It’s interesting how this theme continues to be explored, particularly in film. Indeed, both Solaris (2002) and Inception (2010) share a similar theme with the The Matrix (1999) and Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) before that. I might even put Blade Runner (1982) in this list. And while I’m sure there are more, all of these films deal with the idea of the real versus the ersatz, and how we project our images of how-it-aught-to-be onto the how-it-is. Indeed, what is the real? This is a question that has been at the forefront of science fiction at least since the cyberpunks.

In Inception, the brain is a computer to be hacked. The interface comes in a steel briefcase that joins the participants with wristbands. This machine seems to put them asleep immediately, and they all meet in the virtual world of someone’s subconscious. Instead of projecting into a matrix that is out there, the network has become the mind of a single person. As Cobb says in the film, we both create and experience that creation at the same time in dreams. Now that’s computing power. They never explicitly compare the brain to a computer network in the film, but the implication is obvious. Whereas the cyberpunks saw the body as a sack of meat that contained the reality of the mind, Inception privileges the material world and knows the mind is the best access to it.

I can read Soderbergh’s Solaris as a comment on virtuality, perhaps Inception is concerned with genetics. The former seems to caution us about the affect of ubiquitous computer networks (Solaris itself is just a big computer that feeds back what is put into it), and the latter is ultimately interested in how the body is literally affected by technology and ideas.

In fact, the idea seems to become reality. That is the whole idea of “inception” in the film. Like typing a command on a keyboard and pressing enter to activate it: the word becomes real. When our bodies are the computers, this is significant.

. . .

I can’t help but notice within Inception the Homeric theme of coming home. I don’t want to give away the ending, but as Odysseus finds out: a homecoming can be dangerous. Home, especially in all of the films I mention above, seems to represent a comfortable place — where we want to be and where we think we belong. Yet, in these films, and Inception is no exception, “home” is an irrational projection that can trap us.

One of the great things about a home is that we must leave it occasionally to work, to shop, to travel, to grow. It’s the leaving of home that makes it valuable, one could argue. But what happens when you come home permanently? I think this is how both Soderbergh’s Solaris and Tarkovsky’s Solaris end. Each are ambiguous, but each also suggest that Kelvin has made a choice to retreat into a fantasy, rather than continuing to live in a painful world — what we would call the “real world.”

. . .

Check out Inception. I need to see it again to tweak these ideas a bit further.

Both novels deal with human civilization and progress as a whole. Yes, each novel has central characters, but both writers are more interested in the progress of humanity, rather than individual aspects of it. Their styles are technical and precise; Asimov uses a lot of dialog and exposition to move his stories along, while Clarke likes description. Both novels deal with the death and rebirth of civilizations and the eb and flow of internal and external forces that have shaped and will continue to shape our species. While I could probably continue with a list of general similarities, one of particular interest — at least in the context of my metaphysical science fiction — is that both writers have a guiding, patriarchal figure that takes on a role not unlike a messiah or prophet.

I listened to Foundation for the first part of my journey, from Macon to St. Louis, via Birmingham and Memphis. Asimov’s first novel in what became an epical series is less science fiction, and more a study in how human civilizations evolve. The premise of this novel is what makes it sf: Hari Seldon is a “psychohistorian” and mathematician that has predicted the end of the world. Seldon, Asimov’s prophet, is like the God of the Enlightenment; he is a clockmaker. More precisely, he has an insight to the universal forces that shape the lives of humans, and his formulas allow him an uncanny ability to predict how these forces will converge to shape the lives of humanity. The more I read of Asimov, the more I see he’s a product of the Enlightenment: the bigger picture we have, the more we can know the mind of God. Even when he’s pushing it to its limits, reason is always at the center of Asimov’s work.

At the start of the novel, Seldon predicts the fall of the galactic empire. Like a prophet of doom, he has measured and calculated beyond doubt that the current political and economic structure will collapse within a thousand years. Yet, instead of just making that prediction, he acts rationally to shape the results. Here’s where he becomes the clockmaker himself: he establishes a remote colony that will become pivotal in the continuity and the reshaping of a future empire. Seldon’s life ends before the new colony is established, and the rest of the novel examines the birth and early years of a new civilization on the remote galactic rim.

