"A level of truthfulness that ends in Deception." How Theocratic is that! Skippy loves what Art and Science has accomplished: it has hoodwinked the monkey into believing that his World is Real. And that, like Leibniz & Dr. Pangloss insisted: It's the Best of All Possible Worlds. Kenny La Roche's Mission: Chosen Arrow or Sagittá Electá - the 8th Mission in constructing our PostPost Cathedral Our Lady of the Ligne - took about a year. Par for the course, though these days our Missions are more complicated and take two years or more to complete. Kenny La Roche began his Alchemical Opus of Reenchanting our Environment in 1992. Chosen Arrow was finished in the fall of 1999 or 2000. As Skippy types these words it is Valentine's Day of 2011. Kenny will celebrate his 20th Anniversary when the Mayan Calendar goes thump.
"A level of truthfulness that ends in Deception." We had been negotiating with Barber Perfect for several years to end the open hostilities. He wants the Skull and the Long Bones of Bento de Espinoza returned to his cohort. We are placing our bet on the idea that Barber has not seen these relics since they were liberated from his Schloss up along the cold, cold, Baltic in the chaos of 1945 in Europa. Barber was wanted as a War Criminal and he was so busy Popping Smoke that he never saw Pooler Jones coming. Pooler got the Bones and the carved wooden coffre you see in Page 2 of these Mission Notes. He was out of Europe and on his way to Ireland before SS Oberführer Hans-Marie Widerhaken Ritter von Vollendette buried that skin forever and resurfaced as Barber Perfect. I once asked him: Did being a Nazi complete him as an Artist? When did your Canvas become Yourself? And does all Art end in Deception?
The Theory of Mind -or "ToM" - describes the ability to shift Perspectives from Your mind to the mind of the Others. ToM answers questions about what your cat is thinking when he's looking out the window. ToM attributes Mental States like desire, belief, pretending, and bits of Gnosis to the other Minds in the room besides your own. It's called a "Theory" because for most Etics the Mind is not directly observable but instead must be inferred from messy things like Actions and Gestures. We can never be inside the Mind of another, whether that other is a Monkey, an Angel, or the Butterfly below.
The bug will take 15 hits to tell its tale.
Possessing this ToM allows us to predict or explain what the Others are doing and also to "Posit their intentions." Powerful shit. This leads us to believe that Mental States generally are the Cause of Behaviors. This implies that We - the Talking Monkey - must be able to conceive of the Mind as a "Generator of Representations." We get all this Cognitive Gnosis without doing anything. It's a Genetic Gift and our Cultures only change all the costumes to fit the Times. The Cognitive Etics have come to believe that if a Monkey does not have a "complete Theory of Mind" then he is operating from a deficit from the get-go. He's a Retard. Stump-dumb. One Nail short of a Crucifixion Set. His ideas will tend to flop around and come loose. Or maybe he's Autistic and Can only see the world from the poor Self which god gave him. Down in that world where there really are no others.
Pooler says to chalk it up to Mirror Neurons - or the lack. Perspective, he says, is all about You until you Know that there are Others. After that the Mind refocuses and your Perspective swells to embrace the World from as many Points of View that are allowed. In Nazi Super Science like Super-String Theory there are 11 Dimensions - 10 Spatial and the One of the Time-Lie. In that soup of Infinite Potentiality lay an Infinite number of Universes. There are as many Perspectives as their are Particles in the Multi-verse. But now they are no longer particles but tiny vibrating strings each a Trillionith of the size of a single Atom. All Resonating like a drunken Honky-Tonk band on Saturday Night out on Highway 61. And from each there may issue an infinite number of Perspectives. Every little string in the World is a Prisoner of its Vanishing Points in these unlimited limited Perspectives. The Cosmos is brilliantly Whorfian and always exhibits a "level of Truthfulness which ends in Deception." The Theory of Mind is about putting Yourself in Another's shoes. The Neo-Piagetian's go further and say that a functioning ToM is "a byproduct of a broader hypercognitive ability of the human mind to register, monitor, and represent its own functioning." Jesus on a Slab! It's all a Media Illusion, just like Marshall McLuhan said. Our Reality is based on our ability to Represent our Mind Representing. And since Mind and Body are one and the same we seem to be stuck in the Monkey Sack while it endlessly tries to think itself outside itself and fails again and again. Sisyphus Rising. Shoulder to the Rock. Push the fucker up the hill. Spinoza said we had to ditch the Sack and shrug off its Perspectives and its Vanishing Points. If you want to see what is under the last Veil then you will - of Necessity - have to leave your Self behind as you nuzzle to the Nexus & face the Neckercube which is always changing Forms. Always coming into being and never a thing finished. "Forma Formans per Formam Formatam trans lucens." The Forming Form shining thru the Formed Form. Descartes and Spinoza are the Godfathers of the Theory of Mind. Perspective Taking, they discovered, was linked to a widening sphere of Empathy. So the Alchemists were right they realized - The Opus was an Act of Love. Only when the Monkey loved Everything would he and could he become a Man. To do this would take a Radical Disentanglement from the Self. To Reenchant our Spiritless World would take the ultimate Kenosis - the one Jesus found on his Cross - Becoming the All again would cost the Specified Sum of Redemption - the big Price Tag - the Handing back of Self. Skippy loves to pepper these pages with Pagan Nazi Girls and Willowy Sluts who are more than willing and able to show you the prize. The Yoni of all our Representations. We need our Eternity back. We need the Vas of Universal Intentions. L'Origine du Monde. The "From which All" which is constantly driving us onwards into Illusion after Illusion. Maya, the Cosmic Spinner, weaving Tapestry after Tapestry while we Point at it and Worship it and Miss it completely once again. Chosen Arrow . . .
