The Post-Modern Prometheus: Part One
Commentary on the Drafts for Sensory-Enhancing Bio-Technology Implants
First of Four Parts:
A number of years ago, I was commissioned to write my first comprehensive book on my main focus of research over the past three decades. The Penguine Club: a circle of philosophers, scientists, artists and writers who used to meet informally throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries to discuss subjects and ideas. They consisted of many of the greatest minds of their age. Despite being the foremost scholar on them, I still cannot tell anyone non-conjecturally the origins and original members, though most believe the club began from thoughts Jean Batten had when flying over the Pacific Ocean, or from impromptu weekend social gatherings in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s quarters in Los Alamos. Nevertheless, these are quite romanticized notions, as there is no hard evidence to support these myths.
Hundreds would meet when many could make it, though they often met in smaller groups or favorite pairings locally. Before ground-breaking discoveries and world-changing papers and novels were published or announced, the concepts and ideas would first be the subject of a Penguine meeting, correspondence thread or a time- zone-slicing phone call between someone’s lunch break and another’s broken 3am REM sleep. Nobel Prize winners; sharp wits; shunned recluses who randomly won favor to be allowed a slow introduction into Penguine correspondence, chit- chat, charchaa.
However, todo tiene su final, and the Penguines decided to stop accepting new members. Intellectuals take and reject fads just as much as anyone else. After a hundred-and- fifty years of meetings and correspondence that included the sources of revolutionary work, the ten left alive refused to engage the outside world with any questions about their numbered club. Last year, when the three remaining known members passed away, the club is understood to have ceased to exist. You can read my colleagues' latest claims that the club actually decided to take on new powerful roles and have merely attempted to make it look like they exist no longer. Again, there is no evidence to suggest this.
As research for my book and interest in the Penguines that has sapped most of my research career, I have been collecting letters and documents members had written that cover innumerable musings. Everything from scribbles on a Time magazine about entering themselves as an art exhibit, to first-draft speeches written on passing hotel notepaper about an exoplanet discovery. It was in the months before the last three members were to all pass away, tragically within only a few weeks of each other, I received a posted letter from one of these late members which contained the most fantastic script I had yet encountered. The piece was written as fiction, detailing the possibilities of advancing the capacities of the human brain through biocomputing applications and a theory of “totalizing”, and a cheeky atheistic creation, “ONG!”.
I interviewed the three members to see if they knew about the script, although none knew about it, nor who wrote it, nor even could recollect anyone discussing it and its ideas at any time. The sender’s family had discovered it in their attic, along with their papers that had been kept away for years, and now, on their deathbed, were requested for nostalgia. I tried to speak once more with the sender during their last week, but before I could fly back, having had private business, they had sadly passed away. Now, as mysteriously as it arrived, the piece has gone missing from my collection; I carelessly left the paper on the scrap pile on my desk – I had been putting it down everywhere I went, as I had rarely let it leave my side since discovering it – and recall putting some discarded notes on top of it before leaving for a dinner. I should have learnt from previous times this has happened, though such carelessness seems an inescapable part of my personality. I discarded my wastepaper basket hurriedly when I was dashing to leave for a meeting one morning when I was running late, so I believe the paper has now been recycled.
I will never be able to remember fully the ideas the piece outlined and brought to life, but I will try to re-write it as exactly as I recall. I would really like to hear from anyone who may have known anything about the piece, who wrote it and why, let alone if other copies of it exist anywhere, in any form.
