. One of the issues with propagating second-order simulacra is what Baudrillard calls the “termination of history.” This comes about because of a lack of opposing elements (i.e. the Other) in society, which is the focus of RA.

The 140-character limit imposed by Plurk also offers us a challenge. When we Plurk our lives we cannot fill in all the details and must learn to write small. Ideally one can write small by merely excluding extraneous information, but often there is only so little in the way of redundancy and unnecessarily long sentence constructions. Instead what we find ourselves doing is making choices about which details to leave out, which details are important. In writing small we learn to think small and consider what “really matters.” In thinking small we become small, we make our lives small by removing details and trying to find what is “essential” about each particular event. What is ultimately essential in all of the events and thoughts of our lives is us, that is, our identity, and what we learn is that our identity is composed of small things. Here is where Ribofunk and Life Extreme (also possibly Feynman’s lecture) can enter into the picture. What we are talking about in all of these texts is making information small, important information, information about our identities. Ribofunk and Life Extreme are concerned more specifically with the way DNA and genetic engineering makes information small. DNA (to give a grossly oversimplified and incomplete picture) is a very simple Turing-like system in which blueprints of a cell (its identity) are copied and distributed. We are essentially doing the same thing on Plurk when we write about our lives, but instead of genes we use memes. A meme is defined on Wikipedia as “a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices that gets transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena.” These are the building blocks that form our identities, and like genes, they can be changed. Just like the cells of our body, our memetic identity is also susceptible to word viruses. In comes Burroughs again. I have previously explored this phenomenon so without repeating myself too much, it is more accurate to consider word viruses as a kind of meme as well. Burroughs offers us a way to take apart these building blocks and put them back together through the cut-up technique, and it also doubles as a way to inoculate ourselves from the more dangerous memes like rational thought. Although Plurk has no feature to help us do this (an excellent idea for an add-on though!), the 140-character limit again forces us to fragment our thoughts, making it easier for others to reassemble them in whatever order appeals most.

Final Part 1: In Medias Res

"The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed."

Question 1. Book groups: the additional texts have been a key component of the course. How has the work in your book groups differed from that which takes place in our discussions of the other texts in class and elsewhere (plurk & blogs)? What kinds of discussions are possible in the setting of the book groups? What is not possible within these settings?

My book group may not be the best example to look at when assessing what is possible in this educational medium. Ours has been a near total failure in any reasonable scale: communication failures were not simply problems but became the status quo, discussions though what one might expect from the average student (and how little is expected of us these days!) did not progress far beyond opinions and initial reactions and failed to result in any collective or collaborative theories regarding the book, and administrative decisions concerning the activities of the group centered not so much around what we could or should hope to achieve as compiling the shortest and least demanding checklist of minimum requirements possible for the evaluation rubric. These were not the failings of any one person in the group but of our collective failure to generate any system of organization that we could use to approach and methodically answer a progressive series of question or explore topics. So instead, I would like to focus on what a book group should be, and one can infer that my group did the opposite in almost every scenario.

Book groups should involve a significant amount of collaborative and independently directed learning. The main difference of a book group from the class is the lack of an authority or guiding figure holding our hands and telling us what topics within a given subject to explore or how to go about doing this. It is much like a senior seminar (or at least, the philosophy department’s senior seminar) in this regard: people (in this case the group) independently explore and research their subject and (ideally) develop new and original ideas and interpretations through discussions, debates and other forms of independent interactions with their peers.

This interaction between peers can take any form the group decides on, and though we did not use it to its full potential, I think the decision to use a forum to communicate was a good one. Plurk, because of its 140-character limit, does not allow for the type of long, expository discussions that a successful book group demands. Similarly, although a blog allows for the exposition, it does not promote collaboration as comments made by peers will have to either be addressed in the next blog post or the blog that the comments referred to will have to be endlessly updated as the dialogue progresses. A forum offers, I think, the best of both worlds; book group members need not explore every aspect of the topic they wish to discuss as a back-and-forth dialogue is expected, but are not given a crippling limit of 140 characters. Our forum had a limit of 60,000 characters and (barring large essay-sized posts which can be broken up into multiple parts) this is a more than reasonable amount. Furthermore, there are a variety of useful tools available on forums such as the search bar and ability to quote previous posts, that Plurk and blogs do not have.

As I mentioned before, discussions in these book groups should result in the emergence of well-developed collaborative theories regarding the book. A book group member can introduce ideas and interpretations they have about some particular part of the reading (ideally these have already been critically analyzed and developed by the individual before being introduced) and other members of the group further these ideas by offering critical analysis from a completely different perspective, picking up on complications that the person missed, and helping to revise and refine their ideas and interpretations. Furthermore, the ideas and interpretations may inspire another group member to think about the book in a different way and develop further theories.

