I have
attempted
to build a theoretical machine that perceives time.
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
The inaudible becomes 'the actual heard sound", a nonsense that "implies what is absent.
" The logic o f the unconscious, while appearing as a masque o f characters, points always to a single unconsciousness (one could say an
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? exemplary one). Once we enter into the associative, non-narrative logic of the Wakean dream we find that any paragraph provides us, as John Bishop says, "with as set of vectors that point to an absent content--'the presence (of a curpse)' --into the 'eyewitless foggus' of whose 'trapped head' the process of reading the Evening World leads. " The (unconsciousness of our "humptyhillhead," our "one stable somebody" "aslip" in the text, becomes the underlying organizational locus around which the text can be understood, aroundwhichitwaswritten. Thislocusistheinaudible,andthetemporalconditionsof our form of life emerge out of the ontological crisis attending everynight.
The enfolding o f syntax and semantics in Finnegans Wake follows the description of musical intelligibility that Schopenhauer gave in his later essay "On the Metaphysics of Music" :
music is a means o f making intelligible rational and irrational numerical relations, not, like arithmetic, with the aid of the concept, but by bringing them to a knowledge that is quite direct and simultaneously affects the senses. The connexion o f the metaphysical significance o f music with this its physical and arithmetical basis rests on the fact that what resists our apprehension, namely the irrational relation or dissonance, becomes the natural image of what resists our
will, and, conversely, the consonance or the rational relation, by easily adapting itselfto our apprehension, becomes the image of the satisfaction of the will, (n, 450-51)
The will becomes visible in music (in our hearing music) as the description of an interpretive stance we take from within music: 'I understand this music (or as music)! ' or
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? 'I do not understand this music (or as music)! '. This hardly does justice to Schopenhauer, but it does resonate with Wittgenstein's description o f will as an interpretive stance within language.
How is "Understanding a sentence. . . much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think" (PI? 527). Understanding must be distinguished from "the hearing of a tune or a sentence: these are mental processes" (PI? 154). Such hearing, like "a pain's growing more and less," is a perceptual state with defined duration. But my understanding of a word is not a continuous experience (as if all the words I understand paradebeforeme). Howthenismyunderstandingakintounderstandingathemein music? Wittgenstein says,
What I mean is that understanding a sentence lies nearer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called understanding a musical theme. Why isjust this the pattern of variation in loudness and tempo? One would like to say "Because I know what it's all about. " But what is it all about? I should not be able to say. In order to 'explain' I could only compare it with something else which has the same rhythm (I mean the same pattern). (One says "Don't you see, this is as if a conclusion were being drawn" or "This is as it were a parenthesis", etc. How does onejustify such comparisons? --There are very different kinds ofjustifications here. (PI? 527)
I can understand music (at least I can recognize that something is music from within a form of life within which that music makes sense as music), but how can I explain what it is about? "About" seems like the wrong word here. Music is contentless as something that can be translated into words. Thus the point at which I can say I understand music
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? but I cannot explain it marks a kind of limit point (as Wittgenstein says, this phrase of music "is as if a conclusion were being drawn" etc. ). These analogies are justified primarily by their success in explaining how this music is music, or how it might mean something as music. The criteria for the success o f my explanation might entail you saying "I understand".
Wittgenstein's point in making this comparison, however, is to show how our understanding of a sentence (in ordinary life) might be like understanding music. A failure to understand marks the boundaries ofour involvement, it does not describe this involvement. This boundary, however, is our point o f entry into music (or a language game). Wittgenstein focuses his remark on the point o f incommensurabity between languageandmusic. Thisincommensurabilitysignalsourinclusion(orfromtheotherside our exclusion) within a language game. The content of our inclusion (signaled by an awareness of an incommensurability--our inability to explain what the music is about) is the demand that we either recognize the logic of the music within which our stance toward the sound is as toward music, or we reject this logic and therefore the music as anything but noise. Thus this incommensurability signals an ontological demand, a demand to recognize something as a particular thing ("Theology as grammar), but acknowledging (or accepting) the limits of grammar as the limits of my world. My claim that I understand or do not understand this music can be intoned (another kind of meaningful sound) or be accompanied by certain facial expressions that suggest my intention to either learn or reject these sounds as music. My stance in the face of mis- or non-understanding, with its vector of learning or rejection, signals a shift in my state if this state is understood as a
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? grammatical state--or rather a shift in the sense of the world. Such a shift changes what is included within that world as sensible, determining often times what and who has a claim on me.
The expression o f these ontological demands (whether to learn a new grammar within which I recognize both Stravinsky's Les Noces as music and myself as hearing music), like the patterns described by my failure or success in performing within language games, keeps time. This time is a measure o f "the life (C(C)t|v) o f soul in a movement o f passage from one way o f life (Piov) to another. " One way o f imagining the soul, therefore, is as a description o f the changing expressions o f my stance toward the world in which this stance involves a choice (or a possibility) to recognize the essence of something, what something is, within a world, form o f life, language game within which I function. This amounts to a temporal aesthetic. Such an aesthetic attempts to negotiate among what Wittgenstein calls, in Alice Ambrose's notes, the "solipsism o f the present moment: 'All that is real is the experience o f the present moment'," the problem o f duration, and the relations made visible in language games as aspects, attitudes, states, and pictures(p. 25-28). 7We inhabit our temporality neither within a solipsism of the moment,
nor as an epiphenomenon, nor as a given, but as a modulating set o f temptations that both limit and make possible our language use. Wittgenstein resists William James' "'The present thought is the only thinker', which makes the subject o f thinking equivalent to the experience. " It is this equivalence and its temporal solipsism that suggests a stream-of- consciousness as a picture of our consciousness. 8
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? In Investigations and the Wake, time functions, emerges, and disappears through expectation, hope, belief language games, in the narratives describing memory, actions, intentions, and so on. This suggests that there is not a unitary sense of time, but rather a variety o f temporal grammars, themselves shifting in such a way that our sense o f time changes and flies and crawls (and in this change create another temporal grammar, always
atthelimitofsense). ThetherapeuticgoaldeterminingmuchofWittgenstein'slater philosophy seems to dissolve our temporal awareness in the transparency o f our ordinary language use (the time described by any particular language game). At the same time he rejectsthestructurallysimilarmachine-as-symbol-futurity. Therelationbetweenthe grammar o f time enacted in our practices and the meta-temporal limit generated by and excluded from these practices remains obscure. His discussion of this in the Brown Book I find incomplete. All versions of time and the differences expressing them are grammatically embedded: they are just at varying distances from our other practices.
Philosophical time creates the illusion o f no-time, not only in its drive toward viewing ourselves sub specie aetemitatis, but in its use of picturing and representation as the form of truth. But what is the effect of turning this picturing into 'mere' metaphor? Representation as a form o f knowing is in my sense a-temporal. We confuse these versions o f time with consciousness, self-consciousness, and forms o f unconsciousness. Understanding marks a grammatical limit that creates one dimension of time, but in this it only exposes the grammatical embodiment of time in all our language games (I want to say here, invoking Augustine, time is our 'soul'). That we are not self-conscious, i. e. , when 'time flies', means time is experienced as a function of our activity and not as a function of
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? our self-reflection. 'Crawling time' is more the condition ofbeing aware ofthe disjunction between this self-reflection and our actions. But in each case time remains a function of our grammar, an expression o f our grammar. The emergence o f time as such a grammatical condition, as an effect within and as our being within our form o f life, posits ourpracticesasfunctioningwithinatotalitythatlimitsusaswhatweare. Icallthisthe emergenceofatheology. Wittgensteindoesnotinvestigatethemeaningofthis grammatical condition, and thus he does not bring out the moral and theological implications of our stances toward ourselves within language. But he shows a number of sites where this morality can emerge.
The effect of grounding our thought in the ordinary, in our grammar, therefore, I think, generates our being as theologically embedded. The consequence of the concentration on the ordinary seems to me to generate a theology as the limit o f the ordinary, and thus suggests the significance o f form o f life as a dynamic conceptual limit, or the different voices and names Kierkegaard assumes around the limit of Christianity. For Kierkegaard, religion serving at a distance from philosophy constructs and requires moral obligations and descriptions, a resistance to the ontological. I invoke Kierkegaard here partly because I have often used both philosophy and art in a way that is cognate with his masks. But I do not don these forms in order to resist either science o f ontological limits, but rather to expose their claim and describe ways of meaning or inhabiting languageinrelationtothem. InWittgenstein,unlikeinKierkegaard,whatIamcallingthe theological has an ontological force. I do not mean that it is metaphysical in his sense; it
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? does not make essential claims about reality, but rather acts to temporalize the world as what we are.