Otaku - the Japs call people who are Obsessive with "minute interests" Otaku. Stamp Collectors, Anime freaks, Videogame Zombies - they are all Otaku. The Word means: "Someone else's House." It describes the mentalité of living in an Enclosed World. The Autistic are Otaku. Poets are too. As are the Artificial Intelligence Nerds at MIT and Stanford. All of them are living in "someone else's house." As Wired Magazine points out, the AI labs around the world have unleashed an Army of Bots into the Web where they sport in the streams of our surfing as they slowly ReCreate us in their Image.
Click 9 on the Butterfly to Finish the Riff on the Baptist.
Marvin Minski & his unholy acolytes have failed miserably in their misguided attempts to create Machine Intelligence which mirrored that of the Monkey. They set out to birth "thinking" machines by "mimicking the logic-based reasoning that human brains were thought to use." Can you hear Spinoza laughing? Their problem laid in the fact that no one then really understood how Monkey Brains & Logic worked. But then the new ideas from Cognitive Sciences suggested a "Society of Minds" - a collection of smaller Intelligences bent to specific tasks and not an overarching Grand Intelligence which sat like a gate-keeper and ran the whole show. Thinking was modular, not global.
The Etics called it a "Social Brain" and as the model of Monkey thinking shifted so did the protocols of AI. Research centered on the Specific Task and building a Machine Mind to accomplish it. Intelligence, the AI teams found, could be assembled from "groups of systems that operated according to their own kind of reasoning." Fuck the idea of crafting Silicon to think like Monkeys who believed they were born with Original Sin. How could you Binary that Suicidal Meme? Intelligence was no longer seen as Unitary but as a collection of specific ways of Thinking which could - in controlled conditions - grant us the Illusion of a Unitary Intelligence. That was the breakthru - not a discovery about Silicon, but a revelation about Carbon - Monkey Mentalité was largely based on Perceptual Illusions and our much vaunted ToM - our Theory of Minds - was based on the Illusion that Other Minds were working just like ours. So it's no surprise that the Pioneers in AI made the same mistake - thinking that thinking had to be like our thinking. Leibniz made the same mistake - his certainty about Universal Characteristics was using the wrong Algorithms - those based on "Logical" propositions in a world were there are too many different kinds of "Logic." The Universe is built up from Probabilities and Potentialities and not on "Done Sets." Teaching Machines to "Think" about the World using the false assumptions of Universal Logic led nowhere. So the AI gurus downsized the task: instead of trying to Teach a Machine they decided to simply Monkey See, Monkey Do the task - Show the fucking thing what a Monkey would do and then let it figure out how to accomplish the goal. The results were successful - our Machines are literally taking over our world and all of its tasks - but the "Intelligence" behind them turned out to be nothing like ourselves. We have constructed "Artificial" minds which are now beyond our comprehension. When we sit at our Computers the Theory of Minds falls apart. They are Ganz Andere - Wholly Other.
But then all Representations are exactly that: Ganz Andere - Completely Different. Schopenhauer was Otaku; he was swallowed up by his theory linking the World, our Will, and Representations. All Art is composed of our feeble attempts at Representation - and always there is the Urge to Create our Representations in the Mirror of Ourselves. Man is the Measure of all things. Man is the Micro of some Macro. This we have been hoping.
