proximoception (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
proximoception) wrote2016-10-21 11:44 am
proximoception) wrote2016-10-21 11:44 am
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Oh! Forgot the most important thing I wanted to mention about 1.3:
Lowe's quotation from Ford's evolution-is-based-on-mistakes speech: doesn't he make a sort of "mistake" in his replication of it? Because surely Ford didn't mention "sentient" life but ALL life. Lowe is suggesting the leap from Searlesian computational functionality (may be misremembering this term), the mere appearance of intelligent thought, to the sort of self-directed intelligence human beings have begins with DYS-function, whether or not it can still be reduced to it. Computers say what is, but people can say what is not, accessing a gigantic counterfactual space that may be entirely error but may contain within it something that, while not strictly true, might be as useful as truth - or even be MADE true if once imagined. So Lowe is likely repeating Ford's philosophy, even if departing from his words. Is the analogizing of genetic transcription errors (i.e. mutations) to the evolution of consciousness, which thus presents a theory of consciousness and a path to creating it (make mistakes possible, stir) an error of Lowe's memory or an access to a truth that first had to be imagined, not deduced? Or both?
I'm putting it terribly, but what I'm trying to say is that the very problem Lowe decides he's solved (i.e. by what mechanism sentience came about, therefore whether he can tell if Dolores has it) is either suggested to have NOT been solved in his phrasing of that solution (since in his imitation of Ford's (and what Ford presents as Arnold's) knowingness he is mistakenly analogizing an unproven process that he'd LIKE to believe in with an amply proven one) ...
... OR to be actually demonstrated in that phrasing, either despite or BECAUSE of that mistake.
All of which, along with being pretty much the most subtle and dense dialogue-layering I've yet noticed on a TV show, is particularly fascinating to me because of its closeness to another Bloomian tenet, this time an early, Stevens-derived one: that Romanticism, by "reasoning with a later reason," finds (or perhaps seeks but fails to find) vital knowledge the facts could never access. If Ford's "seeing what isn't there" isn't mere lunacy or "mere" imagining of whatever can subsequently be made real, but instead Wordsworth's "Something ever more about to be," the permanent SENSE of something different, something more that MIGHT be out there, or in here, or subsuming or denying or redefining both out and in ...
... and if THAT is what makes us conscious, or anyway conscious in the peculiar way that we are, or are at our best ...
... then that is a very ambitious possibility to put in play against the others. The Romantics never stayed sure whether to identify such an exalted/connected state with love, or access through "feeling" to the primal motions of the universe, or a counterfactual second world (a la Inception's dream-state, which DiCaprio may or may not end up in) that was unreal but better (because better for US) than reality, or a mere delusion. They cycle through them, pretty much, or stick with one for a long while, even decades, and then waver. The experience can only be self-proved, through the "art" content that separates a Romantic lyrical moment from an essay or biograophical fragment. It's probably an appeal to memory: didn't something happen to you that was like what I describe and unlike how we normally describe, summarize, regard what happens? But through that it becomes, or attempts to become: and isn't what I describe like what is happening to you now as you read that description, with the limits between then and now falling apart, between me and you, between an everyday world where you either have what you want or don't and one where what exists and what's possible are of the same substance, where the moment of desire and that of fulfillment are one, one non-repeating, never-ending? This isn't consciousness but what consciousness might expand to with the right training, the right accident, the right spell. Godhood, at least of a kind - perhaps only possible in the act of creation, or in the act of sharing another's, or in making another's possible, or perhaps something that drives one to create so that it CAN be sustained, shared, taught, as it involves remembering that others are as you are, that when full as can be you are still not full until they are. Sounds mad, but also like a certain kind of love, or maybe like every kind, though the rapid approach involved by getting back "there" through art may make erotic love the go-to metaphor. (Or, perhaps, the readiest memory of what has been in the past that can prove to us what can be yet again, or the readiest memory of our having been able to TRUST in a mutual belonging of us and what we seek - thus proof to us that, possible or no, that was the state worth being in, the others not.)
How anyone captured that, GAVE us that, though never to keep, to remember without help or luck, in WORDS is almost past belief. That it could be done via video is certainly past it, but I'm certainly interested in anyone even suggesting they might try.
And of course there was Mulholland Drive... though I never know if I'm mistaken about THAT. If this is something true of people, maybe people can give it AS people, not just a few and in a few poems, and maybe do give it, maybe always have. Maybe could find ways through any art, once having isolated and rebuked the Sizemores around and inside them. Maybe over time there's simply no stopping its getting out, and maybe different means enable different sorts or aspects of the Something More to escape from potential into experience.
(This was the thing I most wanted to say last night but you can see why it kept slipping out of my mind - I'm not finding the vocabulary to put it simply. Lack of sleep contributes, doubtless, which obsession with what Westworld might be doing has not helped.)
Lowe's quotation from Ford's evolution-is-based-on-mistakes speech: doesn't he make a sort of "mistake" in his replication of it? Because surely Ford didn't mention "sentient" life but ALL life. Lowe is suggesting the leap from Searlesian computational functionality (may be misremembering this term), the mere appearance of intelligent thought, to the sort of self-directed intelligence human beings have begins with DYS-function, whether or not it can still be reduced to it. Computers say what is, but people can say what is not, accessing a gigantic counterfactual space that may be entirely error but may contain within it something that, while not strictly true, might be as useful as truth - or even be MADE true if once imagined. So Lowe is likely repeating Ford's philosophy, even if departing from his words. Is the analogizing of genetic transcription errors (i.e. mutations) to the evolution of consciousness, which thus presents a theory of consciousness and a path to creating it (make mistakes possible, stir) an error of Lowe's memory or an access to a truth that first had to be imagined, not deduced? Or both?