InPhilosophicalInvestigationseverythingseemsbothaudibleandinaudible. Is Wittgenstein's questioning directed at an absolute limit as is Augustine's confession and Aquinas' dialectic? The shift from the Tractatus with its transcendental limit beyond saying, but determining all forms of value and constituting our being, to the Investigations can be described as the reconceptualization of the limit toward which any self-reflection (description) and interrogation takes place. The Tractarian limit between the world of factsandthenon-psychologicalT outsidethisworldistranslatedandembedded,in
Investigations,withinlanguageandhumanpractices. ThislimitinInvestigationscannot be articulated as such within it. Investigations describes (although it is not this 'itself) a shifting set of temporal periods from within our form of life: the limit of being human that describes temporality is within (not outside) our form o f life.
1How should one understand the interaction and difference between being and identity in the Investigations?
2 It is not a possibility o f movement that is denied in the sentence "It's not possible to move this desk without removing a good number o f the books on top o f it. " This is really a limiting condition on an already determined possibility.
3 From the functioning o f signs in any measurement or awareness or constitution o f time I am tempted intotwodirections. Ifmeasurementandexistencecoincidethenoneisboundtoaskiftheexistenceof timeisontologicallywarranted. Thiscansoundlikephysics,thespatializationoftime,orthe dimensional description of space-time, in Minkowski's diagrams, as layers of space and time extending as apictureofmovementthroughacube. Theontologicaldescriptionoftimemightalsoleadonetomodal logic or to something like Quine's spatialization of time and the elimination of tense (in relation to the descriptionofmeaninginWordandObject). WecanlinktemporalmarkerstopronounsasQuinedoes: "Wecantreattheindicatorwords'now'and'then'onaparwith'I'and'you',assingularterms. . . 'I now' and 'I then' mean 'I at now', 'I at then'; the custom just happens to be to omit the 'at' here, as in 'redwine'(173). Quineassumes,ashesaysthat"thetemporaryandshiftingobjectsofreferenceof'I' and 'you' are people, those of 'now' and 'then' are times or epochs" (173).
Thiscanseemmisleading. Benviniste,in"SubjectivityinLanguage,"arguesthatpronounsdo not in fact refer, but mark the dependence of language on a formal subject: "these pronouns are distinguished from all other designations a language articulates in that they do not refer to a concept or to an individual. " "There is no concept 'I' that incorporates all the I's that are uttered at every moment in
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? the mouths o f all speakers, in the sense that there is a concept "tree" to which all the individual uses of tree refer"(226). There exists no "lexical entity" to which I can refer. "How could the same term refer indifferently to any individual whatsoever and still at the same time identify him in his individuality? " I refers to something "Exclusively linguistic: I refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced, and by this it designates the speaker. " This designation is distinguished from reference to objects(bodiesetc. ). Thiscreatesthecategoryof"person",anddoesnotasinQuinereferto"people". The confusion o f reference arises from a vagueness in the description o f indexical reference:
[T]here seems to be no description, not even an indexical one, capable o f giving the meaning of T. Forexample,'theuttererofthesewords'willnotdoasadefinition,sinceIcouldusethat descriptiontorefertothepersonIampresentlyquoting. Thesemanticsoftheword'I'seemsto come to no more and no less than the fact that it use it literally is to refer to oneself. (Bach, 176)
Bach argues, however, that third person reference distinguishes between Iocutionary meaning o f sentence anditsillocutionaryforcedeterminedbythespeakersintention. Thatisthemeaningof'he'candescribe the meaning o f 'he' in "He is G', but its referent can only be determined through the intention o f the speaker(whothespeakermeanstobereferringto). Thevaguenessortheindeterminacyofpronoun reference and the possibilities for mistake (Bach's example of replacing a picture which someone refers to blindly with someone else) suggest that "[reference occurs only at the illocutionary level, where the speaker's referential intention plays and essential role" (186-87). 3 Is intention parasitic on the semantics of'I'?
4 Hoping, intending (in the sense o f expecting) are what Wittgenstein calls a state (not a process): Expectation is, grammatically a state; like, being of an opinion, hoping for something, knowing something,beingabletodosomething. Butinordertounderstandthegrammarofthesestatesit isnecessarytoask: "Whatcountsasacriterionforanyone'sbeinginsuchastate? "(? 572)
Askingwhatkindofcriteriondetermines anyonebeinginsuchastateaskswhatkindofstateis expecting,hoping,knowing,beingabletodosomething? Weknowtheyarenotmentalstates.
s For breif discussion o f Aquinas' development o f Aristotlian actuality see Joseph Owens "Aristotle and Aquinas"inTheCambridgeCompaniontoAquinas, 50-55. AlsoSTIa. 7. 1.
6 Another way o f doing this would be to write a synthetic text as if from within the historical period, for example to describe and analyze Aquinas' Summa Theologica as if from within the theology o f the Summa itself.
7In Wittgenstein's Lectures, Cambridge, 1932-1935.
8 Wittgenstein objects to the metaphysical temptation to say only the present is real, not to using 'the stream o f consciousness' use as a means o f describing our phenomenal experience.
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? V
MACHINE TIME: THE SCIENCE OF BUILDING A FUTURE
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? 14
Machine Time
14. 1 Constructing a time machine (the Self-Inductor) at the limit between cause and interpretation
We can ask for the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, as it were, from inside the security of acting as animate creatures. What would it mean to ask about this distinction from outside our inclusion within these interpretative distinctions. As I suggested earlier this is how cognitive science begins. Its ultimate goal would be the replacement of the psychology we have developed from within our interpretations of our experience with a psychology built from experimental data describing the causal structures andinteractionsofourbrain. Thus,thequestionhowcouldwebuildthedistinction between the animate and the inanimate outside (relative to non-causal language games) of ourinterpretativelanguagecanonlybeansweredbyscience. ThatisnotwhatIam pursuing here. I am asking instead what does it mean to be so built or so described (as an effect within a causal chain)?
I am building in this chapter a causal aesthetic, turning causal principles (a simplified scientific world) into an allegorical picture o f building a mind within itself, but limitedbyitsworld. Inmanywaysthismodelwillenactanaspectofthephilosophical aestheticofthedissertationasawhole. Themockengineeringinthischapterwillnot, therefore, be an exercise in cognitive philosophy, but in philosophical aesthetics: an allegory about how ontological limits describe ways of making sense through the process
Notes for this chapter are on page 613
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? o f building. Call this thinking by making machines as fictions that excavate how an T becomes an 'our' and difference becomes a time.
My machines arejugs which think ofthemselves as minds. Such a fiction means something within a variety of contexts (in philosophy or science fiction or cognitive science). Mygoalhereisneithertoexplorethatmeaningnortheassumptionsofthose contexts and uses. I am using these machines (as fictions and as causal models) to make visible the possibilities of orienting ourselves within the causal limits these machine(s) describe. Thisorientationismeanttopressuretheconfusedcollapseofmodelsof animation and mind into interpretive allegories (in order to give them a kind o f ontological
force) that I described in Jakobson and Vendler and in a different way in Romantic fragmentsingeneralandinKeatspowerfulimageofsoul-making. Soul-makingforme, operates toward the limits of person-making not as a replacement for person-making (for science). In this sense this engineering exercise is a theological exercise meant to question how we apply our interpretations o f art and texts and others as versions o f minds.
If models of mind underlie many of our aesthetic models and many of the ways in which we enter, exit and interpret ourselves within metaphors, allegories, and language games,thenmodelsofthemindcanmakevisibledifferentkindsofaesthetics. Thismight meanthattheoriesofmindshouldbeunderstoodasaestheticmodels. WhileIthinkthat this is true, for the most part, this does not diminish these theories, nor does it tells us much about what kind of aesthetics these are. A full analysis of a theory of mind as an aesthetic would require another dissertation. What my machine(s) are meant to do is to showthekindofaestheticsuchtheoriescangenerate. Inotherwords,howwouldwe
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? inhabit a world described by and large by causal and mathematical limits as meaningful without ignoring those limits? My machines suggest a way o f beginning to orient ourselves in relation to these limits in a way that will move beyond the kind of pictures of the subjunctive enacted by both Heidegger in "Das Ding" and Eliot in The Waste Land. This is why I think it describes a kind o f theology.