Click 9 & fall into the Valley.
We have fashioned our gods in our own image and as McLuhan has shown every Medium which gives us its Illusion of a Real World is an extension of one of our Perceptual Systems. The Book extends the Eye & our Experiences. The Radio extends our Ears & our Experiences. The Computer and its Electronic brethren extend our Minds & our Experiences. But the Machines and the Media don't just Extend - they mold, shape, truncate, and finally take the place of our Perceptions and our Experiences. None of those things is like us in their parts & materials, but they have usurped us in their Functions.
"The fruits of the AI revolution are now all around us. Once researchers were freed from the burden of building a whole mind, they could construct a rich bestiary of digital fauna, which few would dispute possess something approaching intelligence." Indeed. Skippy wants to say the same thing about the Monkey: we are slowly evolving into "something approaching intelligence." Google grins. That fuckin' Bot knows. But since we cannot ascribe to Google our own ToM - since, under the skin Google does not reason in the same way - we can't really Know it Knows. We do not recognize Thought or Thinking which is not like our own. The Autistic are doomed to another Century of our benign neglect because of this. It's a Neckercube Problem if you want an Analogy. There is more than one Solution, more than one Truth, but our minds can never know that all at once. Wired tells us that "we are engaged in a permanent dance with machines, locked in an increasingly dependent embrace. And Yet, because the bot's behavior isn't based on human thought processes, we are often powerless to explain their actions." They plunge us into the Uncanny Valley - they are so much like us but so strangely different. Well, they're here for good, the bots & the pensive machines. It is no longer Science Fiction to say: "The computers are in Control. We just live in their world."
In the 1980s the Etics built an AI System to help Pathologists Analyze their Research Results. It freaked them out. It gave up the Answer too Quickly. So they added a "delay loop with a flashing light, as though it were huffing and puffing to come up with the answers." This Humanized the Machine and made it more comfortable to work with. How Autofigurative do you think we should be? Or are we doomed to mistake forever the model of ourselves with the model of the world?
Click 6 and Vanish.
John the Baptist was not the Messiah, though since he was announcing the Messiah, he was destined to be mistaken for the One whose sandals he was not worthy to loosen. John was the Precursor to the New Dispensation - the New Reality of the Christian Cosmos - he was Cousin to the Christ but Ganz Andere to the Christ. He lived outside the Grid in a Desert of his own imaginings.
"Do not mistake the Pointing Finger for the Moon," the Chinks tell us. But "The Medium is the Message," McLuhan responds. Whorf says that you are a Prisoner of your Language since your language is the Medium with which you construct Reality and every Language has its own unique Perspective on that Reality. A Language molds & shapes Reality. It's constant use grooves us into its ways of thinking until we mistake that "way" for the thing itself. Kant's Ding an Sich - the Unknowable "Thing in Itself" which is beyond all means and modes of Perception. "We are still within the narrow circle of knowledge covered by our sense-experience. Space and time do not widen that circle; neither do the categories. The knowledge, therefore, which we acquire by the understanding is confined to the appearances of things, and does not extend to the noumenal reality, the Ding an sich." Baruch Spinoza, Descartes's "little jew," said that to approach the unapproachable and the unknowable the Monkey would have to give up its privileged Point of View - it's Perspective - and see the Thing from Nowhere. Good luck on that - but start small - Imagine, if you can, both Faces of this Neckercube at once. Go ahead. We'll wait. In the end, we have nothing better to do.
Roman Xenia Paintings separate the Represented world into the Raw and the Cooked - into Nature and Culture. Lévi-Strauss says those are the Baseline Oppositional Dichotomies of the World - but not THE WORLD - only the world which is Represented in our heads. Nature seems to come to us from god, while Culture forms from the work of our hands and our shared constructions of Reality.
Click 16 for the last Slide Show of Chosen Arrow.
Kenny La Roche is an Alchemist and an Outlaw Artist & Adventure Theologian. We place objects which we have invested with Meaning in the Seldom Seen of our Disenchanted Environment. We do these things for the Glory of God even though we don't believe in the kinds of gods which the monkeys have created out of themselves. We see god's new Form forming behind the Formless Form and this one isn't perfect either. But it's what we do. We are Monkey's too and we are living in Someone Else's House. And we know that now.
Click the Atheism button to the left to read the last chapter on god - the No Gate Gate. Click the Molecule of Substance and finish the riff on Spinoza. This is the End of the Chosen Arrow Mission Notes. Ita Missa Est.