From the Archive: Secret Knowledge

Cultagory Theory: Revectoring Psyons

This presentation continues to elaborate on themes here in my blogs. As early as the 1990s, I was emailing E. J. Applewhite, Fuller's sidekick on Synergetics, regarding my "word-meaning trajectories" lingo, which, as I point out starting from my first slide, is by now a more mathematically established concept given word2vec and natural language processing (NLP).

I'm wondering if my metaphor of "trains" as in "trains of thought" (but also literal trains), taking most predictable tracks through a Hilbert space, will catch on more, with respect to LLMs (large language models). The caboose, way in the back, represents "attention span" meaning one way to steer the train through its many locutions is "from the rear" in the sense one needs to revisit to sound cogent. A long train is more determinate in nature.

NLP more generally is serving high end culture as a kind of bridge over the C. P. Snow chasm, twixt the sciences (STEM) and the humanities (PATH). Only a tiny subcultural minority sees a tetrahedral crystal, a grain of sand, sparking the "solidification" of such bridging infrastructure. The activation of a "right brained" test pattern (we might call it), within the mind's eye of literature majors, is preparing the ground for more multi-media literacy, provided the osmosis process continues.

The "test pattern" of which I speak is of course the "concentric hierarchy" of Synergetics, and its BEAST or BASKET modules. STEM meets PATH in this purely geometric construction, with applications everywhere, including in humanities readings.

What gives us leverage on the humanities side is the window into what's weak in STEM, whereas STEM is rather used to intimidating its would-be detractors with a obfuscation. The track record is now open to view: inconvenient truths were bleeped over to keep us from backtracking to some wrong turns in our curriculum development efforts. We neglected to explore the Bucky stuff sufficiently, or some of us did. Some of us didn't, and we're enjoying our edge, our advantages. The normies are on the defensive. The challenge is to remain magnanimous in victory.

Flying to the Moon

:: Flying to the Moon by Russell Towle ::