Deeper Roots

[Mr. Tea]

for some reason, I assumed Sheela Na gig were Norse when I saw them...unless there are Norse ones as well...?

Sheila-na-Gig is interesting, it seems to be one of those archetypal figures that juxtaposes regenerative powers with death and magic - a sort of sacred witch-mother - and has been linked to Kali in Hindu mythology.

 

[polystyle]

Sheila-na-Gig is interesting, it seems to be one of those archetypal figures that juxtaposes regenerative powers with death and magic - a sort of sacred witch-mother - and has been linked to Kali in Hindu mythology.

Quite interesting, Sheila -na -Gig.
Parts of her back story and name sound and resound with Tibetan origin stories and names.
Deep roots alright ...

 

[zhao]

just to add something shortly (so much work right now) that i meant to a few pages back:

of course i realize the very many different periods and types of Greek art, for instance the mosaics, the religious icon paintings, etc, some of which I'm very fond of, and don't mean to flat out diss all of it -- would be foolish to do so. with my harsh words only wanted to make a point... and was mainly on about those statues.

and the valid and good points made by Tea and Nomad (may be others that i have not read) Re: other conceptions of human's relation to the cosmos as expressed in visual art and their relation to fucked-upness in the world -- will address as well.

OK now i have to fight sleep and design design design design design

 

[nomadthethird]

Anyone been to the Byzantium exhibition in London yet? I quite fancy it - got until March I guess.

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/byzantium/about/

It's really weird that you mention this, I'd written a bunch of stuff about Byzantine art/architecture at the end of one of my posts upthread yesterday and decided to erase it because it was kind of rambling and off topic.

Add this to the Babylonian wall coincidence, and I think you've got what we religiously psychedelic folk call "vibing."

 

[zhao]

found some fascinating stuff regarding ancient connections. after collecting the following excerpts i realized that they are from but 1 section of a work called "Polynesian Pathways By Peter Marsh". this chapter is "Ancient Americas", among other chapters with titles like "Ancient Asia". among other things it examine the criss crossing inter-connectedness of ancient cultures by following linquistic, genetic, and artistic strands, offering a vision of shared ancestry entirely mind boggling in its complexity.

so keep that in mind, and at the link at the end use aarows at bottom of page to navigate:

Archaeologists are just beginning to realize that to understand European prehistory, American prehistory must also be considered. The Solutreans of Spain are now believed to have crossed the Atlantic using the southern Equatorial current and entered the Caribbean and Central America between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago to become known as the Clovis hunters of America. Recent genetic findings suggest that the people now known as Gaelic speaking Celts (including Irish, Welsh, Scots, Basques and Berbers) are a remnant of a group of people who also left Spain between 1,8000 and 12,000 years ago and spent 6,000 years isolated from Europe before returning, bringing the Megalithic culture to coastal Europe.

Geneticist Prof Steve Jones, who recently published a book called Y - The Descent of Man, said:
"Genetics provided more reliable clues to the distant past than language did". He and colleagues at University College, London, have spent years creating a genetic map of the Y chromosome, which is passed by males from generation to generation.

James Wilson and Prof David Goldstein of University College London, with colleagues at Oxford University and the University of California, found that Welsh and Irishmen are genetic blood-brothers of the Basque people.

"Somehow these people have remained in isolation from the rest of Europe up until the Bronze age where their genes begin to indicate an influx of female genes from mainland Europe" said Prof Goldstein.

The other scenario is that these people were not living in Europe, but were in the Caribbean, the East Coast of America and on islands in the Atlantic."

Barry Fell, author of 'America B.C.' is an accomplished decipherer of ancient scripts and has managed to identify a great deal of Celtic, Phoenician, Iberian, Egyptian, Berber, Libyan and Viking scripts in America, indicating that a great deal of trade contact occurred during and after the Bronze Age, but ceasing around the time of the beginning of the Roman Empire. Apparently these great ocean navigators after the destruction of Carthage, decided to withhold all information on navigating to the Americas from the Romans and by the end of the Roman Empire and the onset of the dark ages, much was forgotten about trans Atlantic navigation and the Americas.

Barry Fell has identified Ogham script in America, Ireland, Spain and Africa that goes back to at least 800BC. Early Egyptian scripts were used by the Micmac of North America right up to the arrival of Missionaries. He also identifies many early style Celtic Megalithic monuments on the east coast of America, in particular New England, New Hampshire, Vermont and Woodstock, they take the form of Dolmens, Phallic menhir, Men-a-tol, massive stone Druid's chairs, megalithic chambers, Solstice and Equinox viewing chambers and burial mounds. These all parallel similar structures in Coastal Europe, especially on the Dingle peninsular, Brittany and some sites in Spain. As usual, this work has been ignored by the Eurocentric 'No one before Columbus' fraternity.

