BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): the Antipointsman

[ish mailian]

Look, for example, at Victor's account of how he assembles and
animates his creature. He must, of course, be a little vague about the
details, but we're left with a procedure that seems to include
surgery, electricity (though nothing like Whale's galvanic
extravaganzas), chemistry, even, from dark hints about Paracelsus and
Albertus Magnus, the still recently discredited form of magic known as
alchemy. What is clear, though, despite the commonly depicted Bolt
Through the Neck, is that neither the method nor the creature that
results is mechanical.

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

On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 9:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Another great post, Monte, imho. Shows TRP with another use of either-or, no
> excluded middle and therefore of
> the scientific understanding and attempt at control as ...also a metaphor.
>
> On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 9:00 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> pp. 53-54 (Viking pagination)
>> Notice the slide from Jessica's narrative present through a recalled
>> conversation ("Roger has tried to explain...") to The White Visitation ("his
>> little bureau"). He's the one-man Statistics Office.
>>
>> "576 squares" implies a 24x24 grid of squares half a kilometer on a side.
>> So Roger's sampling area is 12 km (~7.5 miles) on a side, 56 sq mi -- about
>> a tenth of Greater London's built-up area. If it's centered at Charing
>> Cross, then very roughly from Kensington east to Greenwich, and from
>> Hampstead Heath south to Streatham Common. (UK readers please correct me if
>> I've screwed up my map-gazing.)
>>
>> "An Erlenmeyer flask bubbles..." and we get a slow pan around the room,
>> Roger's split soul captured in a book and a snapshot, as "the graying
>> Pavlovian, thin as a needle" (heh) looks in from the hall.
>>
>> Zeros and ones: "Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, [Pointsman]
>> imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements....
>> each point is allowed only the two states: waking or sleep... all Pavlovian
>> brain mechanics assumes the presence of these bi-stable points."
>>
>> In 1944, neurologists knew that neurons had an all-or-nothing threshold
>> for "firing." But they had few details on how adjacent neurons connected,
>> how many connections went to remote cells instead, or how many went down
>> into deeper cortical layers rather than across the surface. They wouldn't
>> understand the electrochemistry of the nerve impulse itself for another
>> decade. So this flickering "mosaic," with its seductive similarity to binary
>> circuit elements and digital computing, is an extremely stylized model.
>>
>> “Summation,” “transition,” “irradiation,” “concentration,” “reciprocal
>> induction”... were not observed phenomena, but Pavlov's *inferred* building
>> blocks for the more complex brain functions he was interested in. They all
>> vanished from neuroscience in the 1950s and 1960s. The all-or-nothing view
>> of neuronal activity has changed, too. While the threshold is real, it can
>> slide up and down with the neuron's recent activity and with neurochemicals
>> swirling around the cells -- both very different from the simple, fixed
>> determinism of switches, relays or transistors.
>>
>> Bottom line: what P wrote in GR about, e.g., V-2 guidance was actual
>> engineering that had been built and had worked. What he wrote about
>> Pointsman's neuroscience was less "modern science" as of the date of writing
>> than it was akin to the Magnetick Hi-Jinks in Mason & Dixon, or Aetherism in
>> Against the Day. And he knew it.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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