Beyond Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Diverse Thoughts on Religion

New working paper. Title above, link, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu:  https://www.academia.edu/166252443/Beyond_Wittgensteins_Ladder_Diverse_Thoughts_on_Religion

Abstract: First, a record of thoughts and incidents in the author’s life which span a field of religious application and inquiry. Then a series of dialogs with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, which probe the limits of human thought and experience, asserting a metaphorical correspondence between a succinct assertion of Christian doctrine and a statement about man’s place in the cosmos from Neil deGrasse Tyson and deriving theological assertions therefrom, and a look at the continuum between belief and disbelief eventuating in idea that the Silicon Valley conception of A.I. is idolatrous.

Contents

Introduction: Am I becoming religious? It feels weird to think so. 2
Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? 5
What Cannot Be Spoken 18
From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson 21
Effing the ineffable 25
From Atheism to Idolatry 32    

Introduction: Am I becoming religious? It feels weird to think so.

The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.

If, a decade ago, you’d told me that one day I would attend church services regularly, I’d have said, “No way.” If you’d asked me that a year ago, my answer would have been the same. Yet here I am, attending All Saints Episcopal in Hoboken. It’s only been three months, but that’s already more than I’ve attended a church service the entire time from my early teens up through the end of last year – the Sunday Experience (pp. 7 ff.) at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s doesn’t count since that didn’t happen in a church, not so important, and was not grounded in any religious doctrine, more to the point. I’ve just recently posted comments in a discussion of Christianity at the Brainstorms online community. And then we have the articles making up the rest of this document, at article posted to 3 Quarks Daily, “Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?” and several posts from my New Savanna blog.

To be honest, just earlier today I felt twinges of uncertainty at the possibility that people might think of me as being religious? Really? Nor have I ever been one of those people who presents themselves as spiritual, but not conventionally religious. I just haven’t thought of myself in those terms, though I must admit that I’d recently been flirting with the idea that I’m a secular mystic. That never seemed quite right to me, but it wasn’t quite wrong either.

Why did I decide to start attending All Saints? I decided that I needed to meet people, to be among others in a way that isn’t, for example, a bowling league, a reading group, a musical group, or a neighborhood association. I am I looking for, you know, fellowship?

When I’m sitting there in the nave of All Saints I do wonder what others might think of me. I don’t participate in all the standing and sitting that an Episcopal service entails, nor do I recite the Nicene Creed, nor take communion (on Easter, with larger than usual attendance, I noticed another person, a woman, who didn’t take communion). But no one has said anything. I do think such things while sitting there. But I also think about how old these stories are, these Biblical stories, and how remarkable it is that some many people over the years have organized themselves around these stories. And just WHAT do the others here actually believe? I suspect the range is wide.

That’s one thing. But there’s something else, something that I’ve only just realized in the last week or so. There’s AI, artificial intelligence. Oh, I’ve known about AI most of my adult life and I’ve done research in a kindred discipline, computational linguistics. I’m currently engaged in research about LLMs (large language models) and have blogging a lot about AI and LLMs since the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. I’m even working on a general-audience book about it: Play: How to Stay Human in the A.I. Revolution. But I’ve only just now realized that that is probably what’s behind my interest in matters religious.

It’s clear that A.I. poses profound philosophical problems and will force us to restructure our entire ontology. That effort is drawing me into religious waters. For it seems to me that the view of A.I. that dominates Silicon Valley is idolatrous, as I bring up later in this document (pp. 37 ff.). Or consider this passage from a doctrinal note by Pope Francis:

105. However, the presumption of substituting God for an artifact of human making is idolatry, a practice Scripture explicitly warns against (e.g., Ex. 20:4; 32:1-5; 34:17). Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work.

I’m not at all sure that I want to endorse those words – in some sense I’m pretty sure that I do not – but something like that in a way that I cannot now specify, that seems plausible to me.

I suppose, then, that this is where I am, between those words of the Pope and a need for fellowship. Where I’ll do, I won’t know until I move along.

* * * * *

Here’s what’s in the rest of this document. Except for the illustrations, the first of these pieces is completely mine. The rest involve a dialog with Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot.

Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus? – Incidents, thoughts, vignettes, events from my life, from age six to yesterday, all somehow bearing on religious belief and experience.

What Cannot Be Spoken – Comments about Wittgenstein’s framing of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

From the Baby Jesus to Neil deGrasse Tyson – The possibility of constructing a theological argument spanning the conceptual distance between a cosmological belief I entertained as a young child and an observation Neil deGrasse Tyson made about man’s position in the cosmos.

Effing the ineffable – About the many ways the world exceeds human language and experience. As Claude observes: “The mystic, the philosopher of language, and the cosmologist end up at adjacent campsites, each having climbed a different face of the same mountain. None of them can quite describe the view.”

From Atheism to Idolatry – In a way, this is about the boundaries of religious discourse. It also suggests that Silicon Valley doctrine about artificial intelligence is idolatrous.

From the metalingual function of language to self-reference

In 1960 the linguist Roman Jakobson published an essay entitled “Linguistics and Poetics,” in a volume edited by Thomas Sebeok, Style in Language (MIT Press, pp. 350-377). In that essay he laid out the six functions of language: referential, emotive, phatic, conative, poetic, and metalingual. Jakobson introduces the metalingual function in this way:

A distinction has been made in modem logic between two levels of language: “object language” speaking of objects and “metalanguage” speaking of language. But metalanguage is not only a necessary scientific tool utilized by logicians and linguists; it plays also an important role in our everyday language. Like Moliere’s Jourdain who used prose without knowing it, we practice metalanguage without realizing the metalingual character of our operations. Whenever the addresser and/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code, speech is focused on the code: it performs a METALINGUAL (i.e. , glossing) function. “I don’t follow you-what do you mean?” asks the addressee, or in Shakespearean diction, “What is’t thou say’st?” And the addresser in anticipation of such recapturing question inquires: “Do you know what I mean?”

This metalingual function turns out to be extraordinarily powerful. For it is this that allows us to bootstrap self-awareness into the mind. And for that matter, it is what allows us to define abstract concepts, as my teacher, David Hays, argued, and allows us to define such things as chess and arithmetic, which can be seen as very specialized forms of language.