Penned Autumn [Which hemisphere?] 2083 [or 2093, I couldn’t make out the writing, either written in a hurry or casually]
Tomorrow will be the first day when the public can undergo heavy application operations instead of only acquiring minor applications. I suppose you’re probably not among the rén lóng of the first waiting. 500,005 of us lucky enough to have been living with the latest full-capacity applications can read vast quantities of literature in instants and know every second of a complex and lengthy operation intimately, such as the construction of a skyscraper, or every addition, erasing and rewriting of a shelf-busting novel. But our bodies still impede. Last night I downloaded straight into my brain (well, if you like, brain and silicon neural auxiliaries) and read the entire works of Dù Fǔ in the original script. I’ve been able to access them all over the past year through exocortex wi-fi, but, as you may know, there are still problems with the information accessed by exocortex wi-fi. Namely, how the information still resembles something external from one’s own body, like reading one’s notes or a book, making it more difficult to use the information like data stored in one’s brain, as when one would usually ponder and create. Is the term totalizing fair here? Maybe just totaling. With these new neural auxiliaries I had hundreds of ideas within a couple of minutes about the poems. But I could only speak to Amit, and he me, about our ideas at a pace of a comparison every five minutes, providing we were explaining the comparison fully. I hope to finish designing a direct-transfer mechanism so my ideas can be just transferred straight into someone else's brain, although it's proving tremendously difficult. Writing this has been a challenge as well. I've only been able to write this about ten times quicker than someone who has no applications. Nevertheless, the extra time it gives me allows me to constantly rewrite and improve the text within my head, store, alter, save. There are stronger limits than commonly suspected about how far our biology imposes against potential application power, but I’m not voicing my doubts. The last time I committed such a corporate gustakhi the executives preferred the competing project and gave the grant to them. A hideously rushed anti-malware program that became obsolete within two months.
The details collected so far about those of us with full-capacity applications are not public, but Marian is one of the original scheme’s architects, and I’ve been allowed to see at least some of the data. It’s difficult to believe now that when she first started, it was all about art. Her eyes still have that spark of the intellectually possessed. It was during university. She spent two Odyssean weeks navigating Ulysses, a literature course to add some subjective refreshment to hours of engineering study. Then, in class one dull, cloudy Monday morning, as the glassy tear-shapes made their way toward their attractive pane, in her other humanities study, her philosophy lecturer began talking about a thought-experiment where a miniature computer existed in a brain. If someone searched a database stored in this computer when asked the reflective index of magnesium, do they know the answer, or do they search for it? The lecturer argued that it didn’t matter; the point was that in these circumstances they could, and in some way or another, the information would be temporarily in the person’s mind. After all, without this electronic database “add-on”, the mind still searches through the brain, its own database, doesn't it? A roll of eyes, a glance at the rain outside. Those few moments of quiet, where the mind seems void of any thought whatsoever, before the flash. What matters is that processing power! What does Bloom’s compatriot say? “That was a pen!” That would be a pen! Potentially, the processing power from such a database could create unimaginable aesthetic possibilities for anyone lucky enough to possess it. She began to scrawl on her pad at that rate that suggests the great idea will last only a minute, an Yè Xiàn, a Cinderella, as if somehow she might forget if she didn't write now. “Any great work of art is its shallowness, not its depth. Its treasures should be easily visible from the water’s surface. Critics and artists only talk about depth because depth provides space for more bounty. Ulysses, if you think it is magnificent, is so because it surveys the whole scope of human experience. But it doesn’t. It surveys the furthest Joyce could do with the materials provided to him. Imagine if Ulysses could be read in a second! Its contents stored in the brain. The artwork could be made larger, tome upon tome, like a tower of books built by a stargazer attempting to reach the stars. Joycian x10100!” ONG! as she would say. She named the idea “Sensing All the Themes”, after some Jon Anderson lyric.
She talks like this as well, so you see what I have to put up with. I didn’t quite understand the excitement. For the first three months she raved about this idea and grew sullen that she didn’t think it would be realized within her lifetime. It was when the first auxiliary-database add-on was successfully implanted that winter what seems like an eon ago now – the world’s top story: a new brain within another – that I became interested in applications and considered specializing in the field. When applications first entered testing, companies didn’t respond to Marian’s excitement about the aesthetic possibilities. As you know, the main argument for applications is simply the reading potential. “Speed up the brain, roll back the time”. I didn’t know anything before about general and special relativity, but thanks to what I’ve been downloading this trial period I now have at least a good undergraduate understanding of the concept – sadly I can’t just download terabytes of physics and attain yesteryear’s professor level. There appears to be a point, with the initial technology, anyway, at which storing more information in the brain is merely more mosaic tiles to line mental corridors, but of indecipherable patterns and script. One needs to actually exercise it, not just learn data and be able to repeat it if necessary. Understanding seems to be somewhere within the storage. After all, where else would it be? Marian says that the brain needs to spend a lot of time using the information in conscious and unconscious calculation if one is to actually attain expertise with it. Well, expertise is not the word it used to be. Anyway, I compare it to the slowing of time the closer one reaches the speed of light. I don’t know why the idiots who designed it chose that ad, but you know the one, showing the employees getting more applications as calendar pages break free into the air, and from contrasting a bridge across the Yangtze delta in five years, to planning successful terraformation of Venus in a few decades. It’s ignited support for applicating everyone, even from birth, but as Amit says, it cannot speed up the practical engineering work. Yet.