Although Barry Fell did not go further than assert that most Celtic connections occurred around the Bronze Age. He was not aware of the more ancient genetic connections the Celts had with the proto-American Indians. With further studies done, more accurate dating of the Dolmens and other megalithic monuments will possibly show that some American megaliths may actually predate the arrival of Celts on the Dingle peninsular in Ireland, indicating that the Caribbean and America was the original homeland of the Celts.

article places Atlantis somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, and as some kind of meeting point of ancient american and celtic cultures:

It is no coincidence that many Central American place names are also derived from the fabled city of Atlantis. Aztlan, Azatlan, Atlanta, Tlan, Tolan, Tulan, and Tenochtitlan are all linguistically similar.
...
This period of development, starting 7,590 B.C. is remembered in Aztec legends as the beginning of the Age of the Third Sun - “The Age of the Red Haired People. These people are most likely a reformed fragment, from the survivors of Atlantis.

These people were the survivors of the second age who had come by ship from the east to the New World, settling in the area he called Botonchan; they encountered there giants who also survived the second age, and became enslaved by them.

Not only did the Age of Red heads end in America and Begin in Europe at this time, but it also marks the massive genetic bottleneck in East Asia when the Thais, Tibetans, Tlingit, Haida and Hawaiians dispersed from the Taiwanese people.

Many people seem to think that Celts influenced American culture and ancient petroglyphs and megalithic monuments may seem to suggest this, but what one is seeing here is a dispersal of culture not to America, but from America.

excuse the hurried cut and paste editing job. tried to sum up key points. but time is running out, and there is still a part of this that i have not read, including things like this:

Other Civilizations around the time of Atlantis - 9,500 year old City Found Underwater off India.

According to the BBC's Tom Housden, reporting on the Cambay find:

The vast city which is five miles long and two miles wide. It is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.

the above are all from this chapter:

http://www.users.on.net/~mkfenn/page9.htm

here are all the chapters of the paper:

http://www.users.on.net/~mkfenn/index.html

 

[nomadthethird]

The Y chromosome is so funny, it has so little variability. Men really are all the same. haha.

 

[Agent]

the quipu is really fascinating. it is a language system developed before cuneiform in peru. the language doesn't consist of visual signs or markings on a surface. It is based on colored knots of string that represent concepts and numbers. this was long before the mayan calendar system and all the crazy burroughs time-magic.

this would be the equivalent of a sentence. i think all abstract art prior to the modern period was based on spiritual experience and/or hallucinations. Kandinsky codified it all (incorrectly) according to colors and shapes - i wouldn't say spirituality is entirely absent in modern art like Malevich for example.

 

[polystyle]

Nice add Agent N ... cool

And then this kind of goes back to Zhao's ancient Iran - pre Iranians thread - onto the old Silk Road mixing grounds ...
The red haired mummies out West in China
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/world/asia/19mummy.html

 

[waffle]

The Y chromosome is so funny, it has so little variability. Men really are all the same. haha.

That's what the 'Imitation Game', the Turing Test, is really all about: not only are men 'all the same', they're so all the symbolic-machinic same that even the symbolic sequences of a computer interface are equally acceptable, so much so that computer science and AI are desperate to realise this ultimate symbolic order. I've just been reading Zizek's take on this: the Turing Test was really about sexual difference (and including a startling reference to Adorno's analysis of sonic hauntology from 80 years ago):

We all know of Alan Turing’s famous “imitation game” which should serve as the test if a machine can think: we communicate with two computer interfaces, asking them any imaginable question; behind one of the interfaces, there is a human person typing the answers, while behind the other, it is a machine. If, based on the answers we get, we cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, then, according to Turing, our failure proves that machines can think. What is a little bit less known is that in its first formulation, the issue was not to distinguish human from the machine, but man from woman, why this strange displacement from sexual difference to the difference between human and machine? Was this due to Turing’s simple eccentricity (recall his well-known troubles because of his homosexuality)? According to some interpreters, the point is to oppose the two experiments: a successful imitation of a woman’s responses by a man (or vice versa) would not prove anything, because the gender identity does not depend on the sequences of symbols, while a successful imitation of man by a machine would prove that this machine thinks, because “thinking” ultimately is the proper way of sequencing symbols… What if, however, the solution to this enigma is much more simple and radical? What if sexual difference is not simply a biological fact, but the Real of an antagonism that defines humanity, so that once sexual difference is abolished, a human being effectively becomes indistinguishable from a machine.