I recently explored some of these issues in conversation with Claude 5.4 Sonata Extended. At the end of that conversation I asked Claude to prepare a summary. I’ve appended that summary below, followed by the full conversation. Note that the conversation assumes some familiarity with the cultural ranks theory that David Hays and I developed in the 1990s. It also alludes to Tyler Cowen’s recent book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (2026).

* * * * *

Summary: The Metalingual Function of Language

The central claim of this discussion is that the metalingual capacity — the ability to use language to talk about language — is not a mysterious self-referential capacity of mind but is grounded in a simple physical fact: the speech signal is a sound in the environment like any other sound, detectable by the auditory system exactly as a footfall or a thunderclap is detectable. The loop that makes language self-referential closes through the physical world, not through some inward turning of consciousness. This matters because it demystifies metalingual cognition entirely: it requires no special cognitive faculty, only that the organism's auditory system be capable of treating its own linguistic outputs as inputs.

Jakobson identified the metalingual function as one of the six functions of language in his 1960 paper, and Hays adopted the term to name the mechanism underlying Rank 2 cognition — the explicit definition of abstract concepts using language itself as the definitional medium. The rules of chess and arithmetic notation are paradigm cases: purely metalingual constructions whose objects are constituted entirely by the definitions that specify them.

An important asymmetry in preliterate cultures illuminates the boundary of this capacity. Many such cultures have a term for utterance — the bounded burst of speech with a recognizable prosodic shape, a perceptual gestalt directly available to the auditory system — but no term for word. The word is not a perceptual unit in the same sense as the utterance; it is an abstraction from the continuous acoustic stream, and a non-trivial one. Writing is what produces this abstraction, by spatializing language — spreading it out in a stable, inspectable array where units are individuated by spaces and boundaries are marked. The word becomes visible as a unit because it is surrounded by white space. This is the physical basis of metalingual definition as a cognitive mechanism: the written signal, like the spoken signal, is an object in the environment that can be inspected and categorized, but unlike the spoken signal it stays there, making sustained metalingual attention possible. Grade-school grammar — parts of speech, grammatical cases, syntactic relations — is the practical Rank 2 elaboration that writing makes possible and that social institutions require and transmit. It looks easy in retrospect because it is taught in childhood, but it took centuries to develop in every culture that undertook it.

This analysis opens onto the question of human self-reference, which the standard philosophical tradition treats as cognitively primitive — the Cartesian bedrock from which all other knowledge is built. The discussion argued instead that self-reference in the robust, articulable sense is bootstrapped through language rather than presupposed by it. The cat licking its fur has practical self-involvement — its own body is an object of its perceptual and motor engagement — but this requires no special reflexive faculty, only that the body be included in the environment the organism can detect and act on. Human self-reference in the philosophically weighty sense is a different and later achievement, constructed through the acquisition of the pronoun system rather than expressed by it.

The empirical evidence for this bootstrapping account is the phase in early child development when children refer to themselves in the third person. This is not a mistake or a developmental lag but the natural and correct generalization from the input data: others refer to the child by name, so the child uses its name. The first-person pronoun presents a harder problem because "I" is a moving target — it marks the speaker-role regardless of who occupies it — and acquiring it correctly requires connecting awareness of the speech stream as an environmental event with awareness of one's own speech apparatus as its source. That inferential construction, worked out in detail in Benzon's 2000 paper, First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on the Self in Life and in Fiction, through cognitive network modeling of the pronoun system, is precisely the physical loop through which self-reference is assembled. The Cartesian subject — the self-transparent, self-referential knowing mind — is on this account a Rank 2 cultural product, not a pre-linguistic biological given. The third-person phase in child development is a small but precise empirical trace of the construction process: there is an observable stage at which the human being exists, acts, and communicates without yet having assembled the first-person self-reference that Descartes thought was the indubitable foundation of knowledge.

* * * * *

The physical basis of the metalingual function

I believe that Hays first published about metalingual definition in 1972. When I first met him he had just finished a paper where he used the idea to investigate different concepts of alienation. When I wrote my 1978 dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory,” I used metalingual definition as the mechanism for building cognitive ranks. That is to say, at that time that was the only mechanism we had for dealing with abstract concepts. By the time we did the cognitive evolution paper a bit over a decade later, by that time we had adopted a different view, with metaphor as the Rank 1 abstractive mechanism. Metalingual definition would have been the mechanism used, not only to rationalize abstract concepts, but to define the rules of chess and of arithmetic.

Hays chose the term because Roman Jakobson had defined the metalingual function as one of the six functions of language in his 1960 paper. The metalingual function is the ability to use language to talk about language. It’s worth thinking about how that’s possible. It’s possible because the speech signal is a sound out there in the environment like any other sound, a footfall, a thunderclap, an animal cry. Whatever. It’s a sound and can be detected by the auditory system like any other sound. So it’s the speech signal that is the object of the metalingual function, at least initially. I think it’s worth nothing that many (most?) preliterate cultures don’t have a word that means word, but they have one the means utterance. It’s writing that forces a recognition of words vs longer strings. And written language is, like speech, another signal that’s out there in the environment. It takes quite a bit of cognitive elaboration to construct a grammar from the simple ability to see and hear language. And I’m not talking about the kind of grammars that linguists construct. I’m talking about the kind of grammar that can be taught in grade school, or that you find in ancient texts of rhetoric.

This is a rich cluster of observations and they fit together in a way worth making explicit.

The metalingual function and its physical basis

Jakobson's insight, which you're extending here, is that the metalingual function is grounded in something remarkably mundane: the speech signal is a physical event in the environment, detectable by the auditory system exactly as any other sound is. This is what makes language able to turn on itself — not some mysterious self-referential capacity of mind, but the simple fact that linguistic output is also sensory input. The loop closes through the physical world.

