<nettime> Argument

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hi all,

Just wondering if my chosen limit of one post per month may be unnecessarily few.  When America sneezes, the world dies of pneumonia, as it were, so maybe it is better for an American like me to talk a little bit more than every moon.  What about week?  At least until things settle down perhaps.  Just a thought.  The one month rule has been excellent for editing purposes and in normal circumstances I would stick to it gladly; but maybe a month of weekly or biweekly is more responsible big picture just now, in honor of Lincoln and King and whoever else.  Not sure yet, so apologies for this extra.

Apropos of artificial writing -- what it really must be called -- I'm composing a novel in flight about two computer programs who together, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, are trying to convince the planet in 2032, all 8.7B network users of us, that the Esperienza allegory hypothesis is worth discussing.  Their parm is a 5 star rating input, like for sandwiches.  Their only power is to change the 250-word text on their web page daily, if they want, and send one email a day, 250-word limit no special characters, for example to a journalist or scholar.  It's going fine, 250 words a day being a cakewalk, and I as in all things avoid any use of AI-GPT like the certifiable plague.  It includes no drawings however.

It is more and more clear to me from what few details have reached my peripheral vision about AI-GPT that Gates and Altman would do well to pivot slightly, or might wish to consider doing so, from what might be called a brute-force model to a more philosophical one, not just despite but because of the unchained and snarling lunacy of the naturalized tech goonsquad leaders' scrapping of all ethical Geneva conventions on behalf of a klepto-demagogue's golem administration.

The noble garment of philosophy, of which one hears time to time at university, which means yes natural, moral, and aesthetic all three, can be their paradigm for an AI-GPT role which lives at the app level in a commodified downscape.  This is humble but highly ambitious too, being a genuine culture layer, and Gates need look no further for the words and pictures to explain it by than the very Leonardo masterwork he owns personally, the Codex Leicester/Hammer/Gates.

It's a big turn, yes, not a tweak; but who said converting a living planet to advanced technology would be a picnic?  The Codex Leicester applies; and you don't have to bet the whole portfolio.  Very likely it's not going to be about how strong your Artificially Intelligent Machine is, this kerfuffle over who wins, but whether it is Good -- does it help -- do people want to support it and partner with it.  Can it see the stars above and work in harmony with the land and the waters; is it capable of "loving grace" per Brautigan or a reasonable mirror image.  This is ethics, the putative ultimate Western contribution to politics, philosophy, and poetics, which has been utterly flushed down the proverbial commode by the klepto-demagogue movement based on Machiavelli's very poisoned advice (which might have been a shirt of Nessus even more literally than we know).

With regard to indigenous and other cultural teachings EuroAmerica might enlighten itself by, iterating the indigenous critique that perhaps even spawned the Constitution itself as per Graeber and Wengrow's schismogenetics, I saw an excellent film and talk Friday night here at the local Walker Art Center.  It was the 2024 documentary on Wilfred Buck, by Lisa Jackson, and Ben Weiss of MIT earth sciences joined the talk after.  Highly recommend it, and I especially admired its representation of the sturgeon as it exists in native American astronomical science.  Buck has events in Berlin this coming week if you are there.

Another topic I've seen time to time of late is Jung.  He had a little different view than Freud and the Freudians, including the French Freud or should I say Freuds, no offense to the French, Freud after all being a product of Germania who as Ken said in our conversation gifted us the bane of compartmentalization circa 1900 (along with the even worse bane of Freud).  Some don't like Jung, too loose and hopeful, but I side rather with Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk for example in her essay Ognosia.  Maybe it is so utopian to connect everything to everything, on principle and by default, rather than the other choice (funny what that might be called), but it isn't at all "no place."  In fact it is the opposite: "every place."  It's just being honest.  Brian Klaas starts his new book Fluke, derived from flukey which is a hockey word from another Minnesota product, with a quote from John Muir that everything in the Universe is connected.  Which it is: that's not superstition at all.  Rather, to say the opposite is.  Going back to imperial Roman autocracy is going back to superstitious despotism.

In my interview with Ken Burns about his new Leonardo film and the Esperienza allegory hypothesis, which he supports in the interview (video free online at the MIT Press' Leonardo journal, see their page at Leonardo.info/is-everyone-a-leonardo and scroll down), he mentions John Muir as an author who wrote about the relationship between experience sui generis and constitutional democracy within the US context.  Burns also mentioned Thoreau, who had a major quote about experience i.e. "I went to the woods."  The primary document in favor of the US Constitution and the Union, which ironically conservatives have shied away from these last couple decades perhaps after having actually read it a little bit more carefully, begins thus: "After an unequivocal experience...."  This is a term of art in academic philosophy -- "unequivocal experience" -- by which questions of a priori and a posteriori are to be adjudicated, and goes back to Europe's middle ages or even ancient Westernia.  Is the experience unequivocal?  If yes it supersedes Reason, and it is Reason that must adapt to the burden of proof not vice versa, not the Experience.  Like it or lump it.

There is plenty of solid evidence to go by, in sum, for Tweedledum and Tweedledee's cinque-stelle aspirations and academia is gradually starting to consider it.

In other words:  If you want to help resolve a problem, don't spend your time trying to prove it can't be solved.  Assume it can, even if only by the aid of miraculous good luck, even though you might be wrong or fail or both, and spend your time trying to help image out what that helping resolve the problem could look like while, crucially, sharing all your work throughout with others.  This is how even bacteria survive -- optimistic improv -- and all other organisms do it too.  It is, in fact, basic science.

Because if you can't even imagine what you need then even if it fell in your lap you'd have no idea.

Anyway, here is a poem I wrote yesterday and today.

All best, &c.



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Argument



“Algebra means comparing unlike things”
-- Leonardo of Vinci


Suppose the portrait has a story.

Suppose we do not know it yet
But are meant to, and understand.
Suppose it images something written:
For every painting we must ask.

Suppose the writing it reflects is his.
What might this writing be,
By Leonardo, straight from notebooks?

It could be what he wrote of esperienza,
The mother of all science and all art,
Maestra, of which he is discepolo.
Body born, corpo nato.

This cannot be disproven.

Suppose then it is true, what's more, believed:
What was meant, intended, engineer-designed.

Understandable to every viewer, vernacular,
Of the world’s most treasured picture.
Convivial, like Dante’s Convivio, a shared supper.

What then?  What would ensue?
Leonardo an author, playwright, shipwright?
A five hundred year koan answered in the end?
Imagine what that means:

All Europe remade.

Everything out of Europe set free.

History starts over

And even all this risk can be undone
By the twitch of a veil,
The smallest sigh
Step back

“Or maybe not.”

Now think.




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