GALATEA 2:2

I’m reading another complex and beautiful Richard Powers novel, ‘Galatea 2.2’.  In it, a writer is assisting a cognitive neurologist who is trying to model the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks.   The writer’s job is to talk to the computer, to ‘educate’ it, in order to construct in its memory that endlessly sweet web of connections which makes for a ‘world’ and from which we humans speak, so that one day the computer may be able to comprehend human language and talk back.  Its a virtually impossible task (and one mirrored in similar conversations - semi-impossible or beautifully present - taking place in the worlds of the people around him: an autistic boy, an old woman slipping into dementia, first lovers in a foreign country, a deeply loved professor sinking into death with unbounded dignity) because what makes us human is an infinite yet particularised mosaic of little somethings and nothings, inexpressibly weighted, the somethings balanced against the nothings.  Balanced in ways that defy gravity.

Here’s a slice of the ticker-tape sweetness of that computer’s education, the mimicking of the endless immeasurable context that is human consciousness:

"…We told her about parking tickets and two-for-one sales.  About tuning forks and pitchforks and forked tongues and the road not taken.  We told her about resistors and capacitors, baiters-and-switchers, alternating current, alternate lifestyles, very-large-scale integration and the failure of education to save society from itself.
We told her about wool and linen and damask.   We told her about finches and feeders, bats and banyans, sonar and semafores and trail markers made of anything the living body might shed.  About mites and motes, insect galls and insecticides, about mating for life or for a fraction of a minute.
We taught her about the Securities and Exchange Commission.  We told her about collectors who specialize in Depression-era glass.  About how people used to teach their children about the big hand and the little hand.  About defecation and respiration and circulation.  About Post-it notes.  Registered trademarks and draft resistance.  The Oscar and Grammy and Emmy.  Dying of heart disease.  Divining with a fresh-cut alder rod.
We told her how the keys on a piano were laid out.  About letterhead.  Debutantes balls…  We showed her the difference between triforium and clerestory.  We traced the famous pilgrims’ routes through time and space.  We told her about spoilage and refrigeration.  How salt was once worth its weight in gold.  How spice fueled the whole tragic engine of human expansion.  How plastic wrap solved one of civilisation’s nightmares and started another.
We showed her Detroit, savaged by short-term economics.  We showed her Sarajevo in 1911.  Dresden and London in 1937.  Atlanta in 1860.  Baghdad.  Tokyo, Cairo, Johannesburg, Calcutta, Los Angeles.  Just before, and just after.
We told her about revenge and forgiveness and contrition.  We told her about retail outlets and sales tax, about ennui, about a world where you hear about everything yet where nothing happens to you.  Bar-codes and baldness.  Lint, lintels, lentils, Lent.  The hope, blame, perversion and crippled persistence of liberal humanism.  Grace and disgrace and second chances.  Suicide.  Euthanasia.  First love.  Love at first sight.”
 
And somehow, mixed in with all this and perhaps precisely because of it, I’ve just discovered (FEB 2010) the social networking site Twitter, a site where communications are limited to two lines of text.  An ‘idiotic’ site, full of babble and self-promotion - or so I kept being told.  But when such limitation is taken up by the right person - such as the MIT researcher and ‘futuremaker’ John Maeda - it becomes a free-floating source of temporary context, some kind of innocent high-speed mesh of intelligence and simplicity.

Here’s a slice of the ticker-tape sweetness coming from Maeda:

The art of asking questions, is art.
Subtlety is a kind of dust in the room of life that shouldn’t be confused with just dirt.
The computer is now an abacus of many minds.
Time doesn’t fly. It travels leisurely by foot.
“If you can think, you can draw.”
Herbert Simon likened how we think to a pair of scissors. The brain is one blade, the other is the environment in which the brain operates
The sound of your heart isn’t a sound effect.
Watching waves break is non-stressful because you know you can look away at any time … and won’t miss a thing.
Art is the inexplicable urge to manifest feeling, intent, or question as a specific experience outside the artist’s mind.
Teaching is the rare profession where the customer isn’t always right and needs to be told so appropriately.
small is not only beautiful, but memorable.

and here’s something flagged by William Gibson about an hour ago, ‘tokyo sky drive’ :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpTI3W9dPtc

(watching this, I know I’m never going to make it back to any monastery…)