automatic calculation

I guess this question only makes sense in a world where calculating machines have already been invented, but I think the real question now is "what is NOT a calculator?"

Of course automatic calculators existed well before the human mind, whether we are talking about the classical Newtonian calculations performed when the momentum of two particles is exchanged in a collision, or the two more complicated quantum calculations performed during each landscaping of the gazillionfold multiverse. These mindless exchanges seem to be "embedded" calculations with no possibility for error (though perhaps some room for dice-throwing?).

When calculations are simulated in the human mind, this is when the situation becomes more interesting. Because only then is there possibility for error. What is fascinating to me (much to the chagrin of my past kindly/mean math teachers) is not good math, but bad math. The way that numbers get switched around during hadwritten long division, the misinterpretations that result in a graph that is like a impossibly complicated permutation of the original - the way a certain style of errormaking will result in it's own internally-logical illogical system so that running the mistaken answers through the equasion will result in a confirmation of the incorrect answer - surely there is a "way" to these errors, and surely this has a discernable logic that dictates a graph of our inherent mental frailty that can help us know a little bit more about the ultimate unknowable.

It is funny to think of the mind of a child hard struggling to come to terms with multiplication tables while every aspect of the very matter of their being is an effortless embodiment of a math that would instantly fry all the circuits of the world's creepiest supercomputers. Doesn't this speak to our strange effort to simulate the whole world as pointed out by Baudrillard (and probably apparent to everyone at this point?). It starts out with the back and forth click of the abacus, the strange prints of a reed in wet clay and from there grows more and more all encompassing until we find that when we talk to our own rough tools they answer back.

So non-embodied math must take the form of the contents of thought - there must be a query in the ultra-simplified language of math. Simply doing the calculations behind catching a baseball, sweating when it is hot, rolling around with your lover or constructing a sentence or string of curses does not seem to count as the contents of thought. 10 / 2 = ? What abut when the answer to a math question becomes so routine to us that we don't have to think, only answer? But what about when these queries move out into the world? What about the query, "What note does this string play when plucked?" Is the string performing a complicated calculation of its own wave-function? Are our ears part of the math-loop, or when we leave the room with the vibrations still lingering do the walls themselves take over for us? What calculations are being performed when an abacus gets sucked out of the math room by a twister and rattled back and forth a million times before it is torn to shreds and scattered all over the wild plane?

What about two dancers, holding hands and moving through space and time across the square dance floor? Lets assign a vector to their legs, their hips, their fingers, their eyes. Let's graph this as a long arabesque tube of lines, walls, folds, tunnels and sunbursts through a four-dimensional space and look at its repetitions and irregularities, the patterns that come from the music's beat, from the emotional story of the song, from the peacock and tiger egos guiding the bodies, from the unspoken language of love and sex that is communicated through the code combinations of touch.

Let's consider the real reason the machines have us caught in the matrix (from the movie, duh). It's that we are impossibly complicated embodied calculators ourselves. I don't know whether calculators have feelings themselves (although I'm inclined to say yes, being that I'm really into pan-psychism), but I don't think it's anything more than a difference in magnitude when we are electrolaced into the self-propelled worldwide calculation and when we press the buttons on a calculating machine.

With my new project "attention relay" I am trying to take the concept of the matrix and look at it positively. I am trying to create a series of wetware nodes (i.e. humans) and give it some drive or structure in such a way that this series performs the kind of calculations I was explaining before, the kind that reveals the shape of the human mistake, the shape of whatever it is we call "free choice" that floats on top of our simulation of the world around us, sometimes like an invaluable extract, a golden essence, and sometimes as a repulsive putrid scum.

Dig?