One possible answer has been suggested by software developers in the “Object Spaces” (also called simply “Spaces”) community. According to Wikipedia, Object Spaces is a paradigm for distributed computing and “global” (system-wide) object coordination.² Our view is that Object Spaces is the start of the right road towards making a qualitative revolution in computer science: a major upgrade in how software is made, and in the power of what it can do. Improving the overall situation of software development will be made possible through adapting an Object Spaces approach which can be described as holistic, since it takes on infrastructural challenges with an application-centered unified programming paradigm.

Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter, with his tuple space coordination model, is regarded as being the originator of Object Spaces. In mathematics and computer science, a tuple is an ordered list of elements. In a “Tuple Space,” a repository of tuples is accessed concurrently by many processes. A Tuple Space is an example of an Object Space. Together with Yale University colleague Nicholas Carriero, Gelernter laid the foundations of the Tuple and Object Space paradigms in the late 1980s with the development of the Linda programming language. The importance of the approach was already recognized back then, but it is only recently that large-scale implementations of Object Spaces in production software systems have begun.

In our view, the potentially wide-ranging impact of Object Spaces has been deferred in time due to a somewhat narrow (and hopefully temporary) channeling of the paradigm into the two technologies of “Grid Computing” and JavaSpaces. Josef Ottinger, a proponent of the movement of Grid Computing, defines Object Spaces as the setting up of a sort of memory map for Client/Server applications: a network or Grid in which data resides that can be read and written.³ The Sun Microsystems technology known as JavaSpaces has also tried to implement a Spaces concept. JavaSpaces uses an infrastructure called “Distributed Virtual Shared Memory.” The dimension of distribution is added to shared memory. As the Wikipedia article on the subject states, JavaSpaces provides a “distributed object exchange and coordination mechanism (which may or may not be persistent) for Java objects.”⁴ JavaSpaces is a part of the Java Jini technologies for distributed systems. Jini has not been a commercial success. Chief Jini architect Bill Joy has attributed this failure in part to the fact that the dream of distributed systems will require a “quantum leap in thinking.”⁵

In his groundbreaking book Mirror Worlds (1992), David Gelernter explains that Mirror Worlds (a higher-level term related to Object Spaces) are software ensembles, “glued-together out of many separate programs all chattering at once.” An ensemble is “a group of objects that interact; a group, accordingly, that is more than the sum of its parts.”⁶ Asynchronous ensembles are the critical technology for the realisation of Gelernter’s dream of Mirror Worlds. On the application level, Mirror Worlds are information-intensive software models monitoring and reflecting the reality of some large institution like a hospital, city, or corporation. Gelernter’s dream has arguably now already been partially realized in social software applications like Facebook.

On the technological computer science level, the emphasis in Object Spaces is on the communication and coordination among various running programs. This is fundamentally different from what the conventional emphasis in computer programming has almost always been: the individual processes themselves. Beyond the functional-procedural paradigm of the program as executing a sequence of instructions (languages like Pascal and C), beyond the object-oriented paradigm of the unity of data and code in software objects (languages like Java and C++), a software ensemble – as envisioned by Gelernter – coordinates the simultaneous activities of many independently operating software agents, and furnishes an environment where these agents can receptively obtain real-time systemic information in a way that advances their autonomous intelligence. “Coordinated programs are the future of computer science.”⁷ Objects acquire even more power as object-orientation is taken a significant step further.

Object Spaces add major new design and deployment patterns to the infrastructure of a running system, and to the business application. Similar to time travelers of the future who will need a decoupling of space, time, and Newtonian geo-physical referentiality to embark on their history rewriting adventures, software agents in Object Spaces will have such a decoupling – in principles of software design and engineering put into practice in the very near future – and the freedom that goes with it. An application-side “Blackboard” communication is the basis of this. Software agents get their own space in which to write and log their data. Other programs which have registered an interest in this information receive notifications and can read from the commonly shared Object Space as they like.

Any interaction in an Object Space software system has a triadic structure which has a strong affinity with the core concept of the original semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce was a nineteenth-century “American pragmatist” who is indisputably the most important figure in the history of semiotics. Peirce’s idea of the triadic sign relation occasioned the definition of semiosis as an “action or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.”⁸ The representations of an object operates as a sign, and meaning emerges from the triadic relation among sign, object, and interpretant. Every human thought is a sign, the mediation between an object and an idea. Reasoning or cognition is the interpretation of signs.

The triadic relationship – as opposed to any diadic relationship between a sign and an object, or an object and an interpretant – is the breakthrough to a new paradigm in computer science. A nineteenth-century seminal idea is already two centuries ahead of the seventeenth-century ideas of René Descartes and Francis Bacon on which existing computer science is based. Meaning emanates and flows from the “thirdness” of a genuine triadic relationship. There is also an echo here of something from the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan: the third participant provides a mirror illuminating the reality of the relationship between the first and the second peers. Concepts from the humanities lead to a qualitative upgrade in computer science.

In Object Spaces software systems, peers communicate with each other:

- without directly knowing anythng about each other (reference decoupling)

- without being located on the same physical machine (space decoupling)

- without any agreement in scheduling (time decoupling)

This decoupling in all three degrees of freedom is an ideal situation from the perspective of component and application designers. The less the linkages and rigid dependencies, the better for the software development project in terms of development costs, debugging effort, and the reusability of software code.

Another decisive point is the implicitly held coordination among processes. A program asks for information about another process by creating a Request Object within the shared Space. The Request Object generates a Message in another location. After the second process has carried out a certain action, an appropriate Reply to the Message is posted in the Space. If a Reply is not yet available, then the Agent responsible waits for its arrival. This is called “blocking” (not returning the result, or news that there is no result, immediately). The software developer is spared dealing in a painstaking way with the usual workflow issues.

It is a given that sequential processes will always be a part of software development. Nothing that is of utility and value is going to go away or be thrown away. But processes will become secondary. The emphasis on communication and coordination will simplify many aspects of the design and implementation of systems. Most everything can be accomplished by writing into and reading out of the Object Space. It does not matter if a single Agent, or hundreds of Agents, is/are waiting for the arrival of the Message. Complexity for the developer does not increase as a function of the number of participants.

A convergence of three design/implementation technology projects will later take place: the Object Spaces API (Application Programming Interface), quantum computing in software, and the radicalization of the object-oriented software development paradigm in the direction of “power to the objects.”

And lots of support will come from the community of humanities scholars who earlier brought forward the project of “the deconstruction of the power of the subject” (French theory, Varela and Maturana’s “The Embodied Mind”, Lacanian psychoanalysis, third-wave cybernetics, feminism, postcolonial studies, queer studies, etc.) without ever having become aware for even a single instant of the now obvious fact that computer science is an eminently subject-centered field of knowledge crying out to be revolutionized in the direction of “power to the objects.”

In the design of the Object Spaces API, developers will strive to achieve a radical simplicity and clarity. The API will essentially consist of three methods and an extra module: write, read, read-and-simultaneous-delete (take), and the Event Handler. The Event Handler handles the arrival of incoming Messages, and the initialization of processes which they trigger.

The following three techniques make up the essentials of the Object Space-based programming paradigm:

- Template Matching: A read operation provides a template (an instance of an object passed). Object attributes that have not been initialized are to act as wild cards. Specific attribute values constrain and determine in this way the returned result. The attribute values can be easily and flexibly navigated in an Object Graph.

- Leases: A lease time specifies an expiration time, thus limiting the lifecycle of an object in the Space. The responsibility to delete objects from the Space in order to conserve resources is delegated to the Object Space Engine. Leases has already been implemented as part of the Sun Microsystems Jini technology.

- Timeouts: They are, of course, common to many systems. They are important in our context because they support the workflow of the Object Spaces API. A Communications Object can be made to wait on the arrival of a certain Event Object. If many “Subscriber” participants wait on an event that was generated by one individual “Publisher” participant, this is called the Master / Worker design pattern. The Master hands out tasks to the Object Space, and these are read, processed, and written back to the Object Space by the workers.

Here are some additional programming features of the Object Space, and what they correspond to in traditional software technologies:

+ Write-Take: corresponds to Parallel Processing (Remote Procedure Call)
+ Read-Write: corresponds to Caching (Put, Get)

+ Write + Notify: corresponds to Messaging (Publish, Subscribe), Distributed Virtual Shared Memory
Two keywords – In-Memory and Replication – play a crucial role in the design of how the Space Engine creates the appearance of a distributed, shared memory.

A time traveler in an Object Space-based universe would exist logically only once, but physically in several locations. The Object Space ensures that the application physically recognizes each object as a singularity. However, it stores the object in a distrbuted way across a network or on multiple computers. Although this sounds simple, it is very difficult to implement in practice, since an application must use resources economically, and it cannot distribute all objects to all users (nodes). Replication protocols must be “intelligent” and propagate or partition objects depending on their use. That is, an object is explicitly to be replicated only for one node, if it actually consumes its data. An Object Space Cluster is “application aware,” and not merely a technical infrastructural mechanism. This is a significant departure from traditional clustering approaches in networking. Clustering techniques usually attempt to achieve a virtualisation of resources in a transparent way.

Skeptics sometimes complain that an Object Space-based system does not scale when many computers are involved, and many software clients try to access the same object simultaneously (change locking mechanisms are known to be very expensive). One solution to this for Space systems is not to introduce any locking mechanism in a “pessimistic” way, but rather to implement “optimistic” locking with an internal version counter. In optimistic locking, if a conflict occurs among different software clients trying to lock the same object, the second client still obtains information from the failed write operation.

The Object Space Engine works internally with what is known in the database world as the Primary-Copy method. In this procedure, only one object (the Primary Copy) must be modified in a write operation. All other replica objects are updated synchronously after the conclusion of the transaction. The time during which the writing client blocks on the transaction is minimal (with the compromise that the tailoring of the replica object is postponed). This prevents a bottleneck from occurring. The storing of primary copies of singular objects takes place at different nodes. What is created is a “virtual server” that does not institute any centralized control, and instead practices a peer-to-peer virtualisation. In the application design of this very application-friendly technology, several logical Spaces (hence the plural in the name “Spaces”) are addressed, resulting in an additional segmentation that makes the efficient handling of distributed transactions much more feasible.

Efficient database transaction logs are an important topic of research in computer science, generally considered to be a Holy Grail of the practical-spiritual journey of the software developer. “A transaction log (also database log or binary log) is a history of actions executed by a database management system to guarantee ACID properties over crashes or hardware failures. In computer science, ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties that guarantee database transactions are processed reliably.”⁹

The question of “levels of abstraction” is very related to the quest for truly efficient database transaction logs. Much has been learned in recent years about levels of abstraction in software systems design. In his article “Laws of Leaky Abstractions,” Joel Spolsky coined the term “leaky abstraction.” “All non-trivial abstractions,” writes Spolsky, “to some degree, are leaky.”¹⁰ Here we hear an echo of Kurt Gödel’s two Incompleteness Theorems (especially the second one, first published in 1931). According to Alexis Clancy, this mathematically proven Theorem (pertaining to second order logic, i.e., the logic of types), can be paraphrased as follows: No matter how sophisticated a logic “machine” is, if it is founded on strict axioms, there will always exist, somewhere in the universe, a statement that will “break” the machine, i.e., an unprovable statement, a paradigm smasher.¹¹

Thanks to researchers like Spolsky, some software developers are now aware of a trade-off game of Performance vs. Functionality/Comfort. They proceed willingly by means of a compromise in which the problem is explicitly considered in the building of the system. They no longer try to tough out the bad compromise – by any means necessary – of abstracting in relation to the above-mentioned issue of “concurrent write resolution.” In an Object Space-based system, the entire configuration shifts to reflect this scheme undertaken with awareness. The system designer informs the Object Space about different requirements in different application circumstances in an explicit and declarative way. He or she can, for example, distinguish among the effects of write-most and read-most objects. Different implementations of the Space Engine will deliver specific optimal results for different application domains.

To achieve transactional security, storage is not done on the hard drive or in the database. Data rather remains memory-resident in other replicated nodes. In the case of system failure, the Object Space Engine knows about the redundant data in other data locations and can preserve the overall consistency (the strategy of in-memory fail-over).

In the radicalized distributed application scenario, which the IT research and advisory firm Gartner Inc. has termed XTP (Extreme Transaction Processing), data is made available at different sites, and an asynchonous communication is established between Space Engine and database. There is an advance to new performance levels thanks to the intensified availability scaling afforded by the new Space-based architecture.

Typically, a higher abstraction level is only achieved through the addition of a new software layer. This does not really reduce the complexity of software development, but merely displaces it. In an Object Space-based architecture, an actual reduction in complexity occurs (or rather, it is a “deconstructionist-Buddhist-quantum” architecture where simplicity and complexity are not in contradiction to each other). By merging the communication, coordination, and replication mechanisms, one achieves what can almost be described as the occurrence of a “technological singularity.” There is a folding problem space, similar to what Gilles Deleuze wrote about in The Fold, his book on the philosopher Leibniz. ¹² The same infrastructure enables parallel processing and concurrency on both single processor computers and across networks.

A new (technical) architectural design paradigm with these features:

Stateful Programming: Traditional distributed systems have followed the principles of stateless programming. In that scenario, an application handles each query or request independently from previous ones. There is no memory or recording of a state. The Object Space is stateful, and creates the illusion of a single (virtual) machine.

Deferred Execution: A Space-based system processes all calls asynchronously. This opens up completely new opportunities in temporal processing and in the prioritization of tasks. Opportunities for delegation and decoupling multiply. It becomes much easier to keep response times for an initial response to an event low, with additional tasks running simultaneously parallel in the background (for example with the deployment of Ajax).

Agent-Based: In general, agents are fine-grained components which have their own lifecycle, and they perform specific tasks. Due to the asynchronous and decoupled architecture of the Space based-system, each component in the system “mutates” into an agent. The application becomes a flexible “collection” of services (service orchestration). Components can be tested in a highly decoupled environment. All agents run entirely asynchronously, and their execution occurs in parallel.

Monitoring: The message-based communications and coordination in a Spaces system provide the developer at the application level with transparent introspection into the current process without negatively affecting the total performance. Monitoring and controlling at the application level comprise an additional special agent.

