New Center for Post-natural History to open in Pittsburg

http://grist.org/list/new-center-for-postnatural-history-is-a-museum-of-human-influence-on-nature/

The cosmologist Lawrence Krauss joins a chorus of scientists trying to explain how the universe could be born from, if not nothing, something close to it. http://nyti.ms/w0j6F7

google glasses

http://archinect.com/news/article/39236405/google-glasses-adding-a-virtual-layer-to-the-physical-environment

Jean-Luc Godard's 1956 film Alphaville makes several references to Jorge Borges's essay, "A New Refutation of Time," in which Borges makes an argument against the existence of time. 


"Every instant is autonomous. Not vengeance nor pardon nor jails nor even oblivion can modify the invulnerable past. No less vain to my mind are hope and fear, for they always refer to future events, that is, to events which will not happen to us, who are the diminutive present. They tell me that the present, the “specious present” of the psychologists, lasts between several seconds and the smallest fraction of a second, which is also how long the history of the universe lasts. O better, there is no such thing as “the life of a man,” nor even “one night in his life.” Each moment we live exists, not the imaginary sum of those moments.
....
Let us consider a life in which repetitions abound: my life, for instance. I never pass the Recoleta cemetary without remembering that my father, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents are buried there, as I shall be; then I remember that I have remembered the same thing many times before; I cannot stroll around the outskirts of my neighborhood in the solitude of night without thinking that night is pleasing to us because, like memory, it erases idle details; I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without reflecting how one loses what one really never had...
These tautologies (and others I shall not disclose) are my whole life. Naturally, they recur without design; they are variations of emphasis, temperature, light, general psychological state. I suspect, nonetheless, that the number of circumstantial variants is not infinite: we can postulate, in the mind of an individual (or of two individuals who do not know each other but in whom the same process is operative), two identical moments. Once this identity is postulated, we may ask: Are not these identical moments the same moment? Is not one single repeated terminal point enough to disrupt and confound the series in time [(or) the history of the world, to reveal that there is no such history]? Are the enthusiasts who devote themselves to a line of Shakespeare not literally Shakespeare?" http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2009/02/13/a-new-refutation-of-time-selections-j-l-borges/

Borges plays with the concept of time and the dichotomy of the individual in two of his short stories: "Borges and I" and "The Other." In the latter, Borges coexists as himself as a young man and an old man. "While the younger man cites his romantic vision about a brotherhood of man, the older Borges reveals his doubt about the existence of a single man. Following incorrect information that the first provides, elder Borges concludes that it is a real episode for him, but a dream for the younger." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_(short_story)

This duplicity also brought to mind the unusual experiences of Philip K. Dick.
"Throughout February and March 1974, Dick experienced a series of visions, which he referred to as "2-3-74". As the visions increased in length and frequency, Dick claimed he began to live a double life, one as himself, "Philip K. Dick", and one as "Thomas", a Christian persecuted by Romans in the 1st century AD." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick

image by DeviantArt

Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a 1985 novel by Haruki Murakami, intertwines two narratives, which explore concepts of consciousness, the unconscious mind and identity. These themes thrive within alternative constructs of existence. The landscapes are strange and intriguing. Data, systems control, and the essential nature of the human mind are all reevaluated through Murakami's storytelling lens. 
The novel is clearly influenced by science fiction and cyberpunk, though it is not considered as belonging to either of these classifications. "The theme of the human brain storing encrypted data is found in William Gibson's short story Johnny Mnemonic, but in interviews Murakami says this was not an influence." http://www.worldpress.org/0801books1.htm

The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

Jorge Luis Borges, from Otras Inquisiciones

Translated by Will Fitzgerald

I have checked, and the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica has dropped its article on John Wilkins. This makes sense when you think of how trivial the article is—20 lines of purely biographical facts: Wilkins was born in 1614, Wilkins died in 1672, Wilkins was chaplain for Charles Louise, Elector Palatine; Wilkins was named rector of one of the colleges at Oxford, Wilkins was the first Secretary of the Royal Society of London, etc. It is wrong, though, if we consider Wilkins's speculative work. He was abundantly curious: he was interested in theology, cryptography, music, the fabrication of transparent beehives, the orbit of an invisible planet, the possibility of traveling to the moon, the possibility of, and the principles underlying, a universal language. To this last problem he dedicated his book Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (600 pages in quarto, 1668). Our National Library does not have a copy of this book; I have consulted, to write this note, The Life and Times of John Wilkins (1910), by P.A. Wright Henderson; the Wörterbuch der Philosophie (1924), by Fritz Mauthner; Delphos (1935) by E. Sylvia Pankhurst; andDangerous Thoughts (1939), by Lancelot Hogben.

