Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in “Kubla Khan”

A new working paper. Title above, abstract, table of contents, and introduction below. Download at: Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/78967114/Symbols_and_Nets_Calculating_Meaning_in_Kubla_Khan_
SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=4106687
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360525548_Symbols_and_Nets_Calculating_Meaning_in_Kubla_Khan 

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Abstract: This is a dialog between a Naturalist Literary Critic and a Sympathetic Techno-Wizard about the interaction of symbols and neural nets in understanding “Kubla Khan,” which has an extraordinary structure. Each of two parts is like a matryoshka doll nested three deep, with the last line of the first part being repeated in the middle of the second. They start talking about traditional symbol processing, with addressable memory, and nested loops, and end up talking about a pair of interlinked neural nets where one (language forms) is used to index the other (meaning). 

In search of “Kubla Khan” 2
Fee fi fo fum, I smell computation 4
Calculating over symbols 8
Calculating over a neural net 10
Two linked networks in the mesh 14
Speculative Engineering: A postscript on method 17
Appendix 1: The text of “Kubla Khan” 18
Appendix 2: Rhyme and sense in the first part of “Kubla Khan” 20
Appendix 3: My Work on Coleridge 21 

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Symbols and Nets  

...At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Preface to “Kubla Khan” 

 In search of “Kubla Khan”

This dialog marks progress in my third attempt to comprehend the structure of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” My 1972 Master’s Thesis marks my first attempt: “THE ARTICULATED VISION: Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’”. I read everything I could find about the poem in the Johns Hopkins library. Two essays held my attention. The one by Humphrey House, from his Clarke Lectures, pointed out that no one would ever have thought the poem incomplete without Coleridge’s preface. In the other one, “’Kubla Khan,’ Proto-Surrealist Poem,” Kenneth Burke argued that the poem so defied Coleridge's aesthetic theories that he did not know what to make of it, arguing that it was a ”poetized psychology.”

I updated my thesis work with a 1988 essay I published in Language and Style, “Articulate Vision: A Structuralist Reading of ‘Kubla Khan’.” I tossed out some of the philosophical language and updated it with some cognitive network diagrams, but it was fundamentally the same work. It was an analysis of the poem’s utterly remarkable structure, a structure which no one had seen despit all the attention that had been given to the poem.

Though I hadn’t realized it at the time, that thesis marked my break from what I now think of as standard literary criticism, which centers on interpreting a text’s meaning. I focused on the text’s form and used meaning as a way to examine form. Whereas the profession had moved beyond structuralism to various post-structuralisms, I had moved beyond it to the cognitive sciences. But I branded my essay “structuralist” both to signal its intellectual roots and as a touchstone literary critics could recognize.

Decades passed until, early in the new millenium, I took another pass at “Kubla Khan.” I published “’Kubla Khan’ and the Embodied Mind,” PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts (2003). This was considerably longer than my 1988 article, more prose and many more diagrams, and a section where I speculated on the neural underpinnings of the poem. But I remained focused on the structure I had identified in my 1972 thesis, and which my interlocutors examine in the first section of their dialogue below, “I smell computation.”

I paired that with a later essay, “Talking with Nature in ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,’” PsyArt, November (2004). That poem has a motif, gazing upon the sun, which is closely related to the “sunny dome” of “Kubla Khan” and a glimpse into a “still roaring dell” that resonates with the “deep romantic chasm” of “Kubla Khan.” A decade later I discussed these conjunctions in an unpublished working paper, “STC, Poetic Form, and a Glimpse of the Mind” (2013) – where “unpublished” means not published in the formal academic literature; but I posted it online, as I have this dialog.

At that time I thought perhaps I had gone as far as I could with Coleridge. There was certainly more to be done, but I couldn’t see how to do it. And the I began reading about machine learning and artificial neural nets, which set me to thinking. In December, 2017, I issued a working paper, “Calculating meaning in ‘Kubla Khan, – a rough cut,” Version 2. Here’s how I characterize calcuation (pp. 2-3):

Roughly speaking then, to calculate the meaning of a text is to construct a coherent pattern of signifieds as prompted by the that text. [...] I assume this process involves both composition and convolution. Composition is the primary process and for many texts it may be the only process. I sometimes think of composition as “the freight train” model of meaning, where meanings are discrete entities, each of which is packed into a freight car, and the cars assembled into a train. In fact, nothing in a relational network functions like this, but it will serve as a crude metaphor to underpin the following discussion.

Here is how I characterize convolution (p. 5):

Still, what do I mean by convolve? I’m going to tap-dance through this one. Some years ago David Hays and I published a paper on metaphor, “Metaphor, Recognition, and Neural Process” [7], in which we argued that ‘robust’ metaphor (as opposed to ‘dead’ metaphor) works by convolving the tenor and the vehicle. At the time we were influenced by Karl Pribram’s notion of neural holography, which we explain (somewhat) in the paper. Note that neural tissue is active tissue. Individual neurons are always active, but more so at some times than others. Convolution is thus a process involving the interaction of meshworks of neurons, perhaps arranged in a specific architecture.

Convolution is a very important operation in the world of artificial neural nets, used mostly for processing images. But then, “Kubla Khan” conjures up rich visual imagery.

Thus began my third attempt to understand the mechanisms behind “Kubla Khan.” This dialog continues that attempt. I have created two interlocutors, a Naturalist Literary Critic (NLC) and a Sympathetic Techno-Wizard (STW). I conceive of this Naturalist Literary Critic as one who examines literary works in the way that a naturalist examines life forms. I first explained my conception in a long post at The Valve in 2010, which is now defunct. It’s now on New Savanna, “’NATURALIST’ criticism, NOT ‘cognitive’ NOT ‘Darwinian’ – A Quasi-Manifesto”. Nor, I might add, is it formalist, Marxist, deconstructionist, feminist, or any other form of interpretive criticism. It is, if you will, post-interpretive.

As for the Sympathetic Techno-Wizard, they’re expert in various forms of natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, which I am not, except for my early-career adventure into Old School computational semantics. Nonetheless, as I alone am writing this dialog, I have to play the role of STW, which implies that they say what I want/need them to say. One of my major intellectual goals is to take a topic that has resisted technical development and transmute it into a form where it is accessible to investigators who have technical skills that I lack. That has been one motive driving my work on “Kubla Khan” from the very beginning. I offer this dialog in the hope that some real techno-wizards will read it and take me up on it.