In answering the question cwhat does it mean to be built or described as an effect within a causal chain? ' I have attempted to build a set of theoretical machines that perceive time by figuring themselves (in a fundamental sense) within the temporal order they perceive. 1 By this process the machines construct themselves within a world of temporal surfaces: they figure themselves continually and as the succession o f limits that determine their experience as anything. This is a picture of the writing at limits that I have investigatedinWittgenstein,Joyce,Eliot,Keats,andHeideggerfromtheunderside. Itis not meant to generate a theory, but to offer itselfas another writing toward and at these limits.
This means I have experimented in a form of Science Fiction, in which I have attempted to slice an aspect o f the logic o f human temporality out o f the conscious/ unconscious logic ofthe human mind. The problem in constructing a Time-perceiving machine is in constructing a future, which means constructing a fundamental ontological belief that the future exists.
I have attempted to build a theoretical machine that perceives time. Suchatimemachinesimplifiesourconsciousapprehensiontothebasicprocessof determining successive differences. I will use bits of this machine in order to analyze the conceptual logic and organization which allows and constructs our phenomenal perception
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? o f time. High-level problems in the organization o f mental processes can be explored by building simple machines, or systems, not in an attempt to model what actually happens in the brain, nor to offer an explanation o f how a particular agent might function in a real machine, but in order to model these conceptual problems and their solutions as functions and processes.
I have constructed these theoretical machines, or rather one evolving machine, not in order to model the brain or its evolution, nor even to posit a possible construction of a real machine or set of algorithms to be included in some artificial intelligence machine (although it has some relevance to this). My machines are manipulations, within an imaginary and impossible world, o f the theoretical problems involved in the human inhabitation within time as a grammatical limit. These machines pressure the problem of time into the kind of clarity that allows the structure, and more importantly the significance, of temporality to function in relation to the more complex problems of consciousness and language. I will use my machines to explore and explain the organization and conceptual problems attending any attempt at modeling "reality" as meaningful and not just as a "thing".
In effect this means questioning the relation between the possibility o f meaning and the possibility oftime at the limits ofsense and nonsense. How can you build yourselfinto a grammar using only causal mechanisms? In my attempt to build such a grammar I am trying to outline the point of conceptual confusion around which language breaks down intononsenseinFinnegansWake,forexample. Iamtryingtoapproachorwriteator within the limit described by the soul. This means I am trying to figure causal mechanisms
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? at the limit o f the interpretative relations that I have described so far. These machine masks will not disprove Wittgensteinian or Jocyean grammar, but will describe a causal language game(s) evolving toward the limits these grammars describe.
I return first to a description of philosophy I introduced in the second chapter. Kurt Godel, in explaining his philosophical work, described philosophy as the analysis of concepts, and science as the use of these same concepts. Engineering philosophy into a machine, a philosophy machine, allows us to reconceive and merge Godel's distinctions within a model o f thinking where the analysis o f concepts, categories, and logics follows from their construction and use in an evolving machine.
I will begin this process of construction with the hypothesis that human language and the logic of human temporality simultaneously create each other as systems of symbolization organizing the world and one's relationship to it. Time requires a kind of syntax, a structure allowing for symbolic exchange between different representations of mental states. Instead of the pure syntax of calculus, the syntactical structure of temporality mirrors the structure of symbolic communication in human language, such that to construct a future is to construct a language. Thus, consciousness functions through or within the construction of human time (specifically of a future which mimics the structure of the present) and the simultaneous or contingent construction of human language.
Language and temporality simultaneously create each other as systems of symbolization that organize the world (our experience) and one's relationship to it. (By symbolization I mean the process by which relationships and identities are configured into particular structures and/or signs).
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? In my analysis o f Wittgenstein I showed how the sense that the future meaning o f a word is present in its form (or the sense that future is somehow present as a possibility in thepresent)displayedhowweinhabitourgrammar. Weexperiencechangethroughour shifting position between language games and through our functioning within the temporal orderdescribedbythegrammarofparticularlanguagegames. Thesenseofthefuture arose as an interpretation o f our relation within the structures o f the grammars that describe our forms o f life. I will use my machines to excavate this grammar. Thus in constructing a future my machine(s) will, in general, abstractform from particular contents, and in so doing articulate a symbolic and syntactical structural relationship between external and internal states that will come to stand for the future.
I list the following as the engineering assumptions and goals underlying the construction o f my machine(s):
1) Temporality functions through a syntax, a structure allowing for symbolic exchange between different representations o f mental states. The syntactical structure o f temporality mirrors the structure o f symbolic communication in human language, such that to construct a future is to construct a language.
2) One can identify two forms oftemporal syntax: (a) a simple equivalence between past states and current states that allow for short-term predictions based on simple patterns or causal associations between a small set of inputs and (b) a more complex syntax that functions as a continuous future.
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? 3) My problem is to turn the Turing test around. Instead o f attributing a thinking and/or consciousness to a machine, I need to construct a model in which a machine will attribute its mental state and condition to another machine (or at some point to a human).
4) self-consciousness arises from a model o f other minds as forms o f one's own mind.
5) The possibility ofthe future (that is a symbolic structure defining the future) is built by using structures derived from meta-temporal identities, identities that extend over time but whose contents, except as a markers o f identity, are meaningless.
14. 2 A time machine linguist
A Time Machine constructs a diachronic ontology, a logic organizing and determining the forms o f existence by nesting them within the phenomenal field defined by the machine, as a mechanical surrogate for the individual subject. A time machine, like the one built by H. G. Wells, spatializes time, in order that the appearance of a succession of momentsisdeterminedbythemovement,asonaplain,ofthefieldoftheobserver. In Wells' machine a strangely immaterial metal-like bar serves as a transitive link between the machine (as the physical embodiment and protective encapsulation of the individual subject) and all other times. Consequently, the transitive bar functions as a verb which
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? translates the subject into the future or past, both ofwhich serve as predicate objects, in essence defining the subject. Wells' Time Machine, therefore, defines and functions through the logic o f the copula.
The disguised use o f this linguistic metaphor in organizing Time highlights the fundamental cognitive dependence o f the conceptual structures o f time and language. Language works as a form o f external memory. In this sense language and memory both transport information through time. We use this memory as a means of actively re-shaping elements o f our experience, including other people, into forms and relations that allow for thesuccessofourgoals. Inthissenseweattempttore-formulatethroughakindofviral infection, the internal state, the descriptions o f the world and the goals embodied in these descriptions (goals are often understood as ideal descriptions of self) of other people.
If language is a form of memory, then we should expect our memories to function throughakindoflanguage(asystemofsymbolicrelations). Thisiscertainlytrueof Minsky's K-Iines. K-lines wire together a set of agents active during an experience, and thusformamemoryofthatexperience. Theconnectionsbetweenagentsvaryinstrength, forming a hierarchy of levels. A K-line, to the degree that it links agents within such a hierarchy of relevant levels, sketches a set of relations within a loose syntax. Minsky organizes the formation o f these K-lines within "societies o f memory. " New K-lines are attached to the most recently active K-lines. When (Jack) (Fly) (Kite) are connected by a new K-line, predicates, that is, the K-lines defining each o f these terms, e. g. (Male) (Outside) (Young), are attached to the relevant agent, e. g. (Jack). Because these older K- lines are used to describe the new elements, as predicates, they are in effect nested within
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? the new K-line. IfK-lines are used to form "societies ofmemory", therefore, they build syntactical trees. Minsky never addresses why the world should be categorized in this way. Nor does he examine how such categories would be constructed so that we could recognize them. What his model o f memory does demonstrate is the temptation to describe ourselves and our biology within grammars built from our language.
Predication links Well's Time Machine to all possible times (the set o f possible objects). Although K- lines set up a more complicated set o f relations and associations, these relationship are organized in a rough equivalent o f predication. The Time Machine works not only like parser, it reduces all temporality to the form o f what we understand as memory. Ourexperienceoftime,inspiteoftheroleofconsciousnessandmemoryin determining continuity and particular expectations, is quite different. For Well's the content of all possible moments is pre-determined and already established within the synchronicplainon(orin)whichthemachinetravels. Oursenseoftime,however,and also unlike the closed temporal-spatial loops described in Godel's solution ofEinstein's
gravitational field equations in General Relativity, is of a totalizing alteration or change in the entire universe, where the content o f future moments is understood as undetermined and therefore not yet real. In our experience there is a logical distinction between change (a physical process) and Time (our construction of this change into a form we can perceive). Time arises as an effect of our phenomenal observation of a succession of changes, determined in relation to the relative continuities of other objects or events, and in relation to the continuity of the phenomenal frame through which we represent reality (what we call our subjective consciousness).