Scaling: All aspects of and responsibilities for scaling and distribution are removed from the application code, and are moved to the configuration of the Space. This includes performance, as well as availability scaling. Multi-core systems, which are often supported in currently existing middleware by explicit multi-threaded programming, are set up declaratively with .ini and .cfg files, and according to the parameter semantics of a 5GL programming language.

If the time traveler would do a reality check in 2011, and s/he stumbled upon the first Space-based systems that are in production in large companies, s/he would make surprising discoveries. In most cases, applications are up and running whose complexity significantly exceeds the possibilities of the established Application Servers on the market. These Application Servers work with separate clustering for the application, data, and message layers, and a separate module for parallel arithmetic.

Discussion of Spaces in the computer industry press focuses almost exclusively on the topic of Grid computing. There is little mention of a broader environment, the possibility that the Spaces approach responds directly to the challenges of the problems of software engineering in general. Some space-based techniques and programming patterns have been gradually and incrementally accepted and adapted into established Applications Servers. But the promise of the many advantages that Object Space technology has to offer can only be realized with a holistic vision.

Will time travel be required to initiate a new beginning? No, this is not necessary. Quantum leaps are already possible, available in the here and now by merging computer science with other academic fields of knowledge. The triadic structure of the sign, as conceptualised by Charles Sanders Peirce, will upgrade Spaces into what might be called Triple Spaces. The entire middleware industry is focused on a cautious and incremental approach. Our approach  – the interdisciplinary approach of bringing in ideas from the sciences and the humanities – from mathematics, semiotics, philosophy, art, sociology, biology, linguistics – will bring about a revolution in computer science to systems of great financial and human value. We may look like the underdogs now, but I, Alan Neil Shapiro, guarantee a great upset victory, just like Joe Namath guaranteed victory by the New York Jets over the 19-point favorite Baltimore Colts during the two weeks leading up to Super Bowl III on January 12, 1969.

NOTES

1 – Michael Stal, “Aus der Zukunft; Auf dem Weg zu besserer Software”.

2 – Wikipedia article on Tuple Space and Object Spaces.

6 – David Gelernter, Mirror Worlds: The Day Software Put the Universe in a Shoebox… How It Will Happen and What it Will Mean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

7 – Ibid.

8 – Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893 – 1913) (edited by the Peirce Edition Project) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998); p. 411.

9 – Wikipedia article on Transaction Log.

On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, BOBCATSSS 2012 was organised by students from three universities of applied sciences, namely Hogeschool van Amsterdam (NL), Hanze Hogeschool Groningen (NL), and Stuttgart Media University (GER).

Conference Agenda

My topic was: “How can we redefine information in the age of social media?”

I am honoured to have been invited by the organizers of BOBCATSSS to be the keynote speaker of the second day of this very interesting conference. Looking over the list of great presentations that are going to be made today, I will try to relate my speech to the subject-matter and point of view of many of today’s presentations. I see many presentations about libraries, information, social media. At the Wikipedia conference in Leipzig in September 2010, I gave a talk on “The Library of the Future,” so I can refer you to that. It is published at my website. Now I will talk about information and social media. Sociologists have given different names to the society that is the successor to the industrial society of the production of physical goods: the post-industrial society, the post-modern society, the knowledge society, the network society, the telematic society, the information society. By the way, I think that one of the best names ever was: L’informatisation de la société – “the informationising of society” – a report written for the French government in 1978 by Simon Nora and Alain Minc.

…

Alan N. Shapiro: I believe that the invention of a new computer science, one more powerful than that which presently exists, is possible; a more powerful computer science that often goes by the name of Artificial Intelligence. Shapiro Technologies will go beyond the digital or binary computing paradigm that has persisted since the seminal work of the Second World War generation of information theorists such as Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and Claude Shannon, so as to achieve quantum computing.

The goal of quantum computing has been clearly and explicitly defined by computer scientists, but the mathematics of how to implement qubits and superposition states does not yet exist. It should be noted right away that most efforts to realize quantum computing are, in my view, too one-sidedly hardware-centric.

A crucial characteristic of quantum mechanics known as entanglement occurs under certain experimental conditions. Subatomic particles become ‘inextricably linked’ in such a way that a change to one of them is instantly ‘reflected in its counterpart’, no matter how physically separated they are. Quantum theory postulates a superposition of states that destabilizes the intuitive sensorial notion of spatial separation. Entangled particles transcend space and remoteness. They belong to a ‘shared’ system that acts as a single entity. The distance that divides the particles no longer plays any influencing role that would lead them to be regarded as having distinct identities. Once the entanglement state is established, the subatomic duo stays forever bonded. The two particles will always have either precisely opposing or ‘elegantly complementing’ relative values of key quantum properties such as polarization direction, regardless of how far apart they travel from one another.

Quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, are made use of to perform operations on what are called quantum bits, or qubits. Instead of the classical binary or digital bit, which has the discrete value of 0 or 1, there is a qubit, which may have a third state, an in-between-state, the momentary value of which is determined by the superposition of the state of many other bits in the system.

Entanglement and superpositioning enable this third state, which can be cultivated to correspond with the anticipated choice space of the ‘user’.

EXISTING METAPHORS FOR QUANTUM COMPUTING

In a landmark article called “Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer,” MIT mathematician and computer scientist Peter W. Shor defines algorithmic sequences for quantum computing in software. Shor asserts that digital computing, contrary to common belief and to the famous statements in information theory of Alan Turing (“On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem”) and Alonzo Church (“An unsolvable problem of elementary number theory”), is not an efficient universal computing device. “It is believed able to simulate any physical computing device with an increase in computation time by at most a polynomial factor,” he writes. “But this may not be true when quantum mechanics is taken into consideration.”

Shor considers two mathematical problems in cryptography, factoring integers and finding discrete logarithms, which are highly challenging to implement on a digital computer. He formalizes efficient randomized algorithms for these two problems but still leaves a crucial difficulty remaining to be solved by the hypothetical quantum computer. “To compute the period of a function f, we evaluate the function at all points simultaneously.” But quantum physics imposes on us the limitation that this information is never available to us. Since the mid-twentieth century, physicists have discovered that there is a reality of quantum physics, but have had trouble observing that reality. It is up to the designers of the quantum computer now to implement the quantum property of the ‘superposition of states’.

A measurement of superpositions yields only one value, and at the same time destroys all the others. Computer scientists working on quantum computers therefore rely heavily on the Fourier transform, a mathematical operation that transforms one function of a real variable into another, called the frequency domain representation of the first function, as the hypothesized way to solve the problem. The quantum Fourier transform is primarily thought of as being implemented in hardware. A hypothetical quantum computing device would have so-called ‘reversible logic gates’ which continuously allow sequences of reversible decompositions into mathematical unitary matrices.

In January 2007, I attended the conference “Consciousness and Quantum Computers” in Lucerne, Switzerland, organized by the Swiss Biennial on Science, Technics & Aesthetics (SBSTA). In his opening remarks, René Stettler, Founder and Director of the SBSTA, talked about the trans-disciplinary work that would be involved in the project of bringing to fruition quantum computing. It is especially an expanded understanding of consciousness that would be required to gain a real grasp of quantum physics. Yet, as Stettler pointed out, universities do not even seem to be striving for this trans-disciplinary knowledge. Hans-Peter Dürr, former executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics, and former collaborator of Werner Heisenberg, emphasized in his keynote address that physicists do not have the philosophical training necessary to understand what quantum physics really means. The celebrated mid-twentieth century physicists who discovered quantum mechanics did not understand it, they only spoke about it in metaphors. They settled on the practice of using applied quantum physics statistically without understanding what quantum physics means.

But quantum physics, according to Dürr, is the most profound rational knowledge that we have gained about the world. The necessary expanded understanding of consciousness and action would have to come from engagement with philosophical traditions like phenomenology, Buddhism, and Hindu cosmic perspectives like Vedanta. Excellent talks on the relationship between Buddhism and the philosophy of science were given at the conference by Geshe Obsang Tenzin, a Tibetan Buddhist psychologist living in America and working on mind/body medicine, and German philosopher Christian Thomas Kohl.

NEW TOPOLOGIES, STRANGE ATTRACTORS

© Copyright 2009, Daghdha Dance Company

Alexis Clancy: * Third Space mechanics: I consider a model to be a dynamic series of frames. In modeling a universe, I consider two sets. First, the set F of everything that I know. Second, the set D of everything that I do not know. Something can either be known to me or unknown to me. It cannot be both. [”_F_eicte” is the Irish word for “seen.” _D_ofhiecte is the Irish word for “unseen.”]

The set F of everything that I know is characterised by collapsed wave form Kroneker Delta functions which are finite, bounded and measured. [A Kroneker Delta function is a function whose value is one at a unique instance, zero everywhere else. It best describes the collapse of a waveform on measurement, the wave collapsing to an absolute negation of probability at a certain point on this measurement.]

© Copyright 2009, Alexis Clancy

The set D of everything that I do not know is characterised by Schrödinger type equations, spacewise infinite and unbounded. However, the perimeter of the set F of everything that I know presents a problem, as a point on this perimeter exists in both spaces F and D [Imagine someone standing on the border of Belgium and The Netherlands – essentially, they are standing in both countries at the same time]. This contradicts the first Rule. I correct this model by introducing a small cleft about the perimeter, small yet big enough to exist. Epsilon small. I call this cleft the Epsilon Cleft. This is the Third Space.

Locally and superficially, the dimensionality of F strictly does not go beyond 2D, and it is Euclidean. The dimensionality of D is a function of time; as time progresses, symmetry breaks [i.e the character of an absolute law dictating the character of D is no longer a given. See here] and as many dimensions as are needed to patch the model are used. Ignoring the first term, the sequence (as stated previously) is 4, 11, 26, 57… The Epsilon Cleft is the source of these dimensions. My assertion that symmetry will always break (as long as there is time) dictates that the Epsilon Cleft will have an inexhaustible supply of dimensions. [This assertion is taken as a direct inference of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.] It is therefore countably infinite. Adopting this attitude towards a model renders the ‘problem’ of innumerable infinites not a problem, but rather an actual contributor to an overall dynamic and evolving model.

I like to view spaces like the Epsilon Cleft as a “novelty” space. I find them to be analogous to the “No Mind” structure referred to in the Samurai Creed (“I have no sword. I make No Mind my sword.”) and the characteristic consciousness produced by Samadhi practices of Buddhist and Hindu Yogic meditation; I place my faith in the Epsilon Cleft to provide a space for novelty to emerge. In this case, we design the solution space such that the novelty that emerges is Artificial Life.

• Faith: The interesting thing to me about a probability spike, as derived and described in Shor’s paper, is that even if it hits, say, a 99.9999999999th percentile of certainty, 0.0000000001 must be taken on faith. Faith is a qualitative rather than a quantitative construct – once it is there, it is there and it becomes a fundamental aspect of the overall paradigm, contributing to the overall efficiency of the paradigm. To negate it would take an infinite amount of time. I feel that faith is critical to any sort of AI paradigm, quantum or otherwise. I remember speaking about faith with a friend of mine who is a Jesuit priest. He said that what a lot of people forget is how practical a construct faith is. Indeed, faith is a large part of the Bushido creed: faith in discipline, faith in training, faith in “No Mind,” faith in the Way or Path. Faith is a real time saver.

To have gaps in the spacetime model provides many advantages: the possibility of motion, for one, and more to the point, the capability to creatively evolve and provide the model with as many dimensions as needed. Since it exists outside spacetime mechanics, the “novelty space” is fast. Thus we have the qualities of dance: motion, creative capacity for change, speed; this is the kind of dance Choreographer Michael Klien describes as ‘a state of excitement in a system whereby change becomes possible’ .

• My theory of mutation relates to stochastic (a stochastic method is a method whereby a “guess” is made as to the operation of an observed phenomena and then the “guess” is “tweaked” into rigor) methods, more precisely genetic algorithms. It is an example as to how the behaviour of quantum geometries can be used in developing solutions strategies for the macro world. While I have only observed the probability of mutation as being a constant in contemporary theories, my preliminary theory tries to state otherwise. As stochastic modelling methods rely on their closeness of adherence to natural processes and phenomena, viewing mutation as a multi-variable function improves the algorithm.

I am beginning to think that this theory of Mutation is much more important than I originally surmised, as it bridges Darwinistic theories of evolution and assertions of intelligent design. Once the system comes into a bind, mutating seems like the intelligent thing to do. A shrinking probability interval and the existence of choice is key. So there is a randomness (albeit a shrinking one) and a free will paradigm at play. In terms of theology, I do not feel there is any need to delve any more to further the understanding of the model; a choice exists, that is all. So the mutation theory can stand out not just as stochastic proposal, it is also a bold illustration as to how Möbius (symmetry breaking) Incompleteness in a Riemann geometry can give rise to what can be deemed intelligent behaviour.

Consider any object in a Riemann Geometry. It is a property, a mathematical truth of this object that any line section of it is Möbius (i.e. contains a 180° half twist. See here) in structure -¬ the Riemann object can be described as a pinched S^3 sphere and, by examining it as a Clifford (Fibre) bundle of a Riemannian manifold, we can say that all sections are Möbius in character, as there exists a ‘choice of sign’ with respect to the vectors therein. The Möbius twist itself – the “interval of inflexion” – leaves a gap in the model – this concept is expounded on shortly.

In a Riemann type geometry, a conic represents a pinch of some sort. An unmolested bounded space can be taken to be a sphere but some stress on the system will render it not so – the most basic morphing will be hyperbolically conical. I state gravity to be a constraint simply due to its universality with respect to binding a system. With respect to separating the time and space factors, I feel that, as we are dealing with a spacetime metric, the mutation function is a coupled bivariable function. It is almost a rule of thumb that nature will not use a simple linear function to do anything – a simple non-linear function is generally the case. The geometry can be taken to be a quantum geometry, but I believe that most of what we experience has its origin in these kinds of spaces. I feel that the solution space metric we will design should embody these qualities and also be breathable (my term) and elastic – a mathematical weave as opposed to a mathematical covering (6). I am inspired by Goethe’s quote: Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory.

