dynamic diagram of mental spaces

As "promised," now that the semester has ended I am resuming my presence here on synthetic stupidspam.

I plan to present some of the things I've been doing this semester in reverse order so that it will be in the right order afters. I'm a bit out of practice here, and my time is still mechakucha-limited, so keep the heat up huh? Wanna reach rant speed 2-D sweet. I'm considering more vlogging, but I will need support. Who's gonna do it with me? Bros? Peeps?

As for today's content, I am presenting a video I made for my cognitive linguistics course with Eve Sweetser - it's a diagram of mental spaces, which are a feature of the new grammar being developed here at Berkeley. I will explain more if anyone says "hey," but it's hard to condense. In any case, there is an explanation at the end of this vid. For more, try starting with "The Metaphors We Live By" by the big guy here, George Lackoff.

One major problem is that you can't read the text on this video cause of YouTube is Les Suquesvilles.

N E way, play at your own risk;


link to youtube page

This is officially the hump here. Content to follow will be related more to my art practice, and will be mas radical.

Re!

-f



(click image to enlarge for full-quality)

Final review - tomorrow

after which I will stop not existing.

ALIVE!

I was actually lost in time.

Thank you for your demanding support!

School will be ending in a bit and then I'll start bloggin again.

Now I am not sharing art, though I have some to share. This image is only a screen-capture of the linguistics project I've been working on.

I'll be posting that on YouTube sometime.

-f

From a great...

An interesting article from the great Oliver Sacks:

nytimes article

You may have to register to read...

vocoder

The vocoding itself was not hard. The hard part is trying to make the art GOOD. Sometimes one forgets about that...

PS-

KOYAANISQATSI!!!!

sudden jump

Sorry sports fans, I got really busy. I've got a show at the end of February and a cult classic session before that, so frequency here may decline.

Or, as the law of inverted priority structures (aka procrastination) stipulates, I may write here INSTEAD of doing any work. Oh well.

I've been working with a vocoder. No satisfactory results yet.

Teledating project

An artist friend of mine is doing a project that I am very interested in. The concept is very simple; to arrange a dinner on St. Valentine's Day where romantic partners will be eating in separate locations, but connected via video conferencing. The following video is a rough demo of what the event will be. When I was watching the video I noticed some very interesting things about how the partners were pretending to be in the same space. My rational mind instantly started to object, but I was still able to believe in the fiction. There is always a lot of suspension of disbelief when chatting on-line, and it is more noticeable when you can see the other person, but the setting of the dinner table seems to focus this project explicitly on the subject of manners. What are virtual manners? To what extent is social reality an agreed-upon fantasy that makes us blind to unsavory aspects of physical reality? To what extent does being polite alienate us from our animal nature, from our sexuality, from our presence in the moment, in the real world?

Your tax dollars at work.

You know the word "Qwerty," right? It's really fun to spell!

Well, Qwerty, of course, is an abbreviation of the phrase "Qwertyuiop Asdfghjkl Zxcvbnm." This phrase gets 1,690 google hits as opposed to the much less refined "Qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm" which get 30,100 hits.

Well, I was hanging out in an office and I couldn't escape. I learned to pronounce the phrase and then I chanted it several hundred times and I think I've memorized it.

Synesthetic Superscam is here for YOU!

La Chinoise - Goddard

TODAY'S REVOLUTIONARY CLASS AS A WAVE.

TODAY'S REVOLUTIONARY ACTION AS PLAY.

("We must confront vague ideas with clear images.")

Jean Luc Goddard's 1967 "La Chinoise" is about a group of french communist students who are living in an abandoned apartment, the living room of which they have converted into a kind of temple to Mao, the revolutionary ideal, and violence. The film's narrative is less important than its style; collaged fragments of bold, uncompromising text, Chinese propaganda posters, Andy Worhol influenced pop images of famous figures, primary colors filling monolithically flat planes, and violent modern commodities (this style resembles Guy Debord and the situationists which later influenced Malcom McLaren and the Sex Pistols). (Great list of slogans from May 1968 from wikipedia.)