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? 14. 3 Generatingthepresentfromlanguage "A Rose is a Rose is a Rose"
To perceive time we must represent or model it. Any such model must organize sensory input within a temporal structure. Such a structure is difficult to imagine because the word "structure" defines spatial relationships, and thus can only be used in a vague metaphoricalsensewhenusedtoorganizetemporality. Whatwerecognizeastemporal structure is really repetition (of the sort that orders and constructs music--which is the formal art of structuring time in relation to sound).
Human attempts to re-create a continuous present rely on repetition in order to split the sound o f the word (signifier) from its concept or meaning (signified and referent). In other words, repetition dissolves the symbolic content of a word by erasing semantic difference. As meaning is dissolved, the temporal dimension slows to nothing more than an awareness of the progressive loss of meaning in the sentence. Our experience of reading non-sense exposes a curious relation between our awareness of temporal succession and language.
A single image is not splendor. Dirty is yellow. A sign of more in not mentioned. Apieceofcoffeeisnotadetainer. Theresemblancetoyellowisdirtier and distincter. The clean mixture is whiter and not coal color, never more coal color than altogether.
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? The sight of a reason, the same sight slighter, the sight of a simpler negative answer, the same sore sounder, the intention to wishing, the same splendor, the same furniture. (Stein, 463)
Unlike some o f Lewis Carroll's nonsense lyrics, this passage plays between sense and nonsenseintheattempttoconstructwhatSteincalledacontinuouspresent. Whatwe apprehend as sense defines a frame, a set of expectations, which the subsequent non-sense dissolves. The failure ofthe frame to interpret the semantic content ofthe words throws us into an interpretative loop. We interpret that loop as a failure to progress beyond the immediate context.
Language is not simply structured serially, that is, it does not function through a successionofwords. IfitdidStein'spassagewouldclearlymakesense. Languageis structured through a series of nested domains. In a highly repetitive sentence, "Rose is a Rose. . these nested domains (syntactical categories) collapse into a tautological chain. In Stein's non-sense passage semantic meaning marks a stable moment (or frame) which disintegratesintoindeterminacy,butstillwithinastablesyntax. Theeffectistomodela mind capable o f formulating short-term predictions, but incapable o f organizing the facts (the words) in order to satisfy these predictions.
Stein wants to think like a chimp. D. Premack, in his attempt to evaluate the degree to which the chimpanzee has a theory of mind, formulates a distinction between simple and complex states. Simple states are "hard-wired, automatic and reflex- like, and encapsulated" (172). He defines these states as "seeing, wanting, and expecting". The pathways determining each o f these (with varying degrees o f complexity) are tied to direct
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? sensory input, such that their is little mediating control by the organism over these states. Complex states, however, are highly mediated states in which some level o f decision- making is required in order to determine the state. The prototypical example is belief. Belief arises as a mediating and, some would say, conscious response to particular forms ofdoubt. Premack distinguishes two forms ofdoubt (and consequently ofbelief): doubt in the veracity o f sensory information (epistemological doubt) and doubt in the information communicated by a member o f one's group (fear o f deception).
Epistemological doubt is countered by conscious attempts to construct an external means of determining the truth of sensory input: observation, experiment, analysis, reason, art, religion. Premack characterizes epistemological doubt with three questions: "Do I really see X? " "Do I really want X? " "Are my expectations well founded? " If we ignore the problem of their linguistic form, these questions describe a critical process of categorization. Epistemological doubt of this sort is predicated (and expresses or functions through) a distinction between truth and falsity. In other words these questions, defined by their use of "really" and "well-founded" require doubt to be in place in order to be asked. They appear initially to be questions o f domain. These questions are what I would call questions of syntax concerned about what belongs where as what. In other words syntax defines a set o f domains that taken together define the form and legitimacy of a particular string to function within language, that is to be intelligible. Syntax, however and to what degrees of specificity it is defined, constructs the possibility of determining legitimacy or, in relation to our epistemological doubt, truth. Syntax implies an established semantics, just as questioning the truth of X requires the possibility of falsity.
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? falsity. Syntaxdeterminesthedomainoflegitimacyasameansofstructuringthe possibility of doubt (or failure). Because a particular word might not be legitimate, syntax divorces the criterion for truth from the content of the word. The specific form of an entity is understood as variable and possibly false. This does not mean that a grammarians strictdefinitionofsyntaxdeterminesthesenseofasentence. Syntaxisitselfmuchmore fluidthancommonlysupposed. Strictsyntacticalrulessimplydescribethecenterofa syntactical domain. One can still make sense of words used within an incorrect syntax as long as they still reside within the domain defining their relationship with other words (and
thus its legitimacy as a member of a meaningful string). Once a word, however, can no longer be related to other words in a meaningful way, that word has left the syntactical domain that determined its legitimacy (and thus its meaningfulness). Thus one can see why a cognitive scientist like Schank argues for semantics over syntax. He should be arguing,however, foramorebroaddefinitionofsyntax,asyntaxthatdetermines relationships through the activation of semantic content within a particular domain (a possiblesetofrelations). Schank'sscriptorframeisasyntacticalstructure,onethat determines the legitimacy or meaningfulness of words by the establishment of a set of possible meanings, albeit possible meanings determined by previous knowledge. Belief as a form o f long-range prediction depends on a syntactical elaboration o f the present in order to create the possibility of a future.
The possibility of Premark's second form of doubt is dependent on the what R. Seyfarth and D Cheney call, in their study of meaning and language in Vervet monkeys, the attribution of mental states "such as knowledge, beliefs, and desires to others" (126).
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? In their study they conclude that Vervet monkeys in spite of the character of three specific calls and the different responses these calls cause in those who hear them in warning of a snake as opposed to a martial eagle or a leopard do not have a language because they cannot determine the difference between a knowledgeable audience and an ignorant audience (127). They apparently cannot evaluate the knowledge o f those around them, because their communication is not attempting to change the mental state of their audience. Itissimplyasignalactivatingalearnedresponse. Theattributionofamental state to another seems to require the ability to choose. Making a choice (a kind of
thinking) involves constructing a world, a frame, or a domain of relations organized according to a particular grammar (a set of rules and values).
Chimps make choices. Do they then make conceptual worlds? In an experiment a female chimp was trained to add and count. Part ofthe training procedure required the chimp to play a game where two piles of candies were counted out. Whichever pile the chimp first point to was given to another chimp sitting in front of her in a cage. The object of the game was to get the most candies. Whenever the candies were counted out the chimp invariably pointed at the larger pile, thus losing. When numbers written on cards were substituted for the candies, however, the chimp was always able to point to the smaller number, thus insuring that she would be rewarded with the larger number of treats.
One could speculate. When the chimp saw the food an instinctual grab/eat rule (or agent)determinedherchoice. Sheplayedthecandygameusingherinstinctualrules. She needed instead to nest the candy game within the her instinctual game, by replacing the instinctual mechanism for achieving her desire for the most food with the mechanism
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? defined by the game. By encoding the "amounts" o f candy within a numerical domain the relationship between the two piles can be determined without invoicing the grab/eat rule. Thisinformationisnolongerstoredasanimagewithinthegrab/eatrule. Thenumerical domain indicates the value of each number in relation to the other, not in relation to the chimp or her desire to eat. The failure of any abstract system to define this kind of personal relation requires that its values be accessed and assessed from another domain and according to another grammar. In this case, the chimp can then apply the rules o f the candy game to these "amounts" in order to determine the winning choice.
Any abstract system sets up a play between at least two different systems or domains. This recursive interaction creates a kind o f consciousness, because it creates the illusion o f free choice. This choice is not in any sense free, it is simply the mediation o f one domain by another. The chimp evaluates how to get food [an algorithm defined by CHOOSE THE MOST DESIRABLE and THE MOST DESIRABLE IS THE MOST FOOD] through the algorithm of the candy game [CHOOSE THE LEAST FIRST], The transcription of candies into number allows both of these algorithms to function together.