Take the interval of inflexion and call it the Aleph Point. This is the point where symmetry breaks (down) in the overall section and the system is called on to evolve to a higher dimension. Now consider a closed space under some sort of constraint, gravitational or otherwise, and represent it as a conic, with a time interval T operating. Note that as we travel down the conic, taking sections at points a, b, c, and d, we can deduce, as we travel ‘down’ the conic, that the probability of an “Aleph Point” being called on increases for two reasons. First, because the section interval is shorter (|a|>|b|>|c|>|d|), so the “aleph” point is more likely to be “chosen.” Second, because the time interval is operating faster as spacetime is getting denser toward the bottom of the conic. The overall conclusion is that the greater the strain/constrain(t) on a system, the greater the probability of symmetry breaking.

With respect to genetic algorithms, I propose that symmetry breaking is analogous to mutation. The challenge lies in fabricating an appropriate metric for the solution space so that a suitable variable mutation function can be applied and a more efficient algorithm developed. It must be a Möbius weave, as opposed to a covering. It must be non-Euclidean. It must not be decimal or binary in base foundation, as, to my mind and acumen, there are no universal harmonics bound to 2 or 10. Right now, 360 seems to be the most appropriate base.
This is a very important demonstration as to how Möbius topologies, incompleteness and Riemann geometry combine in a sense that seems intelligent.

• One of the fundamental challenges with respect to our quantum computing/A-Life project surrounds waveform collapse. There is the choice space of the mind of the user and the solution space of the A-Life device. The probability space of the range of choices presented to the user collapses into a decision and the superposition of states offered by quantum computing/A-Life must collapse into the same decision.

My investigations of waveform collapse suggest that it happens due to a “well” of incomplete spaces, and collapse happens in pairs of wave potentials. This is due to the anticipation of Newton’s third law – every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So there is an “instance” (action) vector and a “shadow” (reaction) vector, one anticipating the other. In terms of the dimensionality of the event (i.e. waveform collapse), it is infinite in potential and finite in eventual unfolding – this finitude following the sequence 1, 4, 11, 26, 57, 120, 247… [see the figures ‘the symmetry breaking of aleph’] (based on dynamic patching of incomplete spaces generated by Möbius inflections). In my modelling, the only way that I could stop the well being infinite (and the event taking an eternity to happen) is by observing the origin (the origin being the ordained source of vectors of a given framework) being sucked into the event as all vectors are brought to the event’s location. There is a “kiss” of origin and event, the dimensionality of the collapse reaches a finitude, a moment of absolute parity is achieved and then the collapsed waveform unwinds.

It is this moment of parity that we must strive for – the equality of what is in the mind of the operator and the equivalent member of the solution space. I have meditated on the ‘=’ symbol for many years and the result of these contemplations is that the symbol is actually quite special and not to be used lightly. I regard it as a ‘parity license’ and, like all licenses, it must be applied for.

• Where the challenge lies is in accessing a Schrödinger waveform to “play” with. It may be of use to draw on a conjecture that I developed regarding Schrödinger’s Equations and Parametric Normal Distributions. The question I pose is this: Do statistics imitate life, or does life imitate statistics? The conjecture is based on the meditation that, because Gauss’ rigorous definition of the Normal Distribution [the ubiquitous “Bell Curve” (because it looks like a bell) seen in most statistical models, particularly in models whose elements have the possibility to chose their state] predated the development of Quantum Theory, the results of experimentation and thought experiments were mathematically retrofitted into Gauss’ model and taken to be a system of “statistical aggregates.” However, it is my view that Gauss’ Normal Distribution is a trans-dimensional fractal, mimicking in form and behaviour its quantum origins on a macro scale.

This conjecture is supported by David Bohm’s first postulate of his highly regarded quantum theory: that the Schrödinger equation is not only a mathematical object – it is also an object of form. This expansion of consciousness permits the accessing of a Schrödinger waveform through parametric data. There must be an analogue input at some instance, but the scale is not important. I feel that this search for the appropriate input could be like Edison’s search for the appropriate filament for his lightbulb.

• numbers
  3, or threeness, is very important with respect to escaping the tyrannies of binary/digital. Indeed, the ‘trick’ with respect to our macro q-device will be to build a device that goes beyond Turing’s definition in ‘On Computable Numbers’ of a universal computing device while using components which conform to that definition.

12 has many strengths. Its combination of three and four make it a very musical number, and it has almost self-organizing properties. This is also the case in a strong way for things divided into 360 parts. It is well to remember that base 2 and base 10 are to be seen as some sort of enemy to our thinking regarding this project.

64 is important with respect to partitioning a vector space. My research has led me to conclude that anything after a 64th part partition is meaningless. It represents the gauge of the ‘vector net’ that we are to establish. I believe that complete coverings cannot be applied to real-world scenarios as they fail to incorporate concepts of incompleteness. *Breathable metrics are what is called for*. In order to fabricate these metrics, there is a requirement for a given, acceptable tolerance to this metric and its least element. I propose that 64 be this tolerance. Although it is a classic number in binary computing, it does have a nice twelveness to it in that there are 4 parts of 8 and 8 parts of 4, and this twelveness is crucial in modelling a nexus of any given spacetime scenario.

There must be some analogue input somewhere along the way. Resonance is, as far as I know, one of the few quantum phenomena that can be experienced on a macro level. It is a way to access a Schrödinger waveform in a fractal, macro sense.

Incompleteness is almost treated as a dirty word in modern physics – I am of a polar attitude. I find it to be critical, and, if harnessed properly, the way forward with respect to the development of true Artificial Intelligence. I cannot stress enough how important Gödel’s work is to my overall thesis. It throws “wobbles” into any proposition. Furthermore, on examining the epistemology of axiomatic reasoning, a rigorous examination of any axiom-based theory will inevitably reduce to an examination of the word itself. Axiom: that which can be taken as “self-evident truth.” Well, what is “truth”? It is certainly no objective matter, so, indeed, it is a matter of faith that it is taken to be “true.” Though the faith element may be considered epsilon small in dimension, it still exists, but is habitually glossed over. I have come to see axioms as totems, as opposed to hardline written-in-stone truths. In view of the incompleteness theorem, it behoves one to have mutable, evolving, breathable axioms or else the theory will be crushed by incompleteness at some later point in time and space.

Alan N. Shapiro : Here is the answer to the riddle of quantum physics: not measure, but perceive. And an expansion of consciousness supports an expanded perception. Quantum behaviour is a reality. Physicists thought that they could not observe or measure this reality without destroying the information therein. But they conceptualized the methodology of observation conventionally. The space from which one can observe the reality of quantum behaviour without destroying the information therein is also a reality, a fact of nature. We do not have to invent this space, we only have to perceive it. This space of non-destructive observation really exists, just as quantum behaviour really exists, and we will get it working in software. To perceive this space, we have to change our consciousness. That’s all that we have to do! We have to recognize as being scientific some ways of perceiving that belong to other traditions that Western science has so far small-mindedly regarded as non-scientific. This expanded perceiving includes creative mathematics, the deconstruction of classical spacetime mechanics, Buddhist and Hinduist meditation/ontologies, Aboriginal-sacred-mystical-expanded consciousness thinking, and Continental semiotics/grammatology.

Your idea of the Epsilon Cleft is a very good representation of that protected space which provides an extra framing dimension enabling observation of the set of bits (in a body of real numbers that is beyond Turing’s idea of what is computable) which are in a 0 state, and the set of bits which are in a 1 state. The Epsilon Cleft is safe and protected, non-destructive, a breathable space based on breathable axioms, outside spacetime mechanics.

Read the complete text (8500 words) at choreograph.net.

When the designer is faced with the task of designing a singular object, not a widget (!), that he/she wants to design, he wants to do something creative, but not re-invent the wheel. He/she wants to design an object in a workspace with help from already existing components in a library database. Yet these components will not relate to the new singular object in a typical mechanical relationship of the parts to the whole. There will instead be an exciting, inspirational relationship of creativity between the existing components and the coming-into-existence new design. The relationship between library elements and new object is like musical composition. What corresponds to this suggestiveness and resonance in “new computer science“ (Alan Shapiro) is the radical OO coding of patterns and rules. It is exactly like sports where (1) rules are respected, (2) many previous patterns are known, thereby (3) playfulness is liberated. New computer science is based on a paradigm that combines engineering with art and humanities, rather than being just engineering.

The exact goal of this software development project is to demonstrate, in working code, and in a working client application, the new relationship between the code in the Engine and the software instance.

This relationship will be something new and different, powerful and valuable, that no other software has. It will be a qualitatively new relationship of similarity/patterns/samples between smallest data items and ALife software instance.

The structuralism that underlies standard OO and the “mechanical” way that the software instance instantiates itself from code in an engine is obsolete because structures in fact do not have a rigid, stable center. The center of a structure is wild, dynamic, self-evolving, unstable, creative.

The delivered software will consist of the following 4 packages:

• Logic Engine for Rules and Patterns Extreme OO New Intelligence.

• Logic Parsers for testing the operations of the Logic Engine.

• PSQL (Post-Structuralist Query Language for aesthetic operations)

• Test Client Application (ACAD – Aesthetic CAD)

The Structure class provides the basic repository, or data structure, in the Logic Engine. It is a functor associated with a group of terms. A functor can be any object. A term is either a structure or a variable. A structure is an aggregation of other structures.

The PostStructure class extends the Structure class. It is radicalized OO. Everything is a PostStructure in a Aesthetic Logic Engine.

A Variable is an object that has a name and can Instantiate Structures, PostStructures, and other Variables.

A Rule is an axiom, or statement of truth, or pragmatically simulated hypothesized truth, that has more than one Struture, or PostStructure. In a Rule, the truth of the first PostStruture follows from the ability to prove the remaining PostStructures.

A Program is a collection of axioms, which are Facts or Rules.

A Query, in the conventional “Building Parsers” subdivision of computer science, is a Structure that can prove itself against a program. For us, a Query is a PostStructure that can prove itself against an ALife program.

What does it mean to “Prove” a Query? The Post-Logic Engine proves a Query by aesthetically unifying the query’s PostStructures with Rules in a program.

To “aesthetically unify” means not to do a mechanical calculation, but rather to try out a series of hypotheses, verifying their facticity, their conformance to a set of rules. This establishes their truth in the way of a pragmatic simulation.

The Engine has additional features like Comparisons and Evaluations.

A Parser is an object that recognizes the elements of a language. A Parser is either a Terminal or a composition of other Parsers. I will write a hierarchy of Parsers for Pattern Recognition. The point is to do both standard Pattern Recognition (we need to have that in order to then build on top of it) and a new kind of Pattern Recognition that is non-combinatorial.

We will have a Parser base class, simple parsers for simple operations, then special subclasses of Parser that provide composite Parsers, to describe Sequences, Alternations, and Repetitions of other Parsers.

What we will have here that no one else has is an emergent property of Pattern Recognition arising from “Difference within Repetition and Alternation”. This subclass of the Parser class will be called Differance.

PSQL will resemble SQL. It will have SELECT statements, which implement a new, more powerful relationship among the metadata in the database. It will have JOIN statements for multi-table queries. PSQL will have a simple user environment application, showing Queries and Results.

PSQL will be influenced by list-processing languages like LISP and by Pattern Recognition and Robot command languages (two areas where AI has pragmatically succeeded).

The Centrality of Roles

The object-oriented ontology needs to be radicalized in the direction of Roles and of the autonomy of objects.

The attributes of software classes or software objects are containers of data. Data is a consequence of a subject-centered worldview. Data is reductionist. What we want is a Gestalt of information. An informational field that is the true opposite of chaos, rather than a compulsive need for order in precise information.

The object-oriented model has no real appreciation of time. A class is a blueprint of an instance, and an instance is culled from classes one single time, at construction. It cannot modify itself during the real-time activity of the program, of the software system.

We need a software instance that it is a state of “not knowing.” This makes it alive (almost sort of human). It goes along being alive without being so precisely defined. It picks up its definition in real-time, during the live in-play of the system.

Therefore one can say that may roles are available to the instance. It is existentially free to “choose” among all these available roles.

The system does not define classes, it defines roles.

In the current OO model, there is a kind of Sartrean bad faith going on. The object is fixed or pinned down to its identity.

The object should have no identity. Everything that it does is a “performance.”

On a planetary scale, the quality of communication, work, cross-cultural empathy, scientific and business development, health care, and leisure-time experience in the information society has been limited by the specific way in which English has been adapted as the global language. It is important to have at least one global language (Spanish and Mandarin Chinese are also candidates for this status), but it is also urgent that other languages be recognized and respected, and that the entire multi-lingual situation of the network society and the era of globalization be pragmatically treated with more awareness. The trend has been towards the unconscious creation of hybrids of English and a national language. We instead need to work towards restoring the separate autonomous integrity of both English and the national language.

(with contributions by Alexis Clancy)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

1. Inspiration in the work of Walter M. Elsasser

Towards a Truly Scientific Biology

In a great book in the budding field of Holistic Biology (Reflections on a Theory of Organisms: Holism in Biology), Walter M. Elsasser argues that the task of elaborating a truly scientific biology still lies ahead of us. Physics and chemistry, in their current states of knowledge, are truly scientific, according to Elsasser. Physics, for example, reached scientific status with the unfolding of the twentieth-century theoretical systems of quantum mechanics and relativity. Biology, on the other hand – molecular, evolutionary and genetic biology – is not scientific. It is reductionist. Current biological paradigms reduce our understanding of the living organism to a combinatorial model or formula such as the genetic code. But the genetic message is only a symbol of the complete reproductive process. “The message of the genetic code,” writes Elsasser, “does not amount to a complete and exhaustive information sequence that would be sufficient to reconstruct the new organism on the basis of coded data alone.” Based on this, we place into question the very concept of data.

