Dominic, Neal Stephenson's book sounds like a must read for me. I can't
profess to be anything of an expert on Leibniz, but find his writings
fascinating and prescient... as do a lot of computer
scientists/mathematician I interview (the science writing that pays the
bills.)
So not only things like object-oriented programming, but aspect-oriented
programming, ant colony optimization, of course nanotechnology.. an
inherent intelligence in the code...
Makes me thing of Steve McCaffery's work in monodology and poetics.
Heard him here a few years ago. Now he's an expat Canadian, teaching in
thePoetics Program, Department of English, SUNY-Buffalo
So lots more to talk about but am on deadline and must "go under" for
awhile...
Cheers until I surface again
ML
Mari-Lou Rowley
Pro-Textual Communications
www.pro-textual.com
Tel 604.708.8512
Fax 604.708.8512
-----Original Message-----
From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dominic Fox
Sent: March 14, 2005 12:47 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Half Cocks: Abide With Me
Thank you Mari-Lou. I have only the one small book of Leibniz's
myself, but other sources - I was recently reading Neal Stephenson's
_The Confusion_, in which Leibniz appears as a character and spends a
certain amount of time explaining his monadology in terms that make it
sound suspiciously like a precursor of various modern ideas in AI and
even object-oriented programming (there's a line about monads
maintaining some encapsulated internal state that could've come from
any Smalltalk primer). Given Stephenson's geek credentials (he once
wrote a book called _In the beginning was the command line_), this is
undoubtedly no accident.
Stephenson may or may not have known that the word "monad" has
recently been adopted by computer scientists, via category theory, to
denote a particular approach to handling effects in pure functional
programming languages like Haskell.
Leibniz himself can sound uncannily modern at times. Tell me this
doesn't remind you of Derrida:
"Also, when we consider well the connection of things, we can say that
there are at all times in the soul of Alexander vestiges of all that
has happened to him and the marks of all that will happen to him, and
even traces of all that happens in the universe, although it belongs
only to God to recognise them all" (Discourse on Metaphysics, section
VIII)
Derrida's vestiges, marks and traces are more fleeting, of course, and
one wonders whether even the divine Understanding could recapitulate
them.
There are other Half Cocks in the archives, or on my website here:
http://codepoetics.com/half_cocks/poem.html
Dominic
--
// Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
// bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov
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