Gnostic Norbert Wiener

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Fiero" <rfiero at pophost.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, November 24, 2003 7:02 AM
Subject: Gnostic Norbert Wiener


> "Machine Dreams" by Philip Mirowski is subtitled '"Economics
> Becomes a Cyborg Science" and explores threads running from
> Hilbert, Slizard, von Neumann, Wiener, Shannon, Turing and
> others through the militarized '40s and '50s to current fads,
> research projects and accepted wisdoms.
>
> " . . . the saga of Maxwell's Demon. Eventually the quest to
> render intelligence commensurate with entropy rapidly
> dovetailed with the development of the computer, with
> consequences . . . But this particular 'solution' to the
> problem of the Meaning of Life harbored within itself a very
> nasty possibility, first noticed by Norbert Wiener, the coiner
> of the term 'cybernetics': If mankind is endowed with this new
> kind of intelligence,' this ability to process information
> about the world, then why wouldn't it also be the case that
> Nature also possessed that capacity? And if Nature also had the
> capacity to exert intelligence, then how would we ever know
> whether Nature was merely indifferent to the fate of mankind
> or, more distressing, was both malevolent and misleading with
> regard to the supposed triumph of mankind over dissolution?
> Wiener inadvertently raised the issue that perhaps
> 'intelligence' was not the vaunted solution to man's privileged
> place in the universe that it had first seemed; later thinkers
> merely reinterpreted malevolence as the natural state of
> intelligence. This subjection of Nature to a hermeneutics of
> suspicion was later easily extended to Society."
>
>
>
> ==================
> September 1752
> Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
>         1  2 14 15 16
> 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
> 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
>

Interesting calendar!

--------------------
"The quantity of pleasure not the quality the whole point of it and these
digital machines come in, the all-or-nothing machine Norbert Wiener called
it, machine that counts brings in the binary system and the computer with
it, so Wiener tells us about a brilliant American engineer who's gone out
and bought an expensive player piano. Pushpin or Pushkin, doesn't care a
damn for the music but he's fascinated by the complicated mechanism that
produces it that's what America was all about, what mechanization was all
about, what democracy was all about and the deification of democracy a
hundred years ago all this technology at the service of entertaining Sigi's
stupefied pleasure seeking thrash out there playing the piano with its feet
where it all came from isn't it?
(...)
getting it organized the only way to defend it against this tide of entropy
that's spread everywhere since the year the player piano came into being
from some Civil War battlefield like Christ, its American inventor said, and
its own received it not since Willard Gibbs showed us the tendency for
entropy to increase, nature's tendency to degrade the organized and destroy
the meaningful when he pulled the rug out from under Newton's compact
tightly organized universe with his papers on statistical physics in 1876,
laid the way for this contingent universe order is the least probable and
chaos the most introducing probability and chance convinced Wiener it was
not Einstein or Planck or Heisenberg but Willard Gibbs who brought on the
first great revolution in twentieth century physics but that's not what I'm
talking about is it, that's not what I'm trying to explain, no."
(William Gaddis, "Agapé Agape," Viking, New York 2002, p. 4-5)

"Bombs are not dogs. No link. No memory. No conditioning.
Nice thing to tell a Pavlovian. Is it Mexico's usual priggish insensitivity,
or does he know what he's saying? If there is nothing to link the rocket
strikes-no reflex arc, no Law of Negative Induction . . . then . . .
(...)
How can Mexico play, so at his ease, with these symbols of randomness and
fright? Innocent as a child, perhaps unaware--perhaps--that in his play he
wrecks the elegant rooms of history, threatens the idea of cause and effect
itself. What if Mexico's whole generation have turned out like this? Will
Postwar be nothing but "events," newly created one moment to the next? No
links? Is it the end of history?"
(GR 56)

Everything that has a beginning has an end. Are we able to tell the
beginning of history?

Or have the machines won already?

I'd like to inform everybody that an "Agapé Agape"-reading is slowly
emerging at the Gaddis-List:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gaddis-l/

Otto