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Notes on The Division Bell
Cluster One
"During this wartime mathematical work related to radar-directed antiaircraft fire, Wiener recognized the fundamental relationship between two basic problems -- communication and control. The communication problem in the earliest days of radar was that the radar apparatus was like a badly tuned radio receiver. The true signal of attacking planes was often drowned out by false signals -- noise -- from other sources. Wiener recognized that this too was a kind of cryptography problem (like the Enigma cipher), if the location of the enemy aircraft is seen as a message that must somehow be decoded from the surrounding noise. The noisy radar was more than an ordinary 'interesting problem,' because once you understand messages and noise in terms of order and information measured against disorder and uncertainty, and apply statistics to predict future messages, it becomes clear (to a mathematician of Wiener's stature) that the issue is related to the basic processes of order and disorder in the universe." -Howard Rheingold, Ex-Prodigies and Antiaircraft Guns
"In control and communication we are always fighting nature's tendency to
degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency,...
for entropy to increase."
Cluster One: Noise --> Signal (digital) It is what it is.
"Some years ago, a prominent American engineer bought an expensive player
piano. It became clear after a week or two that this purchase did not
correspond to any particular interest in the music played by the piano but
rather to an overwhelming interest in the piano mechanism..."
"The medium is the message"
DG: Well, I like to be there. If I want to get feedback, I just go into the
studio and stay close to the amp. I control it with great difficulty. I like it
to be at the point where it's all running away from you and you're only just
about in control. In fact, I sometimes like it when I'm not sure whether I'm in
control, or the guitar and amplifier are.
My understanding of the lyrics to 'What Do You Want From Me' is that they are being addressed to whomever is listening to the music, an observation which is consistent with the cybernetic reality of the situation, but somebody might be puzzled by a few lyrics: You can have anything you want You can drift, you can dream, even walk on water Anything you want You can own everything you see Sell your soul for complete control Is that really what you need We're clearly in an immersive virtual environment here. (I mean both in the song, and here communicating in 'cyberspace') Where else can I sell my soul for complete control, other than control-space (cyber-space)? Didn't some Judeo-Christian religious figure 'walk on water', or something? Is the creator of a virtual world (environment), not the god of that world? Is the creator of artificial life not the god of that life? (questions implied by Norbert Wiener in 'God and Golem Inc.') Norm Rice wrote: << Mt 14:22 ¶ And straightway Jesus constrained his disciples to get into a ship, and to go before him unto the other side, while he sent the multitudes away. 23 And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone. 24 But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves: for the wind was contrary. 25 And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. 26 And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear. 27 But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid. 28 And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water. 29 And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. 30 But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. 31 And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? 32 And when they were come into the ship, the wind ceased. 33 Then they that were in the ship came and worshipped him, saying, Of a truth thou art the Son of God. Keep Talking Norm >>
"I wish to take certain situations which have been discussed in religious
books, and have a religious aspect, but possess a close analogy to other
situations which belong to science, and in particular, to the new science of
cybernetics, the science of communication and control..."
"The machine, as I have already said, is the modern counterpart to the Golem
of the Rabbi of Prague."
Where are we now? In time, space, and history, I mean. "The notion of transcendence is a complex one, but it is true that there is something divine in this new technology. The research on cyberspace is a quest for God. To be God. To be here and there."
"I must say that cyberspace is acting like God and
deals with the idea of God who is, sees and hears everything."
"Cyberspace: A new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by
the world's computers and communication lines. A world in which the global
traffic of knowledge, secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainments, and
alter-human agency takes on form: sights, sounds, presences never before seen
on the surface of the earth blossoming in a vast electronic night."
"VR is typically 'fin de siecle' - both outrageous and fashionable.
It fits the nineties to a nicety. But it also has an element of the
Beatles about it, of whimsy, of radical change, and of psychedelia.