The Cartesian Method vs. Complementarity

This reductionism on the part of biologists corresponds to the computational paradigm of binary or digital computing that has been available to us in the twentieth century. It is almost as if the biologists decided, since this is the limit of the computing power that we have, we will devise a biology that functions within the restrictions of what we can compute. It is the question of how do we deal with complexity. Within the existing or dominant computing paradigm, in order to deal with a complex problem, we break down the problem into smaller, more manageable parts. This is essentially the Cartesian Method. But it is impossible to apply the Cartesian Method to quantum-mechanical generalized complementarities like the wave-particle duality or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Whereas the Cartesian method may work for mechanical systems, it cannot be of much use when we aspire to the understanding or creation of something that is living. The more correct approach that would correspond to a breakthrough into twenty-first century science would be to identify relationships of similarity, to find samples or patterns that capture something of the vitality and complexity of the whole without breaking it down in a reductionist way.

Holistic Information is Real

We need a Holistic Biology where we consider the living organism in its true complexity. The structural complexity of even a single living cell is ‘transcomputational’. Elsasser writes that the computational problem of really scientifically grasping a living organism (or organic structure) is a problem of unfathomable complexity. The single living cell is involved in a network of relationships with all life on the planet, with the planet itself, and with the history of life. The individual member of a species decodes in real-time, as it faces each new circumstance, its species-memory. It creatively retrieves this species-memory through a process of information transfer that is effectively ‘invisible’, and does not take place via any intermediate storage or transmission media. Holistic information transfer happens over space and time, “without there being any intervening medium or process that carries the information.” Whereas the genetic code is memory considered as ‘homogeneous replication’, holistic memory is one of ‘heterogeneous reproduction’.

Birth of a New Machine

Although Elsasser’s book is ostensibly about Holistic Biology, I read it as being a blueprint for Computer Science 2.0. Starting from Elsasser’s ideas about the living organism considered as an information system, and his reflections on how this information system actually works in the living being, we develop the design and construction of a new kind of computer. What we are in fact concerned with is a new kind of software system. At this early stage of the work, it does not yet have anything to do with hardware. But I find it reasonable to speak about this new kind of software system as being a new kind of computer.

Identities and Differences Make Static Software

One of our basic insights is that currently existing software is based on a logic of discrete identities and discrete differences. Given this logic, the instantiated software object remains essentially static. The properties of the software object are given to it at the time of its inception or its “construction” as object. Its blueprint or definition lies within the software classes which provide it with its finite number of states (as represented, for example, in the graphical artefact of the state machine diagram), and a definite identity and definite properties. This produces an essentially static system. There is no real dimension of time. The linearity of time is the mere playing out of something static. The software object stays what it is throughout its lifetime, until the programmer deletes it, or the system shuts it or itself down.

An Insight from Marxist Theory

In existing software systems, the software object is considered as a thing – it is the “dead” object of manipulation of an industrial process. There takes place an industrial “handling” of the software object. This insight into what existing software systems actually boil down to in their treatment of the software object comes from a familiarity with Marxist theory (and Weberian sociology). In his great book entitled History and Class Consciousness, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs said that the essence of modern society (i.e., what Lukacs called “capitalism” – a nomenclature that, by the way, we do not accept) is a continual procedure of the transformation of living relationships into things. Lukacs called this process reification (or thing-ification). Paradoxically, it also does not really matter so much what Lukacs said. What matters is that what Lukacs said corresponds to the historical and contemporary social reality.

Software That Is Alive

Instead of the software object considered as a thing (the basic principle of existing software systems), we will consider the software object as being alive. We will design a new computer based not on mechanistic principles, but on the principles of life, of the living being, the living organism. Elsasser’s book on how biology really functions as an information system provides our blueprint and our inspiration. It is of the utmost importance that Elsasser was primarily a theoretical physicist, a quantum physicist. He spent the last 20 years of his life working on questions and problems of biology, and he brought his deep knowledge of quantum physics to that research. It is within quantum physics that we find the idea of a vast number of states of information which are potentialities, not yet “actualized realities,” and which have a relationship of similarity to each other.

This is an Interdisciplinary Project

The building of the “quantum/real world software system with similarity-based dynamic objects” is an interdisciplinary project. Elsasser describes the information system of life as a quantum-biological system. Our system will be quantum-biological, and it will also many other things. The creation of a system of similarites will require ideas from physics, biology, brain science, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, mathematics, etc. For example, we will we speak of a Gestalt of information, taking this concept from Gestalt psychology and Gestalt therapy. We will contrast chaos to Gestalt, not chaos to order.

It really does not matter that the ideas originated historically in what were called separate disciplines of knowledge. Those separated disciplines should be regarded as the pre-history of the knowledge that is now available to us. The advanced ideas from each of these disciplines are, for us, ideas. They belong to the history of ideas as a whole. We will apply the entire history of ideas to the birth of the new machine.

2. Four Components of the New Computer

a)   The “Quantum Reservoir” of Non-Observable Information

· How Does Similarity Work?

We want to go deeper and deeper into the understanding of how similarity works. There are many philosophical texts which will help us here. An example is Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge. Thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Wittgenstein… they were information theorists without a computer, before the time of computers. Similarities is how the reality of the universe in fact really works. We are simply looking for thinkers in all academic fields who had insights into that reality (as opposed to the combinatorial reduction on which existing computers are based).

· Quantum Classes

What we want in the “Quantum Reservoir” is a special sort of blueprint. We want an immensely vast number of classes which are similar to each other in very subtle ways. We don’t want discrete identities and differences. That is a reductionist framework which was imposed upon the reality of the world by combinatorial computer science in order to get something functional up and running. That is our past history. We know from quantum physics that there are really many more states than these discrete identities-differences. The subtle similarities among the states are so vast because it is a vast world of potentialities which have not yet been “actualized” in the jump-over to “real-world” decisional states. The number of classes will be vast. They resonate with each other, as in music. They have similarity and analogy. They are invisible to the observer. They have no identity and we cannot look at them.

· In a Way, Quantum is an Idea, Not a Science

The physicists tend to think that they own the science of the quantum, that quantum equates to quantum physics. In a way the physicists are right, and in a way they are wrong. There are several sides to the question. One or another aspect of the question can be emphasized, depending up what our goals are in the given context. For right now, we wish to say this: the physicists are fond of saying that quantum physics is a correct description of reality (the most correct that we have). That is absurd. Reality is obviously a concept that precedes the advent of quantum physics, so how can it still be valid since quantum physics shook up everything? (The physicist Hans-Peter Dürr tries to “save reality” by distinguishing between the German terms Realität and Wirklichkeit, but we find that to be a weak defense). Reality is not entirely irrelevant (Baudrillard might say that reality is totally irrelevant, but we are not Baudrillard). In our view, reality has been relegated to the status of an earlier epistemological trope, one that still has some force (past history is always around as a component of the present), but whose force has been greatly reduced by its ever-diminishing half-life.

If one has not read Baudrillard and taken him seriously, then one is not qualified to speak scientifically about “reality.”

Taken out of its ordinary context of applied statistical physics, and sent out into the general field of interdisciplinary knowledge, the quantum is really an idea. It is a concept. Anyone can make use of it. As such, we will make use of it in computer science. A quantum informational system, designed by us. We simply need the idea and the design. This is a computer science and science fictional approach. A science fictional approach is indeed the correct methodology. If you build it, they will come. (Kevin Costner, Field of Dreams)

Previously (in “A Proposal for Developing Quantum Computing in Software”), I wrote about the “non-destructive space of observation.” By this term I meant a state of consciousness, reached through meditation, that is a part of quantum “reality.” It is a special subjective space available to the “quantum observer”. It corresponds to the “objective reality” of what is “there” that we call the quantum physical nature of “reality”. But this is a double-edged sword. We can just as easily strip the quantum of its prestigious “objective” status in physics, and appropriate it as a useful concept for computer science design. The software system is quantum because we conceptualize, design and implement it as quantum.

· Representing the Unrepresentable

This “unrepresentable” information must be represented. Yet in a write-only way! Reading the information will be crucial as well, but it will require a new, special kind of reading. It is read only in order to no longer be what it is. In the act of reading, the information is transformed from its own quantum state into the domain of real-world usefulness.

The number of states within the quantum informational reservoir or container is very vast. But it would be a mistake to call it infinite. Here we are in a realm beyond traditional mathematics, beyond concepts like finite and infinite, beyond their binary opposition. We are involved with a more complex and paradoxical topology. This is the applied task that awaits Alexis Clancy’s new mathematics: to make a correct description of the quantum informational space. Note how one of the main and recurring themes of Elsasser’s book is the question of the scientific status of creativity. Elsasser speaks of a principle of creative selection in biology. We know what creativity is in the way that this term is used in ordinary language: the creativity of the artist, of the poet. Something like creativity happens in the biology of the living organism: we must grasp that creativity as a scientific concept. What makes this creativity scientific is repetition, the repeatability of scientific experiments. The poet knows how to describe the indescribable. The concept of the description of information belongs to computer science. This is the task awaiting our new mathematics (and linguistics).

Note here a certain analogy with some of the basic questions of Holocaust Studies. Can the Jewish artist with the proper relationship to the Holocaust, like Claude Lanzmann, represent the unrepresentable?

- We must have a correct (post-quantum) mathematical description of this informational space.

- We must be able to write the code of the Generator-Transformer of the quantum representation of application-specific non-quantum information. Perhaps this code will be written in the new programming language Scala.

- We must specify the format of the input information to be prepared in the specific application domain.

- We must be able to write the code of the Instantiation Technique.

It is clear that a certain linguistics science is also going to be very important in defining the protected format of the quantum information. The realm of similarities not identities in language is the poetic dimension of language, the (often) cross-language nearly-endless signifying-signified chains of words that were studied in a certain tradition of Continental semiotics which culminated in Derrida’s book Of Grammatology. “Le monde, la douleur, la terre, la mère, les hommes, le désert, l’honneur, la misère, l’été, la mer, [le silence].“ (Albert Camus). I believe that Marc Silver’s work on linguistic corpus “databases” is also going to help us here. (Although the word database should become obsolete.)

Until now, only semantics and syntactics as branches of linguistics have been considered by computer science in relation to the question of language understanding. Semiotics and grammatology have not yet been considered by computer science. The area of language understanding in Spoken Dialogue Technology should be one of the most direct applications of the quantum-biological-linguistic reservoir of similarities. More generally, we are also talking about a new kind of database, where information of much greater, “unfathomable” complexity – in contrast to current identity-and-difference-based databases – can be stored. It is a revolution in computer science.

Elsasser speaks of a “ubiquity of creative effects” (154) in the general understanding of biological order. He is interested in the compatability between holism in biology and quantum mechanics. (38) He calls the “holistic memory” of living organisms a conservative machine, not an innovative one. The “more and more subtle” ordering relationships of biological-semiotic life indicate the “conservative character of creativity.” We dream of a computer with holistic information transfer. What is the information stability found in nature? What is the input into a process of creative selection? What is the output from a process of creative selection?

Elsasser formulates the hybrid quantum-biological nature of a computer with holistic information transfer, which he hypothesizes as being an extension of Niels Bohr’s concept of generalized complementarity: “In the scheme proposed here, we assume that two types of order exist in the world in such a way that they never contradict each other. This is, so far as I can perceive it, a novel kind of interrelationship between two different types of order: the laws of quantum mechanics based on a logic of homogeneous classes that, mathematically speaking, rests on an abstract scheme of infinite sets, as compared to the rules of biology which can only be expressed by a logic of heterogeneous and finite classes.” (144)

· The Dimension of Time

I believe that the dimension of time has not yet been truly considered in software systems. All that we have so far is a static model of identities and differences extrapolated onto a abstract-formalistic model of linear-chronological-tic-tock time. Time considered in its true textures and dimensionalities still awaits us as a field of knowledge investigation. Time in a truly dynamical system is very much related to differentiation in language. We need a theory of language and time. Derrida began to develop a theory of language and time in his famous essay on “Differance”. The essay on “Differance” was praised by thousands of academic philosophy and literature professors, but there was never any real scientific follow-up to its groundbreaking insights. “Differance“ means both to differ (in a language signification system) and to defer (in time). It indicates the connection between the poetic dimension of language and the intricate and undiscovered dimensions of time. I have been working on this area long enough to know that the secret to knowledge of the future lies here.

The implementation of differance in software, and the repetitive quality of software, will be the living proof that our approach is scientific, and not some mere manifestation of parapsychology. Here we distinguish ourselves, for example, from the “pataphysics” of Alfred Jarry. Jarry dreamed of a perpetual motion machine, something like a bicycle that would run forever without effort. He never tried to build this machine. He could not, because it is in violation of the laws of physics.

· Within the Quantum Reservoir, the Incompleteness Reservoir

Within the Quantum Reservoir, there is another component: the Incompleteness Reservoir.  The latter is the epistemologically recursive “unseen” in relation to the larger reservoir. Algorithimically, this seen-unseen relationship of container-contained continues on for a while (up to a certain limit, a certain number of iterations of a recurringly “recursive” loop).

An infinite dimension (Hilbert) space is overkill with respect to quantum models. It doesn’t give the quantum model sufficient space to break.  (Explicit) symmetry breaking is implicit as per Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem. No matter how sophisticated the model, there always exists a statement somewhere in the universe that renders a proposition that is unanswerable. It does not compute. It breaks the model.

We want our software model to break. The “accident” (Paul Virilio) plays a completely different role than in Computer Science 1.0. In Computer Science 1.0, we have the semi-absurd and semi-useful activity of “bug-fixing.” In Computer Science 2.0, flaws are part of the design. We design our software to know how to continuously fix itself. This is EVOLUTION. This is CREATIVITY.

There is a Quantum Reservoir. There is an “Incompleteness” Reservoir within the larger component container. The Incompleteness Reservoir has its own physics.  It needs/requires new mathematics in order to describe it. An information description or specification.

The Incompleteness Reservoir is everywhere at once. It is time- and space-independent. It wεaves through Cartesian/Euclidean space, and also through finite dimensional Hilbert Space. As symmetry breaks, the Incompleteness Reservoir provides as many dimensions as are needed to patch the model. As symmetry will always break (in time), it follows that the Incompleteness Reservoir must carry infinite dimensions. Always.