The three systems of relations in the previous experiment are all defined as systems o f value.
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? exemplary one). Once we enter into the associative, non-narrative logic of the Wakean dream we find that any paragraph provides us, as John Bishop says, "with as set of vectors that point to an absent content--'the presence (of a curpse)' --into the 'eyewitless foggus' of whose 'trapped head' the process of reading the Evening World leads. " The (unconsciousness of our "humptyhillhead," our "one stable somebody" "aslip" in the text, becomes the underlying organizational locus around which the text can be understood, aroundwhichitwaswritten. Thislocusistheinaudible,andthetemporalconditionsof our form of life emerge out of the ontological crisis attending everynight.
The enfolding o f syntax and semantics in Finnegans Wake follows the description of musical intelligibility that Schopenhauer gave in his later essay "On the Metaphysics of Music" :
music is a means o f making intelligible rational and irrational numerical relations, not, like arithmetic, with the aid of the concept, but by bringing them to a knowledge that is quite direct and simultaneously affects the senses. The connexion o f the metaphysical significance o f music with this its physical and arithmetical basis rests on the fact that what resists our apprehension, namely the irrational relation or dissonance, becomes the natural image of what resists our
will, and, conversely, the consonance or the rational relation, by easily adapting itselfto our apprehension, becomes the image of the satisfaction of the will, (n, 450-51)
The will becomes visible in music (in our hearing music) as the description of an interpretive stance we take from within music: 'I understand this music (or as music)! ' or
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? 'I do not understand this music (or as music)! '. This hardly does justice to Schopenhauer, but it does resonate with Wittgenstein's description o f will as an interpretive stance within language.
How is "Understanding a sentence. . . much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think" (PI? 527). Understanding must be distinguished from "the hearing of a tune or a sentence: these are mental processes" (PI? 154). Such hearing, like "a pain's growing more and less," is a perceptual state with defined duration. But my understanding of a word is not a continuous experience (as if all the words I understand paradebeforeme). Howthenismyunderstandingakintounderstandingathemein music? Wittgenstein says,
What I mean is that understanding a sentence lies nearer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called understanding a musical theme. Why isjust this the pattern of variation in loudness and tempo? One would like to say "Because I know what it's all about. " But what is it all about? I should not be able to say. In order to 'explain' I could only compare it with something else which has the same rhythm (I mean the same pattern). (One says "Don't you see, this is as if a conclusion were being drawn" or "This is as it were a parenthesis", etc. How does onejustify such comparisons? --There are very different kinds ofjustifications here. (PI? 527)
I can understand music (at least I can recognize that something is music from within a form of life within which that music makes sense as music), but how can I explain what it is about? "About" seems like the wrong word here. Music is contentless as something that can be translated into words. Thus the point at which I can say I understand music
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? but I cannot explain it marks a kind of limit point (as Wittgenstein says, this phrase of music "is as if a conclusion were being drawn" etc. ). These analogies are justified primarily by their success in explaining how this music is music, or how it might mean something as music. The criteria for the success o f my explanation might entail you saying "I understand".
Wittgenstein's point in making this comparison, however, is to show how our understanding of a sentence (in ordinary life) might be like understanding music. A failure to understand marks the boundaries ofour involvement, it does not describe this involvement. This boundary, however, is our point o f entry into music (or a language game). Wittgenstein focuses his remark on the point o f incommensurabity between languageandmusic. Thisincommensurabilitysignalsourinclusion(orfromtheotherside our exclusion) within a language game. The content of our inclusion (signaled by an awareness of an incommensurability--our inability to explain what the music is about) is the demand that we either recognize the logic of the music within which our stance toward the sound is as toward music, or we reject this logic and therefore the music as anything but noise. Thus this incommensurability signals an ontological demand, a demand to recognize something as a particular thing ("Theology as grammar), but acknowledging (or accepting) the limits of grammar as the limits of my world. My claim that I understand or do not understand this music can be intoned (another kind of meaningful sound) or be accompanied by certain facial expressions that suggest my intention to either learn or reject these sounds as music. My stance in the face of mis- or non-understanding, with its vector of learning or rejection, signals a shift in my state if this state is understood as a
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? grammatical state--or rather a shift in the sense of the world. Such a shift changes what is included within that world as sensible, determining often times what and who has a claim on me.
The expression o f these ontological demands (whether to learn a new grammar within which I recognize both Stravinsky's Les Noces as music and myself as hearing music), like the patterns described by my failure or success in performing within language games, keeps time. This time is a measure o f "the life (C(C)t|v) o f soul in a movement o f passage from one way o f life (Piov) to another. " One way o f imagining the soul, therefore, is as a description o f the changing expressions o f my stance toward the world in which this stance involves a choice (or a possibility) to recognize the essence of something, what something is, within a world, form o f life, language game within which I function. This amounts to a temporal aesthetic. Such an aesthetic attempts to negotiate among what Wittgenstein calls, in Alice Ambrose's notes, the "solipsism o f the present moment: 'All that is real is the experience o f the present moment'," the problem o f duration, and the relations made visible in language games as aspects, attitudes, states, and pictures(p. 25-28). 7We inhabit our temporality neither within a solipsism of the moment,
nor as an epiphenomenon, nor as a given, but as a modulating set o f temptations that both limit and make possible our language use. Wittgenstein resists William James' "'The present thought is the only thinker', which makes the subject o f thinking equivalent to the experience. " It is this equivalence and its temporal solipsism that suggests a stream-of- consciousness as a picture of our consciousness. 8
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? In Investigations and the Wake, time functions, emerges, and disappears through expectation, hope, belief language games, in the narratives describing memory, actions, intentions, and so on. This suggests that there is not a unitary sense of time, but rather a variety o f temporal grammars, themselves shifting in such a way that our sense o f time changes and flies and crawls (and in this change create another temporal grammar, always
atthelimitofsense). ThetherapeuticgoaldeterminingmuchofWittgenstein'slater philosophy seems to dissolve our temporal awareness in the transparency o f our ordinary language use (the time described by any particular language game). At the same time he rejectsthestructurallysimilarmachine-as-symbol-futurity. Therelationbetweenthe grammar o f time enacted in our practices and the meta-temporal limit generated by and excluded from these practices remains obscure. His discussion of this in the Brown Book I find incomplete. All versions of time and the differences expressing them are grammatically embedded: they are just at varying distances from our other practices.
Philosophical time creates the illusion o f no-time, not only in its drive toward viewing ourselves sub specie aetemitatis, but in its use of picturing and representation as the form of truth. But what is the effect of turning this picturing into 'mere' metaphor? Representation as a form o f knowing is in my sense a-temporal. We confuse these versions o f time with consciousness, self-consciousness, and forms o f unconsciousness. Understanding marks a grammatical limit that creates one dimension of time, but in this it only exposes the grammatical embodiment of time in all our language games (I want to say here, invoking Augustine, time is our 'soul'). That we are not self-conscious, i. e. , when 'time flies', means time is experienced as a function of our activity and not as a function of
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? our self-reflection. 'Crawling time' is more the condition ofbeing aware ofthe disjunction between this self-reflection and our actions. But in each case time remains a function of our grammar, an expression o f our grammar. The emergence o f time as such a grammatical condition, as an effect within and as our being within our form o f life, posits ourpracticesasfunctioningwithinatotalitythatlimitsusaswhatweare. Icallthisthe emergenceofatheology. Wittgensteindoesnotinvestigatethemeaningofthis grammatical condition, and thus he does not bring out the moral and theological implications of our stances toward ourselves within language. But he shows a number of sites where this morality can emerge.
The effect of grounding our thought in the ordinary, in our grammar, therefore, I think, generates our being as theologically embedded. The consequence of the concentration on the ordinary seems to me to generate a theology as the limit o f the ordinary, and thus suggests the significance o f form o f life as a dynamic conceptual limit, or the different voices and names Kierkegaard assumes around the limit of Christianity. For Kierkegaard, religion serving at a distance from philosophy constructs and requires moral obligations and descriptions, a resistance to the ontological. I invoke Kierkegaard here partly because I have often used both philosophy and art in a way that is cognate with his masks. But I do not don these forms in order to resist either science o f ontological limits, but rather to expose their claim and describe ways of meaning or inhabiting languageinrelationtothem. InWittgenstein,unlikeinKierkegaard,whatIamcallingthe theological has an ontological force. I do not mean that it is metaphysical in his sense; it
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? does not make essential claims about reality, but rather acts to temporalize the world as what we are.