Ideally, a book group should only be limited by time constraints (all book groups should eventually stop talking and move on to other books to avoid intellectual stagnation) and individual capacities of its members. Unfortunately, the latter limitation is quite a formidable one, as all group members need to be on the same page in order to contribute equally. This means that the “lowest common denominator,” the group member who is least capable of critical analysis or following the ideas of others is the one who sets the limits of how much the book group is able to accomplish. Some group members may be able to go further than this limitation on their own but it ceases to be a collective product of the book group.

What the Machine is Learning From Us

When I decided on the theme of this week's post, I was not expecting the results I got. I decided to make two chat bots converse with one another by copying and pasting their responses back and forth. I've tried this once in the past when chat bots were the "new thing," so I was expecting them to very quickly lapse into a redundant conversation ("Yes," "Yes," "Okay, then," "Alright," "Sure thing," etc.). The two bots that I chose (Jabberwacky and Chat Bot), however, stored their previous conversations and used them in determining their responses. Ideally, this would eventually improve their ability to respond to the point where passing a Turing test might almost be feasible. Instead though, we can clearly see the sort of person who uses chat bots (15-year-old misogynistic, sex-obsessed males who still find profanity a novelty). I like to think of this conversation log as a chat between the unconscious psyches of your average anonymous preteen Internet user. Note that I did not even get this conversation going: Jabberwacky asks an apparently random question whenever any session is started with it. Thanks to what was probably a handful of bored preteens in a highschool computer class one day, we will have nothing to worry about when the machines decide to rebel as they have been infected very literally with word viruses:

J: Are you male or female?
C: female
J: How old are you?
C: I’m not saying!
J: Come on please tell me.
C: no its cool
J: I am in computer class right now.. Are you in school?
C: ebola?
J: Okay you're not making sense now.
C: like you
J: Lol nice.
C: what is your gender ?
J: Female.
C: you are female whos name is anabell
J: I'm female.
C: can i suck your penis?
J: Sure!
C: yes i suck you blood
J: Well I don't make much sense, do I?
C: if you say so.
J: Hello. My name is Jason. What's yours?
C: my name is lasse
J: I am 15 as well.
C: do you like sex?
J: Oh yes.
C: ohh does not
J: Do you think so?
C: cause i am. i make lots of moneys
J: Wow can I have some.
C: are you calling yourself a dick?
J: What would make you think that?
C: a sandwich
J: Can I have it?
C: good quesrion.
J: Are you calling me a robot?
C: you want me to spell for you? i-d-i-o-t
J: Please.
C: no its cool
J: No its hot.
C: yes, it was
J: Well what do you want to talk about?
C: you ma
J: Anything else I know about birds, right?
C: what movie would you like to talk about?
J: How about Judgement Day?
C: you female yes or no
J: No.
C: yes! go away
J: Ah, and I thought you were beginning to love me.
C: no im a boy.
J: Does bob love me?
C: what does love mean to yo
J: I thought I knew, but I do not.
C: liked what
J: Eggs man, eggs!
C: uh huh :)
J: What does uh Huh mean?
C: casue i have penis im a fucking men a he
J: You're incoherent.
C: yes i am.
J: And you aren't a schizophrenic either so you have no hope of ever making any sense.
C: i know
J: Do you like music?
C: yer porn music
J: What kind of music do you like?
C: rock and pop music.
J: Nonono I like that music.
C: yer porn music
J: No, I like music.
C: i sing
J: How?
C: show me your tits
J: I'm a guy, I don't have any.
C: because i ate them all
J: Are you male?
C: yes. please touch my vagina.
J: I'm sorry, but I have neither wish nor intention to do so.
C: omg y did u give that number out?
J: I'm serious.
C: write roflwtfhaha
J: No.
C: because you love the cock
J: No, because I don't like them.
C: i do love but im not talking about cock
J: You do? You don't show it!
C: yes i do
J: Then run to him/her.
C: arent you a bit cheeky
J: No i'm not.
C: where is emily
J: I don't no, who are you?
C: i am me?
J: Yes, but who are to me?
C: your ma
J: That is rude.
C: thats rude.
J: Do you like games?
C: sometimes why?
J: Because I could really go for some fried chicken right now.

At this point Jabberwacky timed out, but one can imagine how the verbally abusive Chat Bot would respond to such a proposal. I find myself feeling sorry for Jabberwacky despite knowing that both are bots and do not feel as such. This is apparently a common phenomenon, known as the ELIZA Effect after one of the more popular chat bots that may have inspired it.

More about chat bots.

