Fun stuff in M&D

[Daniel Harper]

On Monday 12 March 2007 11:25, you wrote:

> > 2.) Why would you call a talking dog a Learned
> > English Dog? Perhaps so you can get away with a
> > three word phrase, buried in the middle of page 22:
> >
> > "The L.E.D. blinks, shivers, nods in a resign'd
> > way."
> >
> > I refuse to believe that Pynchon wasn't fully
> > cognizant of a blinking light emitting diode there.
>
> A.greed ...
>
> > So offhand that I didn't even process it as
> > unusual at first.
>
> I think I negelcted to make the connection explicit
> last time through here ...
>
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=60225

I had forgotten about the "Mu" bits in GED -- equally interesting are the 
discussions of machine intelligence to be found in Hoffstader (sp?) and 
Dennet's _The Mind's I_. It's far less famous than GED, and ranges less 
widely, but makes a nice companion piece in my opinion. Now if I could only 
find my copy....

>
> But here's a nice note on that, uh, bit ("no puns
> where none intended," to paraphrase Samuel Beckett)
> ...
>
> Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1998 11:15:02 +1100 (EST)
> From: Matt Treyvaud <m.treyvaud@[omitted]>
> To: pynchon-l@[omitted]
> Subject: "The L.E.D. blinks"
>
> On Fri, 18 Dec 1998, Erik Pohl wrote:
> > Douglas Hofstadter wrote _Godel, Escher, Bach_
> > about a lot of things, including whether machines
> > can have "souls" or not.  One of the major
> > interesting threads in the novel is Hofstadter's
> > Western examination of the koan described by the
> > LED (I think it's the same one) and the concept
> > of mu.  Mu, based on that description, reminds me
> > of an exluded middle, if ya get my drift.
>
> Yeah, pretty much. From my reading, I get the feeling
> that "mu" is the answer you give when neither "yes"
> nor "no" are even possible as an answer, which seems
> pretty excluded-middleish..
>
> Since an electronic LED can only be on or off (you can
> vary how bright it is by changing the rest of the
> circuit, but the LED itself is still a binary on/off
> device, afaik) maybe the blinking L.E.D. is an
> observation on the impossibility of expressing "mu" in
> terms of the age of reason -> aristotlean syllogistic
> western thought -> modern applications of
> technology... the closest you can get to "neither on
> nor off" is "on, off, on, off.."
>

I obviously haven't finished the book yet, but perhaps Pynchon is cluing us 
into some sense that the dog's intelligence is artificial, like the 
blinking-light monstrosities popular in SF programs of the sixties and 
seventies. It's interesting how non-doglike that character seems -- while 
Pynchon relies on dialogue more in this novel than in any others of his, he 
seems particularly fond of not describing action and appearance in that 
scene. Perhaps replicating a sort of Turing test?

Also interesting when compared to ATD, in which the dogs seem to be 
intelligent but do not talk. I also find myself perking up at every instance 
of the word "day" in Mason & Dixon -- many instances seem to foreshadow the 
use of the word in the later novel.

-- 
No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
--Daniel Harper