The content of the following may be a little hard to follow, though take heart; I think it would be for anyone who is not a scholar of Post-Leninist European Communism, Maoism, or the French student uprising of May 1968. However, take a look at this to understand the film's visual style;

Hello? Transformer gun/radio anyone?

The film takes an ambiguous critical look at the students; they are at once portrayed as very serious communists who are intellectually curious, have mastered the literature, are attempting to practice their theory, and are willing to make sacrifices for their cause. But on the other hand they are not workers, they are young students who talk about their summer job of picking peaches as though it were just a lark. They are portrayed as spoiled, overly interested in fashion and appearances, careless with the lives of themselves and others, and ideologically both uncompromisingly rigid and overly willing to avoid nuance in favor of a romanticised simplicity.

As the summer passes, the students' cell fractures and dissolves over ideological issues. In fact, what initially divides them is that one of their own criticises their ideology when he sees it becoming too romantic and unrealistic, too dreamy and extreme. This character is thrown out, his former comrades chanting "revisionist" and booing him inhumanly, as though he were a public speaker (although they are all inside a nice private living room), refusing to engage him in dialogue. As the romantic engagement with the idealised perfection of the revolutionary spirit increases, one of the characters, in pitiful emulation of the tragic tortured artist myth, commits suicide after painting expressionistic rainbows all over the walls of the living room. Does the artistic frame of mind somehow corrode revolutionary political ideology? And if so, is this a bad thing?

In the end, the group breaks up when the owners of the apartment return and school starts up again. In a key dialogue a professor convinces the leading woman not to throw a bomb in a class to close the university (it's a singularly unamerican scene; it takes place on a train and the student loudly declares that she is a terrorist, but without any of those helpful "if you see something, say something" signs around nobody seems to notice). However, this is not before she shoots two people, a Russian communist bigwig (seen as a corrupt traitor to the true spirit of communism) and an innocent bystander. There is a bit of ambiguity here; the violence and its effects are not shown, and the students seem to have avoided any consequences for their actions. However, despite the fact that the students were just playing around their summer of ideological extremism has had very real effects.

This is where I draw a tenuous connection:

Certainly all this violent revolutionary fervor and dedication to intellectual exploration of communist theory is the furthest thing from the minds of young americans in my generation. There is no class consciousness among american workers and certainly no connection between students and workers. Throughout history young people have invariably been called egocentric and hedonistic, but this is a generation that, while interested in politics, has clearly chosen not to make any personal sacrifices to protest the war, human rights abuses, political authoritarianism of the current administration, the ever deepening alienation of modern life, or the destruction of the environment.

I was once speaking with an old-school die-hard communist who insisted that there was no such thing as class in america. Her point was that equality of opportunity and social mobility made it possible for the individual to transcend class. My argument was that the existence of a social class is not contingent upon the members remaining in that class, as a wave consists of a pattern of energy with which individual molecules are associated only for a short time.

The "student class" was not important to Marx in his day, but is clearly an example of a class that is temporary for its members, yet still a constant sociopolitical force. Not that it is much of a force these days. So my question is, is there any potential for the current student class to be a force for social change, revolutionary or otherwise?

My answer has a lot to do with the behavior seen in "La Chinoise." The students are only playing, but their actions have real effects. In some ways, the insularity of the group brings to mind the oft-repeated observation that the internet has a propensity to create "echo-chamber" communities; forums where like-minded people compete to agree with each other. Indeed, the Maoist students' love of pop music and fashionable clothing, urge to romanticise their own lives, and state of moneyed unemployment all resemble the lifestyle that is propagated by my generation's primary environment; the internet, particularly online social networks. Most importantly to the internet analogy, the student commits a violent act in anonymity and escapes all consequences. But there is a positive side to all this, the current generation, while it is having huge trouble addressing current sociopolitical problems in art, music, and other creative disciplines, clearly values creativity and self-expression. The fact that everyone has a band up on myspace (even if it is the completely fake band of their made-up electronic doppelganger as represented by a busty pink-eyed avatar) raises a question we have heard before; does the artistic frame of mind somehow corrode revolutionary political ideology?

We can usefully address this question by talking about escapism in art, but there is a deeper question at stake here. Can a revolutionary class be motivated by the desire to play and express their individuality creatively?