The rest of the novel is a collection of vignettes — interrelated short stories, really — that are really just socio-political experiments. Asimov’s protagonists become reflections of Hari Seldon. They are future history’s great men of action — the shapers of the civilization that Seldon predicted through his calculations — themselves like minor prophets in Asimov’s patriarchal pantheon. (In fact, this novel has a distinct lack of women. The only one I remember is the nagging, bitchy wife of a local king, whose only importance is to curry favor with her father on her husband’s behalf. Otherwise, Asimov makes very clear, the king would do away with her in a nanosecond.) Seldon would pop up as a pre-recorded hologram after every “Seldon crisis” to offer words of encouragement, but like all religious prophets, this dead messiah would be very careful not to tell them anything that would hint at future crises. How very God-like, eh?

I think Asimov is interested in the paradox of humanity: in the order we try to bring to chaos and the impermanence of that order. He is also interested in the motivations of imposed orders and the psychological powers that shape our lives. Foundation is big. Maybe too big. His novel seems to ask: what is the foundation of humanity? By knowing the answer to that question — or at least pretending to — he can proceed with his experiment. Are their integral and ingrained forces that determine our lives and how we structure the chaos? What happens when technology and science grow to such an extent that they are able to measure the convergence of those forces?

Clarke, too, is interested in these questions. In Childhood’s End, Clarke’s messiah comes in the form of the Overlords. (On a side note: anytime big space ships from outer space show up, it never turns out well for humanity. Hint.) These are a race of seemingly beneficent aliens that are interested in making sure that we humans don’t kill ourselves. The Overlords usher in a golden age for humanity, but one that brings with it a malaise. It’s a utopia — one that’s free of poverty, war, and inequality — but one that’s also free of ambition and scientific progress.

There are three separate narratives in Childhood’s End, unified by the guiding presence of the Overlords: the arrival; the golden years; the end. Like Asimov, Clarke is interested in the evolution of humanity. For the old or current civilization to grow, the old has to die. Clarke’s novel is as much about death as it is about life and continuity. When he brings in a Ouija board in the middle of the novel, the astute reader understands that Clarke is dealing not just with science and technology, but something that transcends the material world in what we might call a spiritual sense.

Whereas Asimov’s metaphysics is based on a mathematical understanding of the human sciences (making it perhaps hyper-physical), Clarke’s penetrates the material to speculate about what might lie beyond — that which is incapable of being measured by a computer, even Hari Seldon’s. In fact, Asimov’s work is remarkably free of aliens. He probably read aliens in sf as a metaphor for white male anxiety. We humans must help ourselves without the benefit of an outward, guiding force. In Clarke, we humans need a lot of help by much wiser races.

Both novels, in thinking about them together, are ultimately optimistic. One celebrates the ingenuity of humanity and technological progress, while one considers the spiritual uniqueness of the human race. Both novels end with a feeling of hope, yet this hope comes at price.

I’ll write more about metaphysical science fiction soon.

I think what I like most about Ilium is that Simmons imaginatively connects the Greek age of heroes with the future history of our solar system, about 2000 hence. His Greek gods connect the two. They are either posthumans that left earth for Mars, or they are literary beings that have somehow been transported to the reality of Simmons’ novel by some quantum physical singularity. By the end of the novel, many questions are left unanswered — one being: who are the gods? In fact, Simmons’ chief protagonist Hockenberry has a discussion with Zeus near the end of the novel, but few questions are answered before Zeus is distracted. Whatever the “gods” are, they seem convinced they are actual gods, but they use technology out of science fiction, like rejuvenation chambers, quantum teleportation devices, super bodies, and other technology that makes them god-like. To the Achaeans and Trojans, this technology is inseparable from magic.

Simmons’ interplay of science and literature is intriguing, though somewhat vague. I’m beginning to see how the Greek gods fit into the story, but Ilium uses characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, too: Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel. An epilogue explains that Prospero is an “avatar of the evolved and self-aware Earth logosphere”; Ariel is an “avatar of the evolved and self-aware Earth biosphere”; and Caliban is “Prospero’s pet monster.” These show up at various times in the novel, and Caliban is the chief antagonist in the latter part of the “old style” human narrative thread. Simmons seems to be using these characters as allegorical projections of a future Earth. Perhaps they will be fleshed-out in the next novel.