So it was no surprise to find that virtual reality is was indeed a
product of the 1960's and like much of that era it's taken twenty-five
years to reach adolescence, let alone maturity"
... My take on these lyrics is that they allude to our cultural emigration toward hyperreality, virtuality, simulation etc, rooted in the post-war dawn of the cybernetic age. Read The Bomb was a Cyborg by David Porush. I don't know why (as far as I can tell, nobody reads this stuff anyway), but I've snipped a few quotes: "the contest among nations and ideologies that was World War II masked an even more important war between opposing cognitive faiths, with a definite victory for cybernetic fundamentalism." "The rise of cybernetics in this broad and interconnected community of scientists is not as sudden and spontaneous as it may appear. Rather it was the manifestation of a deep current in Western philosophy and culture." "Wiener dubbed the new science cybernetics, another word whose Greek root carries with it the secret intention of the science. Kybernotos, in the original Greek, meant "pilot" or "steersman," and cybernetics was the science devoted to describing the pilot in all systems of information, the controlling /pp. 22-23/ intelligence for animals and machines, including the mind that steers human behavior and communication." "In Wiener's explanation, cybernetics is also conceived, as in Von Neumann's scheme, as an answer to the unholy introduction of uncertainty into science by quantum physics." "It was eliminating the stochastic -- the uncertain and probable -- in systematic modelling to which John von Neumann devoted his career." "The idea of a controlling servomechanism or central processing unit, the design for a mechanical brain, and the assumption that the nerve holds not only information but the same kind of information as a communications machine like the telephone -- all these make logical sense only if you took Wiener's leap of faith." "As we survey the Cold War landscape, even as it recedes from us in the last five years especially, everywhere we look we see a burgeoning of the computer and enactment of a powerful drama between human and cybernetic technology, a struggle between allegience to humanism and naturalism, on the one hand, and an encouragement to systems of control and information on the other. Music, film, literature, and dance express the labor pains /pp. 28-29/ of humans as they give birth to themselves as a new order of being, what Burroughs called "a soft machine," partly natural, partly artificial.. the cyborg. Some parts of the culture celebrate this transformation, some mourn it, and even others inspect it rationally as an inevitable evolutionary step." "The mushroom cloud is simply the very large trace -- the cultural icon-under-erasure -- obscuring a much more intangible yet more monumental explosion in epistemology called cybernetics. It is the accomplice term which first masks and then becomes simply the shock troops for a larger epistemological invasion." "So if we judge an era by what persists after it, what endures, what is abstracted from it, there is no doubt that the Cold War Era was a Cybernetic, not an Atomic Age, and its legacy is the ubiquitous image of the cyborg."
"The world of games is in a kind of trance,
people are programmed to accept so little,...
but the possibilities are so great."
"I don't think the equipment could take over, we do rely on it alot. I mean, I
don't think we could do what we do, as we do, without it. We could still do a
good entertaining musical show, I suppose, without it; but always things are
down to how you control them, and whether you're controlling them, and not the
other way around...
I mean, it's all extensions of what's coming out of our heads,... the equipment
isn't actually thinking about what to do any of the time. It couldn't control
itself."
"To want control is the pathology! Not that the person can get control,
because of course you never do... Man is only a part of larger systems,
and the part can never control the whole."
"Inseparable from the concept of control are the twin activities of information
processing and reciprocal communication, complementary factors in any form of
control...
Simultaneously with the comparison of inputs to goals, two-way interaction
between controller and controlled must also occur, not only to communicate
influence from the former to the latter, but also to communicate back the
results of this action (hence the term feedback for this reciprocal flow
of information back to the controller). So central is communication to the
process of control that the two have become the joint subject of the modern
science of cybernetics"
"Rest assured that I am always watching and will
certainly return to aid in the event of any serious deadlock."
"And when you lose control,
The theme of control is a recurring one in the music of Pink Floyd. It's most explicit on albums such as 'Wish You Were Here' and 'The Wall'. Consider the playful treatment of the theme in 'Run Like Hell', on 'Pulse' and the live 'The Wall' album.
