Saturday, January 08, 2005
Nodal Points and the Hidden Singularity
Chaotic Cognizance: "Nodal points (are) points of high interest in an information field. Richard Thieme takes this definition further:
Chaotic Cognizance continues: "The most obvious realm that this ability applies to is that of coders and hackers. They immerse themselves in the internal workings of some immense project and try to hold the entire functionality in their mind at once; it makes coding easier when you know exactly what each part of the program can do and where its code is located. When I am in ‘hack-mode,’ sometimes there comes a moment when I recognize that the code base is no longer a beautiful thing; and that by realigning my perspective I can remedy it. I feel like these flashes of correctable elegance come to me due to recognizing nodal points while immersed in the program’s entrails."
"In Idoru by William Gibson, ... Laney is a quantitative analyst with a concentration deficit that he can adjust 'into a state of pathological hyperfocus,' thus enabling him to be 'an extremely good researcher' (Gibson 30)... Laney's employers view him as an instrument to do research. Nominally a 'research assistant on a project' at DatAmerica, a group of French scientists teaches Laney to detect 'nodal points' within masses of unorganized data (Gibson 31)." /Idoru Essays/
"Laney finds 'nodal points,' or 'emergent systems of history,' 'the shapes from which history emerges,' in 'vast floes of undifferentiated data'; 'he palps nodes of potentiality, strung along lines that are histories of the happened becoming the not-yet.'" /Introducing William Gibson/
"Colin Laney, I'd like to say, is half of William