InPhilosophicalInvestigationseverythingseemsbothaudibleandinaudible. Is Wittgenstein's questioning directed at an absolute limit as is Augustine's confession and Aquinas' dialectic? The shift from the Tractatus with its transcendental limit beyond saying, but determining all forms of value and constituting our being, to the Investigations can be described as the reconceptualization of the limit toward which any self-reflection (description) and interrogation takes place. The Tractarian limit between the world of factsandthenon-psychologicalT outsidethisworldistranslatedandembedded,in
Investigations,withinlanguageandhumanpractices. ThislimitinInvestigationscannot be articulated as such within it. Investigations describes (although it is not this 'itself) a shifting set of temporal periods from within our form of life: the limit of being human that describes temporality is within (not outside) our form o f life.
1How should one understand the interaction and difference between being and identity in the Investigations?
2 It is not a possibility o f movement that is denied in the sentence "It's not possible to move this desk without removing a good number o f the books on top o f it. " This is really a limiting condition on an already determined possibility.
3 From the functioning o f signs in any measurement or awareness or constitution o f time I am tempted intotwodirections. Ifmeasurementandexistencecoincidethenoneisboundtoaskiftheexistenceof timeisontologicallywarranted. Thiscansoundlikephysics,thespatializationoftime,orthe dimensional description of space-time, in Minkowski's diagrams, as layers of space and time extending as apictureofmovementthroughacube. Theontologicaldescriptionoftimemightalsoleadonetomodal logic or to something like Quine's spatialization of time and the elimination of tense (in relation to the descriptionofmeaninginWordandObject). WecanlinktemporalmarkerstopronounsasQuinedoes: "Wecantreattheindicatorwords'now'and'then'onaparwith'I'and'you',assingularterms. . . 'I now' and 'I then' mean 'I at now', 'I at then'; the custom just happens to be to omit the 'at' here, as in 'redwine'(173). Quineassumes,ashesaysthat"thetemporaryandshiftingobjectsofreferenceof'I' and 'you' are people, those of 'now' and 'then' are times or epochs" (173).
Thiscanseemmisleading. Benviniste,in"SubjectivityinLanguage,"arguesthatpronounsdo not in fact refer, but mark the dependence of language on a formal subject: "these pronouns are distinguished from all other designations a language articulates in that they do not refer to a concept or to an individual. " "There is no concept 'I' that incorporates all the I's that are uttered at every moment in
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? the mouths o f all speakers, in the sense that there is a concept "tree" to which all the individual uses of tree refer"(226). There exists no "lexical entity" to which I can refer. "How could the same term refer indifferently to any individual whatsoever and still at the same time identify him in his individuality? " I refers to something "Exclusively linguistic: I refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced, and by this it designates the speaker. " This designation is distinguished from reference to objects(bodiesetc. ). Thiscreatesthecategoryof"person",anddoesnotasinQuinereferto"people". The confusion o f reference arises from a vagueness in the description o f indexical reference:
[T]here seems to be no description, not even an indexical one, capable o f giving the meaning of T. Forexample,'theuttererofthesewords'willnotdoasadefinition,sinceIcouldusethat descriptiontorefertothepersonIampresentlyquoting. Thesemanticsoftheword'I'seemsto come to no more and no less than the fact that it use it literally is to refer to oneself. (Bach, 176)
Bach argues, however, that third person reference distinguishes between Iocutionary meaning o f sentence anditsillocutionaryforcedeterminedbythespeakersintention. Thatisthemeaningof'he'candescribe the meaning o f 'he' in "He is G', but its referent can only be determined through the intention o f the speaker(whothespeakermeanstobereferringto). Thevaguenessortheindeterminacyofpronoun reference and the possibilities for mistake (Bach's example of replacing a picture which someone refers to blindly with someone else) suggest that "[reference occurs only at the illocutionary level, where the speaker's referential intention plays and essential role" (186-87). 3 Is intention parasitic on the semantics of'I'?
4 Hoping, intending (in the sense o f expecting) are what Wittgenstein calls a state (not a process): Expectation is, grammatically a state; like, being of an opinion, hoping for something, knowing something,beingabletodosomething. Butinordertounderstandthegrammarofthesestatesit isnecessarytoask: "Whatcountsasacriterionforanyone'sbeinginsuchastate? "(? 572)
Askingwhatkindofcriteriondetermines anyonebeinginsuchastateaskswhatkindofstateis expecting,hoping,knowing,beingabletodosomething? Weknowtheyarenotmentalstates.
s For breif discussion o f Aquinas' development o f Aristotlian actuality see Joseph Owens "Aristotle and Aquinas"inTheCambridgeCompaniontoAquinas, 50-55. AlsoSTIa. 7. 1.
6 Another way o f doing this would be to write a synthetic text as if from within the historical period, for example to describe and analyze Aquinas' Summa Theologica as if from within the theology o f the Summa itself.
7In Wittgenstein's Lectures, Cambridge, 1932-1935.
8 Wittgenstein objects to the metaphysical temptation to say only the present is real, not to using 'the stream o f consciousness' use as a means o f describing our phenomenal experience.
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? V
MACHINE TIME: THE SCIENCE OF BUILDING A FUTURE
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? 14
Machine Time
14. 1 Constructing a time machine (the Self-Inductor) at the limit between cause and interpretation
We can ask for the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, as it were, from inside the security of acting as animate creatures. What would it mean to ask about this distinction from outside our inclusion within these interpretative distinctions. As I suggested earlier this is how cognitive science begins. Its ultimate goal would be the replacement of the psychology we have developed from within our interpretations of our experience with a psychology built from experimental data describing the causal structures andinteractionsofourbrain. Thus,thequestionhowcouldwebuildthedistinction between the animate and the inanimate outside (relative to non-causal language games) of ourinterpretativelanguagecanonlybeansweredbyscience. ThatisnotwhatIam pursuing here. I am asking instead what does it mean to be so built or so described (as an effect within a causal chain)?
I am building in this chapter a causal aesthetic, turning causal principles (a simplified scientific world) into an allegorical picture o f building a mind within itself, but limitedbyitsworld. Inmanywaysthismodelwillenactanaspectofthephilosophical aestheticofthedissertationasawhole. Themockengineeringinthischapterwillnot, therefore, be an exercise in cognitive philosophy, but in philosophical aesthetics: an allegory about how ontological limits describe ways of making sense through the process
Notes for this chapter are on page 613
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? o f building. Call this thinking by making machines as fictions that excavate how an T becomes an 'our' and difference becomes a time.
My machines arejugs which think ofthemselves as minds. Such a fiction means something within a variety of contexts (in philosophy or science fiction or cognitive science). Mygoalhereisneithertoexplorethatmeaningnortheassumptionsofthose contexts and uses. I am using these machines (as fictions and as causal models) to make visible the possibilities of orienting ourselves within the causal limits these machine(s) describe. Thisorientationismeanttopressuretheconfusedcollapseofmodelsof animation and mind into interpretive allegories (in order to give them a kind o f ontological
force) that I described in Jakobson and Vendler and in a different way in Romantic fragmentsingeneralandinKeatspowerfulimageofsoul-making. Soul-makingforme, operates toward the limits of person-making not as a replacement for person-making (for science). In this sense this engineering exercise is a theological exercise meant to question how we apply our interpretations o f art and texts and others as versions o f minds.
If models of mind underlie many of our aesthetic models and many of the ways in which we enter, exit and interpret ourselves within metaphors, allegories, and language games,thenmodelsofthemindcanmakevisibledifferentkindsofaesthetics. Thismight meanthattheoriesofmindshouldbeunderstoodasaestheticmodels. WhileIthinkthat this is true, for the most part, this does not diminish these theories, nor does it tells us much about what kind of aesthetics these are. A full analysis of a theory of mind as an aesthetic would require another dissertation. What my machine(s) are meant to do is to showthekindofaestheticsuchtheoriescangenerate. Inotherwords,howwouldwe
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? inhabit a world described by and large by causal and mathematical limits as meaningful without ignoring those limits? My machines suggest a way o f beginning to orient ourselves in relation to these limits in a way that will move beyond the kind of pictures of the subjunctive enacted by both Heidegger in "Das Ding" and Eliot in The Waste Land. This is why I think it describes a kind o f theology.