Did you know . . . it was all going to go so wrong for you And did you see it was all going to be so right for me Why did we tell you then You were always the golden boy then And that you'd never lose that light in your eyes Hey you . . . did you ever realise what you'd become And did you see that it wasn't only me you were running from Did you know all the time but it never bothered you anyway Leading the blind while I stared out the steel in your eyes Would they really be taunting Syd or Roger here? (it was all going to go so wrong for you) Would they say that about Syd? In a song? (childish taunting) What had Waters become? I think it's evident from 'The Wall' that Waters knew what he'd become. Finally: "Leading the blind..." Huh? Somebody please explain. The idea that the whole song might be about Roger doesn't really work, in my opinion. For example, was Roger ever really 'the golden boy', and did he have that light in his eyes--and lose it? That sounds like Syd, maybe; but it shouldn't be. The following words are particularly problematic:
"Did you know all the time but it never bothered you anyway
Blind fans--yeah probably. Notice that we're sort of blind here too. (we can't see each other--look in front of you) But, 'the steel in your eyes'? What is that? And finally what happens in the rest of the song: "The rain fell slow, down on all the roofs of uncertainty I thought of you and the years and all the sadness fell away from me And did you know . . . I never thought that you'd lose that light in your eyes" What is that? The song seems to build up to that. In the light of the Syd/Roger theme it doesn't make much sense, in my view. And what about the theme of communication which is supposed to be there in every song. In the previous song, 'What Do You Want From Me', it's established that the song is being addressed to whomever is listening to the music. 'You', is clearly understood to be 'You' (yeah 'You'). If we can assume that there's any continuity and coherence to the album, why should we expect 'You' to suddenly be different in the next song. 'Turn and face the light'--could this be the same light being referred to in 'Did You Know'? Why not?
The Division Bell "The simplest mechanical devises will make decisions between two alternatives, such as the closing or opening of a switch. In the nervous system, the individual nerve fiber also decides between carrying an impulse and or not." "It is easy to make a simple machine which will run toward the light or run away from it, and if such machines also contain lights of their own, a number of them together will show complicated forms of social behavior..." "This machine has two principal modes of action, in one of which it is positively photo-tropic and searches for light, and in the other of which it is negatively photo-tropic and runs away from the light." "Moreover, with his love for the gadget as a collection of wheels that rotate and make noise, he has emphasized the extended physical transportation of man, rather than the transportation of language and ideas. He does not seem to realize that where man's word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended. To see and give commands to the whole world is almost the same as being everywhere."
"In control and communication we are always fighting nature's tendency to
degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency,... for
entropy to increase."
"You can drift, you can dream, even walk on water..." "On the day the wall cane down The Ship of Fools had finally run aground" "In a sea of random images The self-destructing animal Waiting for the waves to break" Could it be the sea of random images in front of you? Why not?
"The Internet has already become for a fortunate few ('spiritual scuba divers',
one is tempted to call them) a limitless ocean without bottom or shores. In
whose depths one can breathe effortlessly--in and out, in and out.
It is the habitat of the newest creatures to evolve in our part of the Milky
Way--as enchanting and nobly bazarre as any giant manta or moral eel, say. They
are recorded thoughts and feelings about what it is like to be a living thing."
"But like any ocean, the digital one has streams and eddies and currents,..." -Douglas Adams, Wired UK
"It was an initial idea that we had for TDB.
"He (Norbert Wiener) even coined the term cybernetics in its modern sense,
although it was first used by Plato for steering a ship, then by Aristotle for
steering a community, and more recently also by Ampère for steering a
government."
"Hence 'Cybernetics', which I derived from the Greek word kubernetes, or 'steersman', the same word from which we eventually derive the our word 'governor'." -Norbert Wiener, 'Cybernetics and Society' Publius ~ governor
>Notice that throughout the TDB album there's this theme of cliches--hackneyed
Very good point. "The more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems." "We are in an age where the enormous per capita bulk of communication is met by an ever-thinning stream of total bulk of communication. More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value." "In the arts, the desire to find new things to say and new ways of saying them is the source of all life and interest. Yet every day we meet with examples of painting where, for instance, the artist has displayed no intention... to pursue the uphill fight against the prevailing tendency toward the commonplace and the banal."
"Beauty, like order, occurs in many places in the world, but only as a local
and temporary fight against the Niagara of increasing entropy."
It's totally reflexive. "It's the economy, stupid."
>Do you think the fact that it was recorded in Gilmour's boat might have
Does that boat have sails. It's on a river not the 'sea', right?
No, I don't find that very enlightening, in terms of the themes and ideas in
the music and the artwork. Let me clarify the context. This is Storm being
questioned by Mark Youles about the enigma. They're talking about the artwork:
MY: What about the other symbol that looks like a tree made out of the a P and an F? The one similar to the one used on AMLOR album. ST: No, it wasn't a rejuvinated version of the AMLOR. It was an initial idea that we had for TDB. To do with boats...It is called "The Boatman". According to Norbert Wiener, the beginning of our age of 'progress', is marked by the proliferation of shipbuilding, at the dawn of the Renaissance.