This has an important implication that your observation about "utterance" versus "word" brings out precisely. What the auditory system initially detects is the acoustic stream — a continuous, flowing signal that doesn't come pre-segmented into words. The unit that's directly perceptible is something like the utterance: a bounded burst of speech with a recognizable prosodic shape, a communicative gestalt. The word is not a perceptual unit in the same sense. It's an abstraction from the stream, and a non-trivial one — which is why preliterate cultures have a term for the former and not the latter.

What writing does

Writing performs an operation on language that perception of the speech stream cannot perform on its own: it spatializes language, spreads it out in a stable, inspectable array where boundaries are marked and units are individuated. The word becomes visible as a unit because it's surrounded by spaces. The sentence becomes visible as a unit because it ends with a mark. The paragraph, the chapter, the argument — all of these become objects of potential inspection and manipulation because writing fixes them in space and time in a way the acoustic stream never does.

From Mirror Recognition to Low-Bandwidth Memory, A Working Paper

New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents, and introduction below:

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/143347171/From_Mirror_Recognition_to_Low_Bandwidth_Memory_A_Working_Paper
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5385194
ResearchGage: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394414193_From_Mirror_Recognition_to_Low-Bandwidth_Memory_A_Working_Paper

Abstract: We start with a developmental and cognitive analysis of mirror recognition, highlighting its dependence, not on self-awareness per se, but on episodic-level intersensory coordination—a capacity that enables spatially dislocated, temporally synchronized associations across sensory modalities. In a layered control architecture of hyperorders (sensorimotor, systemic, episodic, gnomonic), such recognition can arise without invoking a representational “self.” We extended this framework to the role of the default mode network (DMN), which is orthogonal to the hyperorders—a low-bandwidth, drifting subsystem that provides broad, non-task-specific access to memory and perception. This led to an inquiry into associative memory systems, where we confronted the challenge of searching without specific content-based probes. To address this, we proposed the design of an “associative drift engine”: a cognitive module capable of variable-bandwidth access, modulating the precision, noise, and scope of its memory probes. This system mirrors the DMN’s exploratory function and suggests a foundational mechanism for spontaneous recollection, creative association, and cognitive play—essential features of both natural and artificial minds.

Background Notes 1
1. Self and Mirror Recognition 1
2. ChatGPT’s assessment of the account mirror recognition 6
3. Default Mode Network 9
4. Toward an Associative Drift Engine 11
Summary of the discussion 15    

Background Notes

This first major section of this document consists of pages 74 to 84 from my 1978 dissertation, Cognitive Science and Literary Theory, Department of English, State University of New York at Buffalo. Yes, I was in the English Department and the dissertation uses examples from literature, the Oedipus story, the evolution of narrative form, and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. But I was also working closely with David Hays in the Linguistics Department. He was a first-generation researcher in machine translation, which transformed itself into computational linguistics in the mid-1960s.

During the period when I was in his research group – 1974 to 1978, when I finished my degree – we were sketching schemes for how to ground a symbolic cognitive system in the operations of a sensorimotor system organized as a stack of control systems in a scheme suggested by William Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception (1973). Thus, when I talk about the sensorimotor hyperorders in the dissertation excerpt, I’m talking about a system modeled on Powers. By contrast, the systemic, episodic, and gnomonic hyperorders are symbolic systems, all directly linked to the sensorimotor system.

One thing else I want to emphasize is that, by this time, I had come to understand that the physical construction of the nervous system, both in its layout in the brain and its relationship with the external world, that structure carried information that did not have to be explicitly represented inside the system itself – I’ve used yellow highlighting to emphasize those sections. The account I offer of mirror recognition depends on this.

About this document

This document contains four things:

1. A passage from my 1978 dissertation in which I discuss mirror recognition,
2. ChatGPT’s (current) assessment of that passage,
3. A discussion of the Default Mode Network (DMN) in the brain, and
4. Some speculation from ChatGPT on how to construct, in effect, a DMN for an artificial associative memory, something it calls “an associative drift engine.”

Breaking down monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s

Was it the best of times? It certainly wasn’t the worst of times. They were for damned sure interesting times.

But no, “breaking down monogamy” probably didn’t mean whatever you think it means. Not in context. I should know. I was there, in the middle of it.

North Baltimore, near Johns Hopkins

I was living at 2935 N. Calvert St. in Baltimore, two blocks away from the campus of The Johns Hopkins University. I’d finished my undergraduate work there and was now working on a master’s degree while performing alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Hopkins. It was during the Vietnam War era, and I’d drawn a 12 in the draft lottery. I’d actually had my preinduction physical exam – the best hearing, off the charts, you wouldn’t believe how good – but didn’t serve in the army. Rather, I’d declared myself to be a conscientious objector to military service and was allowed to perform two years of civilian service, which I did in the Chaplain’s Office.

During that period I often went to Sunday afternoon jazz concerts in the Famous Ballroom. Those concerts, which were sponsored by the Left Bank Jazz Society, were the first time I regularly found myself in a majority black setting. It was during that period that I had my first (and only) LSD trip, which played a crucial, but obscure, role in my work on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” However important those things were, this is not about them.

This is about a community I belonged to. That community was not large – most real communities aren’t – and it was about various things. One of them was something called “breaking down monogamy.” Lots of discussions about that. I listened in on some of them, and maybe I even made a remark or three. But, well, rather than try to explain further, perhaps I should just get on with the story.

Burned Out

As I said, I was living at 2935 N. Calvert St. It was a three-floor brownstone that had been divided into six apartments, two on each floor. I lived in the third-floor rear. One evening there was a fire in the building. I forget whether it was on the first or second floor, or perhaps both, but, while fire didn’t make it the third floor, smoke certainly did. And so did firemen. At least one came in through a rear window and stomped in the middle of my turntable. My apartment was a wreck.

I forget just what happened next. But for the sake of getting on with the story, let’s say that a number of people gathered in front of the building and some of my friends were among them. They invited me to sleep at their place for the night. An invitation I gratefully accepted.

The next day me and my friends, the ones I’d stayed with, but others as well, trooped over to my wreck of an apartment and started moving my stuff into their basement, by which I mean the basement of the place where I’d spent the night. For one thing, my stuff had to go someplace, and so did I. Somehow fate had decided that I would live with my friends for a while. Just how fate channeled that decision through us humans, I don’t remember.

