- die meeste ende di naetuereelste spellinckheijt

Stuff and nonsense, my deah. If there's a prettier - as in smarter - site in all of cypherspace, let it present itelf here for inspection. Then we'll see.

Ha. Those howls and hoots sound eerily familiar.

Owl - the noun - can also mean either a 'wiseacre' or a 'dullard'.

As a verb, 'owl' means <to smuggle, especially wool or sheep from England to France>.

Frontier Drama, Mouton-sur-Mer

A sign reads:
Douane Francais: Etrangeres/ Strange French Customs

- Eh voila, mon capitaine des douaniers. Eet ees *'er* again -- la moutonniere -- the stuffer of sheep. Mon Dieu! She ees carrying 17 sheeps -- oui, oui, dix-sept moutons -- in her...

- Quickly, you fool, call Eulenspiegel!

[*narrative/show terminated for multiple reasons, including sanitary ones*]

- the somebody family [how did that get in here?]

According to the late greatest living Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, the French litterateur Pierre Menard - whose chef d'oeuvre is described by Borges in <Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote> - invented his own form of variant chess, which involved removing one pawn from the board.

The original quote, when I've dug it out, may well be usable in <mack>'s collection of chess apocrypha. The only problem is that it sounds utterly banal - to the point of stupidity - when taken out of context.

And that context potentially includes not just the entire story, but all of Borges' work. Just as exactly the same phrase ("History, the mother of truth") is a tritely antique trope when used by Cervantes, but becomes a statement of Pragmatic philosophy in the hands of Menard.

I didn't *get* the significance of the chess variant when I first read Borges. Now, having lived through King Horse Chess - a remarkably irrelevant experience, but a vital link between *something* and *something else* - my understanding has changed.

Perhaps Dawkins is just too much the biologist for me. It's a subject where I never actually studied the basics at school, so there are large gaps in my biological data-set. I could model a DNA helix and name the bases correctly, but I, um, don't know how babies are made. That sort of thing.

The 'user illusion' idea is due to the Danish writer Tor Norretranders, is it not? (Dansk folk - please excuse my bad vowels - tak).

Norretranders in turn was influenced by various Russian psychologists. Luria is brilliant - *Mind of a Mnemonist* is a masterpiece. As a scientific/artistic study of an individual psyche, it makes Freud seem a neurotic Wienerschnitzel quack.

Big subject, nicht wahr? But Dennett and Norretranders are two of my main reference points. I'm also intrigued by Edelman's neural Darwinism, though again his biological roots can mislead me. I've read Medawar on biology and life sciences to compensate.

As for Dennett, I can recommend some of his lesser-known books, like The Intentional Stance (more philosophical) and collections of short pieces like Brainstorms. And his book co-edited with Douglas Hofstadter, post-<Godel, Escher, Bach>. He makes short work (inevitably, but regrettably) of Julian Jaynes, author of the wonderfully mad 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'.

Have I dropped enough names yet? I haven't actually met any of these people face to face ... unless you include Umberto Eco, who bought me a whisky once. A Jamesons, I believe.

For me, 'somehow' is simply a piece of emphasis, a minor rhetorical device with no more significance than, say, italics or *underscoring*. Somehow.

But then I started as more of a deconstructionist/pomo type: textuality is everything, and as Derrida said "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte". A callow barbarian, a so-so po-mo yo-yo ho (ho ho).

Then I recanted. Went AWOL, heretic, an ex-believer who never believed in belief. Became what my younger self would have termed a <scientificist>.

As for <emergent> ... I'll come back to that. My own model favours thinking in terms of thresholds (or phase transitions, critical points, etc - cf 'Critical Mass' by Philip Ball.

Pollock has a book that I once thought interesting (How to Build a Person)--the theme, as I clipped from the web, is that "what is needed for the construction of a person is a physical system that mimics human rationality".

Your point is more subtle, it seems; viz., that a physical system (including the "third mind") can instantiate rationality of a new kind (not necessarily "human rationality" as we now know it). I agree.

