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.