The further thing one should emphasize here is Turing’s blindness to the distinction between doing and saying: as many an interpreter has noticed, Turing simply had no sense for the properly SYMBOLIC domain of communication in sexuality, power politics, etc., in which language is used as a rhetorical device, with its referential meaning clearly subordinated to its performative dimension (of seduction, coercion, etc.). For Turing, there were ultimately only purely intellectual problems to be solved - in this sense, he was the ultimate “normal psychotic,” blinded for the sexual difference. The crucial intervention of the Turing test appears the moment we accept its basic dispositif, i.e. the loss of a stable embodiment, the disjunction between actually enacted and represented bodies: an irreducible gap is introduced between the “real” flesh-and-blood body behind the screen and its representation in the symbols that flicker on the computer screen. Such a disjunction is co-substantial with “humanity” itself: the moment a living being starts to speak, the medium of its speech (say, voice) is minimally disembodied, in the sense that it seems to originate not in the material reality of the body that we see, but in some invisible “inferiority” - a spoken word is always minimally the voice of a ventriloquist, a spectral dimension always reverberates in it. In short, one should claim that “humanity” as such ALWAYS-ALREADY WAS “posthuman” - therein resides the gist of Lacan’s thesis that the symbolic order is a parasitical machine which intrudes into and supplements a human being as its artificial prosthesis.

Of course, the standard feminist question to ask here is: is this erasure of the bodily attachment gender neutral, or is it secretly gendered, so that sexual difference does not concern only the actual enacted body behind the screen, but also the different relationship between the levels of representation and enactment? Is the masculine subject in its very notion disembodied, while the feminine subject maintains the umbilical cord to its embodiment? In “The Curves of the Needle,” a short essay on gramophone from 1928. [16] Adorno notes the fundamental paradox of recording: the more the machine makes its presence known (through obtrusive noises, its clumsiness and interruptions), the stronger the experience of the actual presence of the singer - or, to put it the other way round, the more perfect the recording, the more faithfully the machine reproduces a human voice, the more humanity is removed, the stronger the effect that we are dealing with something “inauthentic”. [17] This perception is to be linked to Adorno’s famous “antifeminist” remark according to which a woman’s voice cannot be properly recorded, since it demands the presence of her body, in contrast to a man’s voice which can exert its full power as disembodied - do we not encounter here a clear case of the ideological notion of sexual difference in which man is a disembodied Spirit-Subject, while woman remains anchored in her body? However, these statements are to be read against the background of Adorno’s notion of feminine hysteria as the protest of subjectivity against reification: the hysterical subject is essentially in-between, no longer fully identified to her body, not yet ready to assume the position of the disembodied speaker (or, with regard to mechanical reproduction: no longer the direct presence of the “living voice,” not yet its perfect mechanical reproduction). Subjectivity is not the immediate living self-presence we attain when we shed away the distorting mechanical reproduction; it is rather that remainder of “authenticity” whose traces we can discern in an imperfect mechanical reproduction. In short, the subject is something that “will have been” in its imperfect representation. Adorno’s thesis that a woman’s voice cannot be properly recorded, since it demands the presence of her body, thus effectively asserts feminine hysteria (and not the disembodied male voice) as the original dimension of subjectivity: in woman’s voice, the painful process of disembodiment continues to reverberate, its traces are not yet obliterated. In Kierkegaard’s terms, sexual difference is the difference between “being” and “becoming”: man and woman are both disembodied; however, while a man directly assumes disembodiment as an achieved state, feminine subjectivity stands for the disembodiment “in becoming.”

From Masturbation, or Sexuality in the Atonal World

Post-production: forgot to add some audio-visual clarification of the concluding paragraph above:

 

[Mr. Tea]

That's what the 'Imitation Game', the Turing Test, is really all about: not only are men 'all the same', they're so all the symbolic-machinic same that even the symbolic sequences of a computer interface are equally acceptable, so much so that computer science and AI are desperate to realise this ultimate symbolic order. I've just been reading Zizek's take on this: the Turing Test was really about sexual difference (and including a startling reference to Adorno's analysis of sonic hauntology from 80 years ago):

Oh, but of course: and Shannon's Source Coding Theorem is actually a sublimated Oedipal complex, and Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem is a really about castration anxiety, and the Axiom of Choice is an incredibly subtle critique of consumerism, and, and.....

 

[jambo]

Somewhere in a room there is a Chinese speaking person using an elaborate system of punch cards in an attempt to determine if the previous post was composed by a human Mr. Tea, a Ms. Tea or a computer manipulating symbols in a suitably convincing Tea-esque mode, and whether any of these constitute actual intelligence or not.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Bah, lumbled!

 

[nomadthethird]

Very cool, Agent. (I like your blog, btw).