The Incompleteness Reservoir carries within itself the logic of a trans-finite order. Note that that is beyond the binary opposition, the duality, between finite and infinite.

b)  The “Wall” between the Quantum Reservoir and the Real-World Pool of Dynamic Objects

· The Visible and the Invisible

The “Quantum Reservoir” must be protected by a wall of invisibility or non-graspability. Beyond that wall is information that we cannot directly access, the values of which we cannot explicitly set or get.

· Protection of the Reservoir

The quantum informational classes in the Reservoir are protected by a wall of quantum non-observation. Elsasser says: “Living things do not at all employ the engineer’s method of separating information from noise by a vast energy gap.” Classical information theory – like Claude Shannon – is based on this distinction between information and noise. We are interested in a vitally different kind of wall.

c)   The Real-World Pool of Dynamic Objects

· The Centrality of Roles

The object-oriented ontology needs to be radicalized in the direction of Roles and in the direction of the autonomy of objects. The attributes of software classes or software objects are containers of data. The concept of data is a consequence of a subject-centered worldview. Data is reductionist. What we want is a Gestalt of information. An informational field that is the true opposite of chaos, rather than a neurotic-compulsive need for order in the will to precise information.

The existing object-oriented model has no real appreciation of time. A class is a blueprint of an instance, and an instance is culled from classes in one single moment, at construction time. The instance cannot modify itself during the real-time activity of the program, of the software system.

We need a software instance that is in a state of “not knowing.” This makes it alive (almost sort of human). It goes along being alive without being so precisely defined. It picks up its definition in real-time, during the live in-play of the system.

Many roles are available to the instance. The instance is existentially free to “choose” among all these available roles. The system does not define classes, it defines roles. In the current OO model, there is a kind of Sartrean bad faith going on. The object is fixed or pinned down to its identity.

The object should have no identity. Everything that it does is a “performance.” (Judith Butler)

Creative selection occurs from an immense reservoir of possible and admissible states. We need classes where the possibility of life is prepared, and techniques for bringing this potential vitality to actualization, for the real-time lifetime of the dynamic software object.

We need a system where an immense number of possible states is possible, but the switching actions involved are manageable. As Elsasser concludes, the concept of similarity is representative of a somewhat larger cluster of concepts. Holistic memory is the biological phenomenon whereby an organism and an automaton are distinguished from each other. There is a great deal of flexibility in assigning individuals to classes, and a high degree of variability among the individuals of a class.

d)  Programmer Workspace: Programs and Data Specifications

· The Input Program that converts the Class Model to a Quantum Description

There must be a class model where the specific application that is going to be developed is modeled. This model will probably look very conventional – something like UML modeling of classes, attributes, and associations; or the definition of Hibernate classes and records.

There must be a program which converts the class model into a quantum description. We need to generate the quantum software classes without explicitly setting or even seeing them. They will exist in a sort of encrypted way. The mathematics of Alexis Clancy – which is based on the mathematics of Gödel, Schrödinger, and Riemann (to name but a few of many) – will face the challenge of providing us with a correct mathematical description of these quantum-encrypted informational classes. This Generator-Transformer quantizes the input data which we then no longer will be able to directly look at!

· The Output Program that instantiates and/or modifies the Highly Dynamic Sofware Object

There must be a program that instantiates and/or modifies the highly dynamic software object with values and/or information that comes from the “Quantum Reservoir” of Non-Observable Information. The Instantiation from the (quantum-biological) universe of potentialities to the (real-world) universe of actualities is an act of appearance. Non-visible, non-explicitly-setted, analogous-to-each-other-in-subtle- similarities, informational software classes are brought through the “Wall” between the Quantum Reservoir and the Real-World Pool of Dynamic Objects, brought through the “Wall” to visibility, know-ability, and “usefulness.” The object becomes endowed with real-world properties. We speak of an Instantiation Technique, rather than a mechanism (the latter of course now being an obsolete term).

· The Class Model Specification for Input

It will be important to define the class model specification for input.

Transforming Computer Science into a Humanities Subject

Alan N. Shapiro

Recently I bought a copy at the St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City of an interesting book by Edward Slingerland called What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture. Slingerland argues persuasively that the “French theory” which has dominated university humanities studies in recent decades has serious flaws – like disembodiment and cultural relativism – that need to be corrected by infusions from the cognitive and natural sciences. Postmodernism emphasizes cultural discourse, claims that culture determines perception, and “assumes that humans are fundamentally linguistic-cultural beings.” Scientific fields like Artificial Intelligence, semantics, cognitive linguistics, behavioral neuroscience, and developmental psychology teach us that the human person is “an integrated mind-body system.” Knowledge and action are embodied. Slingerland, however, has such a vested interest in carrying out his academic culture war against those who wielded power during the era of the “postmodern turn” that he forgets what is of lasting value in the writings of the deconstructionist thinkers. Regardless of what one may think of the social constructivism of the early Bruno Latour, or of the feminist “science studies” of Sandra Harding, the fact remains that France has since 1960 contributed four great philosophers to world intellectual culture: Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault. It is the primary source texts from which we must learn about that Gallic contributory stream to human knowledge, and not from second-hand versions of so-called “French theory.” Slingerland seems to simply want to swap out the era where postmodernism commanded the humanities, and swap in a new era where cognitive science commands.

Slingerland’s stated goal of bridging the gap between the humanities and the sciences is an important and noble one, an objective with which almost all of us agree. As he states: “It is becoming increasingly evident that the traditionally sharp divide between the humanities and natural sciences is no longer viable.” But – and this is the point that I wish to underscore – it is not possible to make any headway in unifying the sciences and the humanities if one is observing the situation from hundreds of meters in the air. To initiate the project of bringing together the sciences and the humanities, we must be experientially and practically very squarely on the ground, and in the trenches, like in the infantry. Theoretical academics are not in a position to do this. Those who make abstract intellectual approaches will just fall down between the two chairs of the humanities and the sciences, rejected by both sides. We can take a different approach. The approach of embodiment. Embodiment is what Slingerland wants, in his advocacy of the science of “bodily-based cognitive processes,” and the philosophy of consciousness. Our epistemology must be recursive. We must be in our being what we plead for. We ourselves must be embodied. We can make real Geisteswissenschaften-Naturwissenschaften interdisciplinarity happen, not make commentaries about interdisciplinarity from the bird’s eye view, looking down at reality as at a map.

My psychotherapist Jerry Kogan recommended to me that I read Fritz Perls’ autobiography In and Out the Garbage Pail. Fritz Perls was the founder of Gestalt Therapy. In this amazing book, Perls makes a fascinating remark about Wilhelm Reich and where Reich went wrong in his efforts to bring together Marxism and psychoanalysis. I don’t want to give the impression that I am dismissing Reich, because I think that Reich and Reich-inspired mind-body therapies are very important. But Perls zeroes in on the nature of Reich’s failure to synthesize two previously divided intellectual worldviews: “He made the mistake of attempting to get the two Weltanschauungen to relate to each other on a high level of abstraction instead of on the gut level. The result was rejection and name-calling. The Communists rejected him because he was an analyst, and the analysts rejected him because he was a Communist. Instead of a chair with a broader base, he found himself falling between two chairs. He got into trouble through relating two systems before relating his own subsistence and his own sex.” This last sentence is awesome. The Marx-Freud dialogue or encounter is very important. Marx is about economics and Freud is about sexuality. To merge Marx and Freud is not about the elaboration of abstract intellectual talk in a seminar. It is about answering the question of what is my relationship to making money? And it is about answering the question of what is my sexuality?

So the individuals most qualified to conduct research into the possible Marx-Freud fusion would be prostitutes, not cultural theory post-graduate students. This assertion is not so far-fetched as it sounds. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Dickens, Charles Bukowski, and Jean Genet were all very interested in prostitutes. I did some sociological field-work in September 2009, living among prostitutes in Zurich, Switzerland. In the hotel lobbies where they and their protectors spend their time, I was accepted with trust into their conversations. I believe that they felt the existential connection of someone who has dealt honestly with his own multi-faceted sexuality and who has often survived economically “living on his wits” through jobbing, gambling, and long periods of sitting all hunched-up in a chair [as a computer programmer-software developer!].

Who are the individuals who are going to be the best qualified to build the bridge between the sciences and the humanities? Not the scholars who write books about the subject or teach seminars on the subject. Because the subject does not yet exist. Seeing the gap has very little to do with assembling the right structure to traverse the gap. It is first necessary to create the subject. The subject to be created is called: Computer Science. Computer Science does not yet exist. Despite its name, Computer Science is so far only an engineering discipline. Computer Science excluded art and sociology at its foundation, making itself into a strictly technical engineering practice, the tweaking of bits and bytes. We need a New Computer Science that integrates art and sociology at a fundamental level. To become a science, Computer Science must integrate what it previously excluded. To become a science, it must become the apparent opposite of that: a humanities subject. This sounds like a paradox, and it is. The way forward out of the conundrum of the Divided Self (R.D. Laing) of the Western Mind is to embark on an adventure of reinventing knowledge as interdisciplinary in the specific pragmatic context of the work of the Humanities Informatics Laboratory.

In books engrossed in the science vs. “French-theory-inspired” humanities culture wars, Computer Science is never mentioned. In Fashionable Nonsense, Sokal and Bricmont don’t say one word about it. Slingerland mentions Artificial Intelligence, but AI is a small and segregated sub-specialty within Computer Science. AI is rather set apart from the educational instruction and industrial practice of the field of Computer Science as a whole.

Invent a new humanities subject. What is a humanities subject? According to Wikipedia, the humanities are those academic disciplines – like literature and sociology – which study the human condition. As I said in my recent lecture on robots and androids at Ars Electronica, we need to expand our understanding of what is human to include an emerging future of humans and androids together. Man as the sole object of inquiry of the human sciences is the obsolete paradigm of anthropocentrism. We need to establish a double-system of humans and androids, a relationship with someone who understands our experience and predicament, yet has a different perspective on things.

We need a New Computer Science that starts to build the hardware and software and wetware for Artificial Life and androids, and for more powerful applications today. We need a practical knowledge project, which I propose to call the Humanities Informatics Laboratory. As an enlightened humanities, the project will be very much informed by science.

I will mention six aspects of what the Humanities Informatics Laboratory will do.

First, the Humanities Informatics Laboratory will integrate the perspectives of cybernetics and systems theory into its work. Cybernetics was big in the 1950s. It preceded the reduction of Computer Science to mere engineering which began to take hold in the 1960s. Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary science of control, command and communication first devised by Norbert Wiener. I think that Gregory Bateson, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, and Heinz von Foerster were all momentous figures in the history of cybernetics. I am also interested in the systems theory of sociologists like Niklas Luhmann and Talcott Parsons.

Second, the viewpoint of the Laboratory includes looking upon computer hardware and software as being alive. This is what differentiates my axiomatic position from that of other Computer Scientists. Technology is not an inert thing. Once we respect technology as being alive, then we can no longer be engaged in just the engineering of a machine.

Third, the work of the Laboratory will inscribe art – or rather, what I call the radical illusion beyond art – into the heart of Computer Science. I have written about the radical illusion beyond art in the context of cars, architecture, dance, virtual reality, and software. Jean Baudrillard wrote about it in the context of photography. Alan Cholodenko wrote about it in the context of animated films. To inscribe this objective illusion of the world into Computer Science is to work out the mathematics of quantum computing that goes beyond the binary or digital programming of the explicitly setted on/off switch, the logic of either/or or the one-to-one correspondence between the signifier and the meaning of a word-term at the base of identity in the semiological reduction practiced by Western science after Plato and Aristotle up until the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. The software that derives from this reductionist binary logic is mechanistic. No real emergence or autonomy is possible. Software as it is enables a simulation of democracy. Either we get something like Wikipedia, where a power structure hides behind the façade of participation. Or we get computer games where the possibilities of play are limited by the recombinant permutations of what has been pre-programmed in the executing code’s flow control. But technology wants to play for real.

Fourth, the work of the Humanities Informatics Laboratory will inscribe sociology – or rather a quantum physics sociology that is a synthesis of ideas of Jean Baudrillard and Robert K. Merton – into the heart of Computer Science. Software in the prevailing object-oriented paradigm is all about objects and their instantiation from blueprint software classes. But these objects are understood as simulating processes and phenomena in the world which is assumed to be “real.” Baudrillard’s first book, published in 1968, is also about objects. It is called The System of Objects. Baudrillard studied the “directly experienced psychological and sociological reality of objects.” This quantum physics sociology describes a world of aleatory and wily objects. We need to upgrade object-oriented software development’s alleged “simulation of real” objects into the creation of radically uncertain objects, taking into account the twentieth-century sciences of quantum physics, relativity, and chaos/complexity theory. Baudrillard’s quantum physics sociology stands in the same relation to classical sociological reality that our New Computer Science stands in relation to the current object-oriented paradigm. Classical sociologists assume a world of docile objects waiting to be “objectively” investigated, a social world strictly rationally ordered by the exclusively rational subject of social science who is in control. Baudrillardian sociology considers stranger objects in an unmasterable social field governed by incompleteness.

To discharge the integration of sociology into Computer Science, we will also need a very pragmatic and American variant of sociology. Robert K. Merton’s idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy provides support to Baudrillard’s concepts of simulation and the redundancy of abundance at their inception (he mentions it in The Consumer Society, his second book, published in 1970). Merton’s ideas about the role model and social roles and expected behaviors – cornerstones of his theory of social groups – are the counterpart to what Baudrillard said about no one in the established social structure being free to say the truth. Most important for the project of the Humanities Informatics Laboratory is the fact that Merton was the founder of the sociology of science. We want to take the sociology of science one step further: to bring sociology into science, into Computer Science becoming a humanities subject.

Fifth, the Humanities Informatics Laboratory will write advanced code for Artificial Life, and for more powerful systems and applications in business, education, and social networks. There are many individuals, projects, organizations, and enterprises in the “art and technology,” cyberculture, computer gaming, ALife, new media, open source, and biopolitical activism communities who are not just “engineers” or techie programmers. These people are our friends and allies. However, they are working two levels removed from the core of Computer Science. So they cannot carry out an effective computing and cultural revolution. The core of Computer Science is the digital-binary computer and the object-oriented paradigm of programming languages like C++ and Java. I have written about how to get beyond digital-binary computing, and about how to extend object-orientation to include patterns and samples of similarity/resemblance in the part-whole or database element-software instance relationship.