My answer is yes, and I base this on two ideas you may have seen before on this blog. The first is based on the wonderfully (and perhaps dangerously) freethinking Luis von Ahn's revolutionary idea of using people's urge to play during their free time to accomplish useful tasks. He created games that took annoying tasks like labelling images and deciphering garbled text in scanned books, and turned them into fun games or biproducts of routine tasks (Google Image Labeler and reCAPTCHA). These are only humble beginnings, but they point to a new paradigm where compassionate designers use computer networks to make it possible to take advantage of people's natural propensity to to enjoy solving problems. This will be a democracy of governance by the interested, but also by the very bored. As evidence that I am not completely alone in this opinion I would like to cite the untitled essay by Kevin Kelly, published by the annual "World Question Center" which claims that new forms of democracy are appearing on the horizon, ones which will resemble wikipedia and myspace more than anything (the essay is worth reading!). In this new form of government "both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites" and which "has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable." I submit that these forms of government will languish as ideas unless they are supported by a revolutionary class, and that the only way that a majority of americans could ever function as a revolutionary class is if we expand the definition to include a steady yet ever-shifting wave of playactors who are attracted to justice because it is interesting... and FUN.

The final question, and it is a tough one, is; is the type of senseless, anonymous, and unpunished violence seen in the movie a narrative trick of Goddard's, or is it endemic to this type of play-based, temporary revolutionary class? Is there a systemic flaw in this way of effecting social change? I don't dream of utopia, but I wonder; does the potential for positive change outweigh the dangers? How can the system be created by a revolutionary class, rather than by the ruling class bent on exploiting our labor, our humanity, and the planet we live on? Finally, we return to the agonizing question of when, if ever, is a violent act justifiable?

I leave you with a scene from the film that shows these serious revolutionaries at their silliest:

BTW - I haven't checked to see if this film is available at all, but I guess I should end this review by stating that I did, in fact, like this film...

Network recentering

H- is making an effort to revive the dialogue on his multi-party creative commons and crit site The Extended Pizza Network. A lot of people have posted recently and if the dialogue gets going the way it did earlier, well, that would be awesome.

I posted something there so that I could get some feedback about some text I've been working on for my recent project.

I really should be working today, but I'm NOT! Baaaad!

There is a link to the video game maps page on the EPN. If I were going to try to learn to paint these are the colors that I would like to paint with:

Click to enlarge.

Thats book!

I'm a bit of a texting monster and the automatic word organizer predictive texts thing is pretty useful, but it's like a monster word confuser, huh? I tend to keep the rovocab down to like basic english levels, so words like "yr" and "huh" figure big. I'm not sure if all the companies use the same software (probably not) but I have verizon666 and it promotes serious doublethink. Some basic words like if/he, home/good or in/go always trip me up. But one that really strikes me is book/cool. It is so preposterous that they assume Americans want to talk about books more than they say "cool." I mean, right? But, sometimes I find myself actually thinking "thats book!" (If indeed one can think a phrase that is missing an apostrophe - but that's another post...) So, sitting just now, I realized that enables a 21st c. 1984 conformity-togetherness mass-mind techno cyber oh wow man far fucking out man experience (21-84 C.T.M.M.T.C.O.W.M.F.F..O.M.E). So like, if me and about a million billion other people have the same stupid program driving us nuts, then someone else must have the compulsion to say "thats book" as an alternative way to express approval, so...

"Oh fugnuts. I wanted to be on the mug. *goes and sulks in corner* Glad he liked it though! Thats book!" With pix;

"yup thats book bbq"

"thats book, u looking forward to christmas? xXx"

"Chololate pocket on your phone was ringtone channel to ringtone funny thats book. 903sh, but a great fun! Often these heat sensitive i..."

"Wrap up my head zoloft imitrex but thats book. Copy of what hcp this opk. Extreme cap liquid weight loss pills urimax is used to terazosin gelonida..." (great - I'm glad I have synchronicity with complete incoherency.)

This is the most explicit; "Someone I met the other day said that the 'kids' (he must've thought we were much older than we are) were now using the word 'book' instead of 'cool' because that's what comes up first on predictive texts..."