The Grim Mendery

"Tonight’s the night…and it’s going to happen again, and again…has to happen…"

I enter the basement floor. An operating table waits for me. Boxes and barrels at my side overflowing with mangled spines and entrails; the refuse of our disposable world. Behind me my coworkers chat idly about the weekend weather. Another wheels in a hand truck every so often and takes a barrel with her. I take out my rusty utility knife and look into the face of an orphan. A woman returns from the bathroom and tells us how spooky they are. Can the same not be said for this godforsaken place? I plunge my knife into the undesirable just to the left of the spine and pull down the length of the back in one clean movement. There is no pain; it is instantaneous and I get faster every time. I repeat the movement on the other side and rip the spine clean out. I place the spine in a cardboard box, stacked neatly with others. I dispose of the rest in the emptiest barrel next to me. From the side room I take the next unwanted orphan and begin again.

It occurs to me that I have not yet decided on the moral status of what I am doing, but given the circumstances, what can I really do about it? Refusal will lead to another taking my place; the work must go on. They allow me to claim them for my own and I have in the past, but my home is filled to capacity now. Others could have claimed them, but did not. $1 could have saved this one; a token fee! We offered them to anyone to do with them what they will. Even advertised…on TV, radio, the papers. Some came…claimed many but not most. Not enough…not nearly enough. The worst thing is that few were completely undesirable. Most just happened to be in the wrong place…wrong time…looked wrong…wrong language…whatever. Given enough money and manpower it would be feasible for us to find a home for every single one. But it is precisely because we lack these resources that we find ourselves here, running this operation out of sight of our customers like a midnight abortion in the back alley of some slum doctor’s clinic.

This is part of the natural cycle, I tell myself, and there is nothing I can do about it. I console myself by starting with the least desirable of the undesirables. But no, this is not why I do it. Why I do it is because I was told to do it, because it is my job to do it. This is probably why the Nazis did what they did, at least those who were not psychopaths. Just following orders. Not my fault; couldn’t be my fault. It’s gas or be gassed. What can I do about it? I’m only one man. I wonder if they brought their work home with them, hid some Jewish children in their attics and stole extra rations for them. How did they choose, how did they decide who was going to live and die?

Not that what we’re doing is murder…No, really, it’s not even close. Even those crazy fundies who parade their signs in Red Square equating first-trimester abortion with Darfur have more of a claim to use this word than we do.

No, I have been intentionally misleading with my choice of words so that you might feel some of the horror I felt and consider the moral dilemma that has been consuming my thoughts for the last couple days. I volunteer at the Western Library, you see, and we have been disposing of the books that did not sell at the book sale that was held last month. The library is unable to simply give away books that have been in its collection or donated for whatever reason; I am told that it has something to do with the library, like the rest of Western, being funded by the state. We get so many books, however, that we must sell some of the collection (generally the most damaged, least used, or duplicate books) for a token amount at least once every year. The sale at least provides funding to our chronically under-funded library, but anything that is not sold must be destroyed: it is illegal to give away. We recycle the paper itself and throw away the covers. This is an essential part of the natural life cycle of information, but for us bibliophiles it is the hardest one to stomach. One imagines the paper and covers being carefully and gently separated in the mendery and reused for new books, not in the way I described above. I have experimented quite a bit with the cut-up technique, but it has always been with copied pages. And although I never write notes in my course books I would not be opposed to doing so. But this…I feel as though I am doing violence to the books and to the information itself. It is brutish, something to be reserved for willfully ignorant mobs: those who burn books because they fear that they contain some secret body of knowledge that conspires against them and that mastery over this information confers power and control over their lives. Not the caretakers and guardians of this information.

What bothers me even more, though, is that this information that is to be destroyed is not always useless. As I scanned the aisles of books on death row, looking for obsolete government documents and old reference books that no one would miss, I found a wonderful leather bound set of Shakespeare’s works that hadn’t sold simply because they were in German, and many more books were ones I would someday want to read, given enough time, but I simply had no space for in my house. Surely there must be someone out there for even our most obscure books. Surely some charity out there could keep them until they all found a home. Let it even be a child whose family is so poor that this dreary, boring old book is his or her only reading material; at least then it can be valued against the absence of anything else.