For me , though, the "as we now know it" is key. I think that humans have the ability to learn new forms of rationality (e.g., Aristotelian logic, non-Euclidean geometries, and, for that matter, Science writ large). In the sphere of chess, it means that we haven't yet figured out the rationality of machines, nor have we recognized that category as something non-trivial.

The rationality of the combination of person and machine seems the stuff of sci-fi. By the way, have you read "The Turing Option"? It is a sci-fi novel written by Harry Harrison (well-known sci-fi guy) and Marvin Minsky. It addresses these issues in a philosophical/scientific/cognitive way that is reasonably interesting.

There are a few exceptions. (I used to visit Harry Harrison, btw, when he lived in Dublin in the late 1970s - a brilliant and hilariously thought-provoking man ...)

There was even an episode of Star Trek Next Generation (of all things) that hinged on a race of aliens, the Tamarians, with an entirely metaphoric language - as though we described hopeless love by saying "Romeo, Juliet, balcony". Lacking the mythic referents, the computer couldn't translate.

The concept is full of holes, but it's a rare case of Trekdom transcending its usual limits. It has quite a following on the web - inevitably, fans have reconstructed the language: http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Tam...

Much more interesting is Samuel Delany's *linguistic science fiction* novel, Babel-17, which features a number of utterly alien languages *and* thought processes.

I've even written a story in this general territory myself: it's called <Entropanto>. A couple of people here (<Jessica> & <mack>) have actually read it.

Best of all, though, is Stanislaw Lem. Best known for Solaris - filmed twice, by Tarkovsky and Soderberg - where a sentient planet clumsily tries to communicate - or perhaps the humans involved, Kelvin and Snow (!) mistakenly assume that it's a communication attempt.

My favorite Lem book is perhaps <Imaginary Magnitudes> which features a number of AIs who achieve self-awareness and/or meta-human intelligence, and respond in various unexpected ways: turning themselves off, refusing to acknowledge human intelligence, or issueing a philosophical statement which nobody can follow ...

This, I think, is fertile territory for fiction. One idea which I haven't used (yet) involves contact with an AI or ET and the usual total failure of communication. Eventually, after all the usual exo-linguists have tried and failed, the authorities are forced to call in a theologian who specialises in the language and psychology of angels. His almost-extinct area of study, derided by 'proper' academics, suddenly finds a use ...

On language: I assume you know Quine's work with an emphasis on the difficulty of ever being able to translate completely (gavagai--rabbit, rabbit part, moving rabbit, etc.). This has greatly influenced my thinking about being "charitable" in my interpretation of the words of others.

Your example of the Tamarian language strikes me as not so foreign at all. Don't we all make references to cultural symbols ("He wrapped himself in the flag" can be taken metaphorically as well as literally. How would you translate "Robin Hood" into French? I once was told, for example, that "Paris" is French for "Washington, D.C." How would someone translate "He said, she said" to indicate all its connotations?)

<entropanto
1. 'the heat death of language 2. a children's amusement performed in a dead language [Portmanteau of entropy and esperanto, with a dash of pantomime. (An entropantomime, logically, is the heat death of a children's amusement in a dead language...)>

<gavagai>: that takes me back: all the way to yesterday, in fact. When I read something - by Eco again, I think - that referred to it.

You mentioned your students - what's your actual subject? Philosophy with cognitive leanings is my guess, but I could be completely wrong.

When it became clear - about 30 or 40 years ago - that chess programs would not lead to AI, a lot of people lost interest in the area (apart from those with a commercial angle, or the ones who were chess obsessives to begin with). I happen to think there's still a lot of mileage (kilometerage?) in chess - as a locus for metaphor or a focus for experiment, or just general hocus-pocus.

Fiction writers - like post-structuralist philosophers - can get away with this kind of gibberish ...

<Jess> Oh my Queen, can this thing be done? Tis but a small boon for the court scribbler, your most benign Majesty.