And people have even appropriated and commodified the idea; "Thats book, that's totally book...." (From the myspace of a library in New South Wales.)

I only found one example where the apostrophe was used (although it used quite a few predictive text oops in a row); "Yeah I could, but he you foot want to that's book too." (Kind of trying too hard. I guess usually the kind of person who appreciates nonsense phraseology is not an i dotter or t crosser...).

This was a bit hard, but I found three people (ok; one genuine person, one glam-shot, and one avatar) who have had the same super-obscure thought that I had. Again, it's the conformity that makes this possible. Oppression is a great force in drawing people together! Of course probably some of these were just typos. 90% or so of fools were just failing to type "that book" correctly, lots of "that's book value," waaaaaaaay to much crap about the bible, and a surprising amount of "that's book smarts" (pretty much the worst thing you can say about someone these days, shudder...)

So. Aren't you glad that I'm conducting this research for you? If I weren't doing it for free you'd probably have to be paying someone to do it for you, huh?

BTW - What the hell is Neil Young talking about in that song "After the Goldrush?" (Free download here.) It's about an alien invasion right? Planetary defense and evacuation? Back me up here cause google images isn't. I mean, usually alien pix are the easiest thing to find...

So, it's hard going to sleep. I feel like I need to write to you, but what the hell?

OK. Space out;

Mindful Universe

Henry P. Stapp, a quantum physicist here at Berkeley, published the book "Mindful Universe; quantum mechanics and the participating observer" last summer, but it wasn't until yesterday that it appeared in the Berkeley library, where I just snapped it up.

I have been on a pretty serious popular science reading kick for the past two years, reading (with various middling degrees of comprehension) any book I can find on cognitive science, especially those that focus on consciousness. This may have either originated from or inspired various art projects that deal with these ideas (it's a chicken/egg thing...). Here's a partial list for the bibliotechheads in perhaps the order I was reading them;
"The Mind's Eye" by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett - I read my father's version of this a long time ago.
"The Meme Machine" by Susan Blackmore - This book is written is speculative in the most inspiring way.
"How the Mind Works" (and others) by Steven Pinker - This is the most accessible and engaging read and is very clear.
"Consciousness Explained" by Daniel C. Dennett - This is the book unfairly referred to as "Consciousness Explained Away," but it is a very clear read.
"The Physics of Consciousness" by Evan Harris Walker - This book is also a bit speculative and has a stylistic twist that is either inspiring or distracting, but it is a good read.

I've read a few more, and if you look this topic up you will see that there are hundreds of books on this topic and they often contradict each other. This is one thing that attracts me to this topic - nobody is quite sure what the answers to these questions are, or indeed what the right questions are. I am neither a physicist or a cognitive scientist so I can't tell you which are more accurate, although I can recommend which ones are more compelling (compelling doesn't mean true, of course). That said, I think that, as a human who has a consciousness myself, I have a decent chance of sorting these ideas out for myself. As I have claimed before, I think that what we call creative thinking or, in my specific case, "art practice" is a way of thinking that is different than either mathematics, logic, rational argument, etc.  This mode of thinking uses a different spectrum of mental tools including creation, interaction with the chaotic real world, action as experience, performance, play, re-mixing, introspection, social dynamics, analogy, intuition, synchronicity, visual thinking, non-linear thinking, various highly-developed (?) schools of critical thought, etc. Thoughts are a result of the context in which they arise and I would claim that certain thoughts are ineffable. Therefore creative thought has something to contribute to cutting edge areas of investigation that is not available through other modes of thought. But at an even baser level, reading some of these books I was surprised by how often the language was stunted and graceless. This isn't just a nit-picky criticism; there is a loss of communication that seems to be a result of the pressure exerted from the use of insular logic. Moreover, the idea that truth is beauty is not just an artistic conceit; it is a fundamental force driving scientists' thoughts. They are trying to reduce the chaotic world into ever-simpler laws that enable us to understand the world and predict its workings. Indeed, a huge drive in 20th c. physics was to develop a grand unifying theory of everything.

