Man-Amplified

1. Man-Amplifiers
2. Techno Geist
3. Axiomatic And Heuristic
4. NYC Overload
5. Transitional Voices
6. Bitstream
7. Fractalize
8. Final Program
9. Dark Attractor
10. Memories of Sound

TECHNO-GEIST
The Italian anatomist Luigi Galvani (who inspired Marry Wollstonecraft Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein 1818) discovered in 1786 that electricity was one of the essential secrets of life. This discovery galvanized society, its future applications are only just beginning to be envisaged. Its infiltration and uses are beyond calculation, its symbiosis presently is even greater than before, as technology increases the use of electricity becomes even more fundamental to the workings of machines - Machines Breeds Machine. Duchamp's futuristic vision of allegorical machines is one of the true marriages between matter and spirit, art and technology, "the spirit is the bride". Duchamp invented a new physics of his own, closer to Jarr's pataphysics than to conventional science, a fourth dimensional engineering that goes beyond the rational axiomatic rigidity of scientific law. One of Duchamp's greatest works "The Large Glass or the Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even" (1915-23) represents the most difficult and mysterious of all domains, the fourth dimensional phenomenon of sex. These theoretical suggestions which were later to be discovered by Baron Von K. Reichenbach and Wilhelm Reich, isolate and demonstrate a tangible biological energy generated by the human body (particular during sexual activity). These discoveries can only enhance yet even more new possibilities in the future exploration of the man machine symbiosis in all levels of creation. As technology accelerates and new knowledge formulates so does the spirit in its needs to expand its own awareness, only in the pursuit of knowledge of all things can we discover ourselves.

AXIOMATIC AND HEURISTIC
The most current research into the mind and computers has totally dismissed the idea that packaging raw data for bulk digestion by computers like the early artificial intelligence programs (used by Newell & Simon's Logic Theory Machine) that treated data in Alan Turing terms. These designers assumed that knowledge is purely information that could be formalized, codified and then programmed into computer languages, was the key to cognitive modeling. Instead recent work shows that the more complex and sophisticated pathways to problem solving such as the heuristics people use to latch onto relevant data and reject irrelevant are of paramount importance, indeed the operand in human intelligence. "Knowledge in expert systems is a melange of fact, prejudice and beliefs and most important heuristic strategies" says Edward Feigenbaum (computer science professor at Stanford University and one of the leading voices in California's artificial intelligence community). Boolean algebra is an axiomatic system like Euclidean geometry. The writing up of a system into axioms (or postulates) and theorems and rules of influence is much like describing a machine in blue print form. Methods of proof within such axiomatic systems are either algorithmic (exhaustive and precise) or heuristic (short cuts and uncertain) and these methods prove to be very important to our search for intelligent machines since much of the haphazard type of information processing and the making of off-the-cut plans and decisions are essentially heuristic in nature. Algorithms will never produce machine intelligence. Programmed heuristics on the other hands can make the computer provide results that are at once efficient and intelligent. Again intelligence is proving to be more that just syntactic or symantec.

NYC OVERLOAD
"Everything is Sentient" Pythogoras. A "failure of logic" in a "paranoid democracy", ghost in the machine? Sentient Electronics? As technology develops also our dependence on that system increases, even fault tolerant computers are vulnerable to overload, no standards have as yet been developed, "software is not predictable". The nine hour breakdown of AT&T's long distance telephone network in New York dramatizes the vulnerability of complex computer systems everywhere and that chaos is evident is all systems. Chaos breaks across the line that separates scientific disciplines because it is a science of the global nature of systems. Science was heading for a crisis of increasing specialization, dramatically that specialization has reversed because of chaos. Chaos is turning back a trend in science towards reductionism, the analysis of systems in terms of their constituent parts, quarks, chromosomes, or neurons, chaos is looking at the whole. We have to look at chaos. Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, defined information as "essentially a negative entropy". In modern communication theory entropy is equated with noise which causes a waste of information. According to the second law of thermodynamics "the general direction of physical events is towards decrease in order and organization". Schrodinger was led to postulate the existence of an ego which ultimately "controls the motion of the atoms". Whatever the theory, something unseen and as yet unknown is at work behind the mechanism of the world and the universe. From the beginning of consciousness man has been all too aware of the existence of some mysterious force, and we can see this most obviously reflected in his spirituality.

TRANSITIONAL VOICES
Dr. Konstatin Raudives' book "The Inaudible becomes Audible", is a systematic documentation of experiments using tape recorders to record and decode voices from extra-dimensional realms. Numerous theories have been put forward to explain this phenomena, such as "synchronicity", a theory introduced by C.G. Jung. It assumes non-casual but meaningful and related events taking place at one and the same time. The spiritualist theory, being that the voices manifesting on tape emanate from transcendental space. Should it become possible to substantiate this assumption scientifically, it would be the first empirical evidence arrived at by experiments of the existence and the activity of transcendental intelligences. The animistic hypothesis presumes that poltergeist phenomena, such as materializations and spirit messages are part of the psyche (anima) of the medium, these psychic emanations can take shape and impress themselves on our sense organs, our eyes, ears, and sense of touch. These phenomena are so numerous and well attested by reliable witnesses that they have to be accepted as empirically proved manifestations. if the "animistic" interpretations were proved correct it would be evidence through experiment of a purely mental process, taking shape in a physical (acoustic) form; in other words, of psychic forces influencing matter. Further research into the possibilities of amplification of sound and new forms of sonotechnology will open up new boundaries never before heard of envisaged.