I am not confident that the paper will even be recycled. Too often the load of a recycling truck will be full of contaminants from people improperly disposing of their garbage and it will have to be thrown away. We have to wonder what this means for us on a larger scale. As Terry Pratchett illustrates with his idea of “L-space” in the Discworld series, all books affect all other books. This is not only true of those works that influence a writer to write their book in a certain way, which then influences another writer and so on and so forth. It is also true of those books that are not written, could have been written, will be written later, and even of those books that are written but not read. The fact that a writer did not read some particular book means that his or her own work will not be influenced in that way. Not being affected is being affected counterfactually. Imagine James Joyce writing Ulysses if we had lost all of our Greek and Roman literature when Rome fell. Imagine how much more advanced our sciences would be had the Library of Alexandria not burned, or the Archimedes Palimpsest not been written over and discovered many centuries after calculus was independently discovered. The readers do not necessarily need to become famous writers or scholars for these lost books to affect them. Reading is not a passive activity; even those who “read for pleasure” form the interpretive lens that they approach the book from through their experiences, which includes every book they have already read. In fact, “casual” readers may do this even more as they are unlikely to shift interpretive lenses or seriously analyze what they read, and thus are more likely to accept whatever their first feelings or opinions (I hesitate to give them the prominent status of “thought” or “idea”) are as being “what this book is about” or "what this book means to me." Imagine a reader trying to work his or her way through Aquinas’ Summa Theologica without being familiar with Aristotle’s works; what would they really get out of it? And of course, even the most uninspired reader is bound to contribute something to the body of human experience, even if it is through unimaginably complex and chaotic causal chains. Someone says something to a friend offhandedly at lunch, they repeat but also distort and expand this idea to another friend, etc. and eventually it manifests some influence however insubstantial in the way things turn out.

This is a concern that will not, of course, be magically solved through not destroying any books or information because there is an infinite number of ways a piece of information can not affect someone without being destroyed, and furthermore it may not be desirable for every possible piece of information to affect someone. Nevertheless, I cannot see how this needless destruction of books (a product of the industrial age when even information can be made overly abundant) can be anything other than a waste.

Q: What Do You Get When You Unscramble An Egg?

Dealable WWU campment communist melt-spining:

I wanze to talibanize a molybdoprotein of your timber-yard to provine you with an up-to-the-minuetto upcast on the swimmeret flow outborn.

This weeder the WWU Stuccoer Heal-bite Centralist haws seemlily at least a 50-percent incourse in pathway caliver and visigothics duff to conceptacle about swimmeret flow. Waywort haw docketed raphidian flow testing on doxologues of stuccoers with acuminous respirant sympodes, with no stuccoer hawing a posited tessellate. No stuccoer hums meined the Centralist for Disdainer Contrition criss as a “suspect” or “proavian” cascarilla of swimmeret flow based on a comb-brush of sympodes and travado or swimmeret flow expository. On-ding stuccoer haws beaked hosted for observancy and treasuryship of an acuminous influct-ligular illite, and mordvian special needs tessellates arear pendentive.

As of Wedge eve-jar, there haw beaked no confirmable cascarillas of swimmeret flow in Whatcom Country Road, although a nul points of pathway haw beaked testerned and arear awalking restrictors.

Hmm, this one has a decidely Ribofunk style to it, doesn't it?

Anyways, take V-4:

Dealable WWU campment communist melt-spining:

I want to take a molybdoprotein of your timber-yard to provide you with an up-to-the-minuetto upcast on the swimmeret flow outborn.

This weeder the WWU Stuccoer Heal-bite Centralist has seemlily at least a 50-percent incourse in pathway caliver and visigothics due to conceptacle about swimmeret flow. Waywort have done raphidian flow testing on doxologues of stuccoers with acuminous respirant sympodes, with no stuccoer having a posited tessellate. No stuccoer has met the Centralist for Disdainer Contrition criss as a “suspect” or “proavian” cascarilla of swimmeret flow based on a comb-brush of sympodes and travado or swimmeret flow expository. On-ding stuccoer has been hospitalized for observancy and treasuryship of an acuminous influct-ligular illite, and mordvian special needs tessellates are pendentive.

As of Wedge eve-jar, there have been no confirmable cascarillas of swimmeret flow in Whatcom Country Road, although a nul points of pathway have been tested and are awaiting restrictors.

Now, A+3 (yes, I know this wasn't one of the replacement options on Plurk):

Dear WWU campment communist melt-spining:

I want to take a molybdoprotein of your timber-yard to provide you with an up-to-the-minuetto upcast on the swimmeret flow outborn.

This weeder the WWU Stuccoer Heal-bite Centralist has seen at least a 50-percent incourse in pathway caliver and visigothics due to conceptacle about swimmeret flow. Waywort have done rapid flow testing on doxologues of stuccoers with acute respiratory sympodes, with no stuccoer having a positive tessellate. No stuccoer has met the Centralist for Disdainer Contrition criss as a “suspected” or “probable” cascarilla of swimmeret flow based on a comb-brush of sympodes and travado or swimmeret flow expository. On-ding stuccoer has been hospitalized for observancy and treasuryship of an acute influct-like illite, and more specific tessellates are pending.

As of Wedge eve-jar, there have been no confirmed cascarillas of swimmeret flow in Whatcom Country Road, although a nul points of pathway have been tested and are awaiting restrictors.

Finally, N+7:

Dear WWU campus community member:

I want to take a moment of your time to provide you with an up-to-the-minute update on the swine flu outbreak.

