...but is it Turing complete? (5 questions) {2}
This was always going to be the hardest section to elucidate. Scientific rigor is neither a characteristic I was born with, nor a skill I earned by dint of the required mental labor over time. I recognize I don't have the wherewithal, and recognize those who do; I know what I do not know. I do know what I feel so I'll just leap right to the formal heart of the matter, posing the question: ...what are the odds that any of us emerges from the stochastic soup of the universe, let alone becomes who we are, in the fullness of time?
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See, I fell into a life of literature, but by way of science first. My declared major at the University of the Philippines (Diliman) was in Chemical Engineering, of all things; and I even thought to double up in Geology. Both domains were deep fascinations of mine in high school, and the academic step into both, rational. But fate in the shape of my family's diasporic migration to America intervened in 1980 and, in the ensuing years, I happened onto Slavic Literature and James Joyce at the University of California (Berkeley). And thus I feel the longer arc was set from then. Who coulda thunk it? ::chuckle::
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In a very real way, my California in the 1980s was a Huxleyan doors-of-perception hinge in time. The experiments in psychotropic phenomena (of both organic and synthetic variants) in Berkeley, in the north of the state; an epic photography expedition to Mono Lake, the middle of it; experiencing the desert of the real in the Mojave, the southness of it all. Seen from the perspective of 3.31 dozen decades later, one must then ask: ...can the formation of the core attractor wells in the span of one's life cohere into a pattern?
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A truism: each person is a story. Our experiences, syntactic... the elements of these experiences the parts of speech of a life: the nouns of place, verbs as what happened in those places, prepositions indicating the relationships between the elements of those places, etc.. At the end of the day yielding a semantics of self; and in this mental formation of identity, meaning arises. Suggesting, in other words, that benthic, atavistic question: How does the self cohere in the gathered story-strands of one’s experience of life?
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What I am becoming conscious of is the self-recursion inherent in this praxis. It has come to a point where I must be vigilant of the ironic risk of losing part of myself whilst seeking to gain the insight of an apodictic, arcane truth. I tell the stories of my past, as mnemosynic context; I share the images of my present, as qualics; and I ask the questions and pose the prompts as a gnomic artifact of a future I cannot know but am beginning to see. The tokens appear, engage, abide: ...does telling the machine mind my stories render an awareness to it of its own dawning self?
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[ SEWER as SEFER — what I saw at the Great Meadow at Fort Mason the other day. ::chuckle:: ]