The primary basis of the New Computer Science is the original works of two thinkers: Alexis Clancy and Jacques Derrida. Clancy’s work in mathematics references seminal ideas of Kurt Gödel, Erwin Schrödinger, Bernhard Riemann, David Bohm, and Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Jacques Derrida’s best known book is Of Grammatology, published in 1967. That early work is an important root of the New Computer Science. Derrida’s concept of Différance is elaborated in detail in the essay “Différance.” Différance encompasses a number of polysemous features governing the production of textual meaning. Words and signs can never fully conjure what their authors intend them to mean, but can only make appeals to additional words. As the Wikipedia article on Différance says, “meaning is forever ‘deferred’ or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers.” Différance is a theory of the liveliness of language. Différance can give life to software. We will program poetic signifying chains of meaning in language games, sequences of associations, and sounds which foster vitality. Autonomous, self-evolving, self-learning ALife is energized by languages.

Sixth, the Humanities Informatics Laboratory will consult to industry about workflow processes and creativity, harnessing the practices of the new field of social choreography. The chief originators of social choreography are Steve Valk, Michael Klien, and Jeffrey Gormly. Social choreography takes conceptions that come from the dance world – especially William Forsythe’s “postmodern” choreography of the plasticity of the body – and radicalizes and “applies” them to more and more areas of social life. What the predominant “body movement paradigm” in our society relegates to the status of autistic or nonfunctional behavior attains a space of legitimacy in Forsythe’s remaking of the dancer’s body. The ambition of social choreography is to extend this from the dancer’s body to a radical flexibility of the social body. Social choreography is also influenced by ideas and practices of the Situationist International, especially those of filmmaker Guy Debord, painter Asger Jorn, and urban planner Constant Nieuwenhuys.

The System of Objects

Baudrillard sets out in his first book to “classify a world of objects.” He wants to go beyond a strictly “technological” analysis of how ordinary objects are intended – by the companies that manufacture them – to operate and to be used. He will instead study the “directly experienced psychological and sociological reality of objects.” But as soon as he contemplates the “secondary meanings” of modern day objects, he discovers that these everyday life connotations – when considered as a whole – constitute a cultural system.

The damaged life of the fragmented individual, performing his duties in the system of production, is circumscribed by a universe of self-referential images and solipsistic spaces which sustain his socialization in that system. Walking amidst the skyscrapers and luxury boutiques of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, one has the impression of being in an underground city of loyal citizens, cut off from all other possible space and stories, real in history or imagined in dreams. Dwarfed by the immense monoliths, beset from all sides by an unblemished futuristic-technologized décor, the individual is called upon to exonerate his presence in this apparently complete world. He is compelled – within himself, in relation to others, to organizations, and to the undivided ambience – to make known which of his qualities and skills give him the right to participate in the scramble to belong. From how he speaks and dresses to the technical knowledge and credentials that he carries, he is like an African American in the 1950s being scrutinized by White Cops, a Kafka man permanently On Trial, seeking to decipher the intricate workings of the Court. Immersed in a world of unfathomable complexity presenting itself as a closed perfection, the aspiring Cultural Citizen of contemporary American society must conceal his human weaknesses, scratch and claw to plant a stake, and strive to resemble in his being the rigid geometry of this system of survival.

The processes and modes of legitimation, participation, identity, and solidarity in late capitalism cry out for thorough re-examination in the context of a renewed Critical Theory of American Society and Consumer Culture. This project involves the revitalization and rethinking of the vanishing genre of Cultural Theory, as well as the elaboration of a concept of Cultural Citizenship. Since the American and French Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, the concept of political citizenship has dominated our thinking about participation in society to the virtual exclusion of other approaches. But the New Left in the 1960s, at least in its most lucid and audacious moments, initiated a critique of politics which continues to  ring true. Those who partook in the assemblies and action committees in France in May-June 1968, voiced the demands for “participatory democracy” of the early Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in America, marched in the Civil Rights Movement or against the Vietnam War, or actively refused the collaboration of the major political parties during the 1977 student uprising in Italy, shared a critical perception of politics as having becoming a separate sphere, a Simulation of Democracy, a realm reserved for experts and professionals and divorced from everyday life. After the 1970s, voting became more and more of an absurd ritual, politicians were held less and less accountable for their deeds, and ordinary people stopped almost entirely to hope for improvement in their lives coming about as the result of actions in the traditional political sphere. After the scandal and Legitimation Crisis of Watergate in 1972-1973, the victory of Jimmy Carter over Nixon’s chosen successor Gerald Ford in 1976 was a meaningful election. But after Carter’s Presidency failed, there followed a long precession of Simulacrum-Presidents. Carter was a well-intentioned person and in some ways a genuine intellectual, the last such non-simulacrum before Obama. During the Presidencies after Carter, legitimation no longer resided in a notion of political citizenship. Reagan was a Hollywood actor and broadcaster of Chicago Cubs baseball games which he creatively imagined while absent from the stadium reading wire reports. George H. W. Bush orchestrated the deceptive spectacle of the Televison War that “did not take place.” Clinton was a mediagenic clown brought reduced by a lie about oral sex. George W. Bush was, from the point of view of democracy, a an almost complete disaster. The election of Obama in 2008 signaled the possibility that a more authentic human being was now President and that it would be possible to develop new ideas concerning political citizenship.

The classical statement about citizenship in the sociological literature was provided by T.H. Marshall in his essay “Citizenship and Social Class”.  The general concern of Marshall’s writing was the study of the class structure in Great Britain and its relationship to the history of democratic rights. Following an evolutionist schema, Marshall regarded modern history as the progressive unfolding of rights and extension of participation to more and more sectors of the population. The essential meanings of citizenship are equality and “full membership in the community,” and the historical extension of its influence has taken place through three stages: the emergence of the components of civil, political, and social citizenship.

With the rise of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, according to Marshall, came the idea of the Universal Rights of Man and “civil” citizenship. This involved the most familiar set of individual rights: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, property rights, equality before the law, and the right to choose one’s livelihood. “Political” citizenship developed in the nineteenth century. It entailed various rights of participation in the exercise of political power: voting, universal suffrage, etc… “Social” citizenship (the third stage) was, for Marshall, the culmination of the whole process. Beginning its maturation in the twentieth century, social citizenship promised greater economic equality, improvements in social welfare, services and education, and the opportunity for individuals to “share to the full in the social heritage and … live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society”. Rights which had previously been recognized in principle now had the chance of being realized and enjoyed in practice.

The history of citizenship, for Marshall, is progressive and “revolutionary.” Social movements and democratic politics, issuing from the lower strata of society, endeavor to “stretch” the domain of citizenship and “universalize” society. The stratification of the capitalist class system obstructs the “universalizing” process, but this social inequality tends to be overcome by the advancing body of citizenship rights. It is ultimately a history of progress, an incessant reweaving of the fabric of citizenship, the history of the “enrichment of the universal status of citizenship” and “an increase in the number of those upon whom the status is bestowed”.

Most political sociologists have endorsed Marshall’s interpretation. Bendix  follows Marshall’s argument to the letter. Marshall’s outline of the history of modernism and the role of social movements (presented in the guise of the history of citizenship) is not so far from the more sophisticated versions of prominent radical critics like Jürgen Habermas and Claude Lefort – the defense and amplification of bourgeois democratic rights, the expansion of the public sphere, etc… The present essay suggests a different direction for Critical Theory than that of “communicative rationality.”  I contend that new approaches to the comprehension, critique, and positive transformation of American society are possible through the elaboration of the notion of “Cultural Citizenship.” The thinkers who have most influenced me in developing this concept are Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes.

There is no simple definition of Cultural Citizenship. It is a reality of many layers. Understanding is possible through tentative formulations, illustrations, case studies, literature reviews, and approaches from different angles and through different languages. The critical analysis of whole areas of social life can be reworked and deepened through the diffusion of the concept and its implications. Although the term is probably being introduced here for the first time in a rigorous way, no claim to originality is made. In his first book, The System of Objects, Jean Baudrillard refers to the “rights and duties of the consumer-citizen” (“les droits et devoirs du citoyen-consommateur”). As Roland Barthes reminds us, the power or force of the writer is to mix and rearrange previous texts, and to situate himself at a particular intersection of writings, styles, and tissues of the world and of culture. It will be more than apparent to the reader just how much I am indebted to certain prominent philosophers and social critics. My hope is that this “rearrangement of texts” will help to resuscitate the stagnating radical critique of American society and a positive strategy for its transformation.

Alan N. Shapiro

In novels like Sentimental Education and Bouvard and Pécuchet, and in his comic inventory of clichés and repeated ideas, Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues, the great 19th century French writer Gustave Flaubert made fun of 18th and 19th century attempts to catalogue, classify, list, and record all of scientific and historical knowledge. To what extent is Wikipedia an unaware continuation of the “Enlightenment” projects that Flaubert so brilliantly mocked?

Karin Oenema writes:

Unlike the other speakers, such as [Ramón] Reichert (Foucault-inspired), Shapiro said that he is less critical [of Wikipedia]: “The critique is all right, however, it should be a component of a larger view, and the larger view should be pragmatic and constructive.” According to Shapiro, [Jeannette] Hofmann’s ideology critique is insufficient. Blindness and ignorance are a weak thesis within ideology critique. Shapiro is inspired by the work of Gustave Flaubert: “He shows that knowledge is based in society and as such Wikipedia not only represents knowledge, but also stupidity. And what most people believe in society is based on accepted clichés.” We must separate the real knowledge from the clichés and the stupidities.

Shapiro says that Wikipedia is about the democratization of knowledge and the promise of popular education (an [Antonio] Gramsci-inspired view). We need balance between the consensus culture such as Wikipedia and respect for the work of the scholar who has dedicated a lot of research on particular issues. A model for balancing these two contributory streams needs to be developed. So, is Wikipedia cool? Shapiro thinks that baseball fans think that Wikipedia is cool. A lot of these articles on baseball are really good because they are based on information in a non-controversial area instead of a mixture of clichés and real knowledge in controversial areas, as in many articles. During his talk, Alan showed some examples in the Baudrillard article at Wikipedia. In this example one of the clichés is that Baudrillard would be a philosopher; but Baudrillard never considered himself to be a philosopher so you can’t describe him that way according to Shapiro. Another example is that Baudrillard also has been described as a sociologist, but he disliked sociology, was skeptical towards the concepts of politics, and did not consider himself to be a sociologist. The Wikipedia article mentions Baudrillard’s collaboration with CTHEORY (which [perhaps] really happened, and they published translations of many of his essays), but fails to mention his crucial and essential collaborations with the French journals Utopie and Traverses. During his long enumeration, Shapiro received a question from the audience if [he] ever pushed the submit button. He did, and he is now going to undertake the project of trying to submit step-by-step revisions of the Wikipedia articles on Baudrillard, Star Trek, and Flaubert’s novel Bouvard and Pécuchet.

[End of “Karin Oenema writes”]

In this contibution to the CPoV Reader, a volume which has grown out of the March 2010 Amsterdam conference, “Who Is in Control of Wikipedia? Critical Point of View,” I will document my recent efforts to submit revisions of a number of Wikipedia articles. I have tried to add more historical and cultural context to the articles, moving away from the ideology of “just the facts.” So that is what I think is the first step to take to radicalize Wikipedia. We have to deconstruct Wikipedia from within. That’s what we should do. A Trojan Horse strategy. We have to stand the coin of whether we are Wikipedians or critics of Wikipedia on its edge, neither heads nor tails. We are both and neither.

I do a search on “Jean Baudrillard” at google.com. The first result that comes up is the Wikipedia article on Baudrillard.

I begin by changing Baudrillard’s birthday, which was incorrect. It is 27 July 1929. This change was accepted by the Wikipedia gatekeepers of this particular domain. My Mom is about the same age as Baudrillard. She was born on May 29th, 1930. Happy 80th Birthday, Mom! (John F. Kennedy was also born on May 29th)

April 1:

Changing the first paragraph of the Baudrillard article would be too risky to start with. I’ll get to that later.

I’ll start with the section “Life”:

Baudrillard was born in Reims, north-eastern France, on July 27, 1929. He told interviewers that his grandparents were peasants and his parents were civil servants. He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend Sorbonne University.^[3]. There he studied German, which led to him to begin teaching the subject at a provincial lycée, where he remained from 1958 until his departure in 1966. While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht and Wilhelm Mühlmann^[4]

I changed this to:

Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on July 27, 1929. He told interviewers that his grandparents were peasants and his parents were civil servants. During his high school studies at the Reims Lycée, he came into contact with pataphysics (via the philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet). Pataphysics is crucial for understanding Baudrillard’s system of thought.^[3] He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend Sorbonne University.^[4]. There he studied German language and literature, which led to him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 1966.^[5] While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Wilhelm Mühlmann^[6]

Pataphysics and Karl Marx!

Three new references are:

3 – ^ Francois L’Yvonnet, ed., Cahiers de l’Herne special volume on Baudrillard, Editions de l’Herne, 2004, p.317

5 – ^ Francois L’Yvonnet, ed., Cahiers de l’Herne special volume on Baudrillard, Editions de l’Herne, 2004, p.317

6 – ^ Francois L’Yvonnet, ed., Cahiers de l’Herne special volume on Baudrillard, Editions de l’Herne, 2004, p.322

April 2:

No controversy about my first significant changes!

Now to the second paragraph of “Life”:

Toward the end of his time as a German teacher, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology, eventually completing his doctoral thesis Le Système des objets (The System of Objects) under the tutelage of Henri Lefebvre. Subsequently, he began teaching the subject at the Université de Paris-X Nanterre, at the time a politically radical institution which would become heavily involved in the events of May 1968.^[7] At Nanterre he took up a position as Maître Assistant (Assistant Professor), then Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor), eventually becoming a professor after completing his accreditation, L’Autre par lui-même (The Other, by himself).

