Mari-Lou
The Stephenson werke is worth reading, but it's three books, The
Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, & The System of the World)
more than 2500 pages long. I loved it, an historical fantasy on the
change from alchemy to science & the philosophical shifts that
accompanied that, with an adventure story of pirates, tough ladies,
European wars, competing philosophers (Newton vs Leibniz) etc. thrown
in. I think Stephenson tries to be accurate as to the thinking of those
2 masters, but it is a fantastic fiction...
Doug
On 14-Mar-05, at 3:01 PM, Mari-Lou Rowley wrote:
> 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
>
>
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Speech
is a mouth.
Robert Creeley
|