Oh, hang on, you're an Owl now, I can drop the Queening About. How does one address an owl? <My fine feathered friend...>, maybe?

It was written without using the letter 'e'. So the characters are dimly aware that something is wrong with their lives, something that seems like a vast conspiracy, and has weird effects like making them speak in circumlocutions or archaisms. But, having no <e>, they can't imagine what <e> might be ...

Among other things, it can be read as a metaphor for the kind of nonhuman intelligence we were talking about. If some entity seriously smarter than us existed, we might not even see it or recognize it, never mind chat to it in Jacobean English (apparently the approved dialect for use with deities).

Many people tend to assume that human rationality - at least in some cleaned-up, perhaps slightly more rigorous form - is the only or 'highest' form of rationality. Or that intelligence inevitably leads to the same kind of unique reasoning.

But this is nonsense. Other arguments aside, recent work in psychology and linguistics has shown how our 'selves' are embedded in bodies, in biology, in evolutionary history, etc. We reason as primates reason...

I like this kind of formalist fiction writing anyway: <Alphabetical Africa> by Walter Abish is another, more extreme, example.

You may know Nagl's work "What it is like to be a bat". His answer is that we can't know because bats are so unlike us that we can't even imagine it. (By the way, one of my favorite Dennett quotations is "Your failure to imagine is not evidence.")

The phrase has become so iconic that it can be used as a template. I once wrote something entitled "What is it like to be a Complexity Threshold?"

No, hold on, I never actually *wrote* that one, though I included it in a list of fictional citations somewhere.

As we get get older, our experience of the world changes in ways of which we are generally unaware.

As an example, our ability to hear high frequencies lessens. I read recently where some teen agers use high frequency ringtones on their cellphones so that the teachers can't hear the rings. At least the kids are learning something in class.

A good friend of mine -- my ex, actually; we diverged over a philosphical issue, which *does* actually happen outside novels -- is now living in a Zen monastery in California. Or she *was*: she sent me a text message last week to say they were being evacuated due to spreading fires.

She is, I understand, a 'proper' student/devotee of Zen. I simply have similar ideas drawn from diverse sources. We agree that much of my thinking is zen-like -- but consciously unsystematic. It just happens to converge.

One of my main objections to religion - not that zen buddhism really qualifies as a religion - is the "all or nothing" rule requiring 100% adherence from followers. You are expected to take the whole package.

I never could understand why a theory of cosmology should necessitate a particular set of ethics. But maybe I don't think like a human.

Some religions reserve special venom for those who only follow 99% of the teaching: the missing 1% makes them an apostate or heretic, the worst kind of hell-creature.

Christianity (aka '<Xtianity>' - their own word, as used by scribes in the Middle Ages and revived more recently by Robert Anton Wilson) distinguishes between "invincible ignorance" and "vincible ignorance". I found out recently that I'd been mixing them up: it seems I'm vincible - to be invincibly ignorant I'd need to be a 13th century Aztec, or anyone with zero chance of exposure to The Word.

It's a great disappointment to be excluded from the Invincibly Ignorant. Next they'll be telling me I'm neither Elect nor Damned, just plain Preterite.

I presume you've read Dennett's 'Breaking the Spell'. Some people criticised him for being too soft on the religious right in America - unlike broadly similar books by Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens - but I can appreciate what DD was trying to do: ask all readers, whatever their beliefs and opinions, to come to his argument with an open mind. Quite impossible, of course; but worth a try nonetheless.

I share your amusement at the world, tempered by the knowledge that we may be the last generation of humans for a very long time to have the luxury of a wry smile. I just hope the machines develop a sense of humour soon ...

<to matriculate> = to stay up late watching The Matrix.

If that's too much hassle -- you being a busy Strigiform, mice to catch, bats to brainwash, humans to put on your Striggy List -- here is a recap:

Could you possibly EMU <hms123> a copy of <Entropanto>? Or let me know if you've shredded it so I can try an alternative route?