I'm putting it terribly, but what I'm trying to say is that the very problem Lowe decides he's solved (i.e. by what mechanism sentience came about, therefore whether he can tell if Dolores has it) is either suggested to have NOT been solved in his phrasing of that solution (since in his imitation of Ford's (and what Ford presents as Arnold's) knowingness he is mistakenly analogizing an unproven process that he'd LIKE to believe in with an amply proven one) ...
... OR to be actually demonstrated in that phrasing, either despite or BECAUSE of that mistake.
All of which, along with being pretty much the most subtle and dense dialogue-layering I've yet noticed on a TV show, is particularly fascinating to me because of its closeness to another Bloomian tenet, this time an early, Stevens-derived one: that Romanticism, by "reasoning with a later reason," finds (or perhaps seeks but fails to find) vital knowledge the facts could never access. If Ford's "seeing what isn't there" isn't mere lunacy or "mere" imagining of whatever can subsequently be made real, but instead Wordsworth's "Something ever more about to be," the permanent SENSE of something different, something more that MIGHT be out there, or in here, or subsuming or denying or redefining both out and in ...
... and if THAT is what makes us conscious, or anyway conscious in the peculiar way that we are, or are at our best ...
... then that is a very ambitious possibility to put in play against the others. The Romantics never stayed sure whether to identify such an exalted/connected state with love, or access through "feeling" to the primal motions of the universe, or a counterfactual second world (a la Inception's dream-state, which DiCaprio may or may not end up in) that was unreal but better (because better for US) than reality, or a mere delusion. They cycle through them, pretty much, or stick with one for a long while, even decades, and then waver. The experience can only be self-proved, through the "art" content that separates a Romantic lyrical moment from an essay or biograophical fragment. It's probably an appeal to memory: didn't something happen to you that was like what I describe and unlike how we normally describe, summarize, regard what happens? But through that it becomes, or attempts to become: and isn't what I describe like what is happening to you now as you read that description, with the limits between then and now falling apart, between me and you, between an everyday world where you either have what you want or don't and one where what exists and what's possible are of the same substance, where the moment of desire and that of fulfillment are one, one non-repeating, never-ending? This isn't consciousness but what consciousness might expand to with the right training, the right accident, the right spell. Godhood, at least of a kind - perhaps only possible in the act of creation, or in the act of sharing another's, or in making another's possible, or perhaps something that drives one to create so that it CAN be sustained, shared, taught, as it involves remembering that others are as you are, that when full as can be you are still not full until they are. Sounds mad, but also like a certain kind of love, or maybe like every kind, though the rapid approach involved by getting back "there" through art may make erotic love the go-to metaphor. (Or, perhaps, the readiest memory of what has been in the past that can prove to us what can be yet again, or the readiest memory of our having been able to TRUST in a mutual belonging of us and what we seek - thus proof to us that, possible or no, that was the state worth being in, the others not.)
How anyone captured that, GAVE us that, though never to keep, to remember without help or luck, in WORDS is almost past belief. That it could be done via video is certainly past it, but I'm certainly interested in anyone even suggesting they might try.
And of course there was Mulholland Drive... though I never know if I'm mistaken about THAT. If this is something true of people, maybe people can give it AS people, not just a few and in a few poems, and maybe do give it, maybe always have. Maybe could find ways through any art, once having isolated and rebuked the Sizemores around and inside them. Maybe over time there's simply no stopping its getting out, and maybe different means enable different sorts or aspects of the Something More to escape from potential into experience.
(This was the thing I most wanted to say last night but you can see why it kept slipping out of my mind - I'm not finding the vocabulary to put it simply. Lack of sleep contributes, doubtless, which obsession with what Westworld might be doing has not helped.)
no subject
Reading the show is weird. In the first two episodes Ford seems eager to push the boundaries of the machines (even half-illicitly with respect to the rest of the company), but in the third he's adamant (even angry) that they don't feel anything. I suspect his certainty (and his frustration) is linked to Arnold -- who perhaps succeeded more than Ford lets on with Lowe. So I don't know what to make of what Ford is doing.
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Whereas with the technicians he needs them to not look into any of this. And since robots are going haywire left and right a) that's made much harder, b) he feels more and more worried he's failed. So he's genuinely angry here, both at the possibility that the technicians are starting to see the units as human (remember, this is one of the two who saw Thandie Newton's awakening), and at the pointlessness of his life's work if he's failed by either overplaying his hand or having the wrong one, which in either case means all of his creations are or soon will be mere puppets (we can probably assume this specific unit hadn't been updated). Ford's likely keenly aware, or thinks he is, of the difference between true sentience (his goal) and falsified (his failures to date). If the Wyatt storyline is a genuine through-the-fire test of Dolores and the others then it may be that they'll be destroyed if they don't pass it. Not by Wyatt, but because if they can't learn the lesson he presents then they're sitting ducks for security.
There's a sort of reverse Turing test necessarily involved in the success of that plan: a robot who is now like a human will have to pretend to be a robot to pass it. Tests self-interest combined with the ability to listen to one's own experiences, using those to both comprehend and override one's programming.
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