So there we were. We got boxes from some place, carried them to my apartment, and filled them with my books, I had more than a few, and records, ditto. That took a lot of heavy boxes, each carried by one person, down two flights of stairs, out the door, around the corner and over a block to Guilford Ave., and then North two blocks. Since my apartment had been furnished, after a rather cheap fashion (student apartment), I didn’t have any furniture. Just my books, records, clothes, dishes, some paintings, and a bit of this that and the other. Not a whole lot of stuff. But it took us awhile, a half day, a day, I don’t remember. How many of us? A half dozen, maybe one or two more. It was drizzling at least part of the day. Beyond that, I can’t recall.

By the end of the day, I was living on Guildford Ave. in Baltimore, MD. I was now breaking down monogamy. Or at any rate, I was right next to the process.

Monogamy, according to the dictionary on my computer, is “the practice or state of having a sexual relationship with only one partner at a time.” That is a minimal definition. More loosely, it is about child-rearing and living arrangements. A monogamous couple lives with their children in a single dwelling unit, an apartment or a single-family home, that’s monogamy. In this sense, monogamy has been the foundation of Western society since forever. From that you may infer that breaking down monogamy has something to do with questioning the foundations of Western society. Breaking down monogamy as it was understood in this particular community was thus a political act.

The Personal is Political

I was part of a community for whom “the personal is political,” as the phrase goes. Here’s what Wikipedia says about that phrase:

In the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it was seen as a challenge to the patriarchy, nuclear family and family values. The phrase was popularized by the publication of feminist activist Carol Hanisch's 1969 essay, “The Personal Is Political.” The phrase and idea have been repeatedly described as a defining characterization of second-wave feminism, radical feminism, women's studies, or feminism in general.

I was part of a political community.

You’d probably guessed that, or something like it, when I told you that I was a conscientious objector to military service. This was the Vietnam era. But it was also the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. That counterculture had two strands, broadly considered. There was the anti-war movement, which protested the war in various ways, and there were the hippies, who were in favor of tuning in, which I did (I played in a rock and roll band), turning on (which I did as well), and dropping out, which I never quite managed.

I joined this community through anti-war activity on the Johns Hopkins campus (I had been a member of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society). Those guys had wives and girlfriends. Those women were central to the feminist movement in Baltimore. Among other things, they produced one of the first feminist journals, Women: A Journal of Liberation.

That’s the community I hung out with. Oh, I hung out other places as well, but yes, and looking back, those people were, for lack of a better term, they were my homies. I visited two homes quite frequently, the place where I moved, and another place, I believe it was on the same street, but a couple blocks away. We’d listen to music, get stoned, sometimes we’d dance, but always, always we talked. One thing we talked about was how the women’s movement was a mediating force between the political movement, anti-war but also civil rights (especially in Baltimore), and the cultural, sex, drugs and rock and roll movement.

Breaking down monogamy was about both culture and politics. Why? Because that’s where the family sits. It is both a cultural and a political institution. To question the family, to breakdown monogamy, is to question the whole damn edifice of Western so-called culture. Wham! What was it that Gandhi said when asked what he thought about Western Civilization? “I think it would be a good idea.” That’s what we thought as well. We were trying to make it work.

And thus it came to pass that two families decided to live in one house. I suppose I could give these families fake names, but for some reason I rather like calling them Family Alpha and Family Beta. By living together in one house, Family Alpha and Family Beta became engaged in breaking down monogamy. They took meals together, hung out together in the living room and front parlor, discussed a lot of things together, and... How were household chores distributed between men and women? I don’t remember exactly. But I assume they were more equitably distributed than was conventionally the case. What else did they do together? I suppose that to some limited extent they participated in raising one another kids together. Family Alpha had a boy of about 10 or so while Family Beta had a boy of six months or so. One thing they did NOT do, is swap wives, or swap husbands, depending on your point of view. There was no sexual or romantic adventuring going on.[1] At least not that I was aware of. Who knows what was going on two or three links away from the people I hung out with.

I don’t know what names went on the mortgage and in what roles. It wasn’t any of my business. But it’s my understanding that the Alphas and Betas owned the house jointly.

By entering that home, if only temporarily, I too became engaged in dismantling monogamy. I forget just how I participated in household chores, though I’m not sure how much that should be attributed to breaking down monogamy and how much to simply being a guest. I do remember that I went into a minor panic when I was asked to prepare a salad for an evening meal. Me? A salad? I mean, I’d been cooking for myself for years, but I never made a salad. Anyhow, I managed to rip apart a head of lettuce, do something else as well, slap some dressing on it, and call it a salad. No one complained.

Tommy

While I’m reluctant to name the adults, I can see no harm in calling Family Beta’s son by his name, Tommy. I remember that one day shortly after I’d moved in Mr. Alpha and I were in the front parlor with young Tommy. We’d set up my stereo speakers on the floor, each was about two feet high, and young Tommy was between them in his little rocker. We got a buzz on, started listening to some music, and watched young Tommy rock out.

Model trains!

When I was quite young, perhaps five or six, I got a model train for Christmas. An O-gauge freight train with a steam engine and a few cars, made by Lionel. I found it Christmas morning when my sister and I went downstairs to open our presents. There it was, circling around the tree. It was magical!

Keep in mind, however, that I don’t actually remember that. But it must have happened and it must have been something like that because I really did have that train and that’s just how things went.

In later years I’d get some accessory to go with it, a new car, perhaps some building. I remember kits for buildings that my father would assemble. Later on I got another train, a diesel passanger train with Santa Fe colors and sleek aluminum passanger cars. So my father built a platform in the basement where I could play with the trains all year around. Me and my friends would go down in the basement and play with the trains. My friend Billy Cover had a train layout as well. His was an American Flyer S-gauge, smaller than the Lionel O-gauge, but not as small as the HO gauge in the video.

