Prospero's Books

Don't let robots have kids

At his blog The Loom, science writer Carl Zimmer has posted a fascinating article on the emergence of cooperation, and even communication, out of initially random behavior. In a series of experiments conducted at the University of Lausanne, researchers randomly programmed a thousand tiny robots to exhibit various behaviors in the presence of "food," "poison," and each other.

The most successful robots (those with the highest food-to-poison ratio) survived and "bred." Within a few dozen generations, especially when placed in colonies, the robots evolved complex cooperative behaviors, even communicating with each other.

Zimmer concludes, half whimsically:

The rules that govern social organisms may apply to man-made machines as well. and if you want to avoid a robot uprising, don't let robots have kids and don't let them talk to each other.

To write a new narrative

Jeff Carr, at the God's Politics blog, writes today as a member of a U.S. delegation of religious leaders visiting Iran. He recounts one of his hosts' stories of his pain under the "oppressive" twenty-five-year rule of the U.S.-sponsored Shah. Carr then recounts his own "traumatizing" memories of the Americans held hostage in 1979 under the Khomeini government. He concludes:

What I have been thinking about the last few days is not whose narrative is right and whose is wrong. In this case, I'm not sure the facts of these past events are as important as the ways Dr. Jalili and I experienced them. The truth is they are both right, because both of us have a right to tell our own stories.

What is clear to me, however, is that we must find a way to tell our stories and to have our stories heard. And then we must begin to write a new narrative together. One that comes out of humility, mutual respect, and shared understanding. I am convinced it is the only path for a true and lasting peace with justice.

A systems look at Twelfth Night

This week my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" class read Twelfth Night, especially in the light of another pair of premises:

7a. Open (“living”) systems exchange matter and energy with their environment.

7b. Texts exchange “matter” and “energy” with their discourse communities. Shakespeare’s plays have changed, and been changed by, other works. (This fact is the basis of intertextual criticism.)

For me, the most interesting idea to arise from my students' writing, and our subsequent discussion, was the way the love-sick Orsino and the mourning Olivia constituted a closed system until the arrival of energy from outside, in the form of Viola and, later, Sebastian, landing on the coast of Illyria.

"What," says Viola in her first line, "should I do in Illyria?"

Bring life to a dying system, Viola.

The reader's creation of a poem

Last week, in my "Shakespeare, Systems, and Intertextuality" course, we explored another pair of premises:

6a. Systems exist in the relationships among their parts. “Systems are greater than the sum of their parts.” That is, they have “emergent” properties that are not properties of their parts but emerge only at the system level.

6b. Artworks, and their communities of discourse, exist in the relationships among their parts. For example, literary works, such as plays, exist in the transaction between text and reader, or between production and audience. Similarly, theatrical productions exist in the collaborative relationships among artists and script. (Thus the concept of “faithful” and “unfaithful” productions of Shakespeare is meaningless; all productions are a transaction between script and artists.) And Shakespeare’s plays exist in their intertextual relationships with other works.

Louise Rosenblatt, in The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978), spoke of emergence, and laid the foundation for a systems-theory approach to literature:

The reader's attention to the text activates certain elements in his past experience—external reference, internal response—that have become linked with the verbal symbols. Meaning will emerge from a network of relationships among the things symbolized as he senses them. . . .

. . . the reader's creation of a poem out of a text must be an active, self-ordering and self-corrective process (11).

The Hoop of Life

At Changing Places, Donna Woodka reprints a poem attributed to Dave Chief, an Oglala Lakota. It's interesting that the Judeo-Christian tradition tends to see the unity of all living things vertically, in a "tree of life" or a "great chain of being," while this Native American writer envisions . . .

The Circle

The Circle has healing power. In the Circle we are all equal.
When in the Circle, no one is in front of you. No one is behind you.
No one is above you. No one is below you.
The Sacred Circle is designed to create unity.
The Hoop of Life is also a circle.
On this hoop there is a place for every species,
every race, every tree, and every plant.
It is this completeness of Life that must be respected
in order to bring about health on this planet.
To understand each other,
as the ripples when a stone is tossed into the waters,
the Circle starts small and grows…
until it fills the whole lake.

A message in the formless flow of things

In tonight's Joyce seminar, I read my students a passage from No Souvenirs, a twelve-year journal by religious historian Mircea Eliade. The passage describes well the day-long journey of Leopold Bloom in the novel Ulysses, but it also describes the well-lived life:

1 January 1960
    Every exile is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca. Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey. The path toward Ithaca, toward the center. I had known all that for a long time. What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the "powers" which decide historical, earthly destinies). But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and of understanding them as a long series of initiation trials (willed by the gods) and as so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center). That means: seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods of everyday life. Seeing them and reading them even if they aren't there; if one sees them, one can build a structure and read a message in the formless flow of things and the monotonous flux of historical facts (84-85).

In this life we are all exiles. Knowing that, and reading the signs, can help us find our way home.

The Pillars of Creation

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has given scientists a new look inside the "Pillars of Creation," columns of gas and dust inside the Eagle Nebula. According to Chandra, "This penetrating view of the central region of the Eagle Nebula reveals how much star formation is happening inside these iconic structures."

Iconic indeed. This awe-inspiring birthplace of stars suggests the columns of Solomon's Temple, and their adoption as symbols by the Kabbalah and Freemasonry.

(Thanks to EurekAlert for the lead.)

A mathematical sun

Last October, at Chaotic Utopia, Karmen posted as one of her "Friday Fractals" a stunning mathematically generated (and Karmen-generated) moon. Last month, she did the same for the sun. What I wrote in October can be recycled, with one change, here:

The real sun is a miracle. But equally miraculous is the human mind, able to discover the numbers behind the fractionally dimensioned geometry of the sun's face.

(A larger image, along with a comparative photograph of nature's sun, is available at Chaotic Utopia.)

Our own limits transgressed

Today, at God's Politics, the "voice of the day" is Henry David Thoreau's, from Walden:

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

These are the waves we ride

I'm spending part of this snowbound Indiana day trying to catch up with the riches of Chaotic Utopia. Back in early January, Karmen posted an extraordinary entry on the waterfall as metaphor. Her thesis:

The flow of being, from order to chaos, is indistinguishable from the flow of falling water.

She elaborates:

Like molecules of H20, clinging together in a drop, cascading from a laminar, ordered beginning, to a chaotic, turbulent end, so is the being of all matter. Everything must break down in the end. But when we look at a waterfall, we don't watch the smooth edges where the cascade begins, nor are we drawn to the turbulence below. Instead, we are drawn to the rhythmic surges and harmonic meanders in between. So is our perception of being—we focus not on the chaotic end, nor the stationary beginning, but the captivating moments in between.

These are the waves we ride, or the sounds of our call to battle. All of nature, all of the cosmos, is pushing towards entropy, and relishing in the beauty of the fall. Each living thing in an ecosystem is clinging to that edge, getting the most out of the basic energy, taken from the sun, before it is used up, broken down, and given over to chaos. The water flows, the ant marches, the feline stalks... all to take advantage of the "in between" ...to survive, and endure.

Karmen concludes:

We lack adequate terms to describe the flow of being. We may call it thermodynamics, harmony, equilibrium, the power of nature, ecological balance, the hand of God, or Eris and Loki at a tea party. Yet, none of these phrases or terms can truly capture the essence of the flow of being the same way as seeing the active form of falling water.