I am not a primarily visual thinker (in the sense that some people report having an internal dialogue that is conducted in pictures alone rather than words) but images are important to my understanding of a concept. The authors of many of these books are engaged in a fascinating struggle to create visual analogies for the new and difficult concept they are trying to explain. Many of these concepts go beyond the common sense that evolution provided to our minds. Quantum physics is not a speculative theory, but many of its concepts are beyond common sense. It requires the use of the "imaginary numbers" that you may have studied at school (I clearly remember my math teacher advising me not to try to understand them, not listening, and failing the test).  The first prototypes of quantum computers have already been built; they operate much faster than usual computers based on "classical physics" (i.e. old-fashion Newtonian physics) because they perform their calculation simultaneously in several different alternative universes that are the result of quantum uncertainty in the computer's heart (somewhat similar to the multiple universes in sci-fi movies like "Back to the Future 2" "Groundhog's Day" and "The Lathe of Heaven"). This is not a metaphor or esoteric mystical speculation; it produces measurable results.

So, the core of what interesting about theories of quantum consciousness is that it essentially requires a mode of thought that is related to creative thinking and to mysticism in that it isn't "common sense." Perhaps quantum theory may appear to be similar to a mystery cult; at its heart there is something that is outside our understanding. However, what is at its heart is not some bullshit about an all-powerful god, or the great disappointment that the universe is purely robotic. No. What it says is that our conscious observation is what creates that universe, that consciousness is inextricably linked to the basic physical laws of the universe. In the 20th c. physicists and cognitive scientists ignored this fact and tried to explain our minds in terms of classic physics, which was inspired by (and enabled) the fact that the 20th c. was a revoltingly antihumanistic time. The fact that our top thinkers continually deceived us (and our governments) into believing that the whole universe was nothing but a huge pool-table with hard balls bouncing off each other in a complicated but essentially predetermined and heartless manner. In the 21st c. the acceptance and exploration of the implications of the (century-old but still misunderstood) theory of quantum dynamics has the potential to inspire a new understanding of our intrinsic self-worth; that our mind is an essential part of the universe, that we actually exist. In the end we have to admit that most of us don't think in a way that conforms to "common sense" and that in fact "common sense" is a dead-end mode of thought. If we can be smart enough in this new way the 21st c. will be a humanistic era, a mystical time in which creative and analogical thinking play a central role.

I haven't finished "Mindful Universe" but I will say a few quick things. One is that it is a tough read; I think reading a book on quantum physics beforehand would be wise. Two is that the sentences are problematic. Three is that there are not enough illustrations (yet...). Four is that it offers the clearest explanation of quantum mechanics* that I have encountered and that the ideas advanced about the nature of consciousness are further along the path to truth than any other book I've read and will probably be a central part of humanity's self-conception by the end of the century.
(*Note that this means the concepts themselves, the prose is sometimes problematic.)

For the interested, here is Henry P. Stapp's homepage. It's just a list of links to various texts.

dream song

Earlier I was talking about how hard it is to write down the songs from my dreams, although I should have stated that I was frustrated only because earlier I had been so successful at doing this; the songs in Perceival and the dozens of other song-sketches I have on the floppy disks (!) that go in my PSR 550 are mostly dream-based. I say "mostly" because the process of reconstructing a song from a dream is similar to the process of writing a dream diary; a lot of the work is in reconstructing the sequence and logical connection between strange and memorable images. This is a clear imposition of the logical mind. Similarly, the songs are often very specific in certain parts; the timbre is such a big element - and timbre is the hardest thing to sketch out with the keyboard. Usually there is a choice between capturing the melody and the timbre, as there is not enought time (or perhaps concentration-power?) to get both down before the dream fades.

A lot of those tracks are still up on J- d-'s site. These represent tracks that are more finished, the other ones are tolerable to only me.

Writing about this made me remember something that I had forgotten I made. It is always nice to rediscover something. The following video was made from a song that came from a dream I had in Osaka. I remember quite clearly how strange the dream was. I can't write about it here, but the title of the song "tripping in a cardboard box" is a good enough entry point. I had this dream during a period where I was very disoriented, having trouble distinguishing dreams and reality. I guess I have been flirting with this state over the past couple of weeks. A lot of thoughts here, all out of focus, luckily for you, my long-suffering reader. Anyway, I had a lot of fun walking around in the woods in the Watershed and Rosedale Park near Pennington, collecting leaves and shooting footage for this film...