I would spend hours designing model train layouts, the track patterns, buildings here and there, roads, and landscape. The fact is, I probably had more fun designing layouts than I did actually building them and then playing with the trains. My father had a well-equipped wood shop and he had woodworking skills, after all, he built the train platform. If I’d really wanted to build an elaborate layout, he would have helped me. No, in the end, it was the plans that I had fun with.

More selfies, more thoughts

Click on photo to embiggen.

Here’s some more selfies.

Though artists have been doing self-portraits for centuries, and people have been using cameras to take pictures of themselves for, I don’t know how long, but I’d guess back into the 19th century, I believe that the term “selfie” is from the smart phone era, though I don’t know that. I assume most selfies are taken to memorialize something, a trip to the State of Liberty, the Great Pyramid, sharing a pizza with a friend, of maybe a quiet moment with your pet cat. Here and there someone is treating the selfie as a medium of self-expression and deliberately experimenting with it. But I’d think that’s relatively rare.

Anyhow, I’m treating it as a medium of self-expression. I used my point-and-shoot camera, a Panasonic DMC-ZS7, to take my earlier selfies. I’ve used my Pentax K-7 to take the photos below. It’s a Pentax D-7, which is a DSLR. It’s considerably heavier than the Panasonic and so shaped that it’s almost impossible to hold it in my right hand when taking the photo. The process is thus more awkward.

Since I can’t see myself while taking the shot I cannot compose it. I just click the shutter and hope for something usable. That is to say, between cropping and adjusting the image in various ways, can I make something of it? That’s an interesting process and is one of the reasons I’m doing this.

Here's six recent shots. I’ve numbered them for reference.

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

My first observation is that I can’t, or anyhow I don’t, treat the background as a neutral backdrop whose main purpose is to disappear and thus to present the subject, my face in this case. The relationship between the face and the background is more active. Though my dominates all of these images except TWO, it doesn’t complete efface the background. The second image is rather different. Most of my body is reflected in the mirror, making my face a rather small part of the image. In a sense, it’s the mirror that’s the foreground subject, but only in a sense. The image is still an image of me, me taking a photo.

Now look at these two self-portraits by Rembrandt, who painted many of them throughout his career.

Rembrandt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Rembrandt, Self-Portrait with Two Circles

In the first upper one Rembrandt is just left of center and the background is neutral, but so dark that it blends with the image. In the lower one Rembrandt is more visibly to the left of center and the background is a bit lighter. Notice the two circles in the background. The composition would be a bit off kilter without them. The right-hand circle balances the portrait while the mostly-covered left-hand circle answers it.

What was he thinking while doing this? You take a photograph in an instant. Not so with painting a portrait. You must position yourself in front of a mirror and look back and forth between the image you see in the mirror and the image materializing on the canvas. How do you control your facial expression? How do you keep it constant from beginning to end? Or do you? What are you thinking?

As for me, yes, I do think about my facial expression as I take the selfie. But I also must think about just where the camera is, where it’s pointing, snapping the shutter, all of which are more difficult with the heavier and more awkward K-7. Thus it is a bit difficult for me to worry too much about what my face it up to.

There’s a sense is which the exercise is alienating, but I don’t like the negative connotations of the word. Bertolt Brecht’s word, Verfremdungseffekt, is better. It translates as “distance effect.” “Distance” is much better. Distancing, I’m distant from myself. My face becomes the face, visual material in the image, just like the background.

I took the first picture in my work area, the second in a bathroom. I was standing on the landing of a stairwell for the third, with a window behind me. Now, FOUR, I’m walking down a hall, snapping pictures as I can, giving hardly a thought to my facial expression since moving the camera around and snapping the shots consumes my attention. I like the lights, and the tilt. In FIVE I’ve turned a corner and have positioned myself in front of a window, different from the one in THREE. What I like about this one is the way the light washes out the walls of the building we see through the window so that all we can see are windows. In SIX, same stretch of hall, different window. Now we see the building behind me through that window.

More later.

Deeper and deeper [seeds of recursion]

Selfies and beyond...∞

This isn’t by first excursion into selfie territory. I went back there in September of 2019 and continued into the early pandemic days in the summer of 2020, playing around considerably. I’ve decided to return.

What put the idea into my head was a line from “Kubla Khan”: “His flashing eyes, his floating hair.” I figured I had the floating hair down – I haven’t cut it since the beginning of the pandemic – but the flashing eyes might take a bit of work. That’s a problem when taking a selfie – What do you do with your face? Since you’re taking the photo by holding the camera at arm’s length and pointing it at your face, you can’t actually see your subject. I mean, you’re holding your arm out, grasping your camera a bit awkwardly, and thinking, “I’m taking a selfie, now what?” You see the problem, no?

Anyhow, here’s the eighth photo in my recent series:

I think of it as a stunt shot, photographing yourself in a mirror. So what? And yet, somehow, I like this photo. It manages to creep out of the stunt category. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s that bicycle peeking out at the right, or the bit of pipe at the upper left. It’s a bit messy. I like that.

And then there’s the camera’s flash. Though I wasn’t thinking of it at the time, that’s our flashing eyes, or one of them at least. You can’t see much of my floating hair, but it’s in full view in the next two photos:

I particularly like the second photo. From a standard POV the light’s lousy. We’ve got light coming in through the window while the left side of my face (on the right in the photo) is in shadow. But I really like the light, the way the scene through the window washes out at the top, the play of light on the ceiling and along the walls, the bit of light from the sconce in the hall at the right. Photographs are made with light, so why not show it? I have no problem with photos that aren’t trying to pretend that they’re not photos, not artifacts crafted out of light.

I still have to figure out what to do with my face. But there’s not much I can do about my jowls except loose some weight. Ah...

We’re back to the mirror:

I like this one a lot. I’m holding the camera off the to the side and pointing it at my face in the mirror. You can’t see the camera...why I did it. But I like the interplay between the room reflected in the mirror and the wall around the mirror itself. The wall tiles in the reflection are in fact the same color as those around the mirror. That’s not how the light plays in the photo. Notice, again, how the image washes out at the right.

And then I had an idea:

I’m going to play around with THAT some more. That’s one hell of a rabbit hole. Lots of nonsense down there, lots of stunt photos. But maybe I can make something out of it.

