Dan Brown; Rev. Dodgson; Babbage; Turing

[Glenn Scheper]

http://www.cesnur.org/2006/mi_brown.htm
	--Witness Statement of DAN BROWN (Da Vinci Code).
	--Great bio, author insights, world insights.

The artist's language, I learned, was often symbolism and metaphor, and the professor's revelation of the hidden meanings of the violent images in Picasso's "La Guemica" has stayed with me to this day, as has his passion for the absolute pain of Michelangelo's Pieta. The course covered many other works that resonated with me as a young man, including the horror of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son and the bizarre anamorphic sexual nightmares of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. I was surprised by the unexpected "dark quality" of Leonardo daVinci's The Last Supper.




http://www.mattababy.org/~belmonte/Publications/Books/CSaW/2_language.html

Dodgson's was the first literature to rely heavily on portmanteau words, words that use the human tendency toward analogy in phonetics, spelling, visual presentation, historical and cultural referents--every possible container for information--to overload single terms with multiple meanings.

"Oh, all this is orthogonal." What I mean is that the changes I want to make to some parameters of the system will have no effect upon some other parameters; the two sets of parameters are independent of each other...
This style of generalisation of a term based upon an analogy constructed from its semantics recalls the Principle of the Permanence of Equivalent Forms.

Babbage's childhood reveals in his personality the germ of what was to become his life's occupation. When offered a toy some of the workings of which were concealed, the young Babbage would demand what was inside it. If the answer were not sufficient, the toy would be broken open, and Babbage would see for himself. Thus the complex rules of operation of the toy would be resolved into a synthesis of the simpler rules governing its parts.

In one chapter of his treatise, Babbage details the construction of a clockwork machine that produces a series of numbers as its output. He conceives of a hierarchy of levels of controlling rules. This hierarchy of rules in Babbage's computing system is similar to the hierarchies of laws in legal systems. In the United States, for example, the highest law is the Constitution. It determines what other types of laws may be made, and what precedences they are to have, and so on. Similarly, the highest rule in Babbage's machine is the rule that determines what rule will determine the machine's output. So, for example (after Babbage's construction), the highest rule might say "Use rule A until the number 420 is produced. Then switch to rule B." Rules A and B are as follows: A Begin with the number 0, and increase by 1 on each step. B Begin with a count of 421. On each step, produce the square of the current value of the count and then increase the count by 1. Babbage's construction uses a more complex set of rules, but the idea of rules supervising other rules in the operation of a machine is the same. After seeing the first few hundred numbers produced by the machine, any reasonable observer would be fairly confident that the sequence being produced is a simple succession: each number is always one greater than the previous number in the sequence. They would have perceived the apparent harmony. But on the 421st step, the observer would be surprised, and their world-view sent flying topsy-turvy, by the appearance of 177,241 instead of the expected 421. Babbage suggested such a hierarchy of controlling rules as a basis for miracles. In this scheme, miracles were not instances of divine intervention in the universe, but effects of higher-order rules preprogrammed into the universe through divine foreknowledge.

Ironically for one so aware of the omnipresence of systems, Turing was maltreated by the system of English society. Turing was homosexual, and when he inadvertently revealed to the police that he had had homosexual intercourse he was arrested and charged with the crime of "gross indecency". He was compelled to submit to injections of oestrogen, a female sex hormone that was thought to be a remedy for his "disease". After he had served this sentence, when he seemed to have passed the nadir, he killed himself by eating an apple laced with cyanide. He left no explanation for his suicide, at least not explicitly. The explanation lies encoded somewehere within the story of Turing's life. Hugh Whitemore, author of the biographical play Breaking the Code, believes that Turing's suicide was the ultimate experiment in artificial intelligence. In his famous article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in the British philosophical journal Mind, Turing had discussed the idea of a deterministic machine simulating human behaviour. If, he said, the machine could not be distinguished objectively from a human, then one would have to credit it with intelligence. This raises the existential question of whether or not humans are biological automata, whether death is the condition of a machine halting. Can mind exist without body? If so, in what manner? Turing had been fascinated by this since his childhood. He could find his answer only by first-hand experience. If this was not the primary motivation for Turing's suicide, it must at least have been in his mind when he bit into the apple. Turing's death served a dual purpose: it was an escape from social systems as well as a way of possibly answering the mind-body question.

The only assumption that has been made is that H exists; the only way that M* cannot exist is if H, the machine on which it is based, also cannot exist. Therefore there is no algorithm for the halting problem; the question of whether or not any given algorithm halts on any given input is provably undecidable.
	-- reminding me "that existence is not an attribute"

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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