"In short the period during which the main condition of life for the vast
majority of men have been subject to repeated and revolutionary changes had not
even begun until the Renaissance and the great voyages."
The ship serves as an icon for our faith in progress and our quest for 'Bigger and Better Things'. (oddly capitalized in the book) The word 'kubernetes', from which Wiener derived the word 'cybernetics', meant steersman, for the person who steers the ship based on the actual performance of the ship--like a self-regulating system. That is, by means of feedback (communication), which accroding to Norbert Wiener, is the key to progress, the means by which we resist the stream of entropy. What kind of river is an "endless river"? Every river must have an end. In my view the river is the: "Niagara of increasing entropy" "general stream of corruption and decay"
"river of ever-flowing water" (etc. etc.)
The river is the stream of entropy, of time, against which all life must, by definition, swim. "If we wish to use the word 'life' to cover all phenomena which locally swim upstream against the current of increasing entropy we are at liberty to do so." "In physics, the idea of progress opposes that of entropy, although there is no absolute contradiction between the two." "It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback."
"There are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world in
which the entropy as a whole tends to increase, and the existence of these
islands enables us to assert the existence of progress. What can we say
about the general direction of the battle between progress and increasing
entropy in the world before us?..."
"If you choose to discuss your progress openly on this forum, I will be able to help steer you from time to time." "I promise that you have embarked on what will ultimately be an enriching and fascinating journey. Judging from recent postings, many of you are asking intelligent questions and raising provocative issues. Progress is being made." "I was not sent to directly supervise, nor to instruct or acknowledge your progress on a regular basis." "Yes, I've been watching your progress and am duly impressed with the recent discourse." "It is my impression that searching together and exchanging information openly has enhanced your progress."
"I see that your work is progressing nicely."
>I think if you were to say to Dave Gilmour "What do you think of Norbert
Granted, DG might not have known about Norbert Wiener. Douglas Adams, who was something like a consultant for Pink Floyd in making TDB, sure as hell should have known about him and cybernetics--if he's qualified to carry out a speaking tour on a topic such as 'Living in a Virtual World', for instance.
DG: Oh, is it? GF: The album could easily be interpreted as an allegory about the split with Roger. DG: I don't think that it is. There are a couple of hinted mentions that could or could not have something to do with him. But all that I read from people working out what they think it's about has been either fairly or wildly inaccurate. I enjoy that. I'm quite happy for people to interpret it any way they like. But maybe a note of caution should be sounded because you can read too much into it. "A Great Day for Freedom," for example, has got nothing to do with Roger or his "wall." It just doesn't. What else can I say? GF: In "High Hopes," the lyric suggests that the seeds of division were planted in Floyd's early days.
DG: I think it's more about my early days and leaving my hometown behind. There
is an enormous amount of stuff about communication or lack of communication on
the whole album. But that's accidental. We started finding there were one or
two songs like that, and other songs emerged that had it within them. It seemed
to take over the album at some point and dominate the thinking.
"On the day the wall came down They threw the locks onto the ground And with glasses high we raised a cry for freedom had arrived On the day the wall came down The Ship of Fools had finally run aground Promises lit up the night like paper doves in flight"
"Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this
solution."
"Darwin's influence on the idea of progress was not confined to the biological
world, even in the nineteenth century. All philosophers and all sociologists
draw their scientific ideas from the sources available at their time. Thus it
is not surprising to find that Marx and his contemporary socialists accepted a
Darwinian point of view in the matter of evolution and progress."