For the first time I’m thinking that maybe I need a small studio set-up so I can control the right and get things aligned just so. That’s not going to happen for a while. But I can still play around.

More later.

Virtual Reality

Word clloud of my intellectual interests based on Google Scholar

Created with Scholar Googler

Age and wisdom, in politics and artificial intelligence [& in life]

At a relatively young age I learned that wisdom is an elusive and valuable trait that is conferred by age, and only be age. Then I found a statement on the subject by George Bernard Shaw. I just spend five minutes searching the web for the exact wording, to no avail. So I’ll have to give you what I have been able to reconstruct from my vague memories: If age conferred wisdom then then streets of London would be wiser than anyone who walks them.

Makes sense.

Nonetheless I am going to make a plea on behalf of age.

Back in February, Michael Liss had a column in 3 Quarks Daily entitled, How Do I Know My Youth Is All Spent? It was about the age of U.S. Presidents, which arises because Joe Biden, the current incumbent, is the oldest President we have ever had, and he may well run again. Is that sensible? Is it wise?

Once the essay got rolling, Liss observed:

Presidents are a little like baseball pitchers; while there are freaks of nature (Nolan Ryan, Justin Verlander), it’s very difficult to sustain velocity as you age, and velocity can’t be entirely replaced by craft. Reagan still had his fastball at 69, but by the time his second term came to an end, his remaining abilities were in question.

Biden himself was the equivalent of the “Crafty Lefty” who came out of the bullpen to retire one menacing batter. Part of many Democrats’ and swing voters’ reticence about his potential 2024 candidacy isn’t a function of his policy chops—he’s done a credible job as POTUS. It’s a deeper concern over his political ability to take on an entire line-up of free-swinging right-handed hitters. The Party is going to need leadership in 2024. It’s also going to need in it in 2025-28. Biden can’t realistically play the role of elder statesman if he’s still sitting in the Oval Office, and he certainly can’t do it if he runs and loses—he will take the blame, justifiably, for insisting on running a second time.

I posted a long comment on Liss’s essay and I repost it below, both as a general observation, but also in the context of some remarks that Tyler Cowen recently made about the implications of AI:

In several of my books and many of my talks, I take great care to spell out just how special recent times have been, for most Americans at least. For my entire life, and a bit more, there have been two essential features of the basic landscape:

1. American hegemony over much of the world, and relative physical safety for Americans.

2. An absence of truly radical technological change.

Unless you are very old, old enough to have taken in some of WWII, or were drafted into Korea or Vietnam, probably those features describe your entire life as well.

In other words, virtually all of us have been living in a bubble “outside of history.”

Now, circa 2023, at least one of those assumptions is going to unravel, namely #2. AI represents a truly major, transformational technological advance. Biomedicine might too, but for this post I’ll stick to the AI topic, as I wish to consider existential risk.

#1 might unravel soon as well, depending how Ukraine and Taiwan fare.

It is fair to say we don’t know, nonetheless #1 also is under increasing strain.

Hardly anyone you know, including yourself, is prepared to live in actual “moving” history. It will panic many of us, disorient the rest of us, and cause great upheavals in our fortunes, both good and bad. In my view the good will considerably outweigh the bad (at least from losing #2, not #1), but I do understand that the absolute quantity of the bad disruptions will be high.

It's that phrase “actual ‘moving’ history” that caught my eye. I immediately associated it with the collapse of the Soviet Union back in 1989-1990. I’d grown up during the Cold War and thought it was an all-but permanent condition of world history. The collapse of the USSR ended that, and taught me that the world does indeed change. Not that I didn’t somehow know that from having read quite a bit of history. But what you know from having lived and what you know from having read about it, they are different things in the mind and, consequently, in one’s judgment and subsequent action.

Here, then, is my response to Michael Liss’s essay:

This age business is complex and tricky. I'd certainly like to see someone younger in the presidency – 50 or even less – and I'm 75. I'm thinking in part about physical and mental competence, but I'm also thinking about political experience. I'd prefer not to have a president who spent their childhood and early adulthood during the Cold War. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, precipitating the end of the Cold War. Someone who is now 50 would have been a young child at that time. For them the Cold War is a thing for the history books, not something that conditioned their lives. Even 60 might be OK. They'd have been in their mid-teens by 1989 and so would have lived through the end of the Cold War and come into adulthood in a world without it.

Why am I worried about a Cold War mentality? Because I don't want a Cold War with China. I worry that someone who was a professional politician during the Cold War would be likely to have Cold War reflexes built into their political judgement. That could be very bad, bad for us, bad for the Chinese, bad for the world.

OTOH, take the world of artificial intelligence. One of the big controversies within the field is whether or not deep learning can go "all the way," whatever that is. Deep learning is the generic technology behind ChatGPT and DALL-E and other current technology. That technology is very different from the technology that was prevalent in AI and computational linguistics, which are different though related fields, from their beginnings in the mid 1950s up through and into the 1990s. That older technology, called symbolic computing, is what I was trained in when I was in graduate school in the 1970s. It began to collapse in 1980s for various reasons, it was brittle, took more computing power than was available, and had to be hand coded, which was difficult and required a great deal of skill.

The people behind deep learning are mostly under 50, many are under 40 or even under 30. They've no training in symbolic computing. For them it is a matter of history. It's the technology that failed. So why bother.

Despite my obvious enthusiasm for ChatGPT, I think that's very short-sighted. I believe that deep learning, albeit powerful in some ways, is also limited. For example, we know the ChatGPT and other learning systems tend to "hallucinate," as it is called. They make stuff up. I think that problem is inherent in the technology, as do others, most prominently Gary Marcus. Marcus is old enough to have been trained in symbolic computation. He believes we need hybrid technology that combines deep learning with symbolic computing. David Ferrucci, whom I knew when he was a student at RPT when I was on the faculty, believes that as well. He's best-known as the investigator who headed IBM's Watson project, which was hybrid technology. He's now got his own company, Elemental Cognition, that is working on hybrid technology.