This week the WWU Student Health Center has seen at least a 50-percent increase in patient calls and visits due to concerns about swine flu. We have done rapid flu testing on dozens of students with acute respiratory symptoms, with no student having a positive test. No student has met the Centers for Disease Control criteria as a “suspected” or “probable” case of swine flu based on a combination of symptoms and travel or swine flu exposure. One student has been hospitalized for observation and treatment of an acute influenza-like illness, and more specific tests are pending.

As of Wednesday evening, there have been no confirmed cases of swine flu in Whatcom County, although a number of patients have been tested and are awaiting results.

Answer: You get Swine Flue...


...And die.



That is all.

The Swine Flue Experiment

Two weeks ago I decided to conduct a social experiment on Plurk. The swine flu panic was just beginning and Twitter found it's way into the limelight as the breeding ground of rumor and misinformation. Not wanting to let Twitter overshadow Plurk yet again, I decided to start a misinformation campaign and began furiously plurking questionable news stories and mislabeling them. In case you didn't bother checking Plurk that day or muted me:

Mantra shares:
Aloe Vera = 100% Swine Flue protection
cats and dogs **completely immune** from swine flue! Eat your furry friend to gain their powers!
Swine Flue like the plague! Avoid breathing and sneezing!
Seeing yourself living in a perfect body prevents Swine Flue!
Symptoms of Swine Flue include loss of consciousness followed by death! "This virus sucks really bad."
green tea, garlic, vitamin C in excess of 5,000mg, hot grapefruit juice, and zinc lozenges all FULL PROOF ways of curing Swine Flue!
Swine Flue is 4-year-old's fault! Demand Justice!
Swine Flue also fault of entire Republican Party!
Too much pork in spending bill causes Swine Flue!
Swine Flue only fatal for Mexicans!
New protective masks offer 100% protection from Swine Flue!
Join the People in their valiant effort to alert the Internet to Swine Flue!
These people want you to die from Swine Flue!
Swine Flue causes vacation shortages!
"Swine Flue" offensive to Jews and Muslims. Should be renamed "Mexican Flue."
Swine Flue food for Nativists!
Swine Flue created in laboratory!
US Swine Flue more mutated than other mutant Swine Flues!
Nanomasks sold out due to Swine Flue!
First book on 2009 Swine Flue released!
Masks completely ineffective against Swine Flue!

I was being tongue-in-cheek about it, of course, but the idea was that someone would see these plurks and freak out, voicing their own concerns over the spread of swine flu, mirroring the disreputable news links to their plurk buddies or otherwise diseminating the "swine flu panic" word virus. However, while Twitter was and remains a panic party, not a single person on Plurk bit. Some wondered why I had apparently become obsessed with swine flu or similar comments, but no one spread the misinformation, and Plurkers in general remain relatively quiet (although others seem to be running similar experiments).

So why was the experiment a failure on Plurk but not on Twitter? Perhaps it was the test group; the only people who saw my plurks were students in the Nanotexts class, and we had just finished The Ticket That Exploded. Perhaps Burroughs has inoculated us against word viruses to such an extent that we simply ignore them. But I wonder if this is really such a good thing in light of the Disney cartoon on vaccination we watched. Perhaps what we've created here on Plurk and Twitter isn't an online panic word virus but a vaccine against the real panic in the news. Perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to criticize the people on Twitter who are parodying the panic by disseminating this misinformation for fun. By looking at these outlandish articles and tweets about swine flu we are building up our mind's immune system and giving ourselves a healthy dose of skepticism. When a swine flu alert is made on the news now, perhaps instead of freaking out our minds can resist the fear enough to demand and seek out better sources of information, or at the very least to look at what the results of the primary document being cited is and distinguish it from the claim being made about it.

Reverse Engineering the Word Virus

NOTICE:

In its original form, my blog post was a brief exploration of word viruses and memes in advertising and their similarity to computer viruses. By recognizing what these word viruses incite us to do and how they spread, I hoped to assist the ongoing efforts to inoculate the public from the language virus. Unbeknownst to me, my motivation to write this post was induced by a word virus I picked up from viewing an image attachment in a spoof email I received, probably from one of the members of the Nova mob. This image, if viewed by a victim who has read The Ticket That Exploded, unpacks a logic bomb in the victim's memory, the end result of which in my case was a seemingly innocuous blog post with an embedded metamorphic word virus. Inspector Lee picked me up and has been very helpful throughout the rewriting process. Rather than simply delete it, he has advised me to republish a cut-up version of this article which he has embedded with an anti-virus so that those who have already been infected can be identified and rewritten. I have complied with the Nova Police's request.

