MDDM23: A Digestionary Process

Tue Sep 17 04:27:06 CDT 2002

"'The Man Voltaire call'd a Prometheus,-- to be
remember'd only for having trespass'd so ingeniously
outside the borders of Taste, as to have provided his
Automaton a Digestionary Process, whose end result
could not be distinguish'd from that found in Nature.'
   "'A mechanickal Duck that shits?  To whom can it
matter,' Mr. Whitpot, having remov'd his Wig, is
irritably kneading it like a small Loaf, '-- who
besides a farmer would even recognize Duck Waste,
however compulsively accurate?'" (M&D, Ch. 37, p. 372)

>From Ellen Ullman, "Programming the Post-Human:
Computer Science Redefines 'Life,'" Harper's Magazine,
Vol. 305, No. 1829 (October 2002), pp. 60-70 ...

   "What A[rtificial-]life researchers create are
computer programs--not robots, not machines, only
software.  The cybernetic creatures in these programs
('agents' or 'automata') go on to 'reproduce' and
'adapt,' and are therefore considered in principle to
be as alive as we are.  So does the image of the
computer as human paradigm, begun in the 1950s, come
to its logical extreme: pure software, unsulied by
exigencies of carbon atoms, bodies, fuel, gravity,
heat, or any other messy concern of either
soft-tissued or metal-bodied creatures.  Again the
image of the computer is conflated with the idea of
being alive, until only the computer remains: life
that exists only in the machine.
   "What these views of human sentience have in
common, and why they fail to describe us, is their
disdain for the body: the utter lack of a body in
early AI and in later formations like Kurzweil's (the
lonely cortex, scanned and downloaded, a brain in a
jar); and the disregard for this body, this mammalian
flesh, in robotics and Alife.  Early resaerchers were
atrightforward about discarding the flesh.  Marvin
Minsky pronounced us to be 'meat machines.'...  Meat
and glands an viscera--you can sense the corruption
implied here, the body as butchery fodder, polluting
the discussion of intelligence.
   "This suspicion of the flesh, this quest for a
disembodied intelligence, persists today....  And
Alife resaerchers, seeing 'life' in their computer
programs, pay no attention to the body at all,
imagining that the properties of life can somehow ...
be cut away from the dross of living....
   "One might think that robotics, having as it does
the imperative of creating some sort of physical
container for intelligence, would have more regard for
the body.  But the entire project of robotics--the
engineering of intelligent machines--is predicated on
the belief that sentience is separable from its
original substrate....  'Do you have to go to the
bathroom and eat to be alive?'
   "The question stayed with me ....  maybe yes. 
Given the amount of time living creatures devote to
food and its attendant states ... there might be
something crucial about the necessities of eating and
eliminating that defines us.  How much of our state of
being is dependent on being hungry, eating, having
eaten, being full, shitting....  there are huge swaths
of existence that would be
impenetrable--indescribable, unprogrammable, utterly
unable to be represented--to a creature that did not
eat or shit.
   "In this sense, artificial-life resaerchers are as
body-loathing as any medieval theologian.  They seek
to separate the 'principles' of life and
sentience--the spirit--from the dirty muck it sprang
from....  as if intelligence were not simply one of
the many strategies that evolved to serve the striving
for life.  If sentience doesn't ome from the body's
desire to live ... where else would it come from?  To
believe that sentience can arise from anywhere
else--machines, softwaree, things with no fear of
death--is to believe, ipso facto, in the separability
of mind and matter, flesh and spirit, body and soul.
   "Here is what I think: sentience is the crest of
the body, not its crown.  It is integral to the
substrate from which it arose, not something that can
be taken off and placed somehwere else....
   "The body is even the source of abstract reasoning,
usually thought of as the very opposite of the flesh,
according to the linguists George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson.  'This is not just the obvious claim that we
need a body to reason,' they write, 'rather, it is the
striking claim that the very structure of reason
itself comes from the details of our embodiment.'..."
(pp. 66-7)

See, e.g., ...

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson.  Philosophy in
   the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge
   to Western Thought.  NY: Basic Books, 1998.

http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/perseus-cgi-bin/display/0-465-05674-1

As well as ...

http://www.dimensionsmagazine.com/dimtext/Schwartz/Happening_thing.html

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/october24/riskinprofile-1024.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4361923,00.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,650977,00.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0202&msg=65200&sort=date

http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ucpress/metzner.xml?part=7&display=standard&style=generic.css

http://www.penguinputnam.com/static/packages/us/kurzweil/excerpts/prologue/prologue.htm

http://www.penguinputnam.com/static/packages/us/kurzweil/excerpts/exmain.htm

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/september99/gergen_9-13.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0203&msg=65454&sort=date

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0202&msg=65201&sort=date

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0202&msg=65202&sort=date

Not to mention ...

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/Wim%20Delvoye/detail.htm

http://www.artnet.com/magazine/reviews/fiers/fiers1-9-01.asp

http://www.time.com/time/europe/generatione/mediums/delvoye.html

http://lacan.com/frameXIX7.htm

"If our world survives, the next great challenge to
watch out for will come - you heard it here first -
when the curves of research and development in
artificial intelligence, molecular biology and
robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and
unpredictable...."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

By the way ...

"kneading it like a small Loaf" = "pinching a loaf," a
la Paulie Shore?  Given the topic(k) at, er, hand ...

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