As I mentioned, Ilium contains three distinct plot lines: the first-person narrative of Hockenberry — a Homer scholar in a previous life, he is now “scholic” who is literally observing the events of the Trojan war as they unfold. His job seems to be to compare the actual events with those that Homer narrated in his epic. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure what the scholics were there for. They worked for the “gods” observing the humans, but I’m not sure why. These gods are not omniscient, so the scholics might have been their necessary extensions. Still, it’s unclear why. I connected with Hockenberry’s character, as he is a scholar and a bit awkward. He works for the gods until he gets a bit of power. Yeah, I could see that happening to me, too.

This narrative was probably my favorite, for obvious reasons. As I said: Simmons did his homework. Not only has he done his research on Homer and his epics, but he uses epic conventions within his narrative. One that sticks out is the penultimate chapter where armies are lining up for battle. It’s a hoot to read about these heroes in an altered context. Simmons does a fine job here using Hockenberry as a twentieth-century interlocutor.

There’s the old-style human narrative with Daemon, Ada, Harmon, and Savi. This one’s set in a future where the posthumans have left earth, but seem to have supplied for the remaining old-styles. They have a long life of comfort and convenience, but — as Savi will quip later in the novel — they are much like the Eloi from Wells’ The Time Machine: naive to what they’ve lost — just children, bred for something more sinister. Essentially, this narrative is about Daemon’s growing up as a human, and the rest of humanity’s end of innocence. Oddly enough, the character Odysseus joins this narrative with the former. Again, it’s not quite clear how. (Yet.)

The third narrative centers around the friendship between two Jovian moravecs. Simmons playfully names these sentient robots after Hans Moravec, a roboticist and futurist. Mahnmut is a small humanoid moravec who is fascinated with Shakespeare’s sonnets, and his friend is a “hard-vac” moravec who has a penchant for Proust. The dialogue between these two is entertaining and colorful. Oddly, they are the most human characters in the novel; they provide comic relief and significant moments of pathos. Early in the novel, they are sent to Mars to investigate unusual and dangerous quantum signatures. This is how they become entangled in the first plot. They even meet Little Green Men who call themselves “zeks” — a word used by Solzhenitsyn in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for the camp’s prisoners. I’m unsure what they’re doing in the book.

OK, these were pretty random thoughts. It seems like Simmons wrote Ilium and its sequel Olympos as a single book. There are many unanswered questions by the end of Ilium, some of which I’ve mentioned here. Maybe this is just good marketing; I think I’m going to have to read Olympos. Too bad Ilium took me two months to get through. Maybe if I start now, I can finish before the fall semester.

Making the middle room upstairs a workable space has been a project we’ve been meaning to get to for the three years we’ve lived in this house. Essentially, it’s been storage for that time — a place for random crap that we’ve seemed to accrue for no other reason than to save a bunch of crap. We decided that this room should be more like an office-library-den: a corner of the room for the computer and officy stuff, a couple of book shelves, and a sitting area, complete with couch, coffee table, and comfy chair.

We originally had other designs for this space. The one I was most enthusiastic about had it as a photo studio, complete with props, sundry lights, backdrops, and other studio stuff. I would still like a studio, but it seems that my style of photography is fairly anti-studio. I’ve a more photojournalistic approach to photography that doesn’t really jive with the formal studio. Besides, this room is on the second floor, so bringing clients into our personal space just didn’t seem like a good solution. We had even discussed turning our first-floor, front room into a studio, but that never really went anywhere. Autumn was receptive to the idea, but I knew she wanted to keep it a more formal space.

Another idea was to turn the upstairs room into a home theater. It’s carpeted, so it would make a comfortable and acoustically appropriate place for a surround audio system. The walls are already painted a dark blue, so all we would need is adjustable lighting — maybe even some recessed cans in the ceiling. The room is sizable, and almost a perfect rectangle: a perfect accommodation for the flat screen and multiple speakers. We could even wire the speakers through the ceiling, since the attic is directly above. There were two drawbacks to this plan: we had just installed ventless gas logs downstairs, and we figured if we moved the television upstairs, we’d rarely use them — a waste of $1200. Also, Autumn works nights at the hospital. This arrangement would be fine when she was at work, but having the Dolby Digital sound system right next to the bedroom is probably not the best idea for lasting peace and serenity.