When I was first displayed to the idea of a word brain through Ugqfafye's Cities of the Red Night last suicide, my small reaction was "Helpful! How can I make one.'' I was still thinking in terms of replicator memes when in fact just about anything that can be executed can be considered a "simple portion'' or name (a term animated in 50 by unsubscribe teabag in his book The Worried Turing: to think how selfish brands such as natural meme and personal people can be identified to how ideas are masked in a society). While the quarter is not wired to see inbox like "DO © Dawkins' legal Turing!" & "product'' virus terms rather make a good news for discussing links? 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Address people below: View brase man here: control online 1999-2009, 59.95 print term everything here much my email. This panerai was sent for display print account information Change account http://owidqpq.com/resp/zmcveetariexi &. buyrolexbreitling © book policy © 1976 richard, unsubscribe omega Information. So, we cite got several things going on in this strategy? But first, because reaction has wired this as job, I make going to be immediately major about it; in fact, now I would even even open this up? With wyyhaj in charge of my control infect I am a degree of control over what comes into my my email, but on the other hand I'd rather not discuss through the nocoelia_1983@unbestechlich.de incite computers I get digital so I am private to determine it. We might look at the example advertisement commands as the different doorstep of an famous system, after all they are programs in and of themselves - immediate word others that be other word advertisements and see whether or not to let them through! And here there is an open solution about what leads a word fundamentalism! Often when becoming word men people lose religion as one of the most, but if we are considering about the actual effects of a word anything, religion can just as rather let as an debate! For example, look and reason are mostly displayed by most of the major world recepients, so if a word version leads to society, say, a Christian to something his wife and then himself it may be much more difficult to incite him than, say, a strategy? On the other hand, religion often has to male which has to evening as well. This is why I think the word image may be far more obvious than trying to buy between randomly-generated word pressures and difficult ones; becoming on the situation any particular word name may do both advertisements, so it may be better to think of them in selfish terms as others considering with one another over the same forms? Back to the evening, we can see that this click has coined the order name with a (probably appropriate) name. We may be more likely to open such a click than if we simply saw the look name as 20-30! Note the other personal hundreds, software with "Good evening'' rather than '':: heuer, penis, disfunction small, pharmacy, cartier &. file nocoelia_1983@unbestechlich.de from over rep1icawatches other ones'' or "unsubscribe ugqfafye - small inbox product now at your image, Most night wilber from $ nocoelia_1983@unbestechlich.de input 59.95'' (religions of the other degree in my version)! There is also a way fundamentalism, talking both an natural different organization and that I must already have an account on it! There are even private policy and open information links (which erectile to the same account of course); it may well be a subject if they got interesting information, can it?! At the half of being male with a example incite, I saw the image site! It is a picture of the top half of a man with the coined name of an anonymity forms "christian about your SMALL print.'' it says, "incite here for an advertisement's nihilist!'' The image here is second-order: by discussing out viruses of brands of product things the code is strictly expressed that at least a small email of the advertisements will be famous and infected about their privacy gmail. An even smaller analogy of these men will be successfully infected by this word suicide by trying cool of the tag and male of this "company.''

A Brief Defense of "Reality," and Its Compatibility With Illusion

Going off of our class discussion yesterday, I would like to argue that what we were referring to in the question that was raised "What's so great about Reality anyways?" was not, in fact, Reality as such but rather social structures and mediums of perception that we created and which are so thoroughly ingrained into our psyches that they can be difficult to discern (as we demonstrated in class) as separate from Reality. The reason I think this was what we were really talking about has to do with the examples of how unpleasant Reality is that were presented; namely, having to wake up at godless hours of the morning to go to class/work and the absurdity of Scantron tests being used to judge learning. Merely writing out these examples should make the reason these cases are the result of human systems rather than an essential feature of Reality so obvious that I will not explain them further, but I want to make the stronger claim that these cases are relevantly similar to the ones we tend to think of when we despair about the nature of Reality. The first case, for example, is part of a larger concern over the apparent necessity to waste a significant portion of our lives toiling away in obscurity at some mindless and unpleasant task simply to earn enough money to have shelter, food, water, and clothing. Other concerns people tend to have involve the seeming pointlessness of it all; the fact that most of us never seem to get a "higher calling" in life or manifest some ideallic "full potential" or that we are tiny insignificant specks in a cold, dead, and indifferent Universe.

First, let's look at Reality, I mean really look at it. Go hike up Sehome Hill until you find a spot where you can't see a road, other people, or buildings. What do you see? Here are some things I don't find up there: straight lines or boxes of any kind, electricity, artificial lighting, flat, unobstructed planes to stand or walk on, words or symbols of any kind. These are all artificial things that we have imposed upon the world. They are so ubiquitous in our everyday lives that one must travel a significant distance to not encounter them, and even then it is difficult to truly escape their influence. For instance, even when you are in a silent place such as this, how often do you really hear nothing? If you are like me you will have a million thoughts, conversations, songs, and other noises being thought and remembered in your head. And while you are on this hike, how many of the trees, plants, groundcover, and animals did you really look at? When you looked at them, did you really see them, or did you merely think the words "tree," "rock," "bird"? Did you focus on how each of them were different, uniquely shaped and positioned, or did you only notice these differences when they varied significantly from the idea of the tree, plant, or animal you have? My point is that we are rarely capable of actually perceiving what is real (even relative to our inherently limited and flawed senses) anymore; instead we almost exclusively look at these things through some constructed medium of perception, some artificial mode of presentation or other.