Just erased a big chunk of nonsense I wrote about my approach to melody. It is only rarely that I get embarrassed about being so selfish on these pages.

In my dream last night I was travelling south down route 31 to Pennington in a van with my pops and brothers (sorry moms, but you wouldn't have liked it anyway). It was the future, but everyone was a lot younger than they are now. Route 31 was almost entirely encased in huge angular tv screens that formed a kind of technicolor transport tube, sometimes I could see the fields that surround route 31, still being cultivated (I could see the soil plowed into rows in the cold autumn moonlight) but behind them, beyond the wood's edge, were huge star factories, warm yellow-orange lights arranged in grids in 3-D perspective drift as we glided by, flourescent white steam uprushing in the crystal clear air, reaching waaaaay up into the huge open sky). The screens flashed and formed interference strobe patterns as we rushed through them, dark rotten-pink, spring green, and bright yellow-white. They weren't advertising anything but their own presence, all working in sync, competing only with the moon. I was in the back seat with C-, who was being very very hyper and kept calling everything super-something. Like we're super-driving in a super-van etc. Pops and H- were being really loud and not paying attention to the road at all because they were bopping and singing along to a band called super-devo (which sounded suspiciously like my dad and brothers had recorded some devo covers, except Prince was playing the keyboards and they would only play one line from a song over and over). The song that I remember isn't really a devo song at all, though. I got it on a floppy disk in real life though!

Yay!

Steven Pinker article and ethics in art

I was just reading Steven Pinker's article on morality in the New York Times magazine (I'd give you a link, but it's easy to find). The article has an understated greatness to it; Pinker's thought isn't revolutionary, it is very careful, conscientious and clear. It is written by a person who is highly rational, but not reductionist. In the article he reviews ideas about how evolution has driven us to be be composed the way we are morally, socially, and psychologically without simplifying things. Without asking us to step outside ourselves, he is able to give us some distance from which we can reassess the problem. This is what makes Pinker a humanitarian. He then applies these ideas to some of the moral problems we have created for ourselves, the impasses between different groups, including, pointedly, Christians and Muslims, and liberals and conservatives.

Reading this article, I was thinking about paths towards sociopolitical change; the revolutionary path vs the progressive path. I was thinking about this in relationship to issues in art. What role does ethics have in the creation, viewing, and criticism of art? How does Pinker's explanation of morality relate to the ethical questions we ask ourselves? (You may have to have read the article to understand what I am going to discuss here) I have noticed that artists as a group seem to have a moral sense that is skewed towards what Pinker labels a liberal moral bias in favor of justice and against pain. In fact, there is a strange moment where Pinker used performance art as an example where I felt as though he had made a decision to preclude artists as a group from his group of ideal readers (In the example given he tried to induce a sense of disgust by talking about performance art that sounded a lot like something by Coum Transmissions, precursor to Throbbing Gristle - something I would love to have seen). I am somewhat upset by this - I think that artists are more than just superliberals, but I need time to synthesize these two systems. How do you compare a general life-or-death social morality to the ethics of aesthetics? Pinker mentions the moral panic that ensued over medical advancements like blood transfusions, in vitro fertilization, and cloning, but what about the moral panic over groundbreaking art, theater and music? Both of these things continue today, but it raises questions about the difference between the ways modern and postmodern art relates to the generally-accepted morality; questions of revolutionary vs progressive change.