In some interview somewhere, DG says something about the fall of the Berlin wall and all the hoopla surrounding the fall of communism, and how it wasn't all really that great. It might seem odd to some people, but the socialist experiments of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and elsewhere, were really a massive expression of the ideology of progress. The line of march of history was believed to be an evolutionary one toward Bigger and Better Things, with communism as the ultimate state of l-i-v-i-n. Well, that whole school of faith got a big bonk in the head when the wall came down, by the ideology of the second law of thermodynamics, we might say, which implies that things are winding down and such. The Greeks saw history as degression with time. They didn't know it, but they were hip to the second law. On another level, this is The Ship of Fools. Now what the hell is this all of a sudden, you might wonder, unless you have the attention span of my dog: "I dreamed you had left my side No warmth, not even pride remained And even though you needed me It was clear that I could not do a thing for you" What does that have to do with the rest of the song, you might ask. Is it really as incoherent as you think? What does 'You' mean again? Remember "What Do 'You' Want From Me". "Now life devalues day by day As friends and neighbours turn away And there's a change that, even with regret, cannot be undone Now frontiers shift like desert sands While nations wash their bloodied hands Of loyalty, of history, in shades of gray" A nation is an indigenous or long standing entity belonging to some place. A unified ethnic whole. Observe the signing of the Maastricht treaty, the birth of the World Trade Organization, the attack on the bank of England, the proliferation of networks and telecommunications systems--the imperatives of finance capital and communication technologies, machines--globalization, not to mention our quant lil 'global village'. Or popular culture for that matter, McWorld, Pink Floyd. "There Is No Alternative" -Maggie Identity, here under attack, consists of the shared collective experience of social relations, feelings, emotions, collective memory. Shades of gray is fuzzy, inbetween black and white, yeah and nay. Economism--utilitarianism--the Cult of Information rules. Or alternatively, shades of grey is a sky the color of television tuned to a dead channel, or some such. "You're all a bunch of Fu*&in slaves!!!"
"Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems
to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit
from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves,
we don't really have any rights left."
"The game, one would like to say,
has not only rules but a point."
"C'est un beau rêve, Gare au Reveil!" -Marat
"The idea of the feedback loop implies that the boundaries of the autonomous
subject are up for grabs, since feedback loops can flow not only within the
subject but also between the subject and the environment. From Norbert Wiener
on, the flow of information through feedback loops has been associated with the
deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject, the version of the 'human' with
which the posthuman is concerned."
"The old body type was always OK, but the wired body with its micro flesh,
multi-media channeled ports, cybernetic fingers, and bubbling neuro-brain
finely interfaced to the 'standard operating-system' of the Internet is
infinitely better."
"the citizen terminal soon to be decked out to the eyeballs with interactive prostheses based on the pathological model of the 'spastic', wired to control his/her domestic environment without having physically to stir: the catastrophic figure of an individual... who abandons himself, for want of anything better, to the capabilities of captors, sensors and other remote control scanners that turn him into a being controlled by the machine with which, they say,
he talks."
"He's curled into the corner But still the screen is flickering With and endless stream of garbage to ... curse the place In a sea of random images The self-destructing animal Waiting for the waves to break"This is the song that first got me thinking right about it all. "I'm wearing the inside out..." What could possibly be more immediately true?
"We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed,
or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age
of the unconscious and of apathy."
"One thing at any rate is clear. The physical identity of an individual does not consist in the matter of which it is made... The biological individuality of an organism seems to lie in a certain continuity of process, and in the memory by the organism of the effects of its past development... In terms of the computing machine, the individuality of a mind lies in the retention of its earlier tapings and memories, and in its continued development along lines already laid out." "To recapitulate: the individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than as a bit of substance. This form can be transmitted or modified and duplicated, although at the present we know only how to duplicate it over a short distance." "To hold an organism stable while a part of it is being slowly destroyed, with the intention of re-creating it out of other material elsewhere, involves a lowering of its degree of activity, which in most cases would destroy the life in the tissue." "The fact that we cannot telegraph the pattern of a man from one place to another seems to be due to technical difficulties, and in particular, to the difficulty of keeping an organism in being during such a radical reconstruction." "However, even now the transportation of messages serves to forward an extension of man's senses and his capabilities of action from one end of the world to another. We have already suggested in this chapter that the distinction between material transportation and message transportation is not in any theoretical sense permanent and unabridgeable. This takes us very deeply into the question of human individuality. The problem of the nature of human individuality and of the barrier which seperates one person from another is as old as human history."
"We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify
ourselves in order to exist in this new environment..."
"For cyborgs, then, the border between interiority and exteriority is
destabilized. Distinctions between self and other are open to reconstruction.
Difference becomes provisional."
"As we survey the Cold War landscape, even as it recedes from us in the last
five years especially, everywhere we look we see a burgeoning of the computer
and enactment of a powerful drama between human and cybernetic technology, a
struggle between allegience to humanism and naturalism, on the one hand, and an
encouragement to systems of control and information on the other. Music, film,
literature, and dance express the labor pains /pp. 28-29/ of humans as they
give birth to themselves as a new order of being, what Burroughs called "a soft
machine," partly natural, partly artificial.. the cyborg. Some parts of the
culture celebrate this transformation, some mourn it, and even others inspect
it rationally as an inevitable evolutionary step."
