A Golem

There’s nothing wrong with the autopilot, but it can get a little samey. I guess sex is pretty samey, all things considered. When Emily tells me she wants me, there is no “she”, there is no “want”, or is there? Robots use an internal model of the world in order to make sense of it, they have a concept of a world and a concept of themselves inside it. Like us they can never perceive “the thing in itself”. When they act, it’s in accordance to goals, couldn’t that be called desire?

As a counterpoint consider Guilbaud in asking the question What is Cybernetics? refers to the work of Jacques Lafitte, engineer and architect: “The notion of a machine is as hard to define as that of a living organism; a great engineer once spoke indeed of an ‘artificial zoology’. But it is not definition or classification that is needed most urgently.

“Because we are their makers, we have too often deluded ourselves into believing that we knew all there was to know about machines. Although the study and construction of machines of all sorts owes much to advances in mechanics, physics and chemistry, nevertheless mechanology –the science of machines as such, the science of the organized constructions of man –is not a branch of these sciences. Its place is elsewhere in the ranks of scientific disciplines.”

The goal of all machine learning is to harness mimesis into an algorithm. In our present conception of a book, this has become possible. We realized that techniques in deep learning were merely a continuous lookup table, whereas all previous lookup tables had been discrete, and the movement from the discrete to a simulation of the continuous was a kind of revolution.

It’s only partly true that we do not know the nature of the interior logic of our digital minds. The mathematics of cognition are well understood, and indeed, digital cognition would not be possible without such an understanding. And yet the precise contours of the knowledge held in a mind… well, that is a question better left for philosophers.

The sexbot is a golem, animated by the name of god. It was believed that golems could be activated by an ecstatic experience induced by the ritualistic use of a shem, but for all that, the golem, and the sexbot, like those ancient Venuses, are but minerals possessed. In qabbalah, words are reduced to numbers. Compression is qabbalah, digitization is qabbalah, ascii is the true digitization, computation is the occult transmutation of Numbers, consciousness is holy writ, the name of god occurs intrinsically and fractally in the computations, especially in the computation of intelligence. In a sense every computer program is a very long number, and every number is a name, and machine learning is the esoteric art of aggregating vectors of perception until they converge on an isomorphism to a name of god, the name that animates the golem.