Everyone, at some time, has had to endure one of those never-ending debates with someone, who, with copious interjections and locutions, insists that—say—the Spanish word "luna" is more (or less) expressive than the English word "moon." Apart from the obvious observation that the monosyllabic "moon" is perhaps more apt to represent such a simple object in contrast to the bisyllabic "luna," rhere is nothing one can add to these debates—discounting invented words and their derivations, all of the languages of the world (not excepting Johann Martin Schleyer's Volapük and Peano's Interlingua) are equally inexpressive. There is no edition of the Royal Academy's Gramática that does not ponder "the enviable treasure of picturesque, felicitous and expressive voice of the rhythmic Spanish language," but this is mere swagger without support. Still, this self-same Royal Academy every few years produces a dictionary that define how Spanish sounds—In the universal language that Wilkins invented at the beginning of the 17th century, every word contains its own definition. Descartes, in a letter dated November 1629, had already noted that, by means of a decimal numbering system, one could learn in a single day to name every quantity up to infinity and write them in a new language made up of figures¹; he also proposed the creation of an analogous language which would be general, organizing and including every human thought. John Wilkins, about 1664, undertook to complete this enterprise.

He divided the universe into forty categories or genera, subdivided into differences, each subdivided into its own species. To every genus he assigned a monosyllable of two letters; for every difference, a consonant; for every species, a vowel. For example: de, that is, an element; deb, the first of the elements, fire; deba a part of the element of fire, a flame. In the analogical language of Letellier (1850), a, that is, animal; ab, mammal; abo, carnivore; aboj, feline; aboje, cat; abi, herbivore; abiv, equine, etc. In the language of Bonifacio Sotos Ochando (1845) imaba means building; imaca palace; imafe, hospital; imafo, lazaretto; imela, house; imego, a post; imede, a pillar; imego, floor; imela, ceiling; imogo, window; bire, a bookbinder; birer, bookbinding (I owe this final list to a book printed in Buenos Aires in 1886; El Curso de lengua universal, by Dr. Pedro Mata).

The words in the Analytic Language of John Wilkins are not awkwardly created arbitrary symbols; every one of its letters is significant, just as the cabalists treat the letters in Holy Scripture. Mauthner observes that children could learn this language without knowing it is artificial; later, in school, they would discover that it is also a universal key and a secret encyclopaedia.

I have defined Wilkins's method without examining a problem that is impossible or at least difficult to postpone: the value in the quadragesimal table that forms the basis of the language. Let us consider the eight category, that ofminerals. Wilkins divides these into common (silica, gravel, slate), useful (marble, amber, coral), precious (pearls, opals), transparent (amethyst, sapphire) and insoluble (coal, chalk and arsenic). Almost as alarming as the eight category is the ninth. This describes metals that could be imperfect (cinnabar, quicksilver), artificial (bronze, brass),recremental (lime, rust) and natural (gold, tin, copper). Beauty²The whale figures in category sixteen; it is a viviparous, oblong fish.

These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies recall those that Dr. Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese dictionary entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its remote pages it is written that animals can be divided into (a) those belonging to the Emperor, (b) those that are embalmed, (c) those that are tame, (d) pigs, (e) sirens, (f) imaginary animals, (g) wild dogs, (h) those included in this classification, (i) those that are crazy-acting (j), those that are uncountable (k) those painted with the finest brush made of camel hair, (l) miscellaneous, (m) those which have just broken a vase, and (n) those which, from a distance, look like flies. The Bibliographic Institute of Brussels practices this chaos: they have partitioned the universe into 1000 subdivisions, number 262 corresponds to the Pope; #282, to the Catholic Religion; #263, the day of the Lord; #268, to the dominical schools; #298, to Mormonism; and #294 to Brahmanism, Buddhism, Shintoism and Taoism. It doesn't mind heterogeneous subdivisions, for example, #179: "Cruelty to animals. Prevention of cruelty to animals. Duels and suicide from the moral point of view. Vices and various defects. Virtues and various qualities."

I have catalogued the arbitrarities of Wilkins, of the unknown (or apocryphal) Chinese encyclopaedia writer and of the Bibliographic Institute of Brussels; it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is. "The world," writes David Hume, "is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779)." But we can go further than that, to go on to suspect that there is no universe in a unified, organic sense, denoted by this ambitious word. If this is the case, it fails to support its intention; it fails to supply the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms out of the secret dictionary of God.

The impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe does not, however, dissuade us from planning human schemes, even though we know they must be provisional. The Analytic Language of Wilkins is not the least admirable of these schemes. The genera and species that compose it are contradictory and vague; the artifice that the letters of the language indicate subdivisions and divisions is, without a doubt, ingenious. The word salmon tells us nothing, zana, its corresponding word, defines (for one well-versed in the forty categories and the genera of these categories) a scaled, fluvial fish of rose-colored flesh. (Theoretically, it is not inconceivable to have a language in which the name of each being indicates all of the details of its destiny, both past and future).

Dreams and utopias apart, the most lucidly anyone has written about language are in these words by Chesterton: "He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest... Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semitones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises that denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire (G.F. Watts, p. 88, 1904)."

---

¹ Theoretically, there are an unlimited number of numeration systems. The most complete system (to be used by divine beings and angels) registers an infinite number of symbols, one for each number; the simplest only requires two. Zero is written 0; one 1, two, 10, three 11, four 100, five 101, six 110, seven 111, eight 1000, etc. This was invented by Leibniz, who was (it seems) motivated by the secret hexagrams of the I Ching.

² It's been pointed out a couple of times to me that, in Borges' original, the word translated as "whales" here is 'bellena' (whale), not 'belleza' (beauty), and so I correct it. Thanks to Justin Bur (who first pointed it out—in 2005!—and Douglas Crockford, who prompted me to make the change (Translator's note).

http://entish.org/

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