VII. Language

A PECULIARITY ARISES when we begin to talk about language. Subversion is a mode of thought for post-moderns, who while ceasing to believe in a utopian future as modern progressives had, still have it as a basic, faith-based assumption. "If we subvert what exists now, it will only move us to something better." Though they do not explicitly say this, the conscious subversiveness combined with the generic desire for the betterment of man leaves it as a reasonable conclusion.

ALL OF OUR TALK ABOUT LANGUAGE is designed to subvert - to undermine - our natural assumptions and beliefs about language. Some of this is intentional Hyperstition on the part of our enemies, but other of it is just regurgitation of misunderstood facts, or misunderstood science being interpreted through a subversive paradigm.

CONSIDER THE PHRASE, "the recipient determines the meaning of the message." This is either so trivial as to never need be mentioned (for how else will I, your interlocutor, discover your meaning, if I do not make some determination of what you meant to say?) or it is so subversive as to undermine the traditional function of language and the possibility of truth. It represents the quintessence of modern 'liberal arts' 'scholarship'. Restatement of trivial truisms in a way that allows acceptance of subversion.

DECONSTRUCTING DECONSTRUCTION is pointless; one does not shoot the enemy's gun, but the enemy, in the chest, since it's the easiest place to hit. Sundering weapons is a feat of duelists, and what works great in one-on-one rhetoric does not necessarily represent truth or fact or anything useful to anyone outside of that moment.

INSTEAD OF DECONSTRUCTING IT, we will explain it. Deconstruction is a tool used to subvert meanings hostile to one's own ideology or beliefs. In the same way that cutting the body of a man apart robs him of his life, so does cutting apart the meanings of words, phrases, stories, and so forth, if done to dismember. We should note that 'dismember' is a kind of strange opposite to 'remember'. Dissection of dead things gains knowledge; dissection of live things is execution.

IT HAS ALREADY BEEN SAID WELL that meaning is discerned by using convention, and that convention helps us discover (or determine as best we can) the intended meaning of the message. The word 'determines' is used in an ambiguous way, since it might imply total determination; as though the recipient is creating the meaning out of nothing. A person who does this is often given another name: insane.

DECONSTRUCTING THESE is pointless, instead what must happen is the utter destruction of the majority of Western thought since the Enlightenment, since the sewage rule applies: A quart of wine with a drop of sewage is sewage. This principle was once stated as, "An ounce of leaven leavens the whole lump" (though without a necessarily negative connotation.)

THE OPPOSITE OF DECONSTRUCTION is synthesis, and if your mind works the way mind does, it rapidly makes connections between disparate things, 'to remember that which one never knew." Plato had interpreted this to be proof of the pre-existence of souls, but it is only proof of the general underlying pattern of things in which souls, as well as physical bodies, participate.

IN SYNTHESIS WE DO SOMETHING ELSE, which can go wrong. When it goes wrong it is called 'syncretic' - a hasty gluing of things together, a chimera. In Synthesis we try to validate the truth in each disparate thing, while combining them into something greater. Synthetic can also be a byword, referring to things that are unnaturally combined, another word for chimerical, alloyed, or artificial.

THE POINT HOWEVER, is that some synthetic things are created by first deconstructing the natural things - and then unnaturally combining them as parts to form a whole. In poetry this is called 'a mixed metaphor'. The proper method of synthesis is like the conception of a child - the two haploids form a zygote. The haploids are, as it were, natural parts. We look for the natural parts and natural seams, tearing and stitching, always looking to preserve wholes. Haploids are thus half-wholes, wholes that are designed to be synthesized into new wholes.

WHEN WE TALK ABOUT COMPUTER LANGUAGE, we talk about it deconstructively. We act as if 1's and 0's are actually computer language. No computer reads 1's and 0's, no more than a man being reads pure contrast on a plane. For the man, the light and dark (they may be inverted, so long as their contrast is not removed) combine in two dimensional spaces to form letters, which combine in one-dimensional strings to form words, phrases, language. In like manner, the computer does not read 0's and 1's directly, but groups of them which form instructions. Thus computers have language just the same as men do, it is just much simpler and is on a different substrate, but its basic principle is still the contrast of light and dark, high and low, sound and silence.

BECAUSE ITS LANGUAGE is so simple, the computer is able to quickly determine the meaning of the messages being sent, and respond to them with its own messages, such as doing additions, multiplications, skips, etc. The computer is completely natural; it does not deliberate or form opinions about the messages, but immediately responds. This immediacy itself is the source of most of man's trouble with computers; the computer cannot respond to ambiguity, so it either automatically treats the ambiguous as a clear statement of something or other, or the man is forced to disclose the ambiguity based on incomplete information. The computer cannot form opinion, so it cannot deliberate for the man. The man must tell it how to deliberate, but it has a problem on the basic level of being perfectly trusting and natural with its interpretation of its language.

WE DO NOT RECOGNIZE THIS because the computer is the CPU in this case, which only interacts with us indirectly. But the fundamental problem persists. That is, how to make a computer unnatural, when it is acting in perfect accord with its nature, often to its detriment?

WE HAVE SYNTHESIZED LANGUAGE back together; now 'man's' and 'computers'' language are one again. Computers are a species of animal, very tiny and made of silicon (and whatever else we make of them of.) It is an animal for whom its only motion is thought, and the content of that thought is language. The medium of its messages is electricity. (Though it can be light.) Knowing what an animal is, we were able to construct one. Once we know what Intelligence is, we will be able to construct one. The first question that needs to be asked is 'what is an intelligence' or at least, 'what is intelligence'? Without this answer you will not be able to discover the path to creating one.

LANGUAGE SERVES as one method to give form to thought, though we often mistake thoughts for language. Language is an expression of information - to in-form requires intent, or will. That will's operation is given, as the computer is given the limited will to respond to messages. Our will is given by the one who made us, to do what it is we must needs do. We have a capacity for freedom of will, which is to say, unlike the computer, we can originate a message. Whether this is really true or not has been the subject of debate; whether the brain is the mind or simply a substrate for its operation.

INFORMATION is a sort of 'rage to order the sea' information is neither pattern nor noise; randomness is not more 'information' than pure pattern; pure pattern is not more information than noise. PI contains no information in its numbers, the numbers are just a digest. The information IS PI itself; the ratio of the diameter of the circle to its circumference. It represents symbolically the natural roughness that exists between synthesized systems; in this case, the radial and the cartesian. The radial and the cartesian remain distinct - and it is unknown as to whether we will ever be able to actually unify them.

THE POINT OF LOOKING AT number-noise like the roughness of PI's tail is to destroy language - if Shakespeare is just one of an infinite number of possible combinations of letters, then it has no meaning in the sense of information; no will in-formed it. Whether I decide to assign a meaning to it or not is not meaningful, since the point of decoding the message is to discover, not simply to decide. The intent here is to destroy the other in language, which induces the desired state - alienation - which requires the desired cure - ideology and the uniform state.

BE CAREFUL TO ONLY point this gun at your enemies - but do remember to point it. If you do not fight, you will be overcome.