episode 008 - Magic Computers
Computers: they everywhere. Magic: it's also everywhere, including...in the computer?! Zach and Leki take a philosophical journey through the history of computing as an evolution of gnostic philosophy, hermetic alchemy, and memory palaces. It's our headiest conversation yet, with discursions into demonology and demiurges and downloads and other fun things!
Show Notes
Psychonautics: definition as found on the psychonaut wiki
Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as "the art". I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness.
"We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.
"A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform."
Giordano Bruno Biography, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
A book about Giordano the Magus: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, by Francis Yates
A book about Giordano the Astronomer: Acentric Labryinth: Giordano Bruno's prelude to Contemporary Cosmology, by Ramon Mendoza, PhD
Giordano Bruno's Art of Memory
"Ramon Llull's Thinking Machine", by Jorge Luis Borges (via gwern.net)
“Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man.”
When Zach is struggling, talking about "the internet is not inevitable, we didn't discover it like a river" or whatever, he was trying to articulate 'Cosmotechnics', a term coined by Yuk Hui.
Here's a brief foreword from Yuk Hui about the inspiration and general meaning of cosmotechnics. More of his work can be found on his website: digitalmilieu.net
Esalen and the Human Potential Movement
Biography of Douglas Engelbart
A eulogy of Douglas Engelbart, by Ted Nelson(inventor of hypertext) (the laughter in this is so cruel and strange)
On DARPA, and the military origins of the internet, a (mostly) good book is Surveillance Valley, by Yasha Levine
For programming languages as a type of magic, you can read Zach's zine The Map is the Territory
Though writing has become the most commonplace of information technologies, it remains in many ways the most magical. Brought into focus by properly educated eyes, artificial glyphs scrawled onto the surface of objects leap unbidden into the mind, bringing with them sounds, meanings, and data. In fact, it is very difficult to gaze intentionally upon a page of script written in a known language and not automatically begin reading it. The ecophilosopher David Abram notes that, just as a Zuni elder might focus her eyes upon a cactus and hear the succulent begin to speak, so do we hear voices pouring out of our printed alphabets. “This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless—as mysterious as a talking stone.” We forget this mystery for the same reason we forget that writing is a technology: We have so thoroughly absorbed this machine into the gray sponge of our brains that it is extremely tough to figure out where writing stops and the mind itself starts. As Walter Ong notes in Orality and Literacy, “More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.”
The Wreck of the Titan, by Morgan Robertson
"Project Mars, a Technical Tale", by Werner Von Braun, an unpublished novel about a man named Elon travelling to mars.
Elon Musk is Iron Man, according to nerds (including Elon Musk)
Microsoft Strategy "Embrace, extend, extinguish"
Art influences life influences art influences life
Here is a good example of imagining the reader/object of a love letter
For a basic example of websites as text, check out Web Zine
Health Insurers using 'the algorithm' and AI to process medical claims
Lumiere, from Beauty and the Beast
Gnosticism is a type of early Christianity that taught that the material world was created by an evil being, and that Christ came to earth to liberate people from this evil world through the spiritual experience called “gnosis” – the root of the word “Gnostic.” Gnosis was salvation through mystical union with the divine, and as such was something that each individual had to experience internally for himself or herself. It couldn’t be obtained through any outward social/institutional means alone: believing in creeds, observing the sacraments, obeying the clergy, behaving morally, etc.
We are as gods and might as well get good at it
It is more than a joke when I say that Jesus Christ is my main competitor. After all, it was he who talked us into death as our final destiny. I, on the other hand, say that death is a technical problem that can be solved.
“[Google] and [Facebook] now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic”
“The fanfare around the band Geese was actually a Psyop”, WIRED magazine