Readers of Supersilly Sillystraw will not be surprized that I am not drawing firm conclusions about this matter. An exposition on the various ethical questions within aesthetics would result in an entry that would be rather long, even by the low standards of brevity enforced here. But I would like to conclude by pointing out that Pinker's final quote was highly endearing to me, both because it was from Chekov, and because it can be read in a way that allows for the possibility that art can still be as important to our understanding of ourselves as science;

“Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

This is a wonderful succinct gem which elucidates complicated thoughts I have about the moral dimensions of my own work. Art can be moral because there is an ethics in perception; a new way of seeing will open our eyes to new solutions to our problems and enrich our experience as humans.

machine translation divination

For those of you who have been longtime subscribers, you may remember that a while ago, when Sloppyslurper Slurpysip was located in a different place, I spent a lot of time uploading all these experiments in machine translation (i.e. Google translation, Babelfish, etc.). (Looking back at them now, they are so beautiful: here's one about the mass mind project). Specifically, I was using machine translation not for its stated purpose of automated computer translation, but as a way of processing language, destroying language. I know that there have been poets who have looked at this process, but there are a lot of challenges that I think have yet to be addressed, perhaps because the right approach has not yet been found. I'd like to explain why this fascinates me.

I am interested in this process not as a way of creating language that is beautiful to the ear of the poet, but as a way of crossing a mechanically rational logic with a natural evolutionary logic to divine a new kind of knowledge that could never have been known before we had these tools and these methods. I think the word "divine" is correct, as by crossing the electromechanical and biological minds we are creating a synthetic third kind of mind of whose existence we are barely becoming aware of. This perhaps has the potential to become a transcendent gnostic process.

Recently programmers and linguists have put their heads together in a concerted effort to create mathematical formulae and algorithms that attempt to describe language in numbers to feed into our number-crunching machines. This astounding collaboration is one of the peaks of our present technological abilities, and one can only laugh at the fact that the main impression given by machine translated text is one of gross limitation, failure and absurdity. But this is perhaps because we are judging the text by human standards. Our cognitive demands for grammatical agreement and word order is not met, so we judge the text to be nonsense. But in this we are being unfair. We should judge the texts by the computer's standards, in which case we would see that to the perfectly functioning digital mind these texts are proof of a formula correctly completed, electrons shooting from power to ground. All the words are beautiful.

To the machines it must be our strange, organic, rule-defying and highly-redundant language that is dissatisfying. The fact that there are many different trees of language, each with its own branches of diverging dialects must be quite an ugly phenomenon to the chip-eye. Of course we know this to be untrue, that language is one of humankind's crowning achievements that has its own intrinsic worth and beauty, its own aesthetic system by which it is judged, but moreover it has its own secretly encoded knowledge which is implied in its etymology, its history, the knowledge that has been injected into the language through thousands of generations of humans who lived and died dealing with the challenges of communicating, warning each other about danger, gossiping about sex, insulting each other, forgetting words, misinterpreting subtleties, making up new words, rhyming, playing word games, speaking in tongues, teaching strict rules of grammar, etc.

If we cross these two systems of knowledge and standards of beauty two things will happen. First, there will be a decoding of knowledge that is hidden from us if we look at the text with either our human eyes or the chip-eye. Second, there will be a synthesis of the two systems of language aesthetics to create a new way of assessing the worth of the text, the eye of a greater judge. I can't explain precisely what I mean by "crossing." An analogy might be how a mathematical equation can be solved by performing the same operation on both sides of the equal sign. Mistakes are perfectly OK as long as it's balanced over the equal sign. In fact there aren't really any mistakes; some operations bring us closer to the solution, and some draw us away. In the same way, if two people are talking and they both make the same mistakes with their grammar they will not perceive any divergence from order. In fact, if they respect their mistakes a new language begins its life. This is true not only with grammar, but with agreed-upon facts. I can't tell if these analogies are useful, but I hope they point in the right direction.

There are two questions about this process. We are currently making inroads in the solution of the first, the second is perhaps one of those imponderables that drives theosophists, metaphysicians, and philosophers of science mad (and that provide them with their jobs...). The first question is; what does it really mean to "cross two systems of knowledge"? Of course we can talk about crossing two systems of knowledge from different cultures (i.e. French impressionists being influenced by Japanese ukiyo e prints), but this is surely the philosophically simplest way of approaching this problem. Consider what it means to synthetically and simultaneously understand both how the cat understands the mouse and the mouse understands the cat... Not to have both understandings, or reduce to commonalities, or to find compromises, but to naturally have both systems of knowledge. Naturally, not forced. I think this is where machine translation becomes interesting; our language is presented naturally to the machine. Then the machine performs its operations on its data and speaks back to us in its language. We then hear it and perform our operations on it with the language portions of our brain. Both minds are acting completely naturally, free and easy. Nothing is forced.

