First I list the projects currently at the top of my to-do list. Then I discuss them by subject area.
Specific projects on deck
Three working papers in late stages of development:
The road to Xanadu led to Mars: I went one way, you all went another: I figure out how it is that structuralism led me through cognitive science and computation to a new approach to literary studies.
Crisis Among HUMANITIES DISCIPLINES in the Twenty-First Century: Built around the book, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, in which Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon argue that the institutional culture of the humanities is grounded in discord and discontent that follows from 19th debates about the nature of the university.
To Model the Mind: Speculative Engineering as Philosophy: Built around the book, Models of the Mind: How physics, engineering and mathematics have changed out understanding of the brain, by Grace Lindsey. I’m interested in an engineering approach to understanding both the human mind and AIs.
Big intellectual project on deck: To Model the Mind: A Primer on Attractor-Nets: It’s time to dust off the notes on Attractor-Nets which I made in the mid-2000s and get something in a form that other people can understand. Why? Because those notes speak to current debates in artificial intelligence about artificial neural-nets and symbolic computing.
Book project: Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature, which is Volume 3 in the peace series I’ve been working on with Charlie Keil: Local Paths to Peace Today. This consists of various papers, by Charlie, me, and others, on the importance of music and play in life.
Seinfeld working paper: A working paper based on my current series of analyses of bits from his book, Is This Anything?
Literary criticism and the academy
While Crisis Among HUMANITIES DISCIPLINES is about the humanities in general, I concentrate on literary criticism because that’s the discipline I know the best. It turns out that much of the discussion centers on the difficulties I have had defining my relationship to a discipline that has, in effect, rejected me. The road to Xanadu led to Mars is about ideas, how mine evolved from structuralism, while the profession ultimately was unable to accommodate structuralist insights and was forced to deconstruction and post-structuralism (which doesn’t go beyond structuralism, but rejects it). Here’s a short chronology that encompasses events mentioned in both working paper:
1972: Finish my master’s thesis on “Kubla Khan” – The thesis was structuralist in conception and spirit, but moved to structuralism’s farthest edge and sent me toward computation and cognitive science. Central to Xanadu/Mars.
1976: Publish my article “Cognitive Science and Literary Semantics” in MLN’s Centennial Issue in 1976. I’ve now gone beyond the boundaries of literary criticism as those boundaries would evolve into the 1980s, but that wasn’t obvious at the time. At the time those boundaries were fluid. Central to Xanadu/Mars.
1985: I was denied tenure at RPI and unable to secure another academic post. Sometime in the wake of that I negotiate (with myself) a Socratic bargain with the profession. That bargain is modeled on The Crito. I discuss this extensively in Crisis.
1995: I begin reconsidering the nature of my intellectual enterprise in relation to literary criticism as critics become interest in cognitive science, but not the cognitive science that informed my work. I decide that I had all along been interested in form. I discuss this extensively in Xanadu/Mars.
2001: I begin corresponding with Mary Douglas. She gets me interested in ring-form composition. In 2003 I send her a long post about ring-form in “The Nutcracker Suite” episode of Fantasia. Relevant to Xanadu/Mars.
2010: I renegotiate the Socratic bargain. I am no longer loyal to the profession, but simply to the free and unfettered pursuit of truth in an international community of scholars. Again, central to Crisis.
2021: Make sense of it all: Crisis and Xanadu/Mars.
Modeling the mind
Finishing the working paper, To Model the Mind: Speculative Engineering as Philosophy, should be relatively straightforward, though tricky. The main task to be accomplished is to talk in a meaningful way about all the kinds of mind-like entities, artificial, real, and hybrid, that we are currently dealing with. I’m not talking about a thorough discussion, just an indication of the range along with some sense of the kinds of issues involved.
The attractor net primer is perhaps the most important item on my current agenda. I’m guessing the primer is going to run 40 to 50 pages or more and will have lots of diagrams. I have to get it into the current arena of discussion about AI and the mind.
Joyous nature book
I’m currently editing Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature. I need to write an introduction, finish the guide-to-contents, and tell Charlie (Keil) what help I need from him to finish it up.
Working Paper on Jerry Seinfeld
Provisional title of the working paper: Seinfeld’s Comedy: Jokes are Intricately Crafted Machines. I need to do analyses of three more bits, two of which I’ve already done, though in another form, and write an introduction.
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