Electric media are, or were, extensions of the nervous system. Are we now, or becoming, extensions of them? A radical reconstruction--Metamorphosis. Are we losing, or have we lost, our selves? Are we really becoming, or have we become, human/machine hybrids?
"Wiener pleads that we not become slaves to technological 'know-how' without
accompanying it by an appropriate level of 'know-what', i.e., by a clear
understanding of what our purposes are and how we can best accomplish them.
In these passages Wiener is at his prophetic best: many of the recent
discussions on the technological threats to the quality of our environment
are foreshadowed here."
"The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by God, but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social systems and planetary ecology." "If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny,
and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the
precybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution... we may have twenty
or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroy us. Nobody knows how long we have, under
the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most
important task today is...to learn to think in the new way."
"Life is organization. From prokaryotic cells, eukaryotic cells, tissues, and
organs, to plants and animals, families, communities, ecosystems, and living
planets, life is organization, at every scale. The evolution of life is the
increase of biological organization, if it is anything. Clearly, if life
originates and evolves by chance, without organizing input from outside, then
something has organized itself. Logical entropy in a closed system has
decreased."
"A bureaucracy and a factory are automated machines in Wiener's view. The whole
world -- even the universe -- could be seen as one big feedback system subject
to the relentless advance of entropy, which subverts the exchange of messages
that is essential to continued existence"
"As we have said, nature's statistical tendency to disorder, the tendency for entropy to increase in isolated systems, is expressed in the second law of thermodynamics. We as human beings, are not isolated systems." "If we wish to use the word 'life' to cover all phenomena which locally swim upstream against the current of increasing entropy we are at liberty to do so." "It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communcation machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback."
"Of course, in the long run, the great trivial purpose of maximum entropy will
appear to be the most enduring of all"
"The progress of the human race in understanding the universe has established a
small corner of order in an increasingly disordered universe."
"In Wiener's cybernetic story all these machines face a common enemy - entropy, chaotic disorganization, or noise - the villain
of 'the second law of thermodynamics.' Against this enemy Wiener pits the informational effectivity of commanding
communicative feedback. This facilitates the erection of a temporarily 'closed system,' a 'local enclave' against chaos, 'whose
direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization
to increase'... But having stated
this, Wiener then makes a delirious leap from physics to a death-defying onto-theology, connecting the counter-entropic
vocation of cybernetics to the writings of St. Augustine... In this philosophical aspect of Wiener's work, cybernetics becomes a moral science fitted to do battle against its evil arch
enemy - disorganization... Here it is important to recall, even though Wiener makes no mention of this, that one of the most arresting aspects of
Augustine's theology is its fierce and vehement expression of hatred for the flesh of women. And for pagans. But Wiener
mentions only Augustine's hatred of chaos, which he transcodes as a life-preserving pursuit of clearly bounded flows of
communicative feedback. In Augustine's writings, chaos is figured in seductive and pagan-feminine forms. Evil forms.
Pagan-woman as chaos. Pagan-woman as evil. Pagan-woman as 'gateway to the devil.' This is a figure to be combated by
closing the finite eye of the (masculine) flesh; all the while, opening inwardly into an infinite mirror play of perfect Trinitarian
'three-in-One' identity. Perfectly the same and yet simultaneously different. A perfectly informed communicative erasure of
difference, this is also a fantasy of timeless self-perpetuation. Pure autopoiesis. Pure simultaneity. Pure information. It is infinitely
easier to imagine, as is the case with both Augustine and Wiener, when no mother is involved. Or, when the only mother
involved is a fleshless, holy ghostly info-mother. 'Ma Bell' or whoever. No noise. No sin."
"But how does chaos and disorder fit into Dick's various information
cosmologies? Like Thomas Pynchon, Dick was obsessed with the second law of
thermodynamics, and he coined words like kipple and gubble to denotes the
corrosive power of entropy and its ability to render form into formlessness.
Along with Norbert Wiener, Dick viewed entropy metaphysically, casting it in
some tales as evil incarnate or as the sign of some cosmic Fall. In contrast to
this, Dick later came to laud the positive and "negentropic" (or anti-entropic)
power of VALIS's restorative information. This makes good human sense: as
finite, far-from-equilibrium organisms, we are whirlpools of order and
information whipped together for a time against the steady downstream drift of
entropy."