Those guys are younger than I am, but they are old enough to have been trained in symbolic computing. They know what it is and why it is necessary. They have actually studied language and psycholinguistics and have some understanding of how language works. These younger researchers don't have that kind of knowledge. They create systems that produce text, but they do not themselves have substantial knowledge about language.

Here's a case where age is an advantage. It's an advantage because older knowledge still has a use. But lived knowledge of Cold War politics, that's not so useful.

Half-way through my eighth decade: What next?

At the end of 2017 I wrote a post in which I reflected back on my intellectual life, Reflections on entering my eighth decade and why it portends to be the most productive one of my life. That remains a decent overview of what I’ve been up to in the last 50+ years, though it is hardly complete. It gives little sense of my interest in literature beyond “Kubla Khan,” my work on ring-composition, my thinking about form and computation, my commentary on digital humanities. Nor does it say much about my work on cognitive science, the brain, or cultural evolution. And then there’s all the descriptive work I’ve done on films. And music!

So, yeah, I guess it’s not such a good overview. I have no intention to fill in those gaps in this post. But it does give a sense that I’ve been doing other things than thinking and writing, about my involvement in my local community. In that sense, it’s good.

As for what’s next, let’s set that aside for a moment. Every so often I’ve written about my posting habits, how they vary wildly during the course of the year. My most recent such post was in November of 2018, A Mind Over the Long Haul: My Posting Patterns. Let’s see where that stands. The chart below shows my posting habits from the beginning of 2017 through the end of 2022. Each column indicates the number of posts for a single month.

The up and down cycling of my posting productivity is clearly visible. Notice that the slump came in the late Winter and early Spring in 2017, a bit earlier for 2018, and about the same in 2019. Notice that there’s a steep drop at the beginning of 2020, then a rise in summer and into the Fall, with a slump coming in November and continuing through March of 2021, when things move back up, only to drop back down in October and continuing through March of 2022.

So, in 2020, we have slump in November. In 2021 the slump moves to October. Guess when it hits in 2022? That’s right, September. That’s not good. But then we have a major – and unexpected rebound – in December. I know what that’s about; that’s when I started playing with and blogging about ChatGPT. I expect that to continue in this year.

What happened in the Summer of 2020 that brought me back to life? That’s when GPT-3 hit, in June or perhaps July I believe. On August 5, 2020 I issued my working paper, GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons, which I have since revised several times. I don’t recall off-hand what got me revved up in April of 2021, perhaps nothing in particular. But I know what got me revved in 2022. Jerry Seinfeld, Analyze This! AI meets Jerry Seinfeld, and then Grace Lindsey published Models of the Mind, which I read and wrote about, To Model the Mind: Speculative Engineering as Philosophy. Then came a dialog on “Kubla Khan” in May, Symbols and Nets: Calculating Meaning in “Kubla Khan.” That kept things moving on “Kubla Khan,” which as you my recall, is where all this started back at Johns Hopkins in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

And then the big one came in later in May, Relational Nets Over Attractors, A Primer: Part 1, Design for a Mind, which I have subsequently revised. That brought together the work on cognitive networks I had done with David Hays in the 1970s, the work we did on the brain in the 1980s, my conversations about neurodynamics with Walter Freeman in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and my reading of Peter Gärdenfors on the geometry of meaning. It’s all there in one wonderful crazy paper, a major synthesis, albeit a very speculative one. July saw the discussion of Yann LeCun’s position paper, A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence, which I found interesting and discussed over the next couple of weeks.

But, for reasons I don’t understand, the excitement had worn off by September. Come to think of it, I do see why things went downhill. I saw new possibilities of linking my work with what others were doing, but was unable to actualize any of them. I remained in a slump until ChatGPT came out at the very end of November. I signed up for an account and started playing with it.

That’s taken a considerable amount of my time over the last month. I’ve written many blog posts, most with long transcripts of my interaction with ChatGPT. I’ve been working on a paper for the last week and a half – current title, Discursive Competence in ChatGPT, Part 1: Talking with Dragons – and expect to issue it within a week.

Once again I see the possibility of linking my work to the work of others. I do think there is an audience within the technical community for the work I’m doing with ChatGPT. I think I can build on it. But I don’t want to say anything about that here and now. I suppose I don’t want to jinx things by talking in public. Bit mostly I want to finish with this post and get on with the work.

‘Till later.

10,000 downloads at SSRN (Social Science Research Network)

SSRN is the first online paper depository I joined – I later joined Academic.edu and ResearchGate. I joined it on November 8, 2009, so I could deposit my first paper on cognitive science and literature:

A day later, Nov. 9, I deposited three more papers:

Those are perhaps my four most important literary studies papers. The "Kubla Khan" is based on my 1972 MA thesis at Johns Hopkins. That's the work that lead me to suspect that something was seriously amiss in academic literary criticism, that we had neglected to study form and so did not have basic descriptive control over our materials. That's the work that sent me to the cognitive sciences, and "Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics" is what became of that interest. I constructed a cognitive network model for some of the semantic structures underlying Shakespare's Sonnet 129, "Lust in Action."

I coauthored the third paper, "Metaphor, Recognition, and Neural Process" with David Hays, who had been my teacher and mentor during my graduate work at SUNY Buffalo. I learned computational semantics from him. In this paper we proposed a neural account of how the significance of 'fresh' metaphor – metaphor that presents itself as such, as opposed to 'dead' metaphor which as disappeared into ordinary semantics – is computed in the brain. In this we drew on Karl Pribram's idea that cortical processing is fundamentally holograpic in nature. The notion of convolution is central to that process. Convolution, as you may know, has become central to recent work in artificial neural networks.

The fourth paper, "Literary Morphology," is a long paper from 2009 and is the closest I have come to a theoretical and methodological statement of what I've come to believe in three decades of work on literature (and other things). As the subtitle indicates, form is central to my thinking, not merely the idea of form – as in standard issue literary formalism – but the description and analysis of form. I argue that form is fundamentally computational (while metaphor processing would be sub-computational in current terminology).