In answering the question cwhat does it mean to be built or described as an effect within a causal chain? ' I have attempted to build a set of theoretical machines that perceive time by figuring themselves (in a fundamental sense) within the temporal order they perceive. 1 By this process the machines construct themselves within a world of temporal surfaces: they figure themselves continually and as the succession o f limits that determine their experience as anything. This is a picture of the writing at limits that I have investigatedinWittgenstein,Joyce,Eliot,Keats,andHeideggerfromtheunderside. Itis not meant to generate a theory, but to offer itselfas another writing toward and at these limits.
This means I have experimented in a form of Science Fiction, in which I have attempted to slice an aspect o f the logic o f human temporality out o f the conscious/ unconscious logic ofthe human mind. The problem in constructing a Time-perceiving machine is in constructing a future, which means constructing a fundamental ontological belief that the future exists.
I have attempted to build a theoretical machine that perceives time. Suchatimemachinesimplifiesourconsciousapprehensiontothebasicprocessof determining successive differences. I will use bits of this machine in order to analyze the conceptual logic and organization which allows and constructs our phenomenal perception
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? o f time. High-level problems in the organization o f mental processes can be explored by building simple machines, or systems, not in an attempt to model what actually happens in the brain, nor to offer an explanation o f how a particular agent might function in a real machine, but in order to model these conceptual problems and their solutions as functions and processes.
I have constructed these theoretical machines, or rather one evolving machine, not in order to model the brain or its evolution, nor even to posit a possible construction of a real machine or set of algorithms to be included in some artificial intelligence machine (although it has some relevance to this). My machines are manipulations, within an imaginary and impossible world, o f the theoretical problems involved in the human inhabitation within time as a grammatical limit. These machines pressure the problem of time into the kind of clarity that allows the structure, and more importantly the significance, of temporality to function in relation to the more complex problems of consciousness and language. I will use my machines to explore and explain the organization and conceptual problems attending any attempt at modeling "reality" as meaningful and not just as a "thing".
In effect this means questioning the relation between the possibility o f meaning and the possibility oftime at the limits ofsense and nonsense. How can you build yourselfinto a grammar using only causal mechanisms? In my attempt to build such a grammar I am trying to outline the point of conceptual confusion around which language breaks down intononsenseinFinnegansWake,forexample. Iamtryingtoapproachorwriteator within the limit described by the soul. This means I am trying to figure causal mechanisms
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? at the limit o f the interpretative relations that I have described so far. These machine masks will not disprove Wittgensteinian or Jocyean grammar, but will describe a causal language game(s) evolving toward the limits these grammars describe.
I return first to a description of philosophy I introduced in the second chapter. Kurt Godel, in explaining his philosophical work, described philosophy as the analysis of concepts, and science as the use of these same concepts. Engineering philosophy into a machine, a philosophy machine, allows us to reconceive and merge Godel's distinctions within a model o f thinking where the analysis o f concepts, categories, and logics follows from their construction and use in an evolving machine.
I will begin this process of construction with the hypothesis that human language and the logic of human temporality simultaneously create each other as systems of symbolization organizing the world and one's relationship to it. Time requires a kind of syntax, a structure allowing for symbolic exchange between different representations of mental states. Instead of the pure syntax of calculus, the syntactical structure of temporality mirrors the structure of symbolic communication in human language, such that to construct a future is to construct a language. Thus, consciousness functions through or within the construction of human time (specifically of a future which mimics the structure of the present) and the simultaneous or contingent construction of human language.
Language and temporality simultaneously create each other as systems of symbolization that organize the world (our experience) and one's relationship to it. (By symbolization I mean the process by which relationships and identities are configured into particular structures and/or signs).
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? In my analysis o f Wittgenstein I showed how the sense that the future meaning o f a word is present in its form (or the sense that future is somehow present as a possibility in thepresent)displayedhowweinhabitourgrammar. Weexperiencechangethroughour shifting position between language games and through our functioning within the temporal orderdescribedbythegrammarofparticularlanguagegames. Thesenseofthefuture arose as an interpretation o f our relation within the structures o f the grammars that describe our forms o f life. I will use my machines to excavate this grammar. Thus in constructing a future my machine(s) will, in general, abstractform from particular contents, and in so doing articulate a symbolic and syntactical structural relationship between external and internal states that will come to stand for the future.
I list the following as the engineering assumptions and goals underlying the construction o f my machine(s):
1) Temporality functions through a syntax, a structure allowing for symbolic exchange between different representations o f mental states. The syntactical structure o f temporality mirrors the structure o f symbolic communication in human language, such that to construct a future is to construct a language.
2) One can identify two forms oftemporal syntax: (a) a simple equivalence between past states and current states that allow for short-term predictions based on simple patterns or causal associations between a small set of inputs and (b) a more complex syntax that functions as a continuous future.
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? 3) My problem is to turn the Turing test around. Instead o f attributing a thinking and/or consciousness to a machine, I need to construct a model in which a machine will attribute its mental state and condition to another machine (or at some point to a human).
4) self-consciousness arises from a model o f other minds as forms o f one's own mind.
5) The possibility ofthe future (that is a symbolic structure defining the future) is built by using structures derived from meta-temporal identities, identities that extend over time but whose contents, except as a markers o f identity, are meaningless.
14. 2 A time machine linguist
A Time Machine constructs a diachronic ontology, a logic organizing and determining the forms o f existence by nesting them within the phenomenal field defined by the machine, as a mechanical surrogate for the individual subject. A time machine, like the one built by H. G. Wells, spatializes time, in order that the appearance of a succession of momentsisdeterminedbythemovement,asonaplain,ofthefieldoftheobserver. In Wells' machine a strangely immaterial metal-like bar serves as a transitive link between the machine (as the physical embodiment and protective encapsulation of the individual subject) and all other times. Consequently, the transitive bar functions as a verb which
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? translates the subject into the future or past, both ofwhich serve as predicate objects, in essence defining the subject. Wells' Time Machine, therefore, defines and functions through the logic o f the copula.
The disguised use o f this linguistic metaphor in organizing Time highlights the fundamental cognitive dependence o f the conceptual structures o f time and language. Language works as a form o f external memory. In this sense language and memory both transport information through time. We use this memory as a means of actively re-shaping elements o f our experience, including other people, into forms and relations that allow for thesuccessofourgoals. Inthissenseweattempttore-formulatethroughakindofviral infection, the internal state, the descriptions o f the world and the goals embodied in these descriptions (goals are often understood as ideal descriptions of self) of other people.
If language is a form of memory, then we should expect our memories to function throughakindoflanguage(asystemofsymbolicrelations). Thisiscertainlytrueof Minsky's K-Iines. K-lines wire together a set of agents active during an experience, and thusformamemoryofthatexperience. Theconnectionsbetweenagentsvaryinstrength, forming a hierarchy of levels. A K-line, to the degree that it links agents within such a hierarchy of relevant levels, sketches a set of relations within a loose syntax. Minsky organizes the formation o f these K-lines within "societies o f memory. " New K-lines are attached to the most recently active K-lines. When (Jack) (Fly) (Kite) are connected by a new K-line, predicates, that is, the K-lines defining each o f these terms, e. g. (Male) (Outside) (Young), are attached to the relevant agent, e. g. (Jack). Because these older K- lines are used to describe the new elements, as predicates, they are in effect nested within
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? the new K-line. IfK-lines are used to form "societies ofmemory", therefore, they build syntactical trees. Minsky never addresses why the world should be categorized in this way. Nor does he examine how such categories would be constructed so that we could recognize them. What his model o f memory does demonstrate is the temptation to describe ourselves and our biology within grammars built from our language.
Predication links Well's Time Machine to all possible times (the set o f possible objects). Although K- lines set up a more complicated set o f relations and associations, these relationship are organized in a rough equivalent o f predication. The Time Machine works not only like parser, it reduces all temporality to the form o f what we understand as memory. Ourexperienceoftime,inspiteoftheroleofconsciousnessandmemoryin determining continuity and particular expectations, is quite different. For Well's the content of all possible moments is pre-determined and already established within the synchronicplainon(orin)whichthemachinetravels. Oursenseoftime,however,and also unlike the closed temporal-spatial loops described in Godel's solution ofEinstein's
gravitational field equations in General Relativity, is of a totalizing alteration or change in the entire universe, where the content o f future moments is understood as undetermined and therefore not yet real. In our experience there is a logical distinction between change (a physical process) and Time (our construction of this change into a form we can perceive). Time arises as an effect of our phenomenal observation of a succession of changes, determined in relation to the relative continuities of other objects or events, and in relation to the continuity of the phenomenal frame through which we represent reality (what we call our subjective consciousness).