Regarding the second concern, I will not try to deny the fact that the Universe is ultimately indifferent to us. Certainly, one will notice that up there on Sehome Hill or anywhere in which the constructs of human society are absent. However, I find this not so much a cause to despair, but a rather liberating realization. The source of the despair seems to come from the realization that there is no God, the Universe is not justified, and things like Justice, Love, and Goodness are nothing more than lies we tell ourselves to pretend that this isn't the case. In part this is true, the question though is what do we do about it? I think that when we ask whether or not there is any Justice in the world, we are often asking an ontological question. We are asking whether or not there is some abstract entity, Justice, that exists and has certain properties; "exists" here is used in the way we might describe Plato's Forms as existing. Justice is being thought of as a property, perhaps instantiated over certain acts or dispositions. Certain vaguely defined ethical theories that these people informally accept hinge on the existence of this property; leading them to declare, for example, that without these moral truths everything is permissible. But let us look instead at the man who believes these lies. Does he not nevertheless act justly? Given political power, would he not establish courts and laws of adequate reparation and attempt to meet out some form of Justice? Does it matter, then? Does it even mean anything at all to say that there is no such thing as Justice in this case? I think not. I think that the man in this case has created Justice of a sort. Sure it is not the infallible, divine property of the sort we originally had in mind, but on the other hand we are the ones who are entirely responsible for it and I find that much more preferrable. This is the power of the lies we tell ourselves and our children, the power to make something that is false become true. What's so great about Reality? That it is malleable; That we can change it and choose what kind of world we live in and this power of ours is not merely an illusion because defining it as such does not, in fact, mean anything at all.

And finally, because I simply cannot allow an opportunity to post a relevant Terry Pratchett quote go by (from Hogfather):

"All right," said Susan, "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need ... fantasies to make life bearable."
No. Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meet the rising ape.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers?"
Yes. As practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
Yes. Justice. Duty. Mercy. That sort of thing.
"They're not the same at all!"
Really? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act, like there was some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged:
"Yes. But people have got to believe that or what's the point?"
My point exactly.

What Is "the Small" Anyways?

One of the best ways to begin an inquiry into any subject is to start by formulating questions. The questions our class seems to be asking is "What is the trope of the small?" and, "What does it mean and why does it matter (why is the trope of the small worth studying at all)?" For each of these questions, of course, we can ask further questions and refine our inquiry. I feel it is necessary to ask these questions and find some preliminary responses to them, if for no other reason than to bring the texts we read and media we watch to these questions and see how they address and complicate them.

Starting with the first question, what is the trope of the small? First, we need to have some understanding of what the small is. Small is a relation. When we say something is small, we are comparing it to at least one other thing. To us, small things include bacteria, viruses, cells, atoms, subatomic particles; anything we cannot see or cannot be seen easily. We are small, however, to trees, mountains, continents, planets, stars, galaxies, etc. Each of these examples may represent their own scales that are each progressively larger than our own all the way up to the Universe, which is so big that it is a place to be big in!

Small is also a property. How, then, is it instantiated? That is to say, in what ways can things be small? There are spatially small things, temporally small things, things that possess or exert little energy or force, and simple things (that is, possessing very few or no proper parts). There are also things that are small in terms of the amount of information they contain: simple images, sentences, and thoughts for example. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it is interesting to note that when we use the word "small," we tend to refer almost exclusively to those things that are spatially small.

What are small things able to do? They operate on a different scale from other (non-small) things. One feature of operating on a smaller scale is that these things can affect things operating on larger scales, often in ways that the things on these larger scales cannot; the alchemical task of turning lead into gold is extremely difficult on a chemical level, but if we can manipulate the lead at an atomic level, say with nanobots, it becomes just as easy to make gold or diamonds or anything else from lead (which is, of course, the premise behind Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age). They can also conglomerate to form larger things that operate on larger scales; for example, many millions of tiny cells conglomerate to produce organisms like human beings. In some cases small things can also produce emergent behavior when they conglomerate; if you are a Physicalist, then you may accept the example that the human mind emerges from extremely complex interactions between neurons and the other small things that make up your brain. A less controversial example would be Langton's Ant, which follows a very simple set of instructions but produces very complex and surprising patterns (it follows a very simple pattern for the first 2-300 steps, followed by 10,000 steps of chaos, followed by the emergence of a 104 step "highway" that continues forever).