"So, what are we to make of our current information age? Techgnostics would
suggest this is just merely one stage of a key ongoing process. Nanotechnology
opens the possibility that life may start taking more direct control over
matter. Biotechnology, that we may start taking more control of our own genetic
code. Neurobiology, that we may unravel the 'brain code.' And global
internetworking (the Internet) may be part of a planetary effort to combat
other entropic processes (global warming and other forces of ecological
disruption) that this stage of life has set in motion. Ours seems to be a time
of crisis and cataclysm, but from the viewpoint of complexity theory this is to
be expected. Evolving systems are always 'poised on the edge of disaster,' far
enough from equilibrium to evolve, but balanced enough to not fall over the
edge into total disorganization."
On another level:
"Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology
had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental
biological conditions was insanity. Why should a woman give up her
precious seat in the bloody struggle she could not hope to win?
But, for the first time in some countries, the preconditions for
feminist revolution exist--indeed, the situation is beginning to
'demand' such a revoltion... Also, "She will take it back" is quite the opposite of "He will bring order"
Proliferation of computers ~ more direct interaction with computers Less direct interaction with people ~ alienation virtual reality vs. old school reality virtual locations vs. physical locations
"While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words
Coming back to life--like getting a life, big time. "A long road lies ahead; begin to chart its course...
There is much more to this enigma than just a castle and field in England!"
"For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination We learned to talk" -Steven Hawking via voice synthesizer/thingamajig"Feedback loops are what drive evolution..." -Douglas Adams, Fast Company RB: Now was this your first uh, awareness of Steven Hawking? DG: Oh no, no, I've known, known about him for years. He's uh, an incredibly well known, you know his book "A Brief History of Time" is all about black holes and stuff is, is one of the biggest selling.. sort of scientific type books ever. It's, he's a very, very successful person, but he... he can't talk or move or anything. RB: Now what do you know about him, uh, personally. How, how, I mean he is like pre-emminent scientist, is he not?
DG: Yeah, mm, he is, yeah. They got him to do this advert for, for a
telephone company in England, and um.. I don't think he even wrote the
words that they used with him. But they *used* him in the advert, I mean
he was in it, on his, in his wheelchair. He looks kind of strange. Um..
and I just found it so moving that I felt that I had to try and do
something with it, or with him or something, in some way. Um, I suppose
you could say that uh, you know, there's a, a theme throughout the album
which involves communication. And um, *all*, pretty much, *all* the
songs are connected to the theme of communication, in some way or another.
"For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals.
"This book argues that the integrity of the channels of internal communication is essential to the welfare of society." "To sum up, the human interest in language seems to be an innate interest in coding and decoding, and this seems to be as nearly specifically human as any interest can be. Speech is the greatest interest and most distinctive achievement of man." "Man has held the notion that language is a mystery since very early times..." "Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, most chimpanzees, in fact all that have as yet been observed, persist in being good chimpanzees, and do not become quasi-human morons." "I wish to point out... that language is not exclusively an attribute of living beings but one which they may share to certain extent with the machines man has constructed. I wish to show further that man's preoccupation with language most certainly represents a possibility which is not built into his nearest relatives, the great apes." "...in man, unlike the apes, the impulse to use some sort of language is overwhleming..." "The difficulties lie in the fact that for these people (deaf-mutes) the act of conversation has been broken into two entirely seperate parts." "The deprivation of hearing is overwhelmingly the deprivation of one thing- free participation in human conversation." "To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man's inner life, even as they belong to his life in society." "I repeat, to live effectively is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on the outer world, in which we are merely the transitional stage. In the figurative sense, to be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its unhampered exchange."
"In control and communication we are always fighting nature's tendency to
degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency,... for
entropy to increase."
"As long as we are able to formulate the parameters or variables
with respect to which information we want to be fed back, there
is no limit to the extent to which our society can improve its
functioning by learning from the consequences of its previous
performance."
"the increasing
significance of the jointly constructive, the mutually reinforcing aspect of
communication--the part that transcends 'now we both know a fact that
only one of us knew before.' When minds interact, new ideas emerge. We
want to talk about the creative aspect of communication.