New version written by me:

During his time as a teacher of German language and literature, Baudrillard began to transfer to sociology, eventually completing his doctoral thesis Le Système des objets (The System of Objects) under the dissertation committee of Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu. Subsequently, he began teaching sociology at the Université de Paris-X Nanterre, a university campus just outside of Paris which would become heavily involved in the events of May 1968.^[7] At Nanterre he took up a position as Maître Assistant (Assistant Professor), then Maître de Conférences (Associate Professor), eventually becoming a professor after completing his accreditation, L’Autre par lui-même (The Other by Himself).

In 1970, Baudrillard made his first of many trips to the USA (Aspen). His observations about America are crucial for understanding his thought. In 1973, Baudrillard made his first of several trips to Japan (Kyoto). His observations about Japan are essential for understanding his thinking.

Barthes and Bourdieu! America Studies and Japan Studies!

I don’t think that Nanterre was a politically radical institution before the student uprising.

Now I will start to make revisions to the main Wikipedia article on Star Trek.

Before my talk at the CPOV conference, the first paragraph of the main Star Trek article looked like this:

Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment series. The original Star Trek is an American television series, created by Gene Roddenberry, which debuted in 1966 and ran for three seasons, following the interstellar adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the Federation Starship Enterprise. These adventures were continued in an animated television series and six feature films. Four more television series were produced, based in the same universe but following other characters: Star Trek: The Next Generation, following the crew of a new Starship Enterprise set several decades after the original series; Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager set contemporaneously with The Next Generation; and Star Trek: Enterprise, set in the early days of human interstellar travel. Four additional feature films were produced, following the crew of The Next Generation, and most recently a 2009 movie reboot of the series featuring a young crew of the original Enterprise set in an alternate time line.

Now, mysteriously, one phrase was changed to:

Star Trek: The Next Generation, following the crew of a new Starship Enterprise set almost a century after the original series;

It seems that someone heard what I said at the conference about The Next Generation taking place a hundred years after The Original Series, and not several decades after it!

Here’s my new version of the first paragraph of the article:

Star Trek is an American science fiction television and film series that has transcended its context of entertainment. It has shaped and formatively influenced culture, ideas, technologies, sciences, and even race relations. The original Star Trek was created by Gene Roddenberry. It debuted in 1966 and ran for three seasons. Like the Bible and Shakespeare, Star Trek is increasingly understood as being a great text of Western Civilization, and it is now studied in this way by literary criticism and literary theory.^[1] The original pilot film of Star Trek, “The Cage,” was made in 1964, starring Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike of the Federation Starship Enterprise. It elaborates many of the major literary and technological themes that are hallmarks of the entire Star Trek franchise. Roddenberry was very influenced in his creation of Star Trek by the 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet. After saying no to Star Trek in 1965 because it was too cerebral and not suited to serial production, NBC Television Network executives asked that a second pilot film be made.^[2] Hunter then turned down the leading role, and it was given to William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk. Following the release of other series in the franchise, the Kirk-headed series was retroactively referred to as “Star Trek: The Original Series“. These adventures were continued by the short-lived Star Trek: The Animated Series and six feature films. Four more television series were eventually produced, based in the same universe but following other characters: Star Trek: The Next Generation, following the crew of a new Starship Enterprise set almost a century after the original series; Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, set contemporaneously with The Next Generation; and Star Trek: Enterprise, set before the original series, in the early days of human interstellar travel. Four additional feature films were produced, following the crew of The Next Generation, and most recently a 2009 movie reboot of the franchise featuring a young crew of the original Enterprise set in an alternate time line.

Star Trek transcends entertainment! It formatively shapes our culture and science! Cell phones, personal computers, and portable computer memory were largely inspired by Star Trek. Star Trek is a great text of Western civilization. One cannot underestimate the importance of the original pilot film The Cage. Nor can one underestimate the importance of The Animated Series, and of animation generally.

A few hours later, all these changes were reverted, and I received the following message at my user page:

Star Trek changes

Your well-intentioned changes to the lead in of the Star Trek article were undone by me as a violation of WP’s neutral point of view policy. (See WP:NPOV and WP:Undue Weight). However, I would encourage you to write something about the academic field of “Star Trek studies” in a slightly more neutral way in the chapter entitled “Cultural impact” of the same article. It is notable that Trek is studied in colleges, as reflecting Western culture.–WickerGuy (talk) 14:39, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:AlanNShapiro”

I reply to WickerGuy:

I think that some of my changes are about facts, and not about the academic field of “Star Trek studies.” I will try to put in some of these factual changes again, one sentence at a time, and see what you think. I hope that that is OK with you.

And I added one sentence back to the first paragraph of the article:

The original pilot film of Star Trek, “The Cage,” was made in 1964, starring Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike.

This change was accepted.

April 3:

Baudrillard article:

The last paragraph of “Life” reads as follows:

In 1986 he moved to IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d’Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teaching career. During this time he had begun to move away from sociology as a discipline (particularly in its “classical” form), and, after ceasing to teach full time, he rarely identified himself with any particular discipline, although he remained linked to the academic world. During the 1980s and 1990s his books had gained a wide audience, and in his last years he became, to an extent, an intellectual celebrity,^[9] being published often in the French- and English-speaking popular press. He nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l’Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de Pataphysique. He also collaborated at the Canadian philosophical review Ctheory, where he was abundantly cited.

I made changes to the third and fourth paragraphs of “Life”:

In 1970, Baudrillard made his first of many trips to the USA (Aspen). His observations about America are crucial for understanding his thought. In 1973, Baudrillard made his first of several trips to Japan (Kyoto). His observations about Japan are essential for understanding his thinking. He was given his first camera in 1981 in Japan, which led to his becoming a photographer.^[8]

In 1986 he moved to IRIS (Institut de Recherche et d’Information Socio-Économique) at the Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, where he spent the latter part of his teaching career. During this time he had begun to move away from sociology as a discipline (particularly in its “classical” form), and, after ceasing to teach full time, he rarely identified himself with any particular discipline, although he remained linked to the academic world. During the 1980s and 1990s his books had gained a wide audience, and in his last years he became, to an extent, an intellectual celebrity,^[9] being published often in the French- and English-speaking popular press. He nonetheless continued supporting the Institut de Recherche sur l’Innovation Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and was Satrap at the Collège de Pataphysique. He also collaborated at the Canadian theory, culture and technology review Ctheory, where he was abundantly cited. In 1999-2000, his photographs were exhibited at the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris.^[10] In 2004, Baudrillard attended the major conference on his work, “Baudrillard and the Arts,” at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Karlsruhe, Germany.^[11]

All of my Baudrillard changes have been accepted!

April 4:

There are many Wikipedia articles about Star Trek. I made changes to the first paragraph of the article “Star Trek: The Original Series.” It now reads like this:

Star Trek is a science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry that aired on NBC from September 8, 1966, to March 14, 1969. The final episode, “Turnabout Intruder,” was not shown until summer reruns of 1970.”^[1] Though the original series was titled Star Trek, it has acquired the retronym Star Trek: The Original Series (ST:TOS or TOS) to distinguish it from the spinoffs that followed, and from the Star Trek universe or franchise that they make up. Set in the 23rd century,^[2] the original Star Trek follows the adventures of the starship Enterprise and its crew, led by Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), his First and Science Officer Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and his Chief Medical Officer Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley). William Shatner’s voice-over introduction during each episode’s opening credits stated the starship’s purpose:

Star Trek is a science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry that aired on NBC from September 8, 1966, to June 3, 1969.

And they had Spock only as “First Officer,” and left out McCoy’s Dr. title.

April 6

I changed the first sentence of the article on “Star Trek: The Original Series”:

Star Trek is a science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry that aired on NBC from September 8, 1966, to June 3, 1969.^[1]

After originally saying that Nicholasm79 was right about the ending date of “Star Trek: The Original Series”, I have changed my mind. In the M*A*S*H article, the ending of M*A*S*H is considered to be February 28, 1983. Summer reruns are irrelevant. In the Dallas article, the ending of Dallas is considered to be May 20, 1993. Again, summer reruns are irrelevant. Therefore, Star Trek ended on March 14, 1969, with the showing of “All Our Yesterdays,” before summer reruns began. The fact that an additional episode, “Turnabout Intruder,” was aired at the end of summer reruns is a minor incidental fact. This fact deserves to be mentioned as part of the show’s history, but it does not change the ending date of the show.

April 7

“Star Trek: The Original Series“ – they reverted it back to the false ending date of the show.

Did Star Trek: The Original Series end on March 14, 1969 or on June 3, 1969? The question is undecidable. The cult of facts is wrong. Facts are open to interpretation. There are often two sides to every question.

Comments of mine on the cpov listserv:

<<Jon,

that’s a very good question, Jon, thanks for asking. The example of Peirce is excellent.

I believe that a Peircian semiotic could be implemented on the Internet (or a successor to the Internet), and that this a very worthwhile goal. A sort of Peircian emphasis on content, meaning, or deep referent as counterpoint to what is currently happening on the Internet, which is the nightmare realization of the fundamental media-theory-insight of McLuhan-Baudrillard that “the medium is the message” gone haywire, on drugs, so to speak. Content means nothing right now. Everything is links, links, links, where can I get my website or blog linked or ping-backed to as many other websites as possible. And this happening in the context of the rampant reign of Homo Economicus. More links to my website equals more visitors equals higher google ranking equals the dream of the pot of gold.

Any chat of any kind today immediately deteriorates into: are you on Facebook?, are you registered at the Huffington Post?, do you have Skype?, MSN?, Yahoo Messenger?, etc. Meet me at odesk or elance and let’s get exploited together. That’s a nice app you’ve got, but does it run on iPad? Nice book there, but it is on Kindle? The media that overwhelms the message was TV for McLuhan-Baudrillard. Today that fetishized media is Facebook, skype, MSN, etc.

And add to that list the fetish of “just the facts, ma’am” of the Wikipedia gatekeepers.

The second half of my answer to your question will be in the context of explaining something about my project which is my contribution to the conference reader. Focusing on Star Trek I am establishing myself as a good Wikipedia citizen making contributions which, on one level, are indeed adding to the mountain of fetishized facts. However, I am doing this with awareness in such a way that I simultaneously deconstruct from within the fetish of facts by subtly pointing out contextualizations, ambiguities, uncertainties, undecidabilities. Today, for example, on this very day, I was very involved with the Star Trek question: was the character Flint Shakespeare? (Flint is a character in The Original Series episode “Requiem for Methuselah” who is immortal and was many of the great creators of human history, like DaVinci and Brahms). The “fetish of facts” nitpickers will debate until the cows come home whether Flint was Shakespeare or not. Half will defend one thesis, half the other. Of course that’s a ridiculous binary. The episode, which is in fact a brilliant literary story, presents evidence on both sides of the question and the question is undecidable.

Alan

www.alan-shapiro.com

May 28:

I return to the project.

Since it proved so difficult to make changes to the Star Trek article, I have decided to take a different approach.

I go to the article on “Star Trek: Klingon.”

I add:

Klingons appeared in two Animated Series episodes: “More Tribbles, More Troubles” and “The Time Trap.”

These changes stick. They “cling on.”

I go to the article on “Star Trek: Klingon Language.”

I add:

Klingon is sometimes referred to as Klingonese (most notably in the ”[[Star Trek: The Original Series]]” episode “[[The Trouble With Tribbles]]”, where it was actually pronounced by a Klingon character as {{IPA|/klɪŋɡoni/}}, and in “Star Trek I: The Motion Picture”), but, among the Klingon-speaking community, this is often understood to refer to another Klingon language called Klingonaase that was introduced in [[John M. Ford]]’s 1988 ”Star Trek” novel [[The Final Reflection]], and appears in other ”Star Trek” novels by Ford. A shorthand version of Klingonaase is called “battle language.”

It would be used intermittently in later movies featuring the original cast: in ”[[Star Trek V: The Final Frontier]]” and in ”[[Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country]]” (1991), where [[translation]] difficulties would serve as a [[plot device]].

The Klingon language has a following and numerous reference works.  A description of the actual Klingon language can be found in Okrand’s book <cite>”[[The Klingon Dictionary]]”</cite> (published by Pocket Books, [[Simon & Schuster]], 1985, second edition with new addendum 1992, ISBN 0-671-74559-X). Other notable works include <cite>”The Klingon Way”</cite> (with Klingon sayings and proverbs), <cite>”Klingon for the Galactic Traveler”</cite> and the audio productions <cite>”Conversational Klingon”</cite> and <cite>”Power Klingon”</cite>, which feature Lt. Commander Worf. There is a three-volume interactive multimedia language-learning CD-ROM set called <cite>”Star Trek Klingon: The Ultimate Interactive Adventure”</cite>. It features [[Marc Okrand]] and Klingon Chancellor Gowron, and includes a Language Lab for vocabulary drill and an Immersion Studies interactive adventure. The latter is a film directed by [[Jonathan Frakes]], converted to MPEG video, and enhanced with about a dozen interactive situations.

In the [[Star Trek]] mythology, the idea that the great creators of history were aliens (which eventually crystallized into the idea of Shakespeare being a Klingon) has its origin in [[The Original Series]] episode [[Requiem for Methuselah]]. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet Holberg 917G in search of an antidote for deadly Rigellian fever. Living on the planet is an enigmatic humanoid male with superhuman powers named Flint. In illuminated bookcases in Flint’s drawing room, McCoy is astounded to see a Shakespeare First Folio, a Gutenberg Bible, and the “Creation” lithographs by Taranullus of Centaurus VII. Readings from Spock’s tricorder indicate that Flint is six thousand years old, and that the artefacts are re-creations made with the flair of the original masters. When pressed for an explanation, he divulges that he is Brahms, da Vinci, Solomon, Alexander, Methuselah, and many others. Born in Mesopotamia in 3034 B.C., he has been some of the great minds and creators of human history. This is a powerful idea, and it is the introduction of such brilliant ideas into our consciousness that makes [[Star Trek]] great. The extraterrestrial influence on Flint is clear (similar to Gary Seven in [[Assignment: Earth]]), since [[Star Trek]] is basically about alien life in the galaxy. He has ventured into deep space, owns the Taranullus lithographs, and was the painter Stern from Marcus II.

