Saul Paul Sirag takes us through many of the ideas and principles that Robert Anton Wilson explored in both his fiction, and non-fiction. Physics and Consciousness.
I was lucky to also interview Saul in San Francisco, 18 years ago.
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Showing posts with label John Von Neumann. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Von Neumann. Show all posts
SEMIOTIC MACHINES: by Louis Armand (Joyce, McLuhan, Shannon, Weiner, Von Neumann)
SEMIOTIC MACHINES: by Louis Armand, presents a number of passages that see James Joyce, McLuhan, Shannon, Weiner, Von Neumann, criss-crossing and pollinating the tale of the tribe with a Joycean, atomic, digital glossing. Also invoking Orson Welles through the reference to expanded cinema of Gene Yougblood, this essay exhibits the highest standards of critical writing on Joyce IMHO, and in the kind of prose i would like to see utilized to help explicate the questions of the tale of the tribe as defined by Robert Anton Wilson, Ezra Pound, Buckminster Fuller, and Joyce.--Steve fly
Above all, the importance of Joyce for McLuhan resides in the decisive role of Finnegans Wake in re-defining the late stages of print culture and the advent of digiculture (the so-called “postmodern moment”). In this sense, Joyce’s text assumes a pre-eminent status among the agents and historians of late modernity—among them John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion—and, along with the Mallarméan critique of the book and Marcel Duchamp’s satirisation of mechanical rationalism, the Wake becomes something of a benchmark in the early discourse of cyberspace.
Joyce’s technique of “verbivocovisual presentement”(5)—reprising the symbolist preoccupation with effects of synaesthesia—bears directly upon the conceptualisation of virtual reality and emersive signifying environments. Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970?), which proposes the integration of computing technology and other forms of telecommunications for the synaesthetic and syncretistic expansion of film, is heavily indebted to McLuhan’s reading of Finnegans Wake in Understanding Media (1964) and The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). “The stripping of the senses and the interruption of their interplay in tactile synaesthesia,” McLuhan writes, “may well have been one of the effects of the Gutenberg technology”—of which Finnegans Wake is considered a kind of apotheosis.(6)
http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v8/main/essays.php?essay=armand
CYBERNETICS: WEINER AND VON NEUMANN WIKI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics
Cybernetics as a discipline was firmly established by Wiener, McCulloch and others, such as W. Ross Ashby and W. Grey Walter. Walter was one of the first to build autonomous robots as an aid to the study of animal behaviour. Together with the US and UK, an important geographical locus of early cybernetics was France.
In the spring of 1947, Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held in Nancy, France. The event was organized by the Bourbaki, a French scientific society, and mathematician Szolem Mandelbrojt (1899–1983), uncle of the world-famous mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot.
John von Neumann
During this stay in France, Wiener received the offer to write a
manuscript on the unifying character of this part of applied
mathematics, which is found in the study of Brownian motion
and in telecommunication engineering. The following summer, back in the
United States, Wiener decided to introduce the neologism cybernetics
into his scientific theory. The name cybernetics was coined to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms" and was popularized through his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (Hermann & Cie, Paris, 1948). In the UK this became the focus for the Ratio Club.
In the early 1940s John von Neumann, although better known for his work in mathematics and computer science, did contribute a unique and unusual addition to the world of cybernetics: Von Neumann cellular automata, and their logical follow up the Von Neumann Universal Constructor. The result of these deceptively simple thought-experiments was the concept of self replication which cybernetics adopted as a core concept. The concept that the same properties of genetic reproduction applied to social memes, living cells, and even computer viruses is further proof of the somewhat surprising universality of cybernetic study.
Wiener popularized the social implications of cybernetics, drawing analogies between automatic systems (such as a regulated steam engine) and human institutions in his best-selling The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society (Houghton-Mifflin, 1950).
While not the only instance of a research organization focused on cybernetics, the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, under the direction of Heinz von Foerster, was a major center of cybernetic research for almost 20 years, beginning in 1958.
Cybernetics as a discipline was firmly established by Wiener, McCulloch and others, such as W. Ross Ashby and W. Grey Walter. Walter was one of the first to build autonomous robots as an aid to the study of animal behaviour. Together with the US and UK, an important geographical locus of early cybernetics was France.