Creative, interactive communication requires a plastic or moldable medium
that can be modeled, a dynamic medium in which premises will flow into
consequences, and above all a common medium that can be contributed to
and experimented with by all.
Such a medium is at hand—the programmed digital computer."
"It doesn't have to be like this
Also, of course, regarding the concept of the cybernetic organism, or cyborg: "Stephen Hawking, cyborg, speaks. Speaks? Stricken limbs and the Voltrax allophone generator built into his
wheelchair team up to produce electronically mediated utterances. Immobilized flesh remains mute; fingers almost
imperceptibly shift a joystick to select words from a displayed menu, then software and silicon retrieve stored
sounds, assemble them into paragraphs, and emit them from speakers. Not the traditionally constituted body, but
a new sort of electrosomatic construction now becomes the site of practice and project."
"While you are wasting your time on your enemies
Engulfed in a fever of spite
Beyond your tunnel vision reality fades
Like shadows into the night
To martyr yourself to caution
Is not going to help at all
Because there'll be no safety in numbers
When the Right One walks out of the door"
"Because there'll be no safety in numbers
When the Right One walks out of the door"
-Publius, 'The Message'
"Those who resist the American Technopoly are people:
...
who have freed themselves from the belief in the magical
power of numbers, do not regard calculation as an
adequate substitute for judgment, or precision as a
synonoym for truth..."
-Neil Postman, 'Technopoly' p.184
"We have a different faith...
Where then must we reach with our hopes...
by putting an end to that greusome dominion of nonsense
and accident that has so far been called 'history'
--the nonsense of the 'greatest number' is merely its ultimate form..."
(Nietzsche, 'Beyond Good and Evil')
"As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs' universe order is least probable, chaos most probable. But while the universe as a whole, tends to run down, there are local enclaves of whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in these enclaves. It is with this point of view at its core that the new science of Cybernetics began its development." "AS SOME OF YOU HAVE SUSPECTED, "The Division Bell" is not like its predecessors. Although all great music is subject to multiple interpretations, in this case there is a central purpose and a designed solution." "First of all, as you read further, you will better understand why..." "The message itself is what's important." -Publius, "THE MESSAGE" "It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through the study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it..." "But as efficient as communications' mechanisms become, they are still, as they always have been, subject to the overwhelming tendency of entropy to increase, for information to leak in transit..." "It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback." "Progress is being made" -Publius "In physics, the idea of progress opposes that of entropy, although there is no absolute contradiction between the two." "It is difficult for the average person to achieve an historical perspective in which progress shall have been reduced to its proper dimensions." "A unique prize has been secreted" -Publius "The education of the average American child of the upper middle class is such as to guard him solicitously against the awareness of death and doom. He is brought up in an atmosphere of Santa Claus; and when he learns that Santa Claus is a myth, he cries bitterly. Indeed, he never fully accepts the removal of this deity form his Pantheon, and spends much of his later life in search of some emotional substitute. The fact of individual death, the imminence of calamity, are forced upon him by the experiences of his later years. Nevertheless, he tries to relegate these unfortunate realities to the role of accidents, and to build up a Heaven on Earth in which unpleasantness has no place. This Heaven on Earth consists for him in an eternal progress, and a continual ascent to Bigger and Better Things."
At a higher altitude with flag unfurled
"Of course, in the long run, the great trivial purpose of maximum entropy will appear to be the most enduring of all" "May we have the courage to face the eventual doom of our civilization as we have the courage to face the certainty of our personal doom." "In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet." "We are the slaves of our technical improvement and we can no more return a New Hampshire farm to the self-contained state in which it was maintained in 1800 than we can, by taking thought, add a cubit to our stature or, what is more to the point, diminish it. We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one. Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions." The grass was greener The light was brighter The taste was sweeter The nights of wonder With friends surrounded The dawn mist glowing "The dominance of the machine presupposes a society in the last stages of increasing entropy, where probability is negligible and where the statistical differences among individuals are nil. Fortunately we have not yet reached such a state." "If we wish to use the word 'life' to cover all phenomena which locally swim upstream against the current of increasing entropy we are at liberty to do so." "Life is an island here and now in a dying world. The process by which we living beings resist the general stream of corruption and decay is known as homeostasis. We can continue to live in the very special environment which we carry forward with us until we begin to decay more quickly than we reconstitute ourselves. Then we die." "We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message." The water flowing The endless river Forever and ever
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