"A dark illimitable Ocean" — John Milton, Paradise Lost , Book II
"All is number" — Attributed to Pythagoras
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"For a fraction of a second, Phocan senses |
From the MANIFESTO link in the Breakthrough Prize page above —
Our Mission . . . Should We Choose to Accept It
Related reading —
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" He, in his turn, gazes at the couple, at these stand-ins called upon to underwrite a thousand marriages, a thousand renewed couplings. Diamond’s had the same idea as him: the woman’s forehead has a bindi-nipple on it too. For a fraction of a second, Phocan senses one more act of standing-in or substitution at work here; the presence, veiled, redacted, of a coupling unconsummated, of a bride uncaptured—too young, a child almost—exiting the frame. Sennet’s briefing the students further: 'Once you take your bathrobes off,' he says, 'the cameras will detect the markers, and, through these, your exact positions. As long,' he adds, pointing at the floor’s tape-demarcated central area, 'as you stay within the borders of this square—that is, inside the white lines. Of course, you’ve got the bed, but…' Perera picks the thread up: 'As discussed,' she tells them, 'we want to ascertain the stress occasioned by a wide range of positions.' Her diction, coupled with the Sri Lankan accent in which they’re delivered, makes Phocan wonder whether these words are reproduced verbatim from her research brief or whether she always speaks with such lilting formality. 'To that end,' she carries on, 'we ask you to engage with one another in as many variable configurations as you are able. You can move about the bed, the bed’s edge, floor or table…' "
— McCarthy, Tom. The Making of Incarnation: A Novel |
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“Isn’t your work—our work—all about accessing and deploying underlying sequences and patterns? Mapping particulars on to great universals? Isn’t that the art to which, in one way or another, we’ve both devoted our best years?”
— McCarthy, Tom. The Making of Incarnation: A Novel
The hardcover first edition was published by Knopf |
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"It is said that the students of medieval Paris came to blows in the streets over the question of universals. The stakes are high, for at issue is our whole conception of our ability to describe the world truly or falsely, and the objectivity of any opinions we frame to ourselves. It is arguable that this is always the deepest, most profound problem of philosophy. It structures Plato's (realist) reaction to the sophists (nominalists). What is often called 'postmodernism' is really just nominalism, colourfully presented as the doctrine that there is nothing except texts. It is the variety of nominalism represented in many modern humanities, paralysing appeals to reason and truth."
— Simon Blackburn, Think, |
"As McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil, of technological modernity
to reveal the underlying symbolic structures of human experience,
The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories one inside the other,
rings within rings, a perpetual motion machine."
— Amazon.com description of a novel published on All Souls' Day
(Dia de los Muertos), 2021.
See also the underlying symbolic structures of Boolean functions . . .
as discussed, for instance, on Sept. 23 at medium.com —
On the recent Peacock series "Mrs. Davis" —
"The algorithm is known as Mrs. Davis … and is
the all-seeing, all-knowing, not-quite-all-merciful
manifestation of artificial intelligence to whom
humanity has plighted its troth in this eight-part
manifestation of real intelligence from creators
Tara Hernandez and Damon Lindelof."
— John Anderson in The Wall Street Journal ,
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
For The Algorithm , see last evening's Michaelmas post and . . .
For a different Mrs. Davis, see . . .
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From Tom McCarthy's review yesterday of The Maniac , a novel about 1940s social life at Los Alamos — "The mathematician Martin Davis’s wife, Lydia, storms out of a Trinity dinner party, condemning the men’s failure to fully take on board the consequences of their atom splitting. Besides sharing her name with our own age’s great translator of Blanchot and Proust, this Lydia Davis is a textile artist — a hanging detail that points back toward the novel’s many looms and weavings. For the Greeks, the fates spinning the threads of human lives were female (as Conrad knew, recasting them as Belgian secretaries in 'Heart of Darkness'). So was Theseus’ wool-ball navigator, Ariadne. And so, too, was the Ithacan ur-weaver Penelope, whose perpetual making and unraveling of her tapestry beat Gödel to an incompleteness theory by thousands of years. 'Text,' by the way, means something woven, from which we get 'textile.' It might just be that Penelope was not only testing her own version of the ontological limit, but also embedding it — in absent form, a hole — within the weft and warp of what we would eventually call the novel." |
Martin Davis reportedly died this year on New Year's Day.
This journal on that date —
Tom McCarthy today on a new novel about von Neumann at Los Alamos:
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"Beyond its mid-20th-century viewfinder, though, it quickly becomes clear that what The Maniac is really trying to get a lock on is our current age of digital-informational mastery and subjection." "Amid — or, more aptly, beneath — the panoply of brilliant men in The Maniac , women function as bit players. At Los Alamos they’re even called 'computers,' since they carry out the secondary, workaday calculations that are then fed upward for male geniuses to work their magic on. But does von Neumann really deserve the title 'Father of Computers,' granted him here by his first wife, Mariette Kovesi? Doesn’t Ada Lovelace have a prior claim as their mother?" |
"As McCarthy peers through the screen, or veil,
of technological modernity to reveal the underlying
symbolic structures of human experience,
The Making of Incarnation weaves a set of stories
one inside the other, rings within rings, a perpetual
motion machine." — Amazon.com description
of a novel published on All Souls' Day (Dia de los
Muertos), 2021.
The McCarthy novel is mentioned in The New York Times today —
For a simpler perpetual motion machine, see T. S. Eliot's "Chinese jar."
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