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? 14. 3 Generatingthepresentfromlanguage "A Rose is a Rose is a Rose"
To perceive time we must represent or model it. Any such model must organize sensory input within a temporal structure. Such a structure is difficult to imagine because the word "structure" defines spatial relationships, and thus can only be used in a vague metaphoricalsensewhenusedtoorganizetemporality. Whatwerecognizeastemporal structure is really repetition (of the sort that orders and constructs music--which is the formal art of structuring time in relation to sound).
Human attempts to re-create a continuous present rely on repetition in order to split the sound o f the word (signifier) from its concept or meaning (signified and referent). In other words, repetition dissolves the symbolic content of a word by erasing semantic difference. As meaning is dissolved, the temporal dimension slows to nothing more than an awareness of the progressive loss of meaning in the sentence. Our experience of reading non-sense exposes a curious relation between our awareness of temporal succession and language.
A single image is not splendor. Dirty is yellow. A sign of more in not mentioned. Apieceofcoffeeisnotadetainer. Theresemblancetoyellowisdirtier and distincter. The clean mixture is whiter and not coal color, never more coal color than altogether.
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? The sight of a reason, the same sight slighter, the sight of a simpler negative answer, the same sore sounder, the intention to wishing, the same splendor, the same furniture. (Stein, 463)
Unlike some o f Lewis Carroll's nonsense lyrics, this passage plays between sense and nonsenseintheattempttoconstructwhatSteincalledacontinuouspresent. Whatwe apprehend as sense defines a frame, a set of expectations, which the subsequent non-sense dissolves. The failure ofthe frame to interpret the semantic content ofthe words throws us into an interpretative loop. We interpret that loop as a failure to progress beyond the immediate context.
Language is not simply structured serially, that is, it does not function through a successionofwords. IfitdidStein'spassagewouldclearlymakesense. Languageis structured through a series of nested domains. In a highly repetitive sentence, "Rose is a Rose. . these nested domains (syntactical categories) collapse into a tautological chain. In Stein's non-sense passage semantic meaning marks a stable moment (or frame) which disintegratesintoindeterminacy,butstillwithinastablesyntax. Theeffectistomodela mind capable o f formulating short-term predictions, but incapable o f organizing the facts (the words) in order to satisfy these predictions.
Stein wants to think like a chimp. D. Premack, in his attempt to evaluate the degree to which the chimpanzee has a theory of mind, formulates a distinction between simple and complex states. Simple states are "hard-wired, automatic and reflex- like, and encapsulated" (172). He defines these states as "seeing, wanting, and expecting". The pathways determining each o f these (with varying degrees o f complexity) are tied to direct
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? sensory input, such that their is little mediating control by the organism over these states. Complex states, however, are highly mediated states in which some level o f decision- making is required in order to determine the state. The prototypical example is belief. Belief arises as a mediating and, some would say, conscious response to particular forms ofdoubt. Premack distinguishes two forms ofdoubt (and consequently ofbelief): doubt in the veracity o f sensory information (epistemological doubt) and doubt in the information communicated by a member o f one's group (fear o f deception).
Epistemological doubt is countered by conscious attempts to construct an external means of determining the truth of sensory input: observation, experiment, analysis, reason, art, religion. Premack characterizes epistemological doubt with three questions: "Do I really see X? " "Do I really want X? " "Are my expectations well founded? " If we ignore the problem of their linguistic form, these questions describe a critical process of categorization. Epistemological doubt of this sort is predicated (and expresses or functions through) a distinction between truth and falsity. In other words these questions, defined by their use of "really" and "well-founded" require doubt to be in place in order to be asked. They appear initially to be questions o f domain. These questions are what I would call questions of syntax concerned about what belongs where as what. In other words syntax defines a set o f domains that taken together define the form and legitimacy of a particular string to function within language, that is to be intelligible. Syntax, however and to what degrees of specificity it is defined, constructs the possibility of determining legitimacy or, in relation to our epistemological doubt, truth. Syntax implies an established semantics, just as questioning the truth of X requires the possibility of falsity.
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? falsity. Syntaxdeterminesthedomainoflegitimacyasameansofstructuringthe possibility of doubt (or failure). Because a particular word might not be legitimate, syntax divorces the criterion for truth from the content of the word. The specific form of an entity is understood as variable and possibly false. This does not mean that a grammarians strictdefinitionofsyntaxdeterminesthesenseofasentence. Syntaxisitselfmuchmore fluidthancommonlysupposed. Strictsyntacticalrulessimplydescribethecenterofa syntactical domain. One can still make sense of words used within an incorrect syntax as long as they still reside within the domain defining their relationship with other words (and
thus its legitimacy as a member of a meaningful string). Once a word, however, can no longer be related to other words in a meaningful way, that word has left the syntactical domain that determined its legitimacy (and thus its meaningfulness). Thus one can see why a cognitive scientist like Schank argues for semantics over syntax. He should be arguing,however, foramorebroaddefinitionofsyntax,asyntaxthatdetermines relationships through the activation of semantic content within a particular domain (a possiblesetofrelations). Schank'sscriptorframeisasyntacticalstructure,onethat determines the legitimacy or meaningfulness of words by the establishment of a set of possible meanings, albeit possible meanings determined by previous knowledge. Belief as a form o f long-range prediction depends on a syntactical elaboration o f the present in order to create the possibility of a future.
The possibility of Premark's second form of doubt is dependent on the what R. Seyfarth and D Cheney call, in their study of meaning and language in Vervet monkeys, the attribution of mental states "such as knowledge, beliefs, and desires to others" (126).
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? In their study they conclude that Vervet monkeys in spite of the character of three specific calls and the different responses these calls cause in those who hear them in warning of a snake as opposed to a martial eagle or a leopard do not have a language because they cannot determine the difference between a knowledgeable audience and an ignorant audience (127). They apparently cannot evaluate the knowledge o f those around them, because their communication is not attempting to change the mental state of their audience. Itissimplyasignalactivatingalearnedresponse. Theattributionofamental state to another seems to require the ability to choose. Making a choice (a kind of
thinking) involves constructing a world, a frame, or a domain of relations organized according to a particular grammar (a set of rules and values).
Chimps make choices. Do they then make conceptual worlds? In an experiment a female chimp was trained to add and count. Part ofthe training procedure required the chimp to play a game where two piles of candies were counted out. Whichever pile the chimp first point to was given to another chimp sitting in front of her in a cage. The object of the game was to get the most candies. Whenever the candies were counted out the chimp invariably pointed at the larger pile, thus losing. When numbers written on cards were substituted for the candies, however, the chimp was always able to point to the smaller number, thus insuring that she would be rewarded with the larger number of treats.
One could speculate. When the chimp saw the food an instinctual grab/eat rule (or agent)determinedherchoice. Sheplayedthecandygameusingherinstinctualrules. She needed instead to nest the candy game within the her instinctual game, by replacing the instinctual mechanism for achieving her desire for the most food with the mechanism
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? defined by the game. By encoding the "amounts" o f candy within a numerical domain the relationship between the two piles can be determined without invoicing the grab/eat rule. Thisinformationisnolongerstoredasanimagewithinthegrab/eatrule. Thenumerical domain indicates the value of each number in relation to the other, not in relation to the chimp or her desire to eat. The failure of any abstract system to define this kind of personal relation requires that its values be accessed and assessed from another domain and according to another grammar. In this case, the chimp can then apply the rules o f the candy game to these "amounts" in order to determine the winning choice.
Any abstract system sets up a play between at least two different systems or domains. This recursive interaction creates a kind o f consciousness, because it creates the illusion o f free choice. This choice is not in any sense free, it is simply the mediation o f one domain by another. The chimp evaluates how to get food [an algorithm defined by CHOOSE THE MOST DESIRABLE and THE MOST DESIRABLE IS THE MOST FOOD] through the algorithm of the candy game [CHOOSE THE LEAST FIRST], The transcription of candies into number allows both of these algorithms to function together.
The three systems of relations in the previous experiment are all defined as systems o f value.