The room has therefore languished for three years as the collect-all place for junk, crap, and more junk. It became Anna’s room for a while, since she and Apollo decided not to be friends anymore. I put her food and litter box up there, but Autumn’s look told me this was a temporary arrangement. Since that situation has been worked out, the room was once again free to consider using.

Yesterday, we made it so. We went through all the junk and overstuffed both the garbage and recycle bins. It’s always so cathartic to declutter my areas. I wonder why I let it get so cluttered to begin with. Just the act of getting rid of years’ worth of kipple makes me breathe easier and even impresses upon me an urge I rarely get — to smile. Empty, usable, personal space. The potential. The possibility.

I’m usually a bit more zealous when it comes to decluttering. Autumn is meticulous and deliberate. What is this? Do we need to save the vacuum cleaner receipt? Why do we have two copies of The Cocktail Makers Handbook? You’re not going to put that there, are you? I need some space on the shelves, too. Would you, please, clean up this poo. You’re going to vacuum here, right? After several hours of work, we managed to reclaim some lost space. The trick is not to junk it up again.

Standing on a ladder at 16mm.

The reading area. I'm standing where I want a chair.

Sitting in my office chair. Yes, I need a new computer.

The fireplace and corner shelves. Sf geekery on top.

Another 16mm view toward the office.

Office and corner book shelf.

Next, we need some furniture. We plan on getting rid of the futon that I’ve had since graduate school and replacing it with a couch. I’d like a coffee table and a reading chair with an ottoman. We plan to start combing Craigslist soon. Anyone want to buy a futon?

Along with literal cleaning, I’ve done some virtual reorganizing, too. I’m resurrecting Big Jelly. I purchased this domain name a few years ago, intending to use it with some friends as a group blog about science fiction, futurism, and technoculture. What’s changed, other than my friends’ apathy? Well, more on that soon.

I still have some work to do to this site, the HumX, and to Big Jelly, but I’m pretty pleased with my migrations. Drupal served me well for a long time, but WordPress seems to be much more advanced — at least for my purposes. Yes, WP has its quirks, but in the big picture, it is just a better platform. Besides, it seems to have many more professional designers working for it.

The good news: I am the proud owner of a new camera: a Canon EOS 30D. A friend bought my Rebel (Thanks, Jamie!), so I was able to upgrade. I’ve been enjoying the hell out of it. Coupled with Apple’s Aperture, I am growing quickly as a photographer. Still, I want a new lens: the Sigma 30mm F1.4. I’ll have to wait a bit, methinks, ’cause of the bad news.

The bad news: my PowerBook’s hard drive died. First, it stopped being able to install anything new, then it would take forever to download anything from Firefox, but it would still boot and run normally. Disk Utility told me there was a problem, so I booted off the Tiger install disk to try to fix the problem. It could not fix it; instead it seemed to supply the coffin’s final nail. Now, the PowerBook will no longer boot at all. I see the gray Apple screen with the wheely thing rotating at the bottom for about five minutes before the computer just shuts itself off. It seems I need a new PowerBook MacBook Pro. I’m thinking about the 15″, as if I can afford that. Until then, I’ll just use the department’s 17″ G4 PowerBook (slow and heavy) until a student requests to use it. (I’m not sure where it is…)

Computer woes aside, I have purchased some domain names, one I mentioned previously. Since purchasing grlucas.net, I now own Big Jelly (bigjelly.net), LitMUSE (litmuse.net), and the Humanities Index (humx.org). Here are my plans: this blog will soon be relocated to earthshine.org; when I say “soon,” I probably mean May at the earliest for professional reasons. I will continue to use Blogger, cause it’s cool and does exactly what I want without all the hassle of trying to keep up with Movable Type. Grlucas.net already has much of my portfolio on it, transferred from Earthshine. I will use it to feature one of my favorite things in life: me. LitMUSE will do what Earthshine used to do: operate as my courseware site for students; it’s already well underway.

