Alright, so the vampire music doesn’t really come into play except to give the post title some feeling of dynamic and to set the mood, but nonetheless… the randomness function of my ipod seems to enjoy vampires.  It likes to string together whole sets of the Cruxshadows (goth dance music), The Last Dance (more Goth dance music), painbastard (violent german goth music), Pzychobitch (more violent goth music), Blutengel (less violent, but literal translation = blood angel (vampire)) and Combichrist (sample song titles; “Give Head if You’ve Got It” “Enjoy the Abuse” etc.). The startling aspect of this phenomenon is not that it happens often, but that these artists constitute only slightly more tracks on my ipod than the number of Clash songs.  Theoretically, a truly random selection would result in one song from these artists for every Clash song that plays… this is not the case. 

 Regardless of the oddity of the randomness engine (infinite improbability drive anyone?) driving my magical music machine, you can only imagine the state of mind this musical menagerie has left me in while plumbing the philosophical depths of Hofstadter’s exploration of artificial intelligence.

 Right.

Consequently, I’m still not quite sure what to make of any of it… so here go a few insignificant bits of significant ideas signifying my own significant interpretation of what seems to be a largely insignificant… okay, I lost myself, but that was a funny bit of paradox before I tried to put it into words.

“It is when something goes wrong that it is important to be able to think on different levels.”

He is speaking of computer programming here (in the immediate sense), but this comes briefly (a chapter or two) after a lengthy, but poignant, tangent about Buddhism (Zen in particular) in which he circled, closed in on, but never quite got to (I wanted to shout shit or get off the pot) the Zen imperative to destratify the world.

Is he punctuating the unnatural nature of any attempt at quantifying human though?  Is he unintentionally contradicting himself? Am I missing more than I think I am (because I certainly must be missing something)?

“It is not that each higher level extends the potential of the computer; the full potential of the computer already exists in its machine langauge instruction set.”

Hofstadter is continuing with his “Computer Programming 101″ here, expanding on the idea that higher level programming languages don’t create new possibilities, or, if you will, expand the potential of a CPU, the higher level languages merely use the inherent potential to a higher degree… i.e. toward a higher level output generated by the same (read; unchanged) lower-level processing unit.

To take his argument to an extreme here, he seems to be getting at saying that the existence of a binary CPU and electricity in tandem implies the potential of an atrificially intelligent machine, and that the only obstacle (albeit an absurdly large one) is the compiling of a program sufficiently powerful to mimic the many-faceted (without getting into the potentially lengthy and purple string of adjectives) characteristics of human thought.  My problem here is that I can only hear echoes of Nike commercials bouncing around in the vacuum of his argument (Impossible is nothing is impossible is nothing is impossible………..)

“we cannot rewire our brains, we cannot redesign the interior of a neuron, we cannot make any choices about the hardware–and yet, we can control how we think.”

Hofstadter draws an analogy (though being a philosopher/scientist, not a linguist, he calls it an isomorphism) between computers and dualism (i.e. mind=software, and body=hardware).  So much more I want to say on that, but the words are lost in an aetheric haze…

Speaking of aethers… it only took the better part of a year and a half, but I finally finished “Against the Day”.  That was a hell of a mindfuck too…

I’ve come to hate myself for quoting Einstien’s comment “the more you know, the more you realise you don’t know” (or something to that effect) so often, since it only reminds me that I don’t (nor will I ever) know much of anything about what is really going on here…

But then I remember the Kinky Friedman quote I’m so fond of… “Maybe I’m the only sane one on this train.”

BLAH.

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