Heine: There fell a frost in the night of spring, It fell on the tender blossoms young And they are withered and faded. A lad once loved a maiden fair, They fled in secret from house and home, They told neither father nor mother. They roamed and wandered here and there, They had nor luck nor guiding star, They fell by the wayside and perished. -- (trans. Feise) Es fiel ein Reif in der Fruhlingsnacht, Er fiel auf die zarten Blaublumelein, Sie sind verwelket, verdorret. Ein Jungling hatte ein Madchen lieb, Sie flohen heimlich von Hause fort, Es wusst weder Vater noch Mutter. Sie sind gewandert hin und her, Sie haben gehabt weder Gluck noch Stern, Sie sind verdorben, gestorben. All the characteristics of life may be defined by states and processes. There must be an ontological framework capable of shifting from one world to another, in order that the definition holds. Only if one insists that life is a natural kind based on a material environment, material exchange, does artificial life fail to meet the criteria. Worlding occurs within ontological frameworks, attributed frames; the question is whether life can occur within them, whether they would support a set X of fundamental processes. Such processes involve exchange with imminent environment. For example, one can create computer lifeforms which have no necessity to absorb energy; they reproduce wildly and competitively. Conversely, one can create lifeforms which do not reproduce, but horde, absorb, and compete for food. Certain large marine worms near deep-sea thermal vents absorb nourishment without the necessity of a digestive system. Energy must always be present in an operational environment; in the case of artificial life, the environment itself may form an ontological foundation for existence; the two exist in entirely different worlds. One can, in fact, consider a _new topodynamics_ of lifeforms, in which _no_ specific attribute is necessary for an evolving definition of "life." Definitions then become a matter of degree within a holarchic structure, a consensus- situation or fammily of usages. These are important considerations for the philosophy of computer/human interactions. It is only to be noted in conclusion that we are still bound within the state/operator or noun/ verb model of programming itself; either this is to be taken as a funda- mental condition of the real, or one can look towards other domains for future implementation. __________________________________________________________________________ (Life and Nearly Decomposable Hierarchies, follow-up post) Was it Simon who years ago wrote about nearly decomposable hierarchies - that for example, Aristotelian logic (including laws of distribution, etc.) could hold on a macro-level almost and in spite of its failure within the quantum domain? One of the stranger characteristics of our universe is the ability of levels, spaces, and times, to nearly foreclose upon each other, seamlessly, much as the ego appears to do the same (and yet is more of a coagulating/inscribing flow). In which case, life itself exists as foreclosure, which is why I think we can talk about computer life _and_ ignore the matrix which provides its energy. Clifford pointed out that entities within a closed universe could still determine its local topology and curvature (this before Einstein); whether computer life could see "elsewhere" remains open to question. Anyone who believes in spirit or other manifestations of apparent nearly autonomous (although perhaps interpenetrating) realms would assume, I assume, that life is inductive in such a fashion that its very gestural qualities take it beyond or beside itself. But one in return could conceive of spirit _within_ artificial life, in which case perhaps the questions continue to be asked. As in at least some models of inflationary universes, there may be realms that we literally have no access whatsoever to. We seem to have our energy problem settled within the local universe; I am picturing artificial life that doesn't. And such life, in fact, may not recognize energy as a category at all, except for local conservations. I think this would vastly change the appearance of entropy, and hence, information, by the way - does any- one who knows these mathematical formulations (better than I certainly), have any ideas on this? __________________________________________________________________________ Metamorphosis The neuron was added at random; I had no idea where to place it in relation to a network I didn't understand, and which was not mapped out anywhere in the program I was given. Only the addition was possible, and I found myself setting capacitance, membrane potential, and the like, more or less by chance. I'd return to the creature on the screen, a cockroach which had the ability to navigate a closed environment, a roach governed by a limited amount of energy, and a food drive when that energy ran low. It possessed six legs, antennae, and the ability to move through the space, somewhat clumsily. I do not know whether it had the ability to learn, but the movements were sophisticated. My first try resulted in the stretching of one of the legs, never to the breaking point, since that wasn't built into the program; the leg would then return quickly to the insect. It hobbled across the screen, banging up against the corner, turning backwards and forwards as its antennae gave alternating readings of the situation. There wasn't any way in or out, and the banging continued, hopelessly I thought, until the energy ran out, the creature ground to a halt, the program read RIP. My second try resulted in program crashes, one after another; the insect never knew about them, never was cognizant of the flickering of the environment, life itself, in and out of existence. It was there, always looking normal, the same, turned in one or another direction, waiting for the return-key in order for it to progress towards some new goal, that of merely staying alive overriding everything else. And my third try, the last, before the final crash, resulted in legs undercutting legs, legs on top of legs, a real hobble, what appeared to be crippled behavior straight out of Charles Dickens. I couldn't watch it for long on the screen; the schematic roach began to be a source of projec- tion, not of fantasy, but of my own body, and the body of every living creature; it was losing its somewhat symmetrical exterior as the legs splayed almost painfully against one another. The vision was one of empathy and horror; I had created the insect, wounded and dysfunctional, and I wondered if this were always the case, the source of Frankenstein and other golem _formations._ (Is this the sense of tampering with the "natural," sublimating childbirth, playing Faust? Are we always already damaging ourselves as biochemistry and programming simultaneously devour our boides?) The computer refused to save the new neuron and its settings; they over- flowed memory when the program was rebooted, overflowed again and again. As if the program refused to create the insect in its wounded state, at least _that_ wounded, incapable of surviving, even alone with an indefinitely large food supply. I learned a great deal from this, subject and object of my own experiment and victim of a pursuit that could only turn back reflexively, as a Klein bottle, without extrance or exit. Pain always resides in the other, iso- lating the body, cauterizing it, dividing it from itself; a wounded body is a piecemeal body. Objects float before and beyond the senses, general- izing the phenomenological horizon to include extruded body-parts. As Rimbaud said, I am an other. The roach couldn't _account_ for anything, learned nothing. I envied Kafka. And all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! ( from Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol ) __________________________________________________________________________ [These musings continue to touch on life, artificial life, and the arti- ficiality of life. I feel somewhat over my head here, but it's necessary for me at least to pursue this to the end. Forgive.] AIAL Can we differentiate artificial life from artificial intelligence? Clearly they are subsets of each other, the former occupying a bandwidth ranging from robotics (interaction in physical reality) to computer viruses. In general, intelligence is currently aligned with the rich resources of the real; the Turing test depends on it. (A computer might know about the prime-number-world; a human knows more about politics, the weather, etc. - _rich-fields_ instead of isolated parameters.) But I may assume for the moment the self-containment of artificial life, existing within micro-worlds. I think that the notion of a "seamless virtual reality," entirely con- ceivable to date as a gedankenexperiment, if not in real life, plays a role here as well. Inner and outer worlds begin to merge; our useless burning of energy, trashing of the planet, provides a clue towards our own ontological isolation. But this could be programmed as well; there is no escape, just as there is ultimately no escape from solicism, or any ideology that embraces negation, alterity, and the other, within its totalizing armature. These issues, like Lacan's use of the Borromean knows, intertwine in fact hopelessly: 1 - the idea of a foreclosed and controlled environment 2 - the idea of a set of attributes defining artificial or real life 3 - the idea of