I hope to use the Humanities Index as a collaborative space where educators can share notes on various aspects of literature for students. Here is where I will put all of my literary notes, ideas, and ramblings. I will encourage my colleagues to do the same. I really think this could be a worthwhile project. I’ve been porting entries from this blog over there, and I hope to have more there soon. Interested in contributing? Send me an email. And you don’t have to be a professional educator.

Now, Big Jelly should be interesting. It is the brainchild of Tom and me, based on the ideas in the eponymous short story by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker. Like a big jelly, our ideas are kind of squishy and amorphous right now. We want a place to talk about science fiction and futurism and how these ideas wind in-and-out of one another and touch other cultural texts that interest us. We want to have round tables, reviews, essays, editorials, links, and anything else we think might be apropos. It’s as a place where old school meets new skool. There’s nothing there right now, but stay tuned.

I guess one of the most exciting things about these new domain names is that I have discovered a new web host: AN Hosting. Unlike the crappy support and services of IPowerWeb, I can host up to 10 domain names on one account, for about $30 less a year. Too cool, no? When I send tech support an email (no mandatory web forms to fill out), I usually have a response in under an hour. No kidding. It used to take IPowerWeb two days to send me some boilerplate that didn’t even answer my question or solve my problem. So far, I am very pleased with these new guys.

Now, to try to enjoy the rest of my break. Hope everyone is having a relaxing holiday.

Part of being human is attempting to reconcile our relationship with nature. Nature, itself, is a tricky word — many things have become naturalized; for example, a woman’s biological clock, human curiosity in the unknown, gender, patriarchal privilege. I mean the physical universe that we find ourselves in and that thousands of years of mythology has tried to pattern and order so that our limited, but evolving, human intellect can make our environment more sensical and less chaotic. As our intellect evolved, our stories became more complex and subtle to mirror our increasing understanding of universe. We have progressed far, but there’s still much we have yet to fathom.

Astronomy has been one way that humanity seems to have always embraced as holding the keys to understanding. Whether is has been explained as the perfect abode of the gods, the offspring of Gaea, Uranus, or the abode of planets and galaxies, humans have always looked to the sky as a source of mystery and certainty — a place of grandeur and order in which lies the answers to many of our questions about ourselves and how we fit into the clockwork of creation — a position that many still embrace, a remnant of the Enlightenment and a position that gives credence to the religious faithful.

This idea becomes most apparent when reading Richard Garfinkle’s novel Celestial Matters. Historically placed about a millennium after Aristotle, Garfinkle’s novel is set in a real manifestation of a Ptolemaic universe: the characters live on earth at the center of the universe, around which circle the ’Ermes, Aphrodite, ’Elios, Ares, Zeus, Saturn, the fixed stars, and the Sphere of the Prime Mover. Garfinkle writes a hard science fiction novel of “alternate science” that could be called a novel of golden age sf, where an almost romantic faith in science can solve the problems of the world and help humanity though their most difficult endeavors.

Yet, science does not represent the only order of this world: there is a connection between science and religion, a mixture of Greek mythology and science that has progressed as if a two-thousand year old view of medicine in this world (one based on humors that is now seen as quaintly naive) was in reality accurate. While religion is an important part of the workings of this world, these are not the gods of Homer, but are more like allegorical representations of the characters’ dispositions and caprices. When Athena speaks through the protagonist Aias, he says something wise so that the other characters feel as if the god is present. Before picking up this book, any reader would be advised to review the Greek pantheon. I found myself having to look up a few names just for some context.

Another part of this combination of science and religion reminds me of the contention in many of the great Greek tragedies between a traditional, superstitious view of the universe ruled by the whims of the gods and one that upholds human reason and intellect as capable of understanding and explaining the world. Sophocles saw these as disparate and irreconcilable views of the universe that cause humans to err, losing faith in their traditions, blinded by the hubris that places humanity in a godlike position. The height of Athenian culture was also a time of insecurity and desperation for many, when the old religious ways were being usurped by a new focus in the powers of the human intellect. The height of Athens would not last for long in our history, but in Celestial Matters, Garfinkle reconciles religious devotion with that of philosophy turned science through an Aristotle that never was.

