In Which Jung prewrites AtD's epigraph

[Joseph Tracy]

Well I just wrote a longish answer to your question, then somehow disappeared it. But here is the essence.
I don't know what thought is. I am open to the possibility that what we call consciousness is really one of the dimensions of reality that is as fundamental as space or time and that thought is  a form within that dimension.  Of course it could be more a practical aspect of biological survival, but I have a hard time with the idea of wings coming from random mutations. Too much like rolling a rock down a mountain and getting the Nike of Samothrace. I suspect there is a deep connection between mind and body  or even mind and life that has a role in evolution.     
 I listened to Rupert Sheldrake yesterday talking about homing pigeons. Scientists have studied them a lot and they don't know how the pigeons do it. They have done experiments to test all the ideas that seem to fit what we know: sight, smell, ability to discern and remember the path away from home, celestial navigation, sun navigation, magnetic field of earth. It appears you can completely block any and all of these and they still fly home, though without sight they can only get a couple hundred feet from home.  Science has no explanation for how they do it and there are several similar mysteries, that point to the possibility that we may be missing some real basic parts of our picture of consciousness.

Still it is a lot about how you define intelligence.  Chess programs beat chessmasters and computers can be programmed to solve very hard problems. But will they ever ask their own questions and want an answer? But maybe that isn't really what Pynchon is talking about , but more what happens when machines can do anything we can do faster and with no mistakes. 


On Mar 15, 2012, at 11:26 PM, bandwraith at aol.com wrote:

> But do you imagine that thought is something
> more than a physical process, or just some
> physically embodied process that is way too
> complex and self-referential to program from
> the top down?
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Thu, Mar 15, 2012 2:25 pm
> Subject: Re: In Which Jung prewrites AtD's epigraph
> 
> 
> I personally think every prediction of AI so far is absurdly premature. The
> premise still seems fundamentally bizarre to me. I just can't imagine self
> generated thought apart from the kind of innate will that comes with being in a
> bodily form with natural desires attributes and limits. The idea that you can
> program curiosity, or desire to formulate and solve a problem into an electronic
> device designed only to process  binary code just seems real iffy.
>