Unconcluded Continuance

what is it about yesterday
that makes me
more of who i am
than who i am today

it wasn't today that i went to sleep
when i wake up it won't be yesterday
just the unconcluded continuance
of a living dream that i call my self

everything around me is happening
for the first time, the only time, and the last time
being born, being and dying
to become the dream

someplace, sometime in my dreams
the reality that i live through
becomes a dream in my reality
without my knowing

why do i even wide awake
return to places i have already been
making choices that i already regret
to remain who i was yesterday

as if unable to wake up from a dream
parts which i can remember
and parts of which
can only be dreamt about

Epistemic Threshold

what if the laws of the universe aren't absolute
in fact, is there any reason to believe
that there are any laws at all

what if the laws are evolving just like us, with us
in fact, is there any reason not to believe
that it's we, that are evolving the laws
that we are making the laws

that the earth was actually flat until we
gave it the possibility of not being flat
and then dug into our own imagination
to find, as to what else it could be
and so it became, to the extent
to which we could believe

that elementary particles
actually, were actually quite content
with performing their newtonian chores
until the moment that we said
that it's not alive enough, it's too simple

that as soon as we know and understand a law
it becomes too banal for our epistemic threshold
and we need something deeper and more complex
to worship the unknown with

that we are not reaching deeper into the fabric of reality
and discovering something more fundamental than its precedent
but it's actually our desire for there to be
something more fundamental than laws
that is fundamental

that it's because there is no way to quest for something already known
that we are always driven, to explore the extent of our unknowing
and hence forever be in quest

because an absolute knowledge of the object
would mean becoming the object itself
and inseparable from it

is it not that in all that we search for
we are searching for the extent of our boundaries, our frontiers
and rejoicing in our failure to breach them
as they evolve ever slightly further with every conquest

in the end, is it not that in all that we search for
we are searching for our selves, for our noumenon

They are so happy

SANDY: Not to this mechanist. The way I see it, consciousness has got to come from a precise pattern of organization - one that we haven't yet figured out how to describe in any detailed way. But i believe we will gradually come to understand it. In my view consciousness requires a certain way of mirroring the external universe internally, and the ability to respond to that external reality on the basis of the internally represented model. And then in addition, what's really crucial for a conscious machine is that it should incorporate a well-developed and flexible self-model. And it's there that all existent programs, including the best chess-playing ones, fall down.

CHRIS: Don't chess programs look ahead and say to themselves as they're figuring out their next move, "If you move here, then I'll go there, and then if you go this way, I could go that way ..."? Isn't that a sort of self-model?

SANDY: Not really. Or, if you want, it's an extremely limited one. It's an understanding of self only in the narrowest sense. For instance, a chess-playing program has no concept of why it is playing chess, or the fact that it is a program, or is in a computer, or has a human opponent. It has no ideas about what winning or losing are, or -

PAT: How do you know it has no such sense? How can you presume to say what a chess program feels or knows?

SANDY: Oh, come on! We all know that certain things don't feel anything or know anything. A thrown stone doesn't know anything about parabolas, and a whirling fan doesn't know anything about air. It's true I can't prove those statements, but here we are verging on questions of faith.

PAT: That reminds me of a Taoist story i read. It goes something like this. Two sages were standing on a bridge over a stream. One said to the other, "I wish i were a fish. They are so happy!" The second replied, "How do you know whether fish are happy or not? You're not a fish." The first said, "But you're not me, so how do you know whether I know how fish feel?"

PARTICIPANTS: Chris, a physics student; Pat, a biology student; and Sandy, a philosophy student.

~ Selection from "Metamagical Themas: A coffeehouse conversation on the Turing test to determine if a machine can think." Scientific American, May 1981, pp. 15-36.

The Brand Gap

Products made these days

In a Newsweek article commemorating the 20th anniversary of the original Mac, Steven Levy wrote:

Even now for its 25 million users, the Macintosh is a source of passion. (Journalists know that a disparaging word about an iMac or a PowerBook will unleash a hundred flames from rabid Apple-heads.) Steve Jobs thinks he knows why. "In the modern world there aren’t a lot of products where the people who make them love them. How many products are made that way these days?"

If that’s so, then why is the Mac market share, even after Apple’s recent revival, sputtering at a measly 5 percent? Jobs has a theory about that, too. Once a company devises a great product, he says, it has a monopoly in that realm, and concentrates less on innovation than protecting its turf. “The Mac User-Interface was a 10-year monopoly,” says Jobs. “Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late ’80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95. They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens.”

Laboratory of the Universal Particular

philosophy + spacetime. quality + tea. push + boundaries. containers + emotions. meticulous + neon. introduction + sleep. hindsight + semiotics. foreground + needs. scratch + thermocol. needs + windshield. 73 + alien. spine + instead. etc.

I am Naught

I am not this.
I am not not-this.
I am not any of what remains.
I am not what i am.