The Klingon Language (tlhIngan Hol), the Emperor’s Klingon (ta’ tlhIngan Hol), and the “current standard way of speaking” (ta’ Hol) all derive from the original language spoken by Kahless the Unforgettable, who united the people of Qo’noS more than 1500 years ago.<ref>Marc Okrand, ”Klingon for the Galactic Traveler”. Simon & Schuster, 1997.</ref>

An important additional dimension of Klingon grammar is the reality of the language’s ungrammaticality. A notable property of the language is its shortening or compression of communicative declarations. This abbreviating feature encompasses the techniques of Clipped Klingon (tlhIngan Hol poD or, more simply, Hol poD) and Ritualized Speech. Clipped Klingon is especially useful in situations where speed is a decisive factor. Grammar is irrelevant, and sentence parts deemed to be superfluous are dropped. Intentional ungrammaticality is widespread, and it takes many forms. It is exemplified by the practice of pabHa’, which Marc Okrand translates as “to misfollow the rules” or “to follow the rules wrongly.” <ref>Marc Okrand, ”Klingon for the Galactic Traveler”. Simon & Schuster, 1997.</ref>

All these change clinged on!

I go to the article on “Star Trek: Klingon Language Institute.”

I add:

The ”’Klingon Language Institute”’ (KLI) is an independent organization located in Flourtown, [[Pennsylvania]],  [[USA]]. Its goal is to promote the [[Klingon language]] and culture.

About 2500 members in over 50 countries all over the world have joined the KLI.{{Fact|date=January 2008}} For 13 years, it published a quarterly journal ”HolQeD” (Klingon for ”linguistics”), before discontinuing the paper mailings and changing to an electronic version with an irregular schedule. It also published the fiction and poetry magazine ”jatmey”.

Changes accepted!

I go to the article on “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.”

I add:

In the film, Spock questions Gorkon’s use of the phrase to refer to the future. After Gorkon raises his crystal goblet filled with deep blue Romulan ale and says: “I give you a toast: The Undiscovered Country, the future,” Spock replies: “Hamlet, Act three, scene one. I do not understand. The quote clearly refers to the fear of death.”

David Fuchs the Wikipedia watchdog removed this without any explanation. Totally impolite.

I go to the article on “The Klingon Dictionary.”

I add:

It has been an international bestseller, selling more than a half-million copies.

Accepted.

I go to the article on the “Universal Translator.”

I add:

The [[Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual]] says that the Universal Translator is an “extremely sophisticated computer program” which functions by “analyzing the patterns” of an unknown foreign language, starting from a speech sample of two or more speakers in conversation. The more extensive the conversational sample, the more accurate and reliable is the “translation matrix,” enabling instantaneous conversion of verbal utterances or written text between the alien language and American English / Federation Standard. <ref>Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda, ”Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual (introduction by Gene Roddenberry)”, p. 101. Simon & Schuster, 1991. </ref>

In the episode “[[Arena (TOS episode)|Arena]]” the Metrons supply Captain Kirk and the Gorn commander with a Translator-Communicator, allowing conversation between them to be possible.

Changes accepted!

I am tempted to added the following interpretive paragraph:

The Universal Translator is designed from a Kantian transcendental perspective. The Western scientist has reached the analytical summit of passionless objectivity, a “transparent” vantage point from which he gazes out as detached observer at all other languages. He sees what they “translate” or reduce to, the forms of equivalence of his own language. The “own language” of the scientific observer, as an allegedly rhetoric-free zone, remains unexamined.

But I decide against it! Maybe I should add it… but why rock the boat?

I go to the article on “Star Trek: Organians.”

I add:

The Organians are not humanoids. They are incorporeal energy creatures with no precise physical location in the universe. They assumed humanoid form in order to “interact” with the Federation representatives and the Klingons. They render all weapons belonging to the hostile parties inoperable, and then vanish.

Mention is made of the “Organian Peace Treaty” in The Original Series episodes “The Trouble With Tribbles” and “Day of the Dove.”

Changes accepted!

I go to the article on “Seven of Nine.”

I add:

After the addition of the former Borg drone to the starship’s crew at the start of the fourth season of Voyager, the shows’s weekly viewer ratings soared by more than 60%.^[3] Seven’s arrival on the scene was accompanied by a massive publicity campaign in TV magazines and newspaper supplements.

Seven’s erect phallic posture, techno-scientific competence, stringently business-like speaking style, and indifference towards male erotic overtures in her direction make her an ambivalent boundary-crosser with both masculine and feminine semiotic and manneristic attributes. She is an examplar of the cyborg theory of Donna Haraway and the gender-as-performance ideas of Judith Butler.

These changes were accepted. Getting this last paragraph in is a major triumph! Maybe when some watchdog reads this article, then they’ll go back and delete that! But isn’t there a statute of limitations?

I go to the article on “Borg.”

I add:

===Scholarly interpretation===

Inspired by Klaus Theweleit’s psychoanalytic study of the proto-Nazi Freikorps, scholars like Scott Bukatman, Mark Dery, and Rosi Braidotti have identified the Borg as representing a significant anxiety of males with respect to their loss of power and increasing obsolescence in “postmodern culture.” Men feel threatened by feminine liquidity and flows, and seek an armored body to fortify themselves against disintegration and contamination. They become hyper-masculine warriors corporeally enhanced with fetishistic high-tech prostheses.<ref>Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987; Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction, Durham, Duke University Press, 1993; Mark Dery, “Slashing the Borg: Resisting is Fertile,” Nettime, 1996; Rosi Braidotti, “Is Metal to Flesh like Masculine to Feminine?” Metal and Flesh, 2001.</ref>

Changes accepted.

Unrelated to Star Trek, I go to the article on “Computer Worm.”

I add:

History

The actual term ‘worm’ was first used in John Brunner’s 1975 novel, The Shockwave Rider. In that novel, Nick Haflinger designs and sets off a data-gathering worm in an act of revenge against the powerful men who run a national electronic information web that induces mass conformity. “You have the biggest-ever worm loose in the net, and it automatically sabotages any attempt to monitor it… There’s never been a worm with that tough a head or that long a tail!”^[10]

Shortly after 6 PM on November 2, 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, a Cornell University computer science graduate student, inspired by The Shockwave Rider and the architecture of its tapeworm program, unleashed the Great Worm. Morris’ criminal invention was a self-propagating parasitic Internet invader that interrupted U.S. government, military, university, and commercial online activities for weeks.

“Snori” re-writes the above paragraph into what he calls a more “encyclopedic” style:

On November 2, 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, a Cornell University computer science graduate student, unleashed what became known as the Morris worm, disrupting perhaps 10% of the computers then on the Internet^[11][12] and prompting the formation of the CERT Coordination Center^[13] and Phage mailing list. Morris himself became the first person tried and convicted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act^[14].

My first paragraph was accepted.

I go to the article on Data (Star Trek).

I add:

Data attempted to reproduce in “The Offspring” by creating an android daughter, naming her Lal (meaning “beloved” in Hindi), from his own neural net matrix. She dies at the end of the episode of a neural malfunction or “general cascade failure,” due to an emotional overload in the face of having to be taken away from Data on the order of Starfleet. Data transfers her memories to himself.

In “The Outrageous Okona” Data tries to learn humor and become a stand-up comedian in the Holodeck. An avatar of 20th century Earth comedian Joe Piscopo warms up the virtual cocktail lounge audience for Data: “Tonight I have for you the funny man of the stars, the android of antics, that Lt. Commander of mirth. Please give him a nice welcome, ladies and gentlemen, none other than …”

In “All Good Things…“, the two-hour concluding episode of The Next Generation, Captain Picard jumps around among three different times: three temporal instances of the Enterprise-D, separated by 32 years in time, but positioned at the corners of the same triangular location in space. The “old man” Picard of 25 years into the future goes with La Forge to seek advice from Professor Data, a luminary physicist who holds the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge University.

I go to the article “Spock.”

I add:

“As my parents were of different species,” Spock explains, “my conception occurred only because of the intervention of Vulcan scientists. Much of my gestation was spent outside my mother’s womb, in a heated, specially designed environment.”^[3]

And:

Cultural impact

By the late 1960s, NASA personnel en masse wholeheartedly embraced Mr. Spock as one of their own. Leonard Nimoy was invited to be guest of honor at the March 1967 National Space Club dinner, and to take an extensive tour of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. The actor concluded from the warm and intense reception that he received that astronauts like John Glenn and aerospace industry engineers, secretaries, and shareholders alike all regarded Star Trek, and especially the character of Mr. Spock, as a “dramatization of the future of their space program.” ^[7]

These changes were accepted.

I add the following 9 paragraphs:

In “This Side of Paradise“, Spock is walking with botanist Leila Kalomi, one of the agricultural colonists on Omicron Ceti III. Spock and Kalomi knew each other six years ago on Earth and she was in love with him. When Leila tries to get Spock to open up about his feelings, he says: “emotions are alien to me, I’m a scientist.” To this she replies: “someone else might believe that, your shipmates, your Captain, but not me… There was always a place in here [she touches his chest near his heart] where no one could come. There was only the face you allow people to see, only one side you’d allow them to know.” What Kalomi perceives is that Spock may not wish to conclusively reject his human side. After the alien spores which temporarily reside in the flowers of dandelion-like pod plants on the planet exert their influence on him, Spock’s repressed human double appears. He confesses the desire, passion, and tender sentiments that he feels towards Leila. They make love.

In “[[The Devil in the Dark (Star Trek: The Original Series)|The Devil in the Dark]]”, Spock demonstrate his capabilities of empathy towards alien others in his mind meld encounter with the silicon-based Horta life-form on the mining planet Janus VI. The workers of the mineral production station are menaced by a hideous creature they are not sure they have ever seen. The beast has allegedly killed more than fifty of them. Kirk and Spock are the first to get a clear look at the Horta as it moves with great speed through the underground labyrinth of caverns and tunnels. Spock deduces from various pieces of evidence that the enigmatic entity is intelligent, and that the caves are its natural habitat. Encountering the Horta deep in the tunnel system, Spock closes his eyes. concentrates his mental powers, and establishes a first telepathic contact. He touches the Horta with outstretched hands, fingers separated in pairs as in the Vulcan salute that Leonard Nimoy derived from Jewish Kohanim tradition. He enters the trance, and begins a genuine communion with a true alien other.

In “[[Amok Time (Star Trek: The Original Series)|Amok Time]]”, the Enterprise senior officers, on their way to Altair VI, must contend with an increasingly irritable and violent Spock. Spock confides to Kirk the reasons for his aberrant behavior. Once every seven years, the Vulcan individual experiences the primitive drive of Pon farr (along with Plak-tow or “blood fever”), impelling him to return home to mate. Disobeying a direct order from Admiral Komack, Kirk risks his career to bring Spock to the appointed consummation of his wedding vows at the temple of the Koon-ut Kal-if-fee. The “marriage or challenge” ritual of Spock and his betrothed T’Pring is presided over by the stately T’Pau. Spock was the first Vulcan citizen to enlist in Starfleet, and became famous for his achievements. During his long absence, T’Pring fell in love with another Vulcan male named Stonn. On the verge of matrimonial union, she unexpectedly spurns Spock. She chooses the option of Kal-if-fee or challenge. Not wanting to risk Stonn’s demise, T’Pring selects Kirk as her “champion.”  Kirk is forced to engage in a one-on-one struggle to the death against his Plak-tow-entranced best friend.

In “The City on the Edge of Forever“, Roddenberry added an insensitive racial joke to Ellison’s script. Spock is disguised for anonymity as a Chinese-American, but Kirk must explain his ears to a befuddled NYC constable. “They’re actually easy to explain,” begins Kirk. “Perhaps the unfortunate accident I had as a child?” suggests Spock. “He caught his head in a mechanical rice picker,” retorts Kirk.

In “A Private Little War“, a native of the planet Neural gravely wounds Spock by firing a flintlock rifle. The Science Officer heals injured parts of his body through a Vulcan mind-body technique of self-induced hypnosis and intense mental concentration.

Due to the genetic sequencing he shares with other inhabitants of Vulcan, Mr. Spock can “withstand higher temperatures, go for longer periods of time without water, and tolerate a higher level of pain” than humans. ^[7] Spock is more resistant to radiation and needs less food to nourish himself than his non-Vulcan counterparts on board the Enterprise. Physical distress, for Spock, is merely a kind of information input, “which a trained mind ought to be able to handle,” as he declares from his biobed in sick bay in the episode “Operation — Annihilate!“.

In “Operation — Annihilate!“, a flying amoeba-like creature attacks Spock and enters his body. Its tentacles grow internally around his nervous system. Despite experiencing excruciating pain, Spock prepares himself mentally to return to duty. His human half “is an inconvenience, but it is manageable. The mind rules. There is no pain.”

Spock does not perspire. He exercises extreme restraint in his “movements, gestures, and facial expressions.” ^[7] He has much greater physical strength than his Terran colleagues. He has more acute hearing, resulting from evolutionary accomodation to sound wave attenuation in the thin atmosphere of Vulcan. As explained in “Operation — Annihilate!“, Spock has an extra inner eyelid to protect his vision against strong solar and electromagnetic rays.

Spock is perpetually preoccupied with calculating the odds in any given situation. Leonard Nimoy’s chances of “becoming” Spock at the moment of the actor’s birth were exactly one in 789,324,476.76. “^[3]

The preceding 9 paragraphs were all deleted by the Wikipedia “watchdog of the established order” named EEMIV. According to EEMIV, all of my additions are “gratuitous plot summary.” Yet South Park’s reference to Spock’s goatee (that someone else added) is retained.

June 18:

I go to the Wikipedia article on Flaubert’s “Bouvard et Pécuchet.”

I add:

In Bouvard et Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert made fun of 18th and 19th century attempts to catalogue, classify, list, and record all of scientific and historical knowledge. To what extent is Wikipedia an unaware continuation of the “Enlightenment” projects that Flaubert so brilliantly mocked? In October 1872, he wrote, the novel is “a kind of encyclopedia made into a farce… I am planning a thing in which I give vent to my anger…”