That's what the 'Imitation Game', the Turing Test, is really all about: not only are men 'all the same', they're so all the symbolic-machinic same that even the symbolic sequences of a computer interface are equally acceptable, so much so that computer science and AI are desperate to realise this ultimate symbolic order. I've just been reading Zizek's take on this: the Turing Test was really about sexual difference (and including a startling reference to Adorno's analysis of sonic hauntology from 80 years ago):



Post-production: forgot to add some audio-visual clarification of the concluding paragraph above:

When I took cog sci, I paid someone else to make my turing machine.

Did Zizek churn out a book about this or is the internet to only place to look for this stuff?

P.S. I'm reminded that I should probably read some Houellebecq

 

[nomadthethird]

In short, one should claim that “humanity” as such ALWAYS-ALREADY WAS “posthuman” - therein resides the gist of Lacan’s thesis that the symbolic order is a parasitical machine which intrudes into and supplements a human being as its artificial prothesis.

How long have I been waiting to read this sentence?

<3 Zizek

 

[nomadthethird]

my limbic system is confused, it can't decide whether i love or hate Zizek for being so goddamn smart and articulate

 

[Agent]

Very cool, Agent. (I like your blog, btw).



When I took cog sci, I paid someone else to make my turing machine.

Did Zizek churn out a book about this or is the internet to only place to look for this stuff?

P.S. I'm reminded that I should probably read some Houellebecq

Thanks nomad, always enjoyed your posts. Zizek talks about the Turing test in The Parallax View - it seemed like he came to all kinds of contradictory conclusions. There's a section on cognitive psychology (Varela, memes, evolutionary psych). I tend to lean toward the idea that we're made up of independent, self-contained sub-units in the mind. I had a discussion a few years ago with Howard Bloom about this - we decided the brain is like a crowded room where everyone is competing for attention: conflicting memes, values, drives, desires (in the lacanian sense of orbiting around a lack or absence). I think all the rules of a network would have to apply to the brain, so you would have connectedness, the six-degree phenomenon, emergence, complexity, closed-systems, feedback loops, etc. From an abstract/modeling perspective i guess you can map out cogntion but not its full range of causes and affects/effects. To me AI would be like consciousness without reference to time or causality - maybe something like dreaming.

 

[waffle]

Oh, but of course: and Shannon's Source Coding Theorem is actually a sublimated Oedipal complex, and Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem is a really about castration anxiety, and the Axiom of Choice is an incredibly subtle critique of consumerism, and, and.....

Oh, yes of course. Have you actually ever read anything by Alan Turing? (Or Freud for that matter?) Or the article in which his game was first formulated?

The very first sentence in Turing's paper from 1950, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, is "I propose to consider the question, 'Can Machines Think?', a question which he then proceeds to technically reformulate into a series of subordinate questions that result from the playing of a rarefied game of illusion in clinically controlled laboratory conditions.

First the initial formulation of the game: "The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the "imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." ... The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms ... It is A's object in the game to try to cause C to make the wrong identification ... The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. "

Zizek, therefore, is quite correct to state, as previously quoted, that Turing's original 'imitation game' was concerned with sexual difference, and then further, that of comparing the symbolic output of computing machinery with the 'intellectual capacities' of a man:

The reformulated test: "We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often as when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can Machines Think?" ... The new problem has the advantage of drawing a fairly sharp line between the physical and the intellectual capacities of a man."

-----Quoted from Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind, Vol. LIX, No. 236, (1950).

 

[waffle]

To me AI would be like consciousness without reference to time or causality - maybe something like dreaming.

That's the ... unconscious, the real, that which eludes formalization. And the existence of which is denied by (at least by 'hard') AI researchers.

 

[Agent]

That's the ... unconscious, the real, that which eludes formalization. And the existence of which is denied by (at least by 'hard') AI researchers.

i've studied a bit of Lacan and I like the analogy. In Seminar XI I think Lacan says something to the effect of "the real of the unconscious is sexual reality"... which would certainly be denied by most AI researchers. But i'm not sure if by reality here he means the real (that which eludes represenation) or reality (by his definition: a montage of words and images). One thing i was never clear on: is the unconscious Symbolic, Imaginary, or Real? It seems like a fundamental problem but i'm not sure if (or where) Lacan addresses it.

 

[Slothrop]

Kind of relevant to the OP, a vaguely middlebrow BBC prog about medieval Islamic science. It's interesting in that it provides some light historical context and talks about why the Islamic empire was able to do so much cool stuff - primarily because it provided a language of scholarship across half the world, allowing for exchange of ideas between scientists and philosophers from traditions from india to greece - as well as just telling us yet again about the origins of the words 'algorithm' and 'algebra.'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00gksx4