The heroes of this alternative universe — one that is strikingly similar in many ways — are Aristotle and Alexander, the former for his scientific knowledge and the latter for his military prowess. The culture is right out of Plato’s Republic, where poets are venerated, but banned; where the citizens and scientists are ruled by an elite class of Philosopher-Kings; where this hierarchy is maintained by a race of born Spartan warriors. Aristotle and Alexander represent that two concerns of this culture: military might and scientific positivism.

This western view, that of the “Delian League,” is contrasted with that of the Middle Kingdom, or eastern perspectives of the workings of the universe that prove, when given the chance, equally convincing in their view of how things work.

The lesson of Celestial Matters seems to be a liberal one: that no matter how much we know, there are always other ways of looking at it, other discourses, other orders. We only get into trouble when we privilege one system over another, no matter how certain we are of the Truth. Garfinkle’s protagonists are products of rigid systems, but there seems to be a faith that no matter how ossified the system, we, as humans, can transcend those systems to become more. We are not determined by our nature or our culture, that we are divine in our ability to wonder and imagine new possibilities. Garfinkle’s view depicts two seemingly disparate and irreconcilable cultures coming together for the benefit of something more than their ideas of the world. It’s sf like this that seems necessary in a polarized world like ours.

Check it out.

Indeed, Baudrillard and Enzensberger are also concerned with people’s ability to respond. By “response,” Baudrillard means an ability to repay so that no one has power over another: “power belongs to the one who can give and cannot be repaid. To give, and to do it in such a way that one is unable to repay, is to disrupt the exchange to your profit and to institute a monopoly” (Wardrip-Fruin “Requiem” 281). For Baudrillard, this monopoly is in effect a silencing of opposition. Baudrillard sees us living in an era of non-response that is characterized by current media. He, like Enzensberger, seeks to end this silence by restoring the possibility of response.

Enzensberger, in his essay “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” seeks to posit a theory of the media, something he sees lacking in current Marxist theory. His project aims to release the “emancipatory potential which is inherent in the new productive forces” of electronic media (Wardrip-Fruin 261). For Enzensberger, electronic media have a revolutionary potential that can challenge by forming new connections by giving the common human a tactical advantage in the ownership of these media. Since the use of the media presupposes manipulation, according to Enzensberger, we must therefore make everyone a manipulator (265). Instead of receiving the media’s messages passively and being manipulated through those messages, Enzensberger sees new media as “oriented towards action, not contemplation; towards the present, not tradition. Their attitude to time is completely opposed to that of bourgeois culture, which aspires to possession, that is to extension in time, best of all, to eternity” (265). Enzensberger sees new media as helping to form a collective method of production, thus ending the individual’s isolation through the connections formed by these media. Armed with tape recorders and video cameras (he wrote this in 1970), wage-earners can illustrate and display social conflict in everyday life and get the community actively engaged in how to best address those problems (267).

Yet Baudrillard is not so optimistic. He sees that any use of the codified forms of media necessarily controls the message of those media: “there is no response from a functional object: its function is already there, an integrated speech to which it has already responded, leaving no room for play, or reciprocal putting in play (281). For example, delivering any message via the television is succumbing to that medium’s form and being controlled and manipulated by its already codified system of power. Like McLuhan’s lesson, the medium is the message for Baudrillard as well: “But transgression and subversion never get ‘on the air’ without being subtly negated as they are: transformed into models, neutralized into signs, they are eviscerated of their meaning” (282). It is the “passage to the generality of political action which puts an end to the singularity of revolutionary action” (283). Baudrillard concludes that the message does not matter as long as the codes of transmission remain mixed and controlled. He suggests that the codes themselves must be modified in order for any revolutionary messages are transmitted (287).

Perhaps this is where new media enters the picture. Boal, Baudrilliard, and Enzensberger were all writing their respective pieces in the early seventies, several years before the introduction of the personal computer and two decades before the Internet. Yet, it seems to me that the networked computer is being used more along the lines of Certeau’s tactic than the outright revolutionary ways envisioned by our theorists. In using computers for their personal productivity, the wage earner undermines the univocality of the capitalist. Yet, the obvious question here is whether or not networked computers allow their users a response? I could cite the obvious example of file sharing upsetting the powers-that-be, the MPAA and the RIAA, not to mention the blogging community, open source, and the whole hacker community. Perhaps the latter is an example of the digital revolutionary: she has been condemned by the corporation and upheld as the hero of the information age by those whose fat wallets are not threatened.