a distinction among nature, culture, artificial, real 4 - the epistemology and interfacing of the controlled environment in relation to a_meta-environment_ 5 - the possibilities of closed topologies (mobius strip-like) bringing environment and meta-environment full-circle into indistinguishable levels 6 - issues of intelligence and artificial intelligence in relation to mind For this reason, again, my conclusion would be that _life_ possesses no specifiable definition, insofar as artificial life is possible; that one at best is referencing a family of usages; that there is no absolute determination of our own existence as self-sustaining and/or created within the ontic realm of the known universe; and that there is no _necessary_ relationship among mind, intelligence, and life-forms. That being said, it should also be emphasized that there is no reason in the above to appeal to notions of spirit, deity, or totality - it is in fact this _absence_ that fascinates me, that lends itself to the problem- atizing of categories of the real and "artificial." (One ends, in fact, by appealing to the granular or obdurate nature of the real, its fractal quality, realizing as well that this is at best, from a certain viewpoint, only a matter of bandwidth.) --------------------| { Penrose presents four viewpoints relating thinking to computation: " A. All thinking is computation; in particular, feelings of conscious awareness are evoked merely by the carrying out of appropriate computations. " B. Awareness is a feature of the brain's physical action; and whereas any physical action can be simulated computationally, computational simulation cannot by itself evoke awareness. " C. Appropriate physical action of the brain evokes awareness, but the physical action cannot even be properly simulated computationally. " D. Awareness cannot be explained by physical, computational, or any other scientific terms." Penrose's view, based on Godel, is that of C; I would hold to C as well, but on the basis of modeling restraints - i.e. unsolvabilities and quan- tum states within neural operations. Penrose holds with the latter, which he develops at length; for me, unsolvabilities and the very nature of randomness question the ability to model brain states. This isn't to say that _input-output_ couldn't be modeled, but that the internal states, and internal consciousness, would be necessarily different (neither better nor worse, nor more nor less developed). C is clearly unnecessary for any definition of artificial life, which at this point in its development, can be modeled by A. } ________________________________________________________________________ The Songs of 2010 Flake _Down-Generation_ Reading writerly Ovid always from the Augustan period couplets now into contemporary English always transfixed from what the Romans said and did around the beginning of the millennia holding forth into the positive integers - so of course writers always build on other writers - there's no death of the author, nothing but the concretion, stratification, of writers, writers upon writers, interpretations and reinterpretations, writer-cement - there's no death as I said of the author but in fact the birth of too many authors, indistinguishable, but there, present, fixed, fetishized, held in no or vast regard. Take translation each from its own period or socius, in and out of dif- ferent languagings, even the original embedded in the fractal associations of inconceivably complex social landscapes - doesn't each audience find its translation, _its_ translation, up-to-date, all this writing and re- writing, scribbling in the ether, scribbling on every buried and dead bit of matter dug up no matter where, scribbling on burials upon burials... And doesn't each audience find _its_ translation the currency of good design, well-met - the species exhausts itself with symbolic construction, continuous modification, a tattered pipeline filtering a tattered pipe- line, self-same or similar, a spew so far endless, origins non-existent, uncanny, violating in their absence - O the songs still resonate Ovidian whatever that means, from the 1960s from the 1980s from the 2000s, just as they resonate now in their fullness in their currency, in 2010, we're engorged with them, eyes blasted from the third millennium already, void tottering on abyss leaning into chaos, shore it up, shore it all up, virtual reality against annihilation, we bring our toys together, hounded by disease - aids seems naive in lieu of the current conflagration - there's nothing to learn - The _down-generation_ in revolt, gen-Xers never even understood that at the center of their name was the same old crossroads, a continuous run dividing and dividing, continuous run to nowhere at all - _________________________________________________________________________ skin /you can't tickle yourself, you loop:/ skin, covering the body with an unmistakable translucency, my fingers pressed against layered plushness, resilient with the memory of bone the body loops through the touch of the other. it doesn't do that in cyberspace. it doesn't do that anywhere in cyberspace. forget your dreams of virtual reality, hiding out in the suit of the other: it doesn't do that in cyberspace the body is tickled, bruised, caressed, massaged, through the other, the body is always already transitive; hungry, it looks for you you are in the memory of the flesh transitive, the body lends itself through a looping back towards itself, a ring with a gap across which your presence sparks, you bring me presence through alterity yes, but through the sameness or suturing of touch as well the metaphoricity of language itself references the body which completes it unstated, the body is never produced in language, but language is produced embodied untouching in cyberspace, one borrows the hysteria of love, infinite effusions, displacements onto language as i have said, with a mouth sliced like the internet man, language itself microtomed, already microtomed into the re-assemblage of language _you are never any closer_ cyberspace burnout is just that distancing, i won't laugh with the touch of your fingers, won't transform becalmed with your thumbs pressing into the depths of shoulders and neck, won't erect with your teeth on my nipple, inscribing yourself forever and ever never, burnout, my skin sutured back into the body-bag, i can't breath, can't breath, but can only _tell_ you that - (Lakoff, Montague, Lingis, Levinas, Herz, _HyperDOC_) _________________________________________________________________________ artificial life and the violated envelope of the body i can't touch the life on the screen. the life on the screen can touch the life on the screen. if i kill the life on the screen it doesn't know what happened. if the life on the screen kills the life on the screen, memory and history begin, and so do the remnants of the monumental. the life on the screen is propelled by fate which exists outside the bandwidth of its self-defining. the life on the screen develops frameworks for fate, speeding up the development of culture. the life on the screen can laugh, tickle itself, the life on the screen can touch. gods have no hands. ________________________________________________________________________ burnout k:14> more talk.txt I can't get away from this; I lose sleep, shudder nightly, nightmare, scroll follows me during the day, my life is damned, reduced to language, my god I've got a brain hands arms swaying into empty air, my life's a mockery. O poor stage all I do is complain to you my lovely computer screen. I'm fucking fifteen years old without a future! I can't do anything with my life! I can't understand them! I'll never live to twenty-five and my best friend said I deserved to be dead and I think everyone agrees with her that it would be the best thing for everyone. I'll pretend to be anyone! I promise I will! I'll do anything, get me off this machine, bring me a friend walking through the door with smiles on her face and we'll fuck and live forever I promise, she'll never leave me because I'll be so good to her, wait and see. k:15> cd /usr/sondheim/ :path not found k:16> cd anywhere :no such file or directory k:17> cd anywhere :access denied :superuser privilege only my skin is on fire it burns alone killing me not unkindly k:18> kill -9 0 the ashes return me to my body k:19> pwd /usr/sondheim/nowhere chmod +x nowhere :file read-only mind disappears in grief and chaos pain of a burn tunnelling through the eyes everywhere i look i see eyes i swallow the broken glass of the broken screen rsh -l sondheim@panix3.panix.com anywhere | somewhere > where k:20> more where k:21> wc where 0 0 0 where the glass isn't safety glass it doesn't hold together the center doesn't fall apart reflection does k:22> echo where where reflection shows me flames shows me flames reflection shows me flames k:23> talk sondheim@panix.com : NO TALK-DAEMON ON USER k:24> more talk my mind is drowning that's cold before i go down discomfort before i go that's the words melting the water into moths control-T moths moths my cock is cracked earth dust got it by the window mouth got dust got something caked blood red the color of flame the color of water, earth, and blood there's no air here reflection shows me air shows me air earth and empty flames reflection shows me flames k:25> echo flames flames k:26> echo flames flames k:27> kill flames :I don't understand