encapsuled: var(semic) consists of a conversation between Michelangelo, the artist known as encapsuled and Elisabeth Sweet grounded in philosophical texts by David Hume & Ludwig Wittgenstein. each movement culminates with a question inviting the algorithm made by encapsuled to give the final word.
read PARSING PATTERNS, the second movement of encapsuled: var(semic) below.
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Elisabeth Sweet (ES): in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), David Hume writes, “Every idea is copied from some pre- ceding impression of sentiment; and where we cannot find any impression, we may be certain that there is no idea.” how do you think about randomness in this context?
Michelangelo (M): I’m aligned with Hume. all we know is due to our previous impressions, what we call perceptions in the modern context. without perception there is nothing, and yet from connecting perceptions we can form new ideas. so, nothing is ever really new or random. every individual will necessarily evolve and move through space and time as a result of all previous experiences. it’s much like seeded randomness in generative art: not true randomness but only apparent.
in generative art, what usually happens is that the artist crafts an algorithm with some parameters that have a degree of freedom, which is a complex way of saying “a set of choices”. to go from the algorithm to a specific output (often called “iteration”), choices need to be made. that’s normally the job of the seed. given a specific seed the algorithm produces all the choices, necessarily. no matter how many times it’s executed, with the same seed you get the same result.
it looks like randomness to an external observer, but the algorithm already had all the choices inside of it. reality is much the same: there are rules that control everything even if those rules are not evident – secret rules like secret powers – not secret in absolute, they are possible to know in theory, we’re just not there yet.
ES: thinking about Ludwig Wittgenstein through the lens of Hume, Wittgenstein digs into what Hume calls the “secret powers” of words as they appeal to our “sensible qualities” which allow us to communicate with each other through language. how do words create impressions of the world and invoke experience beyond the moment of dictation or conversation in which they arose? what might Wittgenstein say about impressions or experiences formed beyond words?
M: I’d love to ask Wittgenstein and Hume this directly, but without knowing their perspective I’ll talk from mine instead. I’d say that the secret powers of words are storage, abstraction, and condensation. language is able to draw from the existing impressions of the world that form from our experience and extend to new ideas that then become part of our domain of knowledge.
a basic example: think of a blue walnut. assuming you’ve never seen a blue walnut before, you can still picture it in your head by applying the property “blue” to the object “walnut.” language extended your knowledge without you having to experience the object directly. this is a very basic example, but it extends all the way to “best practices in project management” and other abstract concepts. properties of existing experiences can be applied to new ones, so that with only a few words you can expand knowledge by a lot.
so, to define the secret powers of words: storage: ability to “store” an experience to be communicated with other people abstraction: ability to extend an existing experience or part of it to a new experience condensation: ability to craft new words to summarize complex concepts
ES: Hume’s bold argument about the doctrine of necessity analyzes our bias toward believing in cause and effect, neither of which we can really know. his rebuttal of causality makes us question the Western conception of reality. Wittgenstein’s concept of simple component parts provides a map for under- standing the essence of an object – reality – by looking at the pieces as an approach to estimating the whole. how would you think about the human in this context?
M: I agree with Hume: the concept of cause and effect is flawed, there’s only proximity and repetition. so the only difference between a cause and an effect is that one occurs before the other, but it’s also impossible to think of a cause with no effects or effects without a cause, since the terms are defined interdependently. causality is something we define to help us understand, organize, and predict the world, but I don’t think it’s some- thing that belongs to the world itself.
to me the human is an inevitable and continuous reality. an effect of all precedent moments and cause of all sub- sequent. the only difference is the moment we are considering.
ES: considering the continuity of reality amidst the semblance of change described in different yet intersecting ways by Hume and Wittgenstein, it might be said that nothing is ever really new, nothing ever really changes, and everything is known but not by a single mind. however, we can point to examples from cognitive memory and the present that would qualify as new, suggesting that there is an experience or reality of newness. given this paradox, what could we call something that is not new but previously unknown?
encapsuled:
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read the second and third movements of encapsuled:var(semic) here.