Too many colors (was: Bersani - Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature)

[Vellum]

Playing the Devil's Advocate,   in a double sense,  in that
I will argue against the  position, not as a committed
opponent but simply for the sake of argument or to determine
the validity of the cause or position here stated and in the
Roman Catholic sense as one who argues against a proposed
canonization or beatification, only here I will argue
against the new god himself--the Computer. 

It seems that this is the case of a Metaphor gone Mad. 
The message of the metaphor is, in short, that God is an
information machine and the human race is only an
elect/preterite or 0/1 or zeros and ones, or data and that
God in his infinite hardrive has foreordained salvation for
the elect zeros or ones and damnation for the non-elect
zeroes or ones. Isn't God the hacker in Vineland? Anyway,
this is a troubling metaphor. I think it is a diminution of
the other troubling metaphor, the one that says that humans
are machines, computers, or the brain is a computer, so
humans are driven by a "thinking" machine. We here that
Humans are Cyborg. No, we are biological beings, like rats
and cats and elephants and ants and plants and maybe even
rocks, but we are not machines. We are not language machines
or thinking machines. A machine does not defeat man at
chess, men with a computer defeat a great chess champion
playing without the assistance of a computer. A computer
that may be blue, but is never sad, can't dig Jazz, never
believes, can't be deep, can't keep cool.  The computer, as
the Nazi/IBM tale unfolding reveals, is the quintessential,
incomparable, near Perfect machine-tool of the technological
Elite, but only humans with computers can subordinate our
nature, our biology, our emotions, our intellects, our
spirits. I doubt therefore I exist, but a computer doesn't
think, it "thinks" (I knew I would discover a use for that
abuse of language, putting words in quotes), and it only
"thinks better than we can," it doesn't think better than we
can. 

I hate the idea that a computer gets a Virus. The TV never
got the flu. I think this all started when John McCarthy,
the guy who  coined the phrase "Artificial Intelligence"
claimed that thermostats have beliefs. His thermostat he
claimed, had three beliefs; that it was too hot, too cold,
or just right.  I remember a thermostat we had in the Bronx,
we had control of the heat for the entire building. My
Grandma Covollo hung a plaque from it that had a painting of
the three bears and it read

As a rule man is a fool
when it's hot he wants it cool
when it's cool he wants it hot
what it is he wants it not. 

McCarthy didn't know it but his dialogue with John Searle,
who asked him, "what are the beliefs of your thermostat" (or
something like that), was an example of how technology
changes languages and language changes what we believe.
Belief, as McCarthy attributes it to his thermostat defines
what someone or something does. The computer believes in
zeros and ones so it calculates. But humans, while they may
not be able to calculate, without the use of a calculating
machine, the distance to a star, believe in stars and gods
and love and all sorts of things besides what they can do
with or without machines. 
Another problem with McCarthy's claim is that it implies
that simulating an idea is synonymous with duplicating the
idea. More importantly, by equating intelligence with
"artificial intelligence," McCarthy rejects the belief, and
the fact I think, that intelligence, the mind, is a
biological phenomenon and not a man made product or
calculation. 

Mad metaphor: The proposition that humans are like machines,
that intelligence is like computation, becomes the
proposition that humans are machines and  that machines are
human. We talk of language data, or programing ourselves or
deprogramming ourselves, of being hard wired, of retrieving
data, collecting data, storing data, coding and decoding,
but of course we are not machines we are biological beings. 

The eggplant, the corn, the weeping willow tree, the ocean,
the wind, these are how the mind works, not like any
machine. Our minds work much more like our digestive systems
than IBM super computers. 
 

The metaphor gone mad: A figure of speech in which a word or
phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to
designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in
All the world's god's computer and Men but zeros and ones. 

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life
imparted
by a gentle rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by
the sea,
from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep,
this dream is
on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at
all; and your
identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you
hover. And
perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one
half-throttled
shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer
sea, no
more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

Dave, Stig's story, indeed, Cherycoke's tale owes much to
Chapter 35 The Mast-Head, Moby-Dick, KeepinKooooooooooool

T















jporter wrote:
> 
> >> From: "Otto Sell" <o.sell at telda.net>
> >> Subject: Bersani - Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature (was: O'Donnell,
> > "Postmodernity and the Symptom of Paranoia")
> >> Date: Tue, Feb 6, 2001, 6:33 AM
> >>
> >
> > Bersani:
> >
> >> "The Pychonian opposition between They (IG Farben etc.) and We (Slothrop,
> >> Mexico, Pirate Prentice, etc.) is a replay of the opposition of Slothrop's
> >> Puritan forefather's polarity of the Elect and the Preterite. Information
> >> control is the contemporary version of God's eternal knowledge of each
> >> individual's ultimate damnation or salvation, and both theology and computer
> >> technology naturally produce paranoid fears about how we are hooked into the
> >> system, about the connections it has in store for us." (103)
> >
> > And thus the whole "We"/"They" binary deconstructs right before our (their?)
> > very eyes ...
> >
> > Thanks for the quotes, précis, and your own thoughts Otto.
> >
> > best
> 
> Fuckin' A. But before that deconstruction (I prefer melting for some
> paranoid reason of my own), just to "keep the ball bouncing" a bit longer
> here, isn't there a connection between Monroe/MacAdam's notion of _coolness_
> in the face of overwhelming force (or knowledge, or control)- as in
> potential for death or annihilation- as exemplified by those great jazz
> artists alluded to, and, the nonchalance, or even blaise attitude many of us
> cop in order to cope with the vertiginous acceleration of technical advance
> in which we rather suddenly find ourselves- the growing maelstrom of
> complexity threatening to suck us all in?
> 
> I mean- cloning, quantum computing, every reference ever published,
> gargantuan information stores at the flick of a mouse key- who can keep up?
> And it is, in its rational construction at least, all capable of being
> ordered, but at what cost to "the self" (Maxwell's or Laplace's Demons might
> do fine, but you and me? Fuh get about it.) Doesn't it threaten to make
> slaves of us all? Paranoia might be seen as a shortcut for
> self-preservation- a subconscious reductionist scheme to deal with
> information overload. So the implicit preamble to "keep cool..." might be:
> "given the overwhelming opportunities (and temptations) to become paranoid-
> keep cool, but care."
> 
> jody