that k:28> kill -9 0 k:29> exit k:30> cd anywhere :path not found k:31> more talk-to-me k:32> ________________________________________________________________________ Date: Fri, 28 Apr 1995 02:16:00 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Sondheim To: -- Cyb , Fop Subject: Burnout Recently, I've begun to feel burnout on the net, on ascii, on all the analysis, not being able to enter into the pleasure of the text which scrolls _exactly_ down the screen over and over again. So I thought I'd write about it. The dreams have stopped, there's no more scrolling _there,_ and they've returned to the troubled dreams of several months ago, anguish over the loss of an ex-girlfriend, real geographic cataclysms and terror on the streets. Administration takes up less time, but for me the growth of these lists has been slow, and we've lost a lot of people I've valued, although new ones come on. I seem to be one of the few constants here; I'm always here, public and private email both, running in the same circuits, watching the fragility of net relationships transform them as soon as real life comes once again to the foreground. The integration isn't here for me; I've got a strong homing-instinct now, and finding myself without a relationship in the city, without suitable finances, without a place I _like_ living in, the net takes on burdens that make no sense in the long run. There's been a natural progression from thinking about nets and communities through third sex to artificial life; it seems to me if life succeeds in this space, it succeeds as _lateral_ life, that is life that recognizes itself _within_ the medium, not elsewhere. But if we're healthy we _are_ elsewhere, and it's in the complexity of daily life that struggles occur over thinking the Oklahoma bombing through, over thinking about alterity, over so much more. I find myself constantly running back to books so as not to oversimplify my arguments: for example, what's "artificial" in artificial life? But then some of the discussions _here_ do contain considerable complexity - it's not that. Maybe it's the way the text burns through my eyelids, no matter the color of the words on the screen. Maybe it's not seeing the shadow of someone disappear as she leaves, or the knock at the door before someone enters. The net proves insidious; part of burnout is watching real life itself become distanced, finding myself thinking through a relationship that is 90% text and will always be that way. Late at night voices speak to me, on unixtalk, on the phone occasionally. There has to be more to life than the wires, more central to life. It's interesting to watch Andy Hawks over on Future Culture (although I'm off the list now), beginning it, talking about feeling the wires, later leaving, then returning. Is everything packaged here? Is that why I so easily relate (I won't speak for anyone else), yet feel that there is utter darkness surrounding the terminal? Maybe that's why the MOO anonymity or identity morphing is problematic for me, more packaging, more programming. I find myself on-line or teaching off-line moving from one program to another, here's the world wide web worm, there's veronica, here's unixtalk, there's a moo, here's a caucus system... I'm going to stay on. I need something real, though. More and more I understand addiction to drugs; it would be an odd relief to be forced to relate to the grittiness of _substance,_ alcohol or cocaine. It won't happen though. Instead, I find myself still retreating within the virtual; instead of Warwickian bodies vis-a-vis Nick Land and the other Deleuze- Guattarians, I'm sending a videotape, another virtuality to accompany the Virtual Futures conference. Another effacement, distanciation. I feel crippled here, a sure sign of burnout... Alan, meandering with apologies to one and all _________________________________________________________________________ originating huddling near the top of the screen; they're inscribed there, already a totality or curtain-rod, mass lending itself to the procuring of an audience, guiding the reader into the text's desire. compressed, the curtain of opposing empty space falls from line after line; numerous, they will end somewhere, leaving infinite and empty scroll pouring underneath, effluvia of vacated thought. each domain of the text, each topography, is guided by the tether to thinking, by the unfolding of cloth. there are no divisions among the divisions. | | | O O texts refresh instantaneously on the screen, transforming into the begin- ning of our thinking together, the terror and relief of the construct of origin. the screen begins to fill, Rabelaisian, and there are moments when the flood runs itself in the vicinity of thought, thoughtless, work- ing the bridges and routers of words of worlds, turning the cared-for phrase until the liminal moment once again manifests itself. content gathers in the liminal, breath held or harvested, the horizon of distance always a distraction. we plunge paragraphs deep, into always familiar strata, sediments, always a certain relief as well that the saying is occurring. the saying is occurring and developing, filling itself towards the margins, huddled again constantly adjacent to the left-hand sheaf from which everything proceeds: towards fulfillment, thought running out, cloacal, urinary, the _thirst_ of it. the thought that : which would not have been the thought or the thinking of it. beneath, the text, still hanging, through skin sloping into exegeses of the labial, through the weight of the line transformed into teats, begins to close in on itself, an inverted trapezoid, clitoral, mute, abjuring climax or effect. we'll see it cried, the pain of the letter itself turned forward, backward, wobbling into the commonalities of expedient text. the screen scrolls forth, words and lines shift uneasily, the rim of an infinite wheel which returns, qua Nietzsche, only within an inconceivable future, already inscribed, grinding inscription into the fundamental ground, grinding of fundament, ground glass reticule of the terminal screen screamed. | | | O ___________________________________________________________________________ the language which shattered the tongue of the body's tongue Shattered by the lack of Brisez par le manque de language, shattered by your langue, a bris‚ par ta presence, I push my nipples pr‚sence, je pousse mes out to the limits of the mamelons dehors aux limites body. du corps. They're connectors; they Ils sont ils font vous venez make you come to me. … mo. They're adjustments of the Ils sont ajustements du body. corps. They extend like darkness Ils ‚tendent comme obscurit‚ back into the useless. en arriŠre en l'inutile. I make them out for you. Je fais les hors de pour vous. They protrude. Ils saillissent. They grow in size with every Ils croissent en grandeur thought of your own. avec chaqu'ont pens‚ de ta propre. They are the body's Ils sont le networking de networking into the other. corps en l'autre. They are other. Ils sont autres. _______________________________________________________________________ Hypertext, Gaps, Limbs, Architecture The swollen internet is tumor-oriented, ruptured with the decay of information, tethers, traces following through links which wind uselessly through the history of the human. If hypertext provides gaps or hiatus in relation to tunneling through the virtuality of links (which are notated, for the most part, presenced on the surface), then gaps themselves are hypertexts, _not_ the linked document, but the raw absenced and sutured materiality of the hole itself. All texts become rim-texts; nodal sites, in their vectoring, are intensifications rather than signposts, the accre- tion of the symbolic to the useless. What is useless is the knowledge itself, beyond the domain of the _rat- tler,_ the stuttering of facticity across the disciplinary panopticon, frameworking knowledge at every level. "These spirals of misprision and division are deployed across the highest and lowest levels of hypertextual discourse. This is what takes place at the hypertextual detour: a diachronic characteristic of narrative digression - the turn at the link - replays the turn at the synchronic level of the link as a signifier of _pure difference._ On each level, meaning is a function of difference: the slippage in the signifying chain at the level of the sign is articulated at the higher level of narrative, in the slippage between linked threads in the weave of a docuverse. The gap-ridden structure of the hypertext makes explicit the underlying gaps in the fabric of language from which it is constructed, and in which the consumer of the hypertext is constituted as a subject of language." (Terence Harpold, "Threnody: Psychoanalytic Digressions on the Subject of Hypertexts," in Delany and Landow, Hypermedia and Literary Studies.) What Harpold constructs as "gap-ridden," is in fact over-determined, not slippage so much as _limb_ sliced thick, resilient. And in fact, the con- sumer of hypertext may be de-constituted through subjugation of language; it's within the epistolary-novel conditions of email lists, for example, that subjectivity flourishes through the hysteria of the text. The thick rupture of the hypertextual surface, ungapped but sloughing elsewhere, returns language-as-subject whose underpinnings "might as well be" any- where. Hypertextual _activity,_ the labor of the reader, is _varied,_ a question of