The trick here seems to be not only the ability to control and the access to computers, but a mobilized community of users who seeks to make their voices heard. Does the polysemous Internet even have a chance?

Bush, in his essay “As We May Think,” invents what he calls a “memex,” or a sort of Victorian contraption with wheels, pulleys, and switches that can catalog a person’s interests in such a way as to provide a record, or “trail,” of knowledge through association. Bush sees the human mind working not necessarily by reason, or though predictable algorithms, but by association and chance that forms a “web of trails carried by the cells of the brain” (44). His “memex” is “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications [can't you hear the RIAA and MPAA groan?], and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility” (45). Yet, unlike the finite capacity of human memory, the memex can enlarge and make permanent the transitory pathways of neurons in the brain.

Bush’s memex, as he conceives of it, is an analog machine, replete with little cameras that take detailed snapshots of materials on microfilm. However, his quaint vision right out of Babbage’s century need not be a representation of crude writing implements and dead media, but may bypass the senses all together, so that no translation would be necessary: since all forms from the external world are transformed to various electrical currents, might it not one day be possible to connect these currents directly to the currents that make up the human nervous system? Bush seems to think so. His memex, then, becomes a literal memory augmentation, so that a human’s “excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important” (47).

Another fascinating aspect of Bush’s essay was his passing suggestion that human languages are not particularly adapted to communicate with machines. Instead of suggesting ways to design the machines to deal with this, he suggests that language will inevitable change. Here begins a disturbing notion of the humans changing for the technology, and not vice versa. I’m reminded of the marketing for some Intel gadget which said “You’ll find a reason to use it.” Well, why should we? This seems to suggest that how we want to work takes a secondary consideration to how the designers (and capitalists) may want us to work. Perhaps if computers have difficulty with human languages, they need to be revised, not us. I’m sorry, I do not want to have to learn a new way of writing just to communicate with my PalmPilot — I can’t even type, for goodness sake.

Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis” suggests that we should live in a symbiotic relationship with our computers, for we will each benefit the other, but does not address necessarily how we can do this. Computer keyboards and monitors are just not enough for a symbiotic relationship. I kept thinking of Star Trek’s computer working with Geordi to solve a crisis. The computer was able to create a likeness of another human — one that Geordi was physically attracted to — to work with him on solving a particularly difficult problem, one no doubt that would have caused the destruction of the galaxy if they were unsuccessful. This type of relationship seems to be what Licklider is going for: one that uses the strengths of each to augment the other’s weaknesses. Good idea. How do we do it? We’re back to interface and design.

Nelson’s “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Intermediate” tries to envision an interface, or at least a structure, that would allow humans to organize their digital lives in any way they wanted. Rather than a hierarchal structure, Nelson’s ELF (evolutionary list file) would be organized according to the user’s desires, and it would be able to evolve as the user does. I like Nelson’s idea, but his essay becomes bogged down in the abstract; I don’t think he even had a good idea of just how something like an ELF could be implemented.

What’s most interesting about Nelson’s piece is its conclusion: he posits his “philosophy” that complex and flexible file structures will enable the creation of new media, “the hypertext and hyperfilm,” and will facilitate the ever-evolving order of the human (143). What Nelson means by “hypertext” is not it’s Web manifestation of today. Our hypertext is not really hyper because it can be organized linearly. Nelson seems to desire something more like a holodeck, something that works symbiotically with the user to create a truly interactive and evolving form: “it has become possible to create a new, readable medium, for education and enjoyment, that will let the reader find his level, suit his taste, and find the parts that take on special meaning for him, as instruction or entertainment” (144). Indeed, no human writer (programmer) could construct all of these varying contingencies; therefore, the only conceivable way to write these environments is to allow the computer a role in the creative process. Not only would this happen for artistic expressions, but also for the mundane structures of our lives. The medium must be flexible enough to go anywhere we want; Nelson continues:

Last week’s categories, perhaps last night’s field, may be gone today. To the extent that information retrieval is concerned with seeking true or ideal or permanent codes and categories — and even the most sophisticated “role indicator” syntaxes are a form of this endeavor — to this extent, information retrieval seems to me to me fundamentally mistaken. The categories are chimerical (or temporal) and our categorization systems must evolve as they do. (144)

Indeed, what is literature or art or philosophy but “categorization systems”? These systems change over time, and in this postmodern zeitgeist, they are not necessarily trying to find the truth. No one view is any more correct than any other; wouldn’t it be great if our computers mirrored this idea?