The second, imponderable question is whether it is possible for us to understand these texts. To appreciate them for their worth. If any mind can understand the workings of a mind different from it. Whether the ant can understand why it carries its load, whether humans can communicate with the mass mind. And this leads to a second question; if we can't understand the aesthetics of the higher order, how will we know when we have created something beautiful? If we don't understand the knowledge of the higher order, how will we know when we have said something true?

Regarding divination I would like to say something; while I think this process is an (admittedly feebly primitive) way of dealing with higher states of consciousness, I don't think that there is anything mystical about this. At least it should only be as mystical as the contemplation of the unfathomable mystery that is our own consciousness, our own understanding of beauty and knowledge. I would like to smooth the sand so that any small steps in the right direction will leave clear footprints.

Now, back to Earth. Please don't feel let down by the gulf between theory and practice.

I have been working on a project, which, as all the most fun projects do, has led me astray. I started off trying to create a text for a mass mind experiment of a sort, and ended up using google translation to destroy a strangely oversimplified script that came to me one night which dealt with transhumanism and gnostic crossing over. In pursuing this I strayed further and further afield. I made an interesting discovery which hinges upon a third level of misunderstanding. I tell secrets on this blog, so I'll let you know what it is, even though a secret revealed can seem like a small thing indeed.

My new method of machine translation divination uses the following algorithm. First, translate the original text from English to Japanese. Then copy that Japanese text and translate it from Chinese to English - this is where the new layer of synthesis enters; the computer translates the Japanese versions of the Chinese ideograms which are separated by almost a thousand years of divergence and cultural difference (additionally the computer assigns numerical values to the non-Chinese Japanese letters and translates some of these as well). Finally, copy this text and translate it from Japanese to English to clean up the remaining Japanese characters. This is the final text.

A word about the original text; considering our imponderable question re understanding the resultant synthetic text on the higher mind's terms, I think that the path to understanding lies through using an intuitive understanding of the original as a key to unlock the final text. Therefore, partially to show you all that I am not altogether serious in my posthuman misanthropy, I have provided below a translation of Mario Savio's famous speech from the free speech cafe here at Berkeley.

One more thing. For reasons that may be apparent if you consider what I said about the imponderable question above, I am not going to analyse the final text in an attempt to understand it for myself, for all of you, or for the benefit of the chip-eye. But I must say that "random" would be an inappropriate adjective to describe this text. It is an essential part of the process that the computer off in Mountain View (or wherever) that calculates this text has no free choice. It will always return the same result. It is this that makes the synthesis possible. It is always an accurate "reading." For example, the Wikipedia article I copied this quote from had a missing apostrophe, fill it in to witness the butterfly effect in action!

English original;

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you cant take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!

Japanese translation;

時間があるときには、マシンの操作になるので、憎むべき、そんなににより心臓の病気では、カントに参加することは、受動的に参加することはできません。さえ、そして君は遺体の上に置いてくださいギアとする車輪は、レバーの上、その上のすべての装置、および停止することに就くべき！

English translation from Chinese (very similar to below...):

Time when the earth and the nation, is, Solomon treesンtheir operation Lo you willでtheir hate ever humiliating, Are you better than Lo Lo their heart is illで, KafンLot Lo participated in Able! Things is by moving Lo! Participate therein and the turn isでAnd letん. Me Him, And Jun is the body of Our Home! But most do!ギAllah! Things and the wheels are, Has the browserバ, And on earth to speak of their devices,おO mankind! Stop Able to do things on the most humiliating!

Cleaned up translation from Japanese:

Time when the earth and the nation, is the Solomon trees on their operation Lo you will in their hate ever humiliating, Are you better than Lo Lo their heart is ill, Kaf-Lot Lo participated in Able! Things is by moving Lo! Participate therein and the turn is, And let me. Me Him, And Jun is the body of Our Home! But most do! formic Allah! Things and the wheels are, Has the browser version, And on earth to speak of their devices, Please O mankind! Stop Able to do things on the most humiliating!

Amen!

PS - I would be happy to see any texts that you generate using this process!