choosing, setting-aside, standing back. But the freedom is illusory - and I feel compelled to return to this again and again, from Unixtalk through MOO through hypertext - as programming recedes. In this sense, programming imitates the discursive processes of late capitalism or hypercapitalism (Wired comes to mind), in which the simulacra of free- dom give way to... the simulacra of freedom. (It was Ben Hecht who said Hollywood is the place where you can scratch away the tinsel to find the real tinsel underneath.) But the labor of the subject, totally mediated in this format of reifi- cation, nonetheless returns the subject to hirself, hardly constructed, penetrated by language-substance which fills those deliberate wounds which are discovered gaps by those who would still believe in architecture. ___________________________________________________________________________ The Twenty-Six If I have one point to make, it is only that we remain beholden to the twenty-six and their variants. That images of orphaned parents stand at the threshold of our thinking. That no one is comfortable with pain. That there are limited stories, that stories have their logics, that we play them out. That stories are orphans, beholden to the parents, thrust against the repetition of the twenty-six. That speech carries the weight of the world, mouths move armament. That no excuse is excuse. That the twenty-six are pilloried by the events of this and other worlds. That the worlds are filled with noise fluttering the twenty-six. That noise is not chaos, that worlds are underdetermined. That logic never necessitates the impingement of the point. That "of course" follows its own course. That "gods have no hands." __________________________________________________________________________ Subject: Burnout but thinking about the Net as well, bit long (A bit long but hope I made it worthwhile.) Trying to figure out more about burnout. I _don't_ burnout on good discussion, on using the Net as a resource, at all. But there are always tensions between what is promised and what's really present, and this is true in terms of Net relationships - nothing can be real unless flesh- meets occur (and that term itself is painful) - and it's true of resources as well. Doing research on the Net, I find huge gaps everywhere - try searching down invertebrate paleontology for example, or serious art-history research tools. There's almost nothing. There are good discussions in the less-known newsgroups and fun for a while in some of the others. Everywhere, I'm aware of programming, working within the narrow confines of packaged creativity; on the MOO you dig without a license or fear of destroying the environment; in the news- groups, structures and stars develop quickly. Community develops so quickly everywhere that I wonder about its depth or sincerity; some of the most committed members of Cybermind have left for example, sudden disappearances that in real life would be accompanied by mourning or suspicions of death. I'm envious of successful cyber-relationships, love affairs. I find them almost impossible to maintain, and the sheer weight of real life dominates of course, ultimately either destroying them or making them leave the computer for the physical. But then I may not be built for this medium - my expectations are likely askew. Hypertext too seems problematic to me; the disruptions again are programmed and the holes in the text destroyed worlds with an automated consistency. MYST doesn't do that; sheer visuality overcomes and participates in the diegesis. But too often on text-driven web I've found myself losing track of the investigation, with the continuous presence of distractions. Gopher often deadends; ftp thank god made it to lynx where it's reasonably fast and you can read on-screen. Try finding though the poetry of John Skelton - it's there, hidden away - I stumbled upon it by accident - and have seen almost no references to it. And it's in .html just as everything here moves through the programmatic; if you read anything, it's by courtesy of a program that may or may not have tampered with the original. A lot of us are hurting, are looking for love, are sexual in the space. For myself, when the appropriate application closes, the screen slams against the body, emptying it completely of affect; one's faced not only with mortality but absolute isolation. The only recourse is to return again and again - it's the appeal of pornography - the _next image_ will do it finally for me, there will never be the need for another... And for me the email lists get closer to an ideal community; they have the time and space of thought between the posts, and the ability to work through reasonably complex ideas. They can present extremely long posts which can be searched, replied to, and thoughtfully sent back onto the queue. But the discussions often deadend early, participants leave, and the constant morphing means that a community of discourse often repeats its thinking, just as Cybermind might again and again bring up issues of embodiment that were discussed by members earlier, covering the same points. I find myself teaching on-line, editing on-line, loving on-line, being on-line, administering on-line. And trying to work through all of the above is ultimately trying to work through consistencies or stases within ascii text itself, posts by someone I really care about, or downloaded pictures of the Joshua Tree National Monument for example. I'm totally pro-Internet; the future is here, this is the frontier. But it's not miracles, it's not the edge of research (although on private email lists etc. it's a place where the edge is discussed), and it's exhausting. I don't think organic life was built for it. I don't think we have the radiowaves, the binary in our heads. But things will change; we have to realize we're on the cusp of something, and that's what keeps me going. The cusp is this: that the senses will _increase_ in this space, MOOs might actually reflect virtual architecture (_and_ the labor that is needed for any building), email lists might become capable of multimedia, and I can even look forward to the Burgess Shale fauna in a complete photographic catalog somewhere. At the moment, though, we should keep in mind both our privilege and our poverty, and the fact that this _isn't_ utopia by a long-shot. And if it's even going to approach real-life communities, it's going to take more commitment, maybe, than we're willing to give it. (And maybe more money. I've yet to even approach multi-media, and can't afford it. Only by virtue of the New School do I have any Mosaic and Netscape access - and my god, compared to the rate I move, they're unbearably slow. Maybe I should take prozak, ludes, anything to match the endless stuttering of the image upon the screen.) Alan - who apologizes for the awkwardness of his writing here, but he's been with a flu or cold or something and had MSG to boot in what was a great Chinese meal not on alt.food.chinese but actually in this place in the basement and the pineapple chicken was great. __________________________________________________________________________ Path and Road From Jabes, The Book of Dialogue: A young man went to see his Teacher and said: "May I talk to you?" The Teacher answered: "Come back tomorrow. Then we'll talk." The day after, the young man came back and said: "May I talk to you?" As on the day before, the Teacher answered: "Come back tomorrow. Then we'll talk." "I came yesterday and asked you this same question," replied the young man, disappointed. "Do you refuse to talk to me?" "We have been in dialogue since yesterday," replied the Teacher, smiling. "Whose fault if we have bad ears?" From Jabes, The Ineffaceable The Unperceived: THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF THE LAST BOOK The last book is the book of God, a book which would have been man's first had he been able to write it. Then there would be books and books all claiming to be the last. We shall never know the last book; perhaps because we have always, dimly, known it? Likewise God. You do not write what you know, but what you are unaware you know and then discover, without surprise, you have always known. As one knows that death is the end or that in a few hours it will be day. As if you were, in short, exploring a past diverted from the course of your memory, but originally yours. From Jabes, The Book of Resemblances: The book leans on the void. From Jabes, The Book of Resemblances: Any book is but a dim likeness of the lost book. "In each of us," he said, "there is a book that transforms us into words, as blood forms in the blood. "To each utterance each word, corresponds a heartbeat. "The book's price is the price of an alliance." (translation, Rosmarie Waldrop) The uncanny (dis)ordering of the book, book and Book, letters fluttered against the desert like sand unto sand, the ordering is implicate, folded, folds upon folds, the skin of the body turned, sloughed in the sun of the desert, glowing in the midst of sand melted into translucent glass. O the book is singularity, encompassing trace, paths of glass sheeting, discourse of continuity, utterance upon utterance beneath the burning wires of the sun, O the book writes itself upon us, inscribes us one to another, the gainsaying of death, lost voice dying out before writing brings us to ourselves, Jabes, "No book is complete." Jabes, "The world is exiled in the name. Within it there is the book of the world." Jabes, "I am a man's wanderings, path and road." We are your wandering. _________________________________________________________________________ Artificial Life I am still puzzling over entropy and information in relation to artificial life. Consider a suitably large enclosed screen environment, steady-state in terms of energy input from an "external" framework. Is it necessarily true then that the degree of entropy remains constant internally? Note that there is no _increase_ of energy in this model; the quantity E is also constant. _Within_ the environment, one can imagine local areas in non-equilibrium potential wells, and other areas remaining in equilibrium with a specified degree of disorder. Within the wells, information increases; this is ultimately a result of the external energy input. Such input transforms into _time._ The question is what happens to the entropy? In a closed system with finite energy, entropy increases; in our system, which may be considered _virtually open,_ entropy seems to decrease as information increases.