As I pointed out to Marian when she first began discussing the idea, how does one read Ulysses or Gilgamesh in a second? Or, even, a couple of minutes? Their aesthetic qualities are like wine. They convey taste. One has to savour the tastes. One can’t skim through a poem. A good actor times the lines perfectly. I discovered these lines last week when searching through an old catalogue of Australian spoken word poets – now that I know so much about literature, I actually enjoy it almost as much as my science. The poem appears to be about someone whom the poet, Daniel East, used to know, although I don’t know in what capacity.
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Ben Frater…? Down here it could not matter more
That Alan Wearne hunched,
Spitting strips of bright tobacco on my Toyota's shotgun floor...
Ben, Isis pulled you from the Nepean. You were a crocodile’s gullet.
We shook the reeds when we beheld your ruby crown,
Your mouth stencilled in copper, Orion's belt cinched at your brow – Thoth’s quill was your element, the swill of hyena howls,
The maze of men’s malarkey, the rack of Moloch’s growl.
And now,
Now you have been jackaled. Some cheap joke at our expenses.
I dreamt of you, Ben Frater.
We were building stone fences, and yours receded
To a river I could not cross.
And though I looked for you on the other side, It was night, there were foxes,
And I was afraid.
You can read lines quickly with applications, but you cannot read the literature, the poetry, quickly. Don’t get me wrong, you can appreciate it much faster, but the human senses only process the aesthetics at the speed under which they, as tissue, organs and biological- inner-threading, operate. They are still warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer. To quicken aesthetic processing, applications are required to specifically discern rhymes in the text, because although one can scan them quickly, one isn’t orating when doing this, either out loud or mentally. I have some of the prototype applications for this, but it does not speed up the rate at which many key aesthetic parts of the piece need to be played in order to be comprehended. With this text I found a recording of the poet performing his piece, and it shows the problems that faster mental computation aided by applications faces with aesthetic feeling. After certain sections he pauses and slows down over key words or passages, providing that extra time that stresses the subject or image of a particular word or line. But this is how poetry is read. One reads in the same way, if one truly reads the poem. One performs it, even if the words are read solitarily, islands away.
So, Marian’s latest fix is looking at combining the computing power with the sensory equipment. The team she works with hope that some form of hypercomputation, like Siegelmann, Copeland and Proudfoot suggested, could solve the problem. “Mei”, she always says, “it’s Zeno’s and Huì Shī’s paradox”. Any substance, element, concept, whatever it is: within it, an infinity resides. Infinities have to be understood as limits. Finiteness is split into a sum of infinite parts. If the time taken to do the infinite sum could be sped up, the infinite number of processes could be undertaken; it could be simulated, or calculated. What was it that Bertrand Russell said? Here we are:
Miss Ambrose says it is logically impossible to run through the whole expansion of π. I should have said it was medically impossible… Might not a man's skill increase so fast that he performed each operation in half the time required for its predecessor? In that case, the whole infinite series would take only twice as long as the first operation.
Still seems impossible to me – I mean, speeding the body? – there's been endless debate amongst those who have been using and designing applications about whether this can actually work. But if it can, then most aesthetic qualities that require lengthy times from the point of view of the body could be employed in artworks that use and / or play to the benefits applications provide, with quicker comprehension of the works and hence more detailed works as well, previously impossible because they would be too vast to be understood and appreciated. A future Joyce, in an imminent world, pens a Ulysses x10100. This time, a Dublin, Pune, Lagos, Shànghăi, is beheld in an artwork that simulates the entire city; each character as detailed as Joyce’s Bloom; or, maybe a whole world, where one can experience a different part of the whole narrative each time by focusing on different viewpoints throughout the story, concentrating on what happens to select characters during each reading or viewing.
End of Part One
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