If we order my papers according to downloads, these are the top three:

You'll notice that "Music and the Prevention and Amelioration of ADHD" is the oldest of those, uploaded in 2009. It was my most popular paper until one of the other two was uploaded. Why? I'm not sure, but I'd guess because it's about ADHA. I uploaded the Dennett paper in 2013. I'd guess it's popular because Dennett, though cultural evolution is increasingly popular, and that surely has something to do with its popularity as well as I've got two other papers with "Dennett" in the title and they're not nearly so popular (less than 60 downloads each). And then we have the Dumbo paper. I'm glad it's popular as I like it, and the movie, a lot. But I don't know why it's so popular. Disney? Dumbo? Did the 2019 Tim Burton remake of Dumbo create interest in the Disney original? I don't know.

My fourth most popular paper:

I can understand its popularity easily enough; Latour is a popular thinker. I note that, at 309 downloads, it's way behind the ADHD paper, at 415. The fifth most popular paper, at 269 downloads, is my "Kubla Khan" paper. That's not my oldest paper, nor the first one I uploaded (it's the second one), but it is my oldest work. That's a good place to end.

Things change, but sometimes they don’t: On the difference between learning about and living through [revising your priors and the way of the world]

This is a year old (first published in July 26 of last year). I'm bumping it to the top of the queue because I'm thinking about these things once again.

It has long been obvious to me that there is an epistemic difference between knowing history and living through history. I now have half a notion of how to think about this. That’s what this post is about.

I begin by talking about the effect the fall of the Soviet Union had on me. That’s my paradigm example of the phenomenon I’m talking about. Call it a RUPTURE in my sense of the world. Then I consider my intellectual career as a series of ruptures where I had to reconsider my priors, if you will, and so rethink my intellectual foundations. Finally I move to a graphics revolution that could have happened, SHOULD have happened, as a result to digital technology. I saw it coming, but it never really got started. What was I missing? I conclude with some reflections on the current situation.

 

I list five such ruptures in all. Three INSIDE my primary intellectual trajectory, my intellectual career, while two are OUTSIDE that trajectory, but nonetheless affected me.

World history and the fall of the Soviet Union

It’s about having to revise your priors – I’m talking Bayes, as least informally, your prior commitments. Living through events forces that on you, or at any rate, gives you the opportunity to revise those priors. Merely learning about the past doesn’t do that. Changing how you think is deeper than learning about change.

My paradigmatic example is the fall of the Soviet Union. I grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s, when the Cold War was going strong. I remember reading about how to construct bomb shelters, and thinking about where the family shelter should be. I remember talk of the missile gap; I remember the Cuban missile crisis. I fully expected to be living the Cold War when I died.

And then the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Cold War was all but over. Though some had anticipated this – I’m thinking particularly of U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan – I certainly did not. It took me by surprise.

What did I learn from that? Simple, that The World can change. Sure, I knew world history, I knew that things changed deeply and fundamentally, time and time again. But I hadn’t seen it for myself. I suppose I might have taken that simple lesson from the Civil Rights movement, but perhaps the persistence of racism blunted that achievement. The end of the Vietnam War? No, and I’d marched against that one and been a conscientious objector.

It was the fall of the Soviet Union that reached me, that forced me to abandon a set of simple, but fundamental – I was about to type “epistemic”, “epistemic commitments”, but no, it’s deeper – ontological commitments. For me the Cold War had ontological force. It was simply the way of the world. I learned about it in childhood and lived it through a quarter century of adulthood.

And then the world changed.

Let’s call that an OUTSIDE RUPTURE in my sense of the world, outside because it was outside my primary sphere of action and commitment.

My intellectual life

My intellectual life has had a number of “ruptures”, if you will. In the late 1960s I learned to interpret literary texts as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. I was trained in so-called “close reading”, but was interested in structuralist analysis as well. In the spring of my senior year I became interested in “Kubla Khan.” I decided to undertake a structuralist analysis of the poem for a master’s thesis.

Worksheet, first 36 lines of "Kubla Khan"

As things worked out that project fell apart in 1970 or ‘71. “Kubla Khan” refused to submit to the methods I applied to it. My commitment to the poem won out and I was forced to abandon those methods. I tell the story in considerable autobiographical detail in “Touchstones” [1] and supply the intellectual detail in a working paper on Lévi-Strauss [2].

FIRST INSIDE RUPTURE, inside because it is dead center in my primary sphere of action and commitment. I could no longer believe that existing methods of literary criticism were adequate to the task of understanding how literary texts work. New methods, incidentally, that required visual thinking. Standard literary criticism has been and remains committed to expository prose as its fundamental intellectual medium.

In 1973 I went off to get a Ph. D. in the English Department at SUNY at Buffalo and ended up spending considerable time studying computational semantics with David Hays in the Linguistics Department. My dissertation ended up as a quasi-technical exercise in cognitive semantics as applied to literature, one where, for large sections, I drew the diagrams first and then wrote prose to explain them. In 1976 Hays and I published a humanities-oriented review of computational linguistics in which we proposed the development of symbolic systems capable of “reading” a Shakespeare play in an intellectually interesting way [3]. I fully expected to be working with such a system later in my career. That hasn’t happened, nor do I expect it to.

Part of a semantic network for Shakespeare's Sonnet 129

SECOND INSIDE RUPTURE. Symbolic computational systems are not adequate for understanding the mind.

But this was not so drastic as that first inside rupture. For one thing, Hays and I didn’t really believe that symbolic systems were adequate to the task. We’d been exploring how to ground them in analog systems and in distributed neural computation [4]. The failure, rather, was one of degree rather than kind. I had overestimated the power of symbolic systems. I would later pick up my interest in neural systems in conversations I had with the late Walter Freeman and I incorporated into the early chapters of my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001) [5].

I suppose there was a THIRD INSIDE RUPTURE, or quasi-rupture, as well. In 1995 I discovered that a bunch of literary scholars was interested in “the cognitive revolution” – you know, the ideas I’d begun investigating in graduate school. That was in the Stanford Humanities Review. My work was forgotten but, and more importantly, computation was nowhere to be seen in this newer. Their version of cognitive science was thus very different from mine. It was in working through that difference that I figured out that I had been chasing form all along.