* Ultimately, can one consider the environment _to- tally ordered,_ and what would constitute this? Would this be - or more to the point _could_ this be a form of self-organization, self-conscious- ness, and if the latter, would it conceivably involved the use of external data-storage devices? If so, these devices would presumably be aligned or internalized with the life-forms (I wrote a story about Travis in one of the Internet Text files about this); there would be no mechanical move- ment, no thought processes whatsoever, already a form of death... *which is the opposite I believe of the definition of entropy in informa- tion theory. (Can someone help with the mathematics here?) __________________________________________________________________________ hello hello are you there are you there answer me the server won't pick up try again hello hello dialing infra.com come in infra.com line's down again, stuttering all over the net i can see your right side do you hear me i can see no it's gone again hs for the past two hours forty minutes no lag isn't a factor corrupted transmission out againtry once more are you there hello heloo the hand or elbow not sure black male caucasian female the right side it's getting late grafting hello the sand's no not yet wind these tings damnn i it's changed forevr nw sun's unbearable out there the screen damn losig now power the server's gone us or them i don't kow atthis point it doesn't matter oesn't matter it's down its definitely down the right hand side was struck i thik the last thing one or two of them srvrs down nsr nsr h __________________________________________________________________________ why o gods the more i want to learn the more you turn away from me the more i beseech you with my words, the more your silence wounds i write again and again about my artificial life you burn out on language, oh technique my words dig deep into the essence of things, layer after layer unfolds, you remain silent on the surface yea, silent in the depths as well "from purusha, viraj was born, and from viraj, purusha was born" (rig veda, x, 90) from the rocky, earthen surface of the ocean, the fish floats in the sky. a little air kills, o gods. "he carried speech across first. when speech became free from death, it became agni (fire). agni, having stepped beyond death, shines." (brihadaranyaka upanishad) worse is to talk. far worse is to talk to oneself. the waves are ripples from a center at a distance worse than infinite. begging for precise language, my mouth hungers after the little rice remaining. empty, i send your thoughts to me. the sexuality of the first is illusion. the sexuality of the second is the first. the sexuality of the third is speech. why o gods the more I want to learn the more you turn away from me ______________________________________________________________________ horse sacrifice Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Muller trans: "He desired, 'Let a second body be born of me,' and he (death or hunger) embraced speech in his mind.' Briha- daranyaka Upanishad, Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty trans: "He desired, 'I wish that a second body were produced for me.' He, who was hunger, death, caused speech to copulate with mind." Possessive "his" in the first trans- forms everything. Continue with O'Flaherty; read carefully: "He desired, 'Let me sacrifice more, with a greater sacrifice.' He exhausted himself, and he generated heat in himself, and out of him as he was exhausted and heated came glory and virility. Now, glory and virility are the vital breaths, and so when the vital breaths had gone out of him, his body began to swell. His mind was in his body. "He desired, 'I wish this body were fit for sacrifice. I wish that I could have it for my own body.' And it became a horse (_ashva_) because it had swelled (_asvat_). 'It has become fit for sacrifice (medhyam),' he thought, and that is why the horse sacrifice is called the Ashva-medha. Whoever knows him in this way really knows the horse sacrifice." Muller in part: "He desired that this body should be fit for sacrifice and that he should be embodied by it. Then he became a horse, because it swelled, and was fit for sacrifice; and that is why the horse-sacrifice is called Asva-medha." Muller later: "He (who knows this) overcomes another death, death does not reach him, death is his Self, he becomes one of those deities." This is knowledge of "the sacrificial fire and the Asvamedha-sacrifice." O'Flaherty: "He (who knows this) conquers repeated death; death does not get him; he becomes one of these gods." The "chief queen" lays in the Shatapatha Brahmana with the suffocated horse; the attendants "make the chief queen (Mahishi) lie down next to the horse, and they cover the two of them with the upper cloth as they say the verse, 'Let the two of us cover ourselves in the world of heaven,' for the world of heaven is where they 'quiet' the sacrificial animal. Then they draw out the penis of the horse and place it in the vagina of the chief queen, while she says, 'May the vogorous virile male, the layer of seed, lay the seed'; this she says for sexual intercourse. While they are lying there, the sacrificer insults the horse by saying, 'Lift up her thighs and put it in her rectum.' No one insults (the sacrificer) back, lest there should be someone to act as a rival against the sacrificer." The horse is then dismembered and then there is a restoration. There are seeds of the Kalevala here, the restoration of Lemminkainen, Rune XV. Nasshut kills him: "There the blood-stained son of death-land, There Tuoni's son and hero, Cuts in pieces Lemminkainen, Chops him with his mighty hatchet"... and the pieces are thrown in the Tuoni. (John Martin Crawford trans) There is the beginning of a thread. Outside of Copenhagan, the reconstruction of a horse-sacrifice. Who sacrifices who for which knowledge is gained, who possesses which attributed disembodied/bodied/foreboded body? These questions are always already silenced. Turn now to the Poetic Edda, Havamal 138-139, Hollan- der's translation: "I wot that I hung on the wind-tossed tree all of nights nine, wounded by spear, bespoken to Othin bespoken myself to myself, [upon that tree of which none telleth from what roots it doths rise]. Neither horn they upheld nor handed me bread; I looked below me - aloud I cried - caught up the runes, caught them up wailing, thence to the ground fell again." Self-sacrifice again for knowledge, inverted, by one of the gods them- selves. Hollander's commentary: "Othin sacrificed himself by hanging himself on the World-Ash and wounding himself with his spear." Now for a variant, Bellows' translation, Hovamol 139-140: "I ween that I hung on the windy tree, Hung there for nights full nine; With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was To Othin, myself to myself, On the tree that none may ever know What root beneath it runs. None made me happy with loaf or horn, And there below I looked; I took up the runes, shrieking I took them, And forthwith back I fell." He gains "nine mighty songs" and stanza 147 again circulates among the realms: "Knowest how one shall write, knowest how one shall rede? Knowest how one shall tint, knowest how one makes trial? Knowest one one shall ask, knowest how one shall offer? Knowest how one shall send, knowest how one shall sacrifice?" The ritual/repetition enters into and among the realms. One may, if one desires, place the Crucifixion in the midst of these scenarios. The distinction of course is that the state mediates, which problematizes the act; why, if the mediation were necessary and desired by Deity itself, were the Jews repeatedly chastised for their complicity? Death itself weaves and sutures among the worlds, which are spoken and written; language pervades them. In cybermind, it is our own death that is sacrificed; on the rim, packets stutter, reminding us of the cloacal nature of the dead animal/chora where all is melange. Interpenetrations have no resolution; Othin connects from the tree, Mahishi through the lingam of the horse. Disembodiment can be dismemberment, the body trans- formed into the broken text; reassembled, the text remains. The body becomes its own tattoo, everything written in the irresolution, recup- eration of worlds. O'Flaherty: "Falling apart and coming