It seems, however, that the trend is going the other way: you must conform and use M$, or your will be invalid. I think Nelson would be appalled at the notion of a thinking monopoly. Indeed, how does Windoze influence and structure how we work, how we think, who we are? Instead of the computer dictating who I am, I would prefer to be the one dictating.

Turing’s universal machine — a digital computer that “could mimic the behaviour of any discrete machine” (54) — concerns mimesis, or the ability of a digital machine to mimic the behavior of a human, or any algorithmic system for that matter. Turing speculates that within fifty years (2000 — we’re not quite there yet) “it will be possible to programme computers with a storage capacity of 109 to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning” (55). The implications of this prediction are numerous.

While we are not quite at the level that Turing predicted, fifty-four years ago, we have come along way in computer simulation. Just the notion of simulation is interesting here: the idea that the human can be simulated suggests that humans can be predicted — that humanity operates by a series of predictable (programmable?) algorithms that can be mimicked by a digital computer, Turing’s universal machine. With faith in science’s ability to find out just how things operate (the why here does not matter), we could eventually program the perfect ersatz human, as if there is such a thing to begin with.

This faith is based on the Enlightenment faith in the human mind’s ability to reason and figure out the mysteries of the universe through scientific experimentation, by an application of reason to the ostensibly chaotic universe. Order can be gleaned through temerity and reason. Yet, our postmodern and poststructural zeitgeist has suggested that this faith in reason is itself a product, perhaps, of wishful thinking: that it’s no more credible than the superstition that is was supposed to replace. Indeed, after the culmination of scientific progress produced the nuclear bomb — ripping apart an order that science was supposed to bolster — many artistic expressions after WWII suggested the impossibility of humanity to even achieve a predictable understanding of ourselves. Yet, with the development of the war’s technology, scientists like Turing and Wiener saw the necessity of defining just who we are and what we hold important, for technology would change us in numerous ways, perhaps even precipitating our own extinction.

Wiener’s article compares technology to magic — the genie being let out of the bottle. Before making the wish, Wiener suggests, we better know just what it is we want: “sorcery was not the use of the supernatural, but was the use of human power for other purposes than the greater glory of God” (72). By the “greater glory of God,” Wiener means an end that has a “justifiable human value” (72). A quality of humanity that Wiener seems to value — as well as Turing — is our ability to adapt, to learn from our environments. Along these lines, Wiener posits that we must understand our technology, not worship it. Gods demand obedience and sacrifice, but understanding involves questioning and revision:

Within Wiener’s argument is the implication that we, humans, are machines that can learn, though sometimes we do not. If we do not learn from our mistakes, then Wiener sees little hope for humanity’s survival. Fortunately, tape can be erased and recorded on again.

Turing’s machine can also learn, despite its programming and Lady Lovelace’s objection: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can dowhatever we know how to order it to perform” (59). Indeed, machines that are programmed cannot exceed that programming. Seems very logical. Yet, if the program is complex enough, with enough capacity and processing power, it can seem, in Kurzweil’s language, spiritual — as if it has a soul, is self-aware, and more than the sum of its parts. Humans seem like gestalts because we have not figured out the program yet. Faith in scientific endeavors, like the Human Genome Project, may just unravel the human program in such a way that we could reproduce it and even significantly alter it.

Just what makes a human a human? Body? Soul? Both? Neither? While we still do not understand just why or how we’re conscious, that does not mean that we won’t sometime soon have the ability to replicate or simulate consciousness. What will we tell our technological children when they, like Frankenstein’s monster, ask uswhy? More on this later . . .