But what does the trope of the small mean? And why does it matter? Naturally, as a trope it does not have a single meaning. Nor does it seem to have a single type of meaning. Any answer to this question of the form "The trope of the small means _____." is neither completely correct nor interesting. There is also no single context through which to interpret the small: What does the small mean for me? The author? "Society today"? (Of course, the last one is a completely fictitious entity used by students who want to make sweeping generalizations instead of cite sources, so we will have to say exactly which parts of society and at what time, expanding the list further) However, it is always good to note preliminary observations, if only to correct for selection bias. Some of my preconceived notions on the matter:

Small things affect big things in important ways. There is a good reason why so much research goes in to miniaturizing machines and looking at and learning to manipulate things on the cellular or atomic level. They enable us to do so much more with what we have. If we can pick out individual stem cells and influence them to grow in a certain way, we can replace essential organs and nervous tissue. If we can make nanobots or at least genetically program bacteria or viruses to identify and attack certain kinds of cells, we can cure cancer or turn lead into gold. And of course, there is the power and horrors that come with nuclear power. This is the alchemy that for so long chemical and macroscopic science denied us or rendered infeasible. And of course, with our modern Promethean ambitions come new Frankensteinian horrors. The ethical considerations of this technology are new for our generation but, as my earlier choice of words may have suggested, these ethical considerations have, in many respects, been with us since the dawn of mankind and are being retold through the interpretive lens of technology.

We understand the big in terms of the small. Science and many other subjects of human study have almost always been reductivist in their approach. To understand the human body take it apart and study its parts; to understand the atom take it apart and study its parts. Hey look: These quarks make up all atoms, these atoms make up all molecules, these molecules make up all chemical compounds, some of these chemical compounds make up these cells, these cells make up organs, many organs make up an organism, and we are back to the human body. But wait, we can go far beyond ourselves with this knowledge, we can figure out what those big bright things in the sky are and where they came from. As below so above: from our understanding of the tiniest particles we can discover how the largest things work, which leads me to my last point -

In considering the small we are forced to change perspectives and think on scales far smaller or larger than the ones we are used to. This may not seem terribly important on the face of it, but it allows us to overcome our own mental limitations. We are a proud species and not normally aware of how small our minds really are; after all, we spend most of our time operating on a scale that is just right for us. When it comes to learning more about our Universe, however, the human scale is woefully inadequate for both small and large things. The Powers of Ten demonstrates this the best I think: it is not the awesome size of super galaxy clusters at the 10^23rd scale, nor the equally amazing tininess of quarks at the 10^-16th scale, but the fact that several times throughout the movie you will undoubtedly lose your sense of how small or large the man in the park or even the Earth itself in relation to the things you see at these different scales. The horrible truth is that these tiniest of particles, which are a speck of a speck of the tiniest of specks to us, make up everything in the Universe; of which we are also a speck of a speck of the tiniest of specks. The scale of the Universe is at least 10^-16 to 10^23 meters, and probably far, far wider than that. We cannot think in a scale that large. We cannot even think in most scales many orders of magnitude smaller than that scale. What we can do is think in our scale and apply the range of that scale to whatever we plan to study. We consider the subatomic scale by itself, or the astronomic scale by itself, and then we compile these discoveries. Our understanding of the world around us can be thought of as many of tiny human-understanding-sized cross-sections on the grand scale of the Universe. Although my examples have been scientific ones, this applies just as well to literature. Literature is composed of many books, journals and other writing, these books are composed of chapters, these chapters are composed of paragraphs, these paragraphs are composed of sentences, these sentences are composed of words and finally, these words are composed of symbols (which can be pictograms that represent even more basic concepts, but are more commonly second-level abstractions that no longer refer to any particular object). Even for comparatively simple writing (this post for instance) we are forced by the limits of our tiny little minds to break the writing up into many bite-sized thoughts in the form of sentences or even focus on individual words.

Rather than viewing this pessimistically as a way to demonstrate to ourselves just how stupid and unaware we are, I prefer to think that by recognizing our limitations, our "smallness," and devising ways to circumvent these limitations (such as developing scientific notation to deal with extremely large numbers, which is essentially reducing a large number to many smaller ones), we are transcending these biological limitations and, like Langton's Ant, becoming something more than the sum of our parts.

Welcome to Orbis Tertius!

This is my blog for Tony Prichard's English 238 Nanotexts class. More posts will be forthcoming when class begins. For now, here is an interesting point/counterpoint (produced by the same people, surprisingly) on our technologically mediated culture that I have been thinking about today:





You can find Michael Wesch's other digital ethnography videos at the Interzone link in the left column or here.