back together again is seen in Vedic literature as the problem of creation." ... "In particular, things fall apart at their junctures or liminal points, joints; 'parvan' means both the joint of a human body (knee, elbow, and so forth) and the junctures or liminal moment of transition between one time period and another." ... "The problem of falling apart in the act of creation is then analogized to the ever-present fear that the sacrifice itself will fall apart or go wrong in some way, which makes necessary complex restorations (_prayashcitti_)" ... Moving among/between the worlds, sacrifice, death, soul, writing, speech all tangle in a Borromean knot; a single mistake unravels the hole/whole. The joints shimmer as they connect across ontologically separated domains, cyberspace to physical reality, the dismembered body dreaming to dreams of the membered body. They shimmer as interstitial connections, the fingers upon the keyboard, death announced over the computer screen. And they shimmer as conjunctions, junctures, concatenations, screen after screen in cyberspace, mind after mind throughout cybermind. Things seem terribly wrong and restoration is always part of the process; it is restoration that sutures worlds, and restoration is always after death. Healing is ontology and epistemology both; the body tears itself apart, sacrificing for the truth, hoping beyond hope that enough remains of good sense and perception to comprehend the remnants of self and desire in the debris. Opening of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Muller: "1. Verily the dawn is the head of the horse, which is fit for sacrifice, the sun its eye, the wind its breath, the mouth the Vaisvanara fire, the year the body of the sacrificial horse. Heaven is the back, the sky the belly the earth the chest, the quarters the two sides, the intermediate quarters the ribs, the members the seasons, the joints the months and half-months, the feet days and nights, the bones the stars, the flesh the clouds. The half-digested food is the sand, the rivers the bowels, the liver and the lungs the mountains, the hairs the herbs and trees. As the sun rises it is the forepart, as it sets the hindpart of the horse. When the horse shakes itself, then it lightens; when it kicks, it thunders; when it makes water, it rains; voice is its voice." [O'Flaherty: "speech is his whinny."] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Henry Adam Bellows, The Poetic Edda Lee M. Hollander, The Poetic Edda Elias Lonnrot, The Kalevala or Poems of the Kaleva District, translated by Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., also The Kalevala, The Epic Poem of Finland, translated by John Martin Crawford Nicol Macnicol, Hindu Scriptures Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism See also Rene Girard, Alphonso Lingis, Muller's translations of the Upanishads, passim. __________________________________________________________________________ cybermind: horse sacrifice ghost: what is substantial in one realm, translucent in another horse sacrifice: departure, resolution matter: what is substantial in its realm horse sacrifice: dismemberment echo: what is substantial in one realm, matter in another, form in the first horse sacrifice: horse sacrifice mind: what is substantial in one realm, active in another horse sacrifice: body of death. I lie down, fuck the horse. it's still warm. there are cloths and bodies on me. I open my eyes: Ghosts! number: what is substantial in one realm, passive in another horse sacrifice: enumeration of parts life: process, reproduction, negation horse sacrifice: dismembering intercourse intelligence: speech and phenomena horse sacrifice: speech fucks mind. year is born. year's spewed out by death. death starts to eat year. year says "Bhan!" that's speech. sacrifice: worlding, restoration, horse sacrifice horse sacrifice: sacrifice imaginary: mind and ghost horse sacrifice: horse sacrifice symbolic: matter and echo horse sacrifice: enumeration of members real: mind horse sacrifice: junctures, conjunctions. lines divide body. my limbs are charred, gnawed, numbered. Agni is fire, world is body. body: torn from me. horse sacrifice: torn from me. ________________________________________________________________________ Troping Around Ecocyb 1. Depression. The tiniest little thing makes me cry. The world is filled with clutter whose history is lost forever. Surely that doll made someone happy once upon a time. Surely there was a once upon a time. The cup I am holding was turned from a tree or fossil life before the existence of names. Did australopithecines have events. 2. The lot down the street remains emptied; it covers several city blocks, and building has not yet begun, politics or funds? The neighborhood suffers as a result; older businesses have disappeared, and new ones haven't gained a food-hold as a result of the shaky climate. 3. I watch my body cease to be my own; it desires to return somewhere, anywhere, outside of this realm of trashed illusion. Capitalism invented trash; traditional societies invented the kitchen-midden. Their archeologies are different; in late capitalism, knowledge = consumption. 4. I am never sick in cyberspace, but I _report_ my sickness. Environment sublimates hysterically into body. 5. On MOO, I say @dig and room exists, even if permits are necessary. Environment sublimates hysterically into text. 6. Do we have events. Fleshmeets are events, deaths are events. On email lists, voices disappear with an imminence that can only be described as uncanny, terrifying, if one insists on listening to absence. The cloaca is always already substitu- tion. 7. Here we are, clean and proper bodies; nothing oozes. What of this ultimate ideology of cleansing, with its dubious flight from the maternal, from abjection? One screams to whisper. Shower stalls. The lessons of Kristeva, Theweleit, come to mind. 8. Chislenko's writings on filtering (again): we manufacture ourselves, the ultimate postmodern constructivism. Essence, Jim Reith's coreman, disappears for the glitter of surface phenomena. The core itself abrogates essence, but at least within the machinery, the trolls are visible, mind in and out of the waters. And at least in the machinery, labor and its political economy are of major concern. 9. Learning magic _here_ is a form of separation; not only do we believe we are not killing species, but we also believe we can create new ones. Artificial life, character morphing. It's precisely in the obdurate nature of character/body in real life (with their atten- dent psychoanalyses, psychotherapies, surgeries) that negation or the con-fronting of the other occurs. In cyberspace, the other is consumed, subsumed, assumed, which is no other. How much of this problematic ideo- logy leaks _back_ into a foreclosing of the suffering of the real? 10. Living within the safe environment of the screen or screens, delimited in ways we can never foresee. 11. Depression: The tiniest little thing makes me cry. The world is filled with clutter whose history is lost forever. In cyberspace there is no history that is not the history of the real. 12. Which world is this anyway? My life is getting smaller. I wait for a slow wind to meander through the room, the roof to burst, evaporate, silently, perfectly, as if it were never there at all. ___________________________________________________________________________ Subject: Alan Searches for Abuse Alan Anguish shakily walks down the corridor of Media Moo looking for an angry fix. There's nothing there, contraptions frozen in an icy maw. Veronica refuses him her favors once again, Dewey speaks and shuts the hell up. He gets lost in the origin of numbers, pulls out, shrieks back to planet earth. All the words are his; the injections don't take any more, though - what can you do with a dismembered body? A. A. remembers Archie, splayed open, hunched against command line k:22> and turns on for abuse. Archie's busy. Archie's not _that_ busy. Alan splays for Veronica, for no one else. Archie turns the lever. Alan searches for abuse: Host ftp.univie.ac.at Location: /archive/faq DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Mar 31 16:14 net-abuse Host plaza.aarnet.edu.au Location: /usenet/FAQs DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Dec 17 20:18 alt.abuse.offender.recovery DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Dec 17 20:18 alt.abuse.recovery DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Dec 17 20:18 alt.abuse.transcendence DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Dec 9 19:51 alt.current-events.net-abuse Location: /usenet/FAQs/alt.current-events.net-abuse FILE -r--r--r-- 12015 Dec 9 03:24 alt.current-events.net-abuse_FAQ,_1_of_2 FILE -r--r--r-- 13222 Dec 9 03:24 alt.current-events.net-abuse_FAQ,_2_of_2 Location: /usenet/FAQs DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Dec 17 20:20 alt.sexual.abuse.recovery DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Dec 17 20:20 alt.sexual.abuse.recovery.d DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Dec 17 20:20 alt.support.abuse-partners Host ftp.unicamp.br Location: /pub1/gopher-data/FAQ-RFC-DICAS/Frequently-Asked-Questions DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Feb 4 18:17 net-abuse Host freebsd.cdrom.com Location: /.9/rtfm DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Sep 16 1994 alt.abuse.offender.recovery DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Sep 16 1994 alt.abuse.recovery DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Sep 16 1994 alt.abuse.transcendence DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Sep 16 1994 alt.sexual.abuse.recovery DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Sep 16 1994 alt.sexual.abuse.recovery.d DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Sep 16 1994 alt.support.abuse-partners Location: /pub/aminet/mods/pro FILE -rw-r--r-- 240495 Jul 3 1993 DrMabuseMods.lha FILE -rw-r--r-- 79 Jul 3 1993 DrMabuseMods.readme Host qiclab.scn.rain.com Location: /pub1/overview/alt DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 Feb 27 16:53 abuse Location: /pub1/overview/alt/current-events DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 May 1 07:19 net-abuse Location: /pub1/overview/alt/government DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 May 1 07:21 abuse Location: /pub1/overview/alt/sexual DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 Feb 27 17:17 abuse Location: /pub1/overview/alt/support DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 May 1 07:25 abuse-partners Location: /pub1/overview/lt DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 Feb 27 17:50 abuse Location: /pub1/overview/news/admin DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 Apr 14 08:01 net-abuse Host ftp.tcp.com Location: /pub/QRD/events FILE -r--r--r-- 5367 Oct 16 00:00 same.sex.abuse.conference-10.22.94 Location: /pub/QRD/orgs/contacts FILE -r--r--r-- 1239 Apr 10 1992 glb-substance-abuse Location: /pub/QRD/world/americas/canada FILE -r--r--r-- 3137 Mar 21 1994 dr.sexual.abuse.of.aids.patient-03.14.94 Host think.com Location: /mail DIRECTORY dr-xr-xr-x 512 Dec 12 1991 joy-abuse Location: /mail/joy-abuse/rochester FILE -r--r--r-- 5515 Oct 22 1990 randy-abuse Host ftp.belwue.de Location: /news/spool/overview/alt DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Feb 14 1994 abuse Location: /news/spool/overview/alt/current-events DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Jul 17 1994 net-abuse Location: /news/spool/overview/alt/sexual DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Feb 12 1994 abuse Host cocoa.contrib.de Location: /t1/pub/doc/FAQ/control/alt FILE -rw-rw-r-- 617 Aug 14 1993 alt.abuse-recovery.gz FILE -rw-rw-r-- 435 Apr 19 1993 alt.abuse.offender.recovery.gz FILE -rw-rw-r-- 1736 Nov 1 1993 alt.abuse.recovery.gz FILE -rw-rw-r-- 664 Jun 19 1994 alt.abuse.transcendence.gz FILE -rw-rw-r-- 434 Jun 26 1994 alt.current-events.net-abuse.c-n-s.gz FILE -rw-rw-r-- 930 May 3 1994 alt.current-events.net-abuse.gz FILE -rw-rw-r-- 1172 Jul 19 1994 alt.sexual.abuse.recovery.d.gz FILE -rw-rw-r-- 1936 Apr 24 1992 alt.sexual.abuse.recovery.gz FILE -rw-rw-r-- 348 Aug 26 1993 alt.support.abuse-partners.gz Location: /t1/pub/doc/FAQ/usenet/alt FILE -rw-rw-r-- 28836 Apr 16 1992 alt.sexual.abuse.recovery.gz Location: /t4/pub/text/etext/Politics/Feminism/GenderIssues/Violence+Women/TeachingGuide FILE -rw-rw-r-- 12427 Jun 29 1993 3wife-abuse.gz Location: /t4/pub/text/etext/Politics/QRD/info/CONTACTS FILE -rw-rw-r-- 1239 Apr 8 1992 glb-substance-abuse FILE -rw-rw-r-- 806 Apr 8 1992 glb-substance-abuse.gz Location: /t4/pub/text/etext/Politics/QRD/info/contacts FILE -rw-rw-r-- 1239 Apr 8 1992 glb-substance-abuse 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alt.current-events.net-abuse Location: /pub/usenet-by-group/alt.current-events.net-abuse FILE -rw-rw-r-- 12015 Dec 9 03:24 alt.current-events.net-abuse_FAQ,_1_of_2 FILE -rw-rw-r-- 13222 Dec 9 03:24 alt.current-events.net-abuse_FAQ,_2_of_2 Location: /pub/usenet-by-group DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 Dec 17 00:39 alt.sexual.abuse.recovery DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 Dec 17 00:39 alt.sexual.abuse.recovery.d DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 Dec 17 00:39 alt.support.abuse-partners Location: /pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/alt DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 Sep 2 1994 abuse Location: /pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/alt/current-events DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 Dec 9 03:24 net-abuse Location: /pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/alt/current-events/net-abuse FILE -rw-rw-r-- 12015 Dec 9 03:24 alt.current-events.net-abuse_FAQ,_1_of_2 FILE -rw-rw-r-- 13222 Dec 9 03:24 alt.current-events.net-abuse_FAQ,_2_of_2 Location: /pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/alt/sexual DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 Sep 1 1993 abuse Location: /pub/usenet-by-hierarchy/alt/support DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 Dec 17 00:39 abuse-partners Host ftp.cis.ohio-state.edu Location: /tknews/beta.94.10.24/src/newsapi FILE -rw-r--r-- 1516 Oct 24 16:10 abuse.c Host nova.cc.purdue.edu Location: /pub/next/lore FILE -rw-r--r-- 9383 Feb 27 1992 abuse.tar.Z Host sonata.cc.purdue.edu Location: /pub/next/lore FILE -rw-r--r-- 9383 Feb 27 1992 abuse.tar.Z Host relay.cs.toronto.edu Location: /pub/usenet/news.answers DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Jan 8 04:19 net-abuse Host uceng.uc.edu Location: /pub/wuarchive/systems/amiga/aminet/mods/techn FILE -rw-rw-r-- 240495 Aug 2 1993 DrMabuseMods.lha FILE -rw-rw-r-- 139 Oct 30 20:39 DrMabuseMods.readme Host ftp.cs.widener.edu Location: /pub/eff/legislation FILE -r--r--r-- 10920 Jan 5 14:59 computer-fraud-and-abuse-act Host ftp.univ-lyon1.fr Location: /usenet-stats/groups/alt FILE -rw-r--r-- 1952 Dec 3 20:23 alt.sexual.abuse.recovery Host ftp.univ-rennes1.fr Location: /listes-de-diffusion/Quelques-archives-de-listes-Nationales/flexfax.archive FILE -rw-r--r-- 626 Jan 17 1994 0004.I-am-sorry.-I-didn't-intend-to-abuse-this-list. Host ftp.germany.eu.net Location: /pub/newsarchive/news.answers DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Jan 14 22:24 net-abuse Host ftp.uu.net Location: /government/umich-poli/Feminism/GenderIssues/Violence+Women/TeachingGuide FILE -rw-rw-r-- 12718 Jul 7 1994 3wife-abuse.gz Host unix.hensa.ac.uk Location: /pub/uunet/usenet/news.announce.newgroups/soc FILE -r--r--r-- 16718 Oct 20 16:06 soc.support.recovery.abuse Location: /pub/uunet/usenet/news.answers DIRECTORY drwxr-xr-x 512 Jan 9 12:14 net-abuse Anguish decides too much violence, pulls out, Veronica leaves with him. Travis drives the spaceship - if you got this far, if you read the Internet Text - you'll know all about Travis. Whatever life there was, he found... __________________________________________________________________________ Net Sentience I want to go over, again, issues of Net sentience, emergent intelligence, which I find impossible, given the current configuration of the network. So please bear with me. Consider this as "why the Internet can't think." First, beyond echo, there is no looping in the structure. There is hand- shaking among the computers, and reports on successful/unsuccessful transmission of packets, but there is no complex/holarchic organization. In fact, looping leads to black holes, to breakdown. Second, the transmission is in the form of packets. Packets are sent independently of one another from site to site, reassembled at the site. They cannot act together in the midst of transmission. Third, the Net utilizes the old NSF-backbone; everything is done to simplify connectivity. Neural networks rely on multiply-connected and interacting model neurons ("neurodes"); in the human brain, a neuron is directly and continuously connected to 10,000-100,000 others. Fourth, the Net uses five protocol levels simultaneously, each encapsul- ating the others; this creates a situation of "inertia" at the stage of the symbolic (interpreted as content by the user - for example, the text of an email post). Note that the text has _no relation_ to the underlying protocol structure. There is a deep division between content and network. Here is where confusion arises; community and community's interacting vis-a-vis message bases on the Internet do not constitute the level of interactivity that would be necessary for Net sentience. Fifth, there is no thresholding involved (with the exception of resending packets for a specified length of time, then reporting error messages if they do not get through). There is, in other words, no conceivable model of neural networks within the TCP/IP transmissions. Sixth, on the other hand, sixth hand, the development of intelligent search and filtering agents will leads to the implantation of neural networking programs _on_ the Net, just as there are already intelligent agents/bots on the MOOs and IRC. There is no reason why these would not eventually become sentient (we're talking a decade or so), communicating with one another. This leads to the notion of ENTITY spanning the wires, not "in" them. In Naturally Intelligent Systems, Caudill and Butler define the following characteristics of neural networks; my comments follow in brackets: 1. A neural network is composed of a number of very simple processing elements that communicate through a rich set of interconnections with variable weights or strengths. [The processing elements of the Net are task-specific, complex, and use a very rich set of over 100 protocols, which do not have variable weights. Eventually a priority weighting may be instituted, determining the speed of transmission of specific mes- sages.] 