“ACTION”
Grace Slick has
a quote in Somebody To Love? (Warner, 1998) on the 50s stars who influenced
her, like Betty Grable
behaving in a
primarily offensive, often masculine way and producing slapstick results. No
heavy feminist stuff, no serious reprimands. Just a series of entertaining
events, showcasing the character’s comedic qualities and instinct for following
her whims.. I clearly was influenced by the do-it-yourself heroines I’d watched
as a child. They took it all without viewing “it” as something that needed a
great deal of support to handle. Consequently, in the early sixties, when women
started telling me I should join “the Cause”, that we should stand up for each
other, march in DC and so forth, I thought that was about as interesting as
joining the Daughters of the American Revolution. It seemed like a new slant on
an old Tupperware party. (page 5,6,7)
Women stars of
that era were fragrant but could act in a mannish manner, like Katherine
Hepburn. In our political days women have sold out to a vague idea of
uniformity that Slick seems to abhor. Being completely un-political about it
means being politically incorrect, so here goes!
I was wondering
through the park on a sunny day, and appreciating the artistic shadows thrown
by fronds on the grass, as well as the dark embrace of a grove of field maple trees
(poetic, huh?) It struck me then that the shade cast by foliage is cool and
damp, shapely, succulent as well as being a lifesaver for animals of the
desert.
This womblike,
watery sense is womanly. Not only that, it’s a lifesaver not only if you’re in
a parched desert. Talking of parched deserts, let’s cut to Google’s campus in
Mountain View, Cali.
It’s very airy
and their low-lying campus is strewn with tasteful plants, but is that all for
show? Google’s big aim is to solve
problems and this tends to involve investing heavily in AI and machine-learning
(the intelligent seeking for patterns). CEO Pachai is aiming for “intuitive”
robotic assistants.
It seems to me
(see post 4) this is a completely political motive. “There are always problems
to solve and the more intelligent you are the better you are at solving them”.
Actually this is completely wrong. The assumption is we live in an ordered
world, and by studying it we can ascertain the order and sort of “tweak” it and
get it a bit better. We don’t. We live in a universe of opposites such as male,
female; night, day.
The only thing
Google is doing is skewing things more and more towards one group of opposites,
and away from the other group. There’s a simple moral to this, which is that
skewing things takes it away from correct action.
Action is
something that happens in time and place, and takes place in-the-moment.
Jean-Luc Godard has a quote that directing is like a battle, only with no
casualties. It is like a happening, and he prefers not to plan in advance but
to give actors their head. There are two possible futures here; one is
unplanned and the other is completely planned.
But you can only
plan something if it’s uniform. If you have women interacting with men, they
will just act as comes naturally. What that says is the unplanned society is a
natural one like a tribe, which sleeps, hunts, eats, makes merry and so on.
These societies can be governed, but they can’t be planned. They operate in
this iconic sense of “Me Tarzan, you Jane”.
It’s very well
for Pachai to say, “Can machine learning and AI make progress on those things
(a cure for cancer etc.)? In my mind the answer is yes.” That’s because he
thinks intelligence is the answer when in fact things are above all action.
A tribe is a
very active, foraging or nomadic state, living close to nature and close to its
wetness and dryness. This way of living is actually very, very healthy albeit
harsh, provided the environment is there. That is the ideal of action, but
unless you say, “ok, the world has changed from being disordered to being
ordered”, you have to treat the ideal as something to have very much in mind,
and something with value of all kinds (social, economic, mental).
The future of
Google seems an extrapolation of our already political world, except this time
with AI. The other future is a revival of what you could say history is;
movement and action and restoration of past glories. I would say this is the
real world and has real problems, not invented ones.
What I’m really
saying is the world of information that Google deals in is not the real one.
It’s an invented one. I mean everything from self-driving cars to the human
genome. Even though they’re perfectly true and logical, they don’t inhabit the
world of action. Action is not so much true and logical as real. The
interaction of men and women, fire and water, old and young.
There’s a
good tradition of love and hate
Staying by
the fireside
Now the rain
may fall
You still
feel safe inside (Tanita
Tikaram)
Visually, you
can almost see this in the Mountain View complex if you compare it with, say,
the
Roman bath complex of
Sulis-Minerva at Bath (4th century)
Th
The entire
function of the pagan monument to the water gods was to facilitate bathing in a
natural spring. The monumental scale seems to speak of something very simple –
mud, spring, mineral water – being given an unbelievably sophisticated
treatment in stone and mosaic. Why this fantastical ritual? The only answer
that occurs to me is that it is real. How do we tell it’s real? By the senses,
the sense of well-being and ease, the feel of mineral water on skin, even by an
echo of the primordial.
The King’s
bath was drained, its floor removed and the mud and rubble beneath was
excavated, exposing the great buttressed enclosure wall of the reservoir. It
was into here, through fissures in the natural clay which formed the floor of
the reservoir, that the mineral waters gushed from many thousands of feet below
the surface of the ground.
The spring
and reservoir formed a central focus for the complex of Roman buildings put up
around it. To the South lay the baths, so arranged that from the entrance hall
a magnificent view could be obtained across the spring to the altar itself,
while for anyone in Roman times standing in the precinct in front of the temple
to the north, the spring glimpsed through an ornamental façade would have
formed a major focus of interest. There was even provision for access to the
point at which the water flowed out of the reservoir into the outfall drain.
The removal
of the mud from the spring produced an array of offerings to the goddess.. a
curse scratched on a small plaque of lead asking the god to damn the person who
had carried off a girl called Vilbia; “May he become as liquid as the dumb
waters”.. Rome and the
Barbarians, Barry Cunliffe, The Bodley Head 1974 (page 104)
Anything to
which votive offerings and sacrifices were made has to be real. How do we tell
what is real in an invented world? It’s very difficult, almost impossible as we
seem to be inhabiting a logical maze. The only way out is to construct things
that are real.
“There is a
streak of the irrational in the World Soul” – Plato
The way I
interpret this quote is that logic is applied to the illogical. The things which
are real and have a natural aesthetic such as a natural spring just happen to
be there. The value of these things is just in their being there. The same
would apply to other things like a primeval forest.
That sort of
value I would therefore say apples to Plato’s quote. The Romans have a
reputation for pragmatism, and you can see this in the solid engineering that
produces thermal baths – stoke, flue and hypocaust.
Hy
Hypocausts (left) under heated rooms were
stoked, with heat escaping through flue
The use, though,
is not exactly utilitarian. It’s a lot more subtle and a mix of psychological,
aesthetic, health and harmony. You could almost say more Eastern than our
current Western perspective.
Everything
Google deals with is information which implies the world is information.
Actually, that’s only half of the world, the logical half. The other half is
not logical, but it is real. The real trouble with Google and transhumanism is
that, by their assumeptions, they are creating an invented world.
It’s not that
the human genome is wrong; it’s that it’s just information and not everything
is information. The world of information is therefore an invention, even if
logically speaking that would be hard to prove!
But it’s not so
hard to see, and that is in post 6.