BITSTREAM
Claude E. Shannon, father of information theory, whose work "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" is one of the greatest works in the annals of technological thought. It showed how an algebra invented in the mid 1800's by British mathematician George Boole, (Boolean Algebra) could represent the working of switches and relays in electronic circuits, its implications were profound. He defined the overall potential for information in a system of messages as its entropy, which in thermodynamic denotes the randomness of a system. Shannon defined the basic unit of information which came to be called a bit. Information could then be encoded as bits. Code compresses information into its most compact form. Shannon's ideas were almost too prescent to have an immediate impact. Vacuum tube circuits simply could not calculate the complex codes needed to approach the Shannon limit. Not until early 1970's, with the advent of high speed integrated circuits did engineers begin to fully exploit information theory. Today Shannon's insights have shaped virtually all systems that store, process or transmit information in digital form. Obviously this information applies to the above applications but science and computer technology is returning to the much older concept of connectionism. "Does not the fiction of an isolated object imply a kind of absurdity, since this object borrows its physical properties from the relations which it maintains with all others and owes each of its determinations, and consequently its very existence, to the place which it occupies in the universe as a whole." Bergson: Matter and Memory 1910.

FRACTALIZE
Devised by Benoit Mandelbrot from the latin term Fractus, from the verb Frangere, to break. The resonance of the main English cognates - Fracture and Fraction (noun and adjective) (English and French). Mandelbrot devised the word Fractal to describe a new mathematical geometry, part of the new science of chaos. "A fractal is a geometric shape, a geometric shape having a special property that as you look closer and closer to it you see it is essentially the same thing." The notion of self-similarity strikes ancient chords in our culture. An old strain in western thought honors the idea. Leibniz imagined that a drop of water contained a whole teeming universe containing in turn water drops and new universes within. "To see the world in a grain of sand." Blake. When spermatozoa was first discovered it was thought to be a homunculus, a human, tiny, but fully formed. But self-similarity receded as scientific principle, and the process of ontogenetic development is far more interesting that mere enlargement. The myth died hard as the human vision was extended by telescopes and microscopes. The first discoveries were realizations that each change of scale brought new phenomena and new kinds of behavior. For modern particle physicists, the process has never ended. Every new accelerator with its increase in energy and speed, extends sciences field of view to tinier particles and briefer time scales and every extension seem to bring new information. But physicists wanted to know more. They wanted to know why. There were forms in nature, not visible forms, but shapes embedded in the fabric of motion, waiting to be revealed.

FINAL PROGRAM
Could be said to be the ultimate software, once programmed it expands indefinitely, redeveloping its own structure and evolution, designing new systems so that it can activate new forms of existence, outgrowing its own limitations as it proliferates to new states of being. The final program could also be the development of the finest organic computer we at present know. The human brain whose limitless capacity we have never harnessed, but whose possibilities are endless. The quest for the development of evolution can move in two ways, outwards or inwards. The outward projection seems to have progressed and developed more rapidly than the inward, eventually if we are succeed then the two must join. For eons this knowledge of arcane connections has been employed in mythology and within the occult science, now we must go back to the beginning and develop the tool that gave us light. In a recent article on The Connection Machine - a new breed of parallel computers, W.D. Daniel Hillis, graduate of M.I.T. and co-director of the Thinking Machine Corporation, says "The applications worthy of a billion-processor machine are those that entail a radical change in the way we think about computation. A parallel computer with a billion processors might provide a basis for the computational utility analogous to the existing electric utilities. Just as a plant generates electricity that is transmitted to individual appliances, a huge parallel computer could provide a computational power to a city's worth of robots and workstations."

MEMORIES OF SOUND
The electrical signals that are conducted to the brain by the auditory nerves fibers are like the impulses that activate a computer. They are not themselves sounds; they are symbols of sounds. In this role they evoke different reactions in the various sections of the brain which govern responses. The brain has a sound memory center which begins accumulating sounds even before birth. We are able to distinguish between 400,000 signals. It is in the brain where the journey of sound ends, an instant after it begins that hearing and the memory of sound becomes the keynote of all communications.

MAN-AMPLIFIED
There is real possibility that we may one day design a machine that is more intelligent than ourselves. There are all sorts of biological limitations on our own intellectual capacity, ranging from limited number of computing elements we have available in our craniums to the limited span of human life and the slow rate at which incoming data can be accepted. There is no reason to suppose that such stringent limitations will apply to computers of the future, it will be much easier for computers to bootstrap themselves on the experiences of previous computers than it is for man to benefit from the knowledge acquired from his predecessors. Moreover, if we can design a machine more intelligent than ourselves, then a fortiori that machine will be able to design one more intelligent than itself. Dr. Marvin Minsky of M.I.T. has predicted:"As the machine improves we shall begin to see all the phenomena associated with the terms 'consciousness', 'intuition', and 'intelligence'. It is hard to say how close we are to this threshold, but once it is crossed the world will not be the same; is unreasonable to think that machines could become nearly as intelligent as we are and then stop, or to suppose that we will always be able to compete with them in wit and wisdom. Whither or not we could retain some sort of control of the machines, assuming that we would want to, the nature of out activities and aspirations would be changed utterly by the prescence on earth of intellectually superior entities. But perhaps the most portentous implication in the evolving symbiosis of the human bio-computer and his electronic brainchild was voice by Dr. Irving John Good of Trinity College, Oxford, in his prophetic statement: "The first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need make."

ClockDVA, Man-Amplified, Conte Disc 182, (C) 1992 Anterior Research
All essays written by Adi Newton