Skywritings

Nous n’avons pas de catégorie expérientielle désservant le décès de quelqu’un. On a l’absence, la distance, mais pas la mort. On se résigne consciemment au fait qu’on ne verra plus jamais la personne [le « jamais » c’est déjà flou ], et qu’elle n’existe plus, mais on n’a aucun ressenti inné pour cette catégorie, juste le regret, ce qui se dérive plutôt de l’absence que de la non-existence — qu’on ne comprend que chez les objets, pas chez les êtres animés. Reste seulement l’oubli. Mais jamais l’appréciation de la mort, l’inexistence. C’est encore une fois notre célèbre animisme : Une conscience, comment peut-elle ne plus être ? Elle n’est pas physique, matérielle. C’est pour ça qu’il y a le culte des ancêtres. Et c’est ça la provenance de l’idée biscornue de l’âme immortelle et de tous les plaisirs (croisades, inquisitions, djihads) qui en sont l’issue.

In the land of the old
everyone’s a foreigner
fancied native-born
by but the haply young.

Time thus ensures
rude awakenings all round.

Journalists
like moths and drunks
seem attracted
irresistibly
where the light
shines, not
where the key lies

He who steals my prose, steals trash:
The purse from whence it flows
Inexhaustibly
Is stashed
Inviolate
Intracranially

Yes, the Hwang truth came out, fast, on the web. But it would have come out anyway, because one cannot build on a fake foundation. It was science’s public, self-corrective nature that triumphed; the web merely accelerated it (as with cold fusion). My guess is that Hwang was not really a conscious, deliberate fraudster, but merely (merely!) incompetent and self-deluded. It is the rapid pace of celebrity and also the (peculiar to biomedicine) precipitate push toward clinical applications (partly for justifiable, partly unjustifiable reasons) that puts biomedical research at greater risk of short-term damage from error or fraud before, inevitably, it is discovered. The only undetected fraud is the harmless kind — the noncumulative, hit-and-run research that no one cares about because it goes nowhere (and serves only to earn a PhD or promotion)…

It feels disingenuous to bear witness to a profound hardship of which one has been largely spared. But how can I not express my admiration and gratitude for the heroic triumph of the commanders and crew of HMS Soton-ECS and Soton over this undeserved and unprovoked assault from Nature? It was indeed reminiscent (again from a distance, to someone spared the tumult) of Dunkirk. And not just reminiscent but a direct embodiment of that same Brit grit that an outsider may perhaps be excused for alluding to directly. Its emblem is always the same (and has already been identified by others): “Oh dear. Never mind. Let’s get on with it.”

Well done. Indescribably, inimitably, well done. And duly, indelibly, noted.

Stevan Harnad

(safely, gratefully following the recovery from the colonies)

Probably better (for human creativity) if no one ever builds them, but surely I’m not the first to think of the following online prostheses for poetasters:

(1) A straight rhyme-grepper (words that rhyme with…)

(2) An alliteration-grepper (words that begin with…)

(3) Combining (1) and (2) with a thesaurus (grep only words that mean something like…)

(4) Metric constraints could easily be plugged in too

(5) And machine-aided metaphor

The reason it’s probably better if would-be poets stay away from such devices is that necessity is the mother of invention, and the brain is such that once it senses that it can off-load a task onto another device, it no longer rises to the occasion. And then versification becomes just a multiple-choice exercise…

Comment on: “Is It Art?” Dan Falk, Saturday, October 15 2005

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In 1843, Lady Lovelace (Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada) made her famous objection to Charles Babbage’s prototype computer, “The Analytical Engine,” that it “has no pretensions to originate anything. It can [only] do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”

Harold Cohen (the artist who wrote AARON, the computer programme that paints pictures) agrees that AARON is not “creative” because it is just mechanically following the rules Cohen wrote. (Cohen may be creative, but not AARON.) Yet Cohen thinks his newer program, which is “no longer ‘rule-based’ in the old sense” may be creative because it is capable of modifying itself. But what difference does that make? The self-modifying capability is itself rule-based! And even if a random element were thrown in, that would just be rules plus a bit of random shake-up, and still no more creative than the “malfunctioning toaster [that can produce] a piece of toast with burn marks completely unforeseen by the toaster’s builder.”

In any case, none of this has anything to do, one way or the other, with the “consciousness and intentionality and subjectivity” (all really just synonyms for the same thing: feeling) that Toronto’s cognitive scientist John Vervaeke invokes. The real point is that we don’t yet know the rules underlying most of our abilities, whether creative or uncreative. The paradox will come if and when cognitive science does discover the rules underlying our “creative” abilities, for then there will be no degrees of freedom left for creativity (other than chance).

So perhaps we should focus on “giftedness” rather than on creativity: Perhaps the genius is the one who has the ability to master and play according to rules that none of the rest of us can master,
rather than just the one who can modify them.

Harnad, S. (in press) “Creativity: Method Or Magic?”
Harnad, S. (2001) Spielberg’s AI: Another Cuddly No-Brainer.

The irony of “A Temetetlen Halott” (“Unburied Remains” or “The Uninterred Corpse,” woodenly translated “The Unburied Man”) is buried in its one good metaphor: that what tormented Imre Nagy (the abettor of the ill-fated and short-lived Hungarian uprising of 1956) the most at the end was that his (inevitable) posthumous rehabilitation would be at the hands of his own assassins (rehabilitating themselves).

The film ends on the note that Imre Nagy’s exhumation and reburial with honours was not done until 1989, after the remains of the post-1956 regime had faded out (and on the very day his successor/executioner János Kádár died). But it seems to be lost on the film-makers and the nation that the internecine squabbles among the true-believers (few) and the opportunists (many) about whether 1956 was a revolution or a counter-revolution had itself been just another incarnation of Hungary’s unburied cycle of red/white — previously black-yellow/red-white-green) oscillation and carnage. The same archetypes keep re-emerging, out of the self-same mother-soil and blood-types that the film is here whitewashing (in accordance with the current cycle), if not beatifying.

But Hungary is perhaps no worse than the rest of the planet in this regard, and certainly not the worst.

The film itself, apart from a few moments of good character acting, is dead dialogue and dreary docudrama throughout.

(full disclosure)