Anyway, on to Hayles. This may strike some as funny, but throughout the entire text, I couldn’t get the catchphrase “She/he’s just not that into you” out of my head. For some reason, I really didn’t enjoy Hayles. It’s basically because I couldn’t make rhyme or reason out of her thought processes. She’d say one thing that I thought I understood, but then she’d turn right around and say exactly the opposite. The text was the most comprehensible when Hayles was sharing her own ideas rather than trying to parse others, but these passages are too few and far between.

One passage that stumped me early on was on page 27, when she said: “In the regime of Computation, code is understood as the discourse system that mirrors what happens in nature and that generates nature itself.” In this, is she arguing that code is superior than writing and speaking in this “Regime of Computation” or is she simply arguing that it’s a separate entity until itself? If she is arguing that code is an entity all by itself, then that makes sense. But I fail to see how code is better than writing or speaking as a method of communication as you can’t evoke feeling in code.

I could go on, but I’d like to get at least these preliminary thoughts out there before technology shuts me down again.

She says that Sims went in and altered the code when some creatures developed paddles with which to smack themselves for locomotion (195). This is an unforeseen evolution the programmer decided to write out. Granted, it was an exploit of a bug, but isn’t the purpose of the simulations that “the creator does not always need to be as smart as his creatures, for he is counting on their ability to come up with solutions that have not occurred to him” (196)? How can we see what will evolve if we cut out the unexpected evolutions?

Hayles uses other examples of Sims altering the program (height, purpose, etc.) to suit his needs. Admitting the subjectivity of the experiments is good, but it goes against any attempt to compare organic and virtual evolution. Our super-computed universe does not have some master programmer deleting code every time we evolve to exploit naivety. If the universe worked that way, we’d be spam and pyramid scheme free.

The Sims “experiments” were admittedly subjective. Hayles writes, “When Sims decides which fitness criteria to use, which programs to eliminate, and which to render visually, he injects doses of his human intelligence into the system, along with the attributes we conventionally assign to humans, including desires and intentions. Moreover, his published articles make clear that his intentions affected virtually every aspect of the design, so it is not possible to bracket out his intentions by saying that we should consider only the programs in themselves, not the global system.”

If the virtual evolution was all about authorial intent from the beginning, what separates virtual creatures from traditional literature? Nabokov intended for readers to follow a certain logic path through his narrative. Sims intended for viewers to see certain emergent patterns in his. Since each controlled his message source, we receive the message as intended by the authors. Chapter 8 seems more to confirm that we are the controlled objects of subjective authors than the evolutionary offspring of a universal control computer.

Further, she explains that while Austin’s speech acts may put acts into motion, code is the only language that is executable. (p50)

So where does this lead us? I would argue that code, despite being economical and exacting, will never be able to translate consciousness of a human being. Jeff Hawkins, through his studies of how the brain works, found that we were able to detect shapes in a way that computers cannot replicate, and that the detecting of shapes is in large part how the brain communicates. If you were to do the same detecting with a computer, the feedback loops would go on ad infinitum. So much for the economy of language that code supposedly brings.

So this concept of a man (or woman) cosigning a common language with a computer based on how our own consciousness works doesn’t seem plausible. It may be fun to think about. Being a “non-coder” who will do anything to avoid learning too many computer languages, I’m hoping that this gap is bridged in a more transparent way through intelligent interfaces rather than knowledge of the source code. That could be naivete on my part, but it’s worked so far.

Hayles discusses consciousness not being in complete control of things, a person is a collection of autonomous processes and desires that co-author behaviors and decisions much like a complex computer program is layered atop many lower level processes which ultimately fragment into ones and zeros indicated by voltages. Well you can’t argue with that, does anyone really want to consciously regulate all of the body’s autonomous functions? You may want to stay out late but your body tells you it’s time to sleep, your behavior and decisions are being co-authored by the conscious you and the biological you through a lower level function that communicates this status. This is an interesting observation, but hardly enough reason to extrapolate to the Theory of Everything, particularly the concept of the big computer in the sky. I don’t think Hayles is proposing this, I think she is just remarking on her cultural observations. (If at some point in the future a salesman comes calling about uploading yourself into a computer, just tell them you can’t afford it, not with all those monthly cryogenic payments for uncle Ted. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/20/national/main533849.shtml )

Micro blogging is much like regular blogging. We’ve all seen traditional blogs.. you’ve read them. However with the growing popularity of micro blogging (via Twitter), the way in which we communicate has slightly shifted. And micro blogging is not the only instance of this change in writing either. Take a look at IM (instant messaging) or text messaging patterns – these are probably better (and earlier) examples of a change in writing style. Our way of communicating thoughts has shifted. Eloquent diction is not necessary to get one’s point across. Perfect use of language is not required to communicate gracefully. The micro blog post has shifted in to a short-form of communication. And this is form of short communication, unlike the longer traditional (and sometimes longer) blog format, is intended to inform and communicate via concise, short-format posts. With Twitter, the 140-character limit both limits and frees many users. It limits users simply by the total characters one person can post at one time. Likewise, it also frees the user from the traditional writing style.

My curiosity stems from the shift in this communication style. Now that many users are twittering back and forth for communication, how will the “code” format adjust to accommodate users’ use of colloquial expressions and acronyms (commonly used to conserve post limits on Twitter)? If the pro-code people are so adamant on suggesting the connection between language and code, how will they form the connections between short- and long-hand code? Once could argue that it is just a matter of linking up new acronyms to their long-hand and corresponding meanings. But this is not an automatic process.

So, the nightmare that kept coming into my mind, especially in reading about Delphi and P.Burke in “Code as (Re)incarnation: The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (after reading the first two chapters), was the idea that—with the blurring of the lines between fiction and reality now made so easy through mediation and the technological advances in cybernetics and intelligent machines—the obsessive and addicted players of ARGs, given their beehive mentality and extreme desires to escape from reality by playing in reality, will be the first chosen to form the first cyborg “race.” They would be easy pickins’ and probably totally willing to be experimented on, most likely for nefarious purposes, in the guise of a new alternate reality “game.” It could happen. And then what? Then follows the race that is not a “mixed-race” but a pure bred race of sentient artificial-intelligence-machine-beings. As Hayles says, the meanings of key terms (ones that the human race has until recently believed to be fixed, stable, and secure) are shifting and the notion of the Universal Computer is begging the question of what it means to be “human.” After all, “what we make and what we (think we) are coevolve” (216).

Okay, that was mostly sarcastic. I really do appreciate the intricacies of the title, but I do wish there was some less explicit way of bringing that to the attention of the reader.

The view of the universe as a computational model makes sense in an age where robotics is making significant advancements, and the rise of the robot seems just around the corner. As technology brings about our integration with the machine in increasingly profound ways, this model of the universe will make even more sense in a few decades. Survival, in a sense, is now hinged on the knowledge of computers, rather than relying on the strength of the body to hunt and gather. We now hunt and gather information. As we learn more from computers than the other humans around us, and the natural environment has been altered forever by our footprints, it is easy to see “the displacement of Mother Nature by the Universal Computer.” (3)