The Blazing World

Harriet Burden Notebook T

May 24, 2001

We have made the pact, or at least I think we have made it. He looked into my eyes and he said it would be fun.

I have bought a Rune multiple — a video work. The New Me. I am curious to see how it holds up over time.

His apartment: a plumber’s dream of Baroque splendor. I didn’t dare ask him if the gold tassels were tongue in cheek or not, but he is too smart not to know. He indulges himself in contradictions and expects everyone to go along with him; and this is paradoxically charming because it is childlike. Look at my toys. Aren’t they cool? He strutted through the rooms, giving me the tour, as his arm shot out in the direction of each object, but he did not pause to examine a single trophy: “pot from Cambodia, 2000 B.C., Diane Arbus photo — killed herself in ’71,—the shoes Marlene Dietrich wore in Morocco.” When a girl with a pixie cut suddenly appeared in a doorway, he flung out his arm and barked “Jeannie,” after which he grinned at me to make sure I understood he was joking. An “assistant,” one of a team of “helpers” roaming about, mostly competent-looking young women with telephones.

Robot photos in heroic display, taken in various labs around the United States and in Geneva, but also “filmbots,” imaginary machines, a movie still of Hal from 2001 and Woody Allen as the robotic waiter in Sleeper. Give me Woody Allen’s bumbler any day, I said, but Rune did not smile.

He has ideas, but they are jumbled. He never read a single page of the books I recommended. But a demon called the Singularity has possessed him, the grandiose offspring of one Verne Vinge, mathematics professor and science fiction writer, who in 1993 predicted a monumental, revolutionary shift in time, the moment we poor mortals will manufacture machine intelligences greater than our own. Our technical devices will race ahead of us, and a posthuman, postbiological world will dawn. We will all be machine-organic hybrids. We will “upload” ourselves and become immortals, although the trick remains elusive. Vinge, a techno-Frankenstein, writes: “Large computer networks may ‘wake up’ as a superhumanly intelligent entity.”I

Wake up?

I grunted and guffawed and waggled my finger, but Rune tells me with a straight face that it will all happen by 2030. How I would love to bet on it, but I’ll be dead. Harriet Burden will be dust, bones ground to ashes. Does Rune really believe it? Has he really embraced this article of faith founded on a false theoretical model: computational theory of mind?II The boys in the labs and some of their cohorts in analytical philosophy have been kneeling in obeisance to the sacred machine that processes information at ever-increasing speeds, that plays chess well but translates from one language to another so badly it hurts, and which doesn’t feel anything at all. Don’t you know that others are writing about paradigm change, that information processing as a model for brain function fails at many levels? Rune wants to believe. It is a form of salvation.

The Singularity is at once an escape and a birth fantasy. I said to him: A Zeus dream that avoids the organic body altogether. Brand-new creatures burst forth from men’s heads. Presto! The mother and her evil vagina disappears.

I pointed out that his crosses are fertility symbols.

I don’t know how much of what I say goes in. Deafness is part of his being. And it helps him, helps him assert himself as the young Wonder Man.

But there is an undertow, and it is personal. He is trying to leap out of his biography. Maybe this is where we overlap. I would like to leap out of my story, too.

Today, after my tirade on CTM and its fatal flaws, he told me a story about his mother, now dead and buried. I see the woman in my mind in baby-doll pajamas teetering around in backless slippers with high heels and a puff of feathers at the toes. He did not include a description of what she was wearing, but from his stories I have invented a vain, troubled, pathetic creature. I have made her the seductive mother, a crazed and scary beloved for the boy child, a woman who lunges between tearful clinging and crushing rage. She is a cliché, a feminine mess from a 1950s movie, one of those Technicolor tarts, drunk and disorderly with lots of cleavage. We are all guilty of types. But the story is grim, and as he tells it, his eyes are cool and empty. Rune’s sad, mad mother takes in a stray cat and feeds it. One day, the pregnant cat gives birth in the family’s hamper, a warm, soft, dirty, smelly bed. But his mother becomes deranged when she discovers the kittens and wails, No babies, no babies. She drowns the newborn kittens in a bucket in the garage as Rune and his sister watch.

The father was passive. I see him, too, sitting in a chair, a long, pale, beleaguered face. I could draw him. Where do these pictures come from?

“I’m happy to be you,” Rune said, “or rather happy to be you as me or me as you.” He stood on his hands and walked across the floor, only a few steps, but I was impressed. As I looked on, I had a moment of flight, a sense of losing me and looking at the world as if it had just been made, then and there in all its strangeness. It used to happen to me when I was a child. I would discover noses all at once and find myself fascinated — nostrils, for example, some with hairs, pale and waving or coarse, black wires. What were these two holes in a face of multiple openings? Some tight and narrow — mere slits that hid the channel that led up into the unknown; still others flared and round or great and gaping or inflamed and moist with mucus.

It might have been his upside-down posture that brought on the thought. I used to dream of turning over my room and walking on the ceiling. When I told him, he stared at me. Kirsten and I used to do that, he said. Kirsten is his sister.

I. Vernor Vinge first presented his views on the Singularity at the Vision-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA, March 30–31, 1993. For a review of the continuing discussion, see “The Singularity: Ongoing Debate, Part II” in Journal of Consciousness Studies 19 (2012), nos. 7–8.

II. Computational theory of mind (CTM) advances the idea that the mind works like a computer through rule-based symbol manipulation. Hilary Putnam, “Brains and Behavior” (1961), in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, ed. Ned Block (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 24–36, and Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Thomas Cromwell, 1975). In Notebook T, Burden criticizes the scientists and philosophers who have adopted the model, because it doesn’t account for “the brain as a wet organ of the whole body” and it “leaves out guiding emotional knowledge.” She also calls CTM “a surreptitious form of Cartesian dualism” and cites Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of the theory in What Computers Still Can’t Do (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1992).