In the spring of 1947, Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held in Nancy, France. The event was organized by the Bourbaki, a French scientific society, and mathematician Szolem Mandelbrojt (1899–1983), uncle of the world-famous mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot.
In the early 1940s John von Neumann, although better known for his work in mathematics and computer science, did contribute a unique and unusual addition to the world of cybernetics: Von Neumann cellular automata, and their logical follow up the Von Neumann Universal Constructor. The result of these deceptively simple thought-experiments was the concept of self replication which cybernetics adopted as a core concept. The concept that the same properties of genetic reproduction applied to social memes, living cells, and even computer viruses is further proof of the somewhat surprising universality of cybernetic study.
Wiener popularized the social implications of cybernetics, drawing analogies between automatic systems (such as a regulated steam engine) and human institutions in his best-selling The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society (Houghton-Mifflin, 1950).
While not the only instance of a research organization focused on cybernetics, the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, under the direction of Heinz von Foerster, was a major center of cybernetic research for almost 20 years, beginning in 1958.
RAW V.A.L.I.S JOYCE & HOLO-GRAMIC PROSE?
"One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot. --JAMES JOYCE, Referring to Finnegans Wake in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver (1926-11-24)"
I have a playman's or better yet ploughman's interest in physics, science and the paranormal, once again due for the most part to Dr. Robert Anton Wilson.
I was fortunate to meet many of the bright characters from the Berkeley Based Physics Consciousness Research Institute, where RAW was a somewhat regular alumni, with an irregular illumi.
I recently joined the new and improved http://www.stardrive.org/ a surprisingly interactive website hosted by Jack Sarfatti and friends, and a site I would suggest anyone interested in the physics-consciousness oriented writing of Robert Anton Wilson pay a visit. My interview with equally brilliant and Maverick thinker - Saul Paul Sirag - has been linked from said website to my surprise.
Here I'll simply contribute a number of papers available, or excerpts, that I feel help frame my interpretation of some of the content at stardrive.org and compare with some of the RAW's interpretations, if I may be so bold.
Philip K. Dick writes:
"Someday I'm going to get my artricle published; I'm going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn't exist until centuries after James Joyce's era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I'll be famous forever. --Philp K. Dick, The Divine Invasion.
Robert Anton Wilson writes:
"As Bucky Fuller was quick to point out, the development of Information Theory by Shannon and Weiner enables us to see the human mind as the greatest synergy-machine, the greatest tool for doing-more-with-less, in this part of the universe.
Fuller points out that knowledge can only increase (except for tragedies like brain damage in an individual or totalitarianism in a society.) As our communication skills and information processing improve, human knowledge as a whole accelerates synergistically. Therefore, both hard and soft technologies accelerate – ideas and tools both change faster, faster, faster.--Robert Anton Wilson"
Please excuse the age and mixed context of these google-book I-FRAME presentations. Yet acting as a great resource and hub of helpful footnotes and research, we hope.
Gravitation and cosmology: from the Hubble radius to the Planck scale ...
By Richard L. Amoroso, Jean-Pierre Vigier, Geoffrey Hunter
The singularity is near: when humans transcend biology
By Ray Kurzweil
Developments in quantum physics.
By Frank H. Columbus
Our Superstring Universe: Strings, Branes, Extra Dimensions and Superstring ...
By Jr. L. E. Lewis
Explorations beyond the machine: a philosophy of social science for the post ...
By Ian Trevor King
Extreme Physics
By Scientific American (COR), Rosen Publishing Group
Cosmic catastrophes: exploding stars, black holes, and mapping the universe
By J. Craig Wheeler
And now, what I feel is one of the most important ingrediants to making star Trek real; Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and HOLOGRAMIC PROSE.
The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce's ...
By James S. Atherton
AND FINALLY, FROM WIKIPEDIA:
Holographic principle:
The holographic principle is a property of quantum gravity and string theories which states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region—preferably a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed by Gerard 't Hooft, it was given a precise string-theory interpretation by Leonard Susskind.
In a larger and more speculative sense, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be seen as a two-dimensional information structure "painted" on the cosmological horizon, such that the three dimensions we observe are only an effective description at macroscopic scales and at low energies. Cosmological holography has not been made mathematically precise, partly because the cosmological horizon has a finite area and grows with time.[1][2]
The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics, which implies that the maximal entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, and not cubed as might be expected. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the description of all the objects which have fallen in can be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
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