2. Memories are stored or represented in a neural network in the pattern of variable interconnection weights among the neurodes. Information is processed by a spreading, constantly changing pattern of activity distributed among many neurodes. [Memories are address bases at best, for routing. _Transmission_ is processed by a spreading...] 3. A neural network is taught or trained rather than programmed. [TCP/IP is programmed, not taught or trained.] 4. Instead of having a separate memory and controller, plus a stored external program that dictates the operation of the system as in a digital computer, the operation of a neural network is implicitly controlled by three properties: the transfer function of the neurodes, the details of the structure of the connections among the neurodes, and the learning law the system follows. [The Internet uses the stored external program model.] 5. A neural network naturally acts as an associative memory. That is, it inherently associates items it is taught, physically grouping similar items together in its structure. [Intelligent address routing may be a possibility, using roaming agents to determine the fast path from site to site, depending on the health of the Net. Beyond this, associative memory plays little role in the organization of the Net.] 6. A neural network is able to generalize; it can learn the character- istics of a general category of objects based on a series of specific examples from that category. [This does not occur in any way on the Net.] 7. It is highly fault tolerant, or "fail soft." This characteristic is sometimes also called "graceful degradation." A neural network keeps working even after a significant fraction of its neurodes and inter- connections have become defective. [This is true of the Net, and is the major characteristic of TCP/IP, which is designed to continue working even if specific sites go under.] 8. A neural network innately acts as a processor for time-dependent spatial patterns, or spatiotemporal patterns. [This applies as well, considering the formatting and reassemblage of packets.] 9. A neural network can be self-organizing. [The Net is not self-organ- izing.] (Some characteristics abridged.) It seems to me that intelligence will appear through neural networking approaches, rather than hard-wired, hard-weighted approaches; in any case, these more mobile architectures are coming into AI with real results. (The cockroach program I mentioned a while ago is based on a neural network.) The brain, any brain, uses somewhat similar but more complex systems; the Internet, however, does not. The Internet is redundant, but uses fixed programs, protocols, to ensure transmission. Intelligence may be _on_ the Net, may travel the Net, but the Net itself is passive, as passive as the phone system. If this is the case, why does the spectre of Net sentience keep getting raised here and elsewhere? I believe this is because of user interaction, the amazing communality that develops on a human/languaging level. We tend to believe that there is mind simultaneously within and beneath the words (just as poetry and incantation carry a weight beyond the facticity of protocol statements), that the mind is growing, and somehow manifest or imminent. We also tend to believe in over-minds, even now, an inheritance from science fiction (and religious transcendentalism), that there is a Spirit which communicates with us, and that it is everywhere, in the midst of our speech itself. Because the Internet is a multiply-connected global network, because it appears inexhaustible and an open architecture on the level of the user, it appears to be the (immanent) site for something else, something "driving it" ... This is, however, a result of our own projections/introjections (what I've called "jectivity" elsewhere), not a reality; much as we may desire it, Net sentience is better left to our minds and future bots. __________________________________________________________________________ Listen to this, Travis: "In reality we ourselves make cinema by living it: that is, by existing practically; that is, by acting. _All of life, in the whole of its actions, is a natural, living, cinema: in this, it is linguistically the equivalent of oral language in its natural and biological dimension._ By living, therefore, we represent ourselves, and are present at the representation of others. The reality of the human world is nothing other than this double representation in which we are both actors and specta- tors: a gigantic happening, if you like." (Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, in Pier Pasolini, Naomi Greene, Cinema as Heresy.) And this: "Cinema is not a universal or primitive language system ('langue') nor even a language ('langage'). It brings forth an intelligible matter, which is like a presupposition, a condition, a necessary correlation through which language constructs its own 'objects' (unities and signifying opera- tions)." (Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II, quoted in Greene.) What's the matter in cyberspace? Listen in any case: Travis sat down facing the terminal. He could hear the sea lapping on distant shores. welcome to the pavilions of stuttering speech the beginning of the mouth of the message he had left cyberspace unannounced no-announcement is a preparation a preparation is always lost his fingertips were damaged through hours of practice at the glass-harmonica it was a case of nerves as the bowls spun in their wooden frame it was his habit his touch with something other than the keyboard it sat in the corner an eighteenth century memory of his future the lights blinked ceaselessly as he began the slow descent in the midst of the starfield he thought to himself that sometime he would have to begin the process of memory for what is the vain endeavor of the paysage of faces and lanterns Travis thought of stars. He thought of the matter of stars, enormous, inchoate, all culture's reversion to the molecular, along the fringes of solar storms. He opened his mouth to speak but he had nothing to say. The lanterns were beautiful and so were the illuminated faces. He couldn't speak. ________________________________________________________________________ Carefully Read Before Anything Else! ... "whereas our whole art struggles to enforce the 'life,' the 'reality' of fictive beings, the very structure of Japanese restores or confines these beings to their quality as _products,_ signs cut off from the alibi referential par excellence: that of the living thing." (Barthes, Empire of Signs.) To be sure, by way of a _necessary introduction,_ a capital surmounting the column of prose, to which I dedicate this post, from henceforth until two days following, write in and be included! Fortune: You will become involved with the person who has written you the very text post; my lover frames it with the following post. If this is, in other words, post x, be assured that your future partner has written x+1, and that my current partner is to be found, alas, separated from me, in x+2. However, I am owed a great deal of money by the individual who has written the _post before last_ - just so you know who you're dealing with... And happiness becomes me! Three posts down, immediately following my current partner at x+2, please note: My child has written a first post to the Internet! As a proud father, I am sharing this with you; please forgive my immodest behavior in this instance! Alas, three posts before this, at unlucky x-3 (and luck always comes in threes!), the cause of my death - decades from now. Read back three posts, and all will be revealed... But again, what concern is that of yours? It is _this very post_ that tells of _your_ good fortune, future happiness, and a life filled with joyous accomplishments! I salute you! Alan! ________________________________________________________________________ My Use of Quotation My quoting of text presaging the future presence of cyberspace - the trace, filigree, found in these older works - as if disembodiment, era- sure, effacement, distantiation, presencing, introjection and projection, had an uneasy relationship to the future imaginary - the quotes from everywhere and nowhere at all, magic, fetishization, unexplainable phen- omena, all moving from the explanatory realm, hurtling towards the elec- tronic highway, destination unknown, lanterns and ghosts, shimmering for ests curtseying as the car disappears, the passengers holding the reins - It's this kind of note that seeds a text, frames it at the level of the curtain rod opening onto a senseless space. The space is as shallow as the Net is shallow, not infinite information by a long shot, but selected tropes depending upon the taste of someone carrying a book or document into the electronic. I am aware of Ovid, the Icelandic Runic Poem, Lucan, Kraus, Old Hittite, the Rig Veda, Manning on four-dimensional space, the list, irregular as can be, goes on and on. And I search for these roots, Barthes' writing on Japanese (which he probably got wrong) lending itself towards cybermind, this or that mathematics, Jabes, Bharata, Blake and Chatterton, all as if haunted, presaging... And it's not that I trace these texts as historic curiosities, but instead as a book of emblems constituting the discourse of cybermind itself, which did not begin with the Internet, won't end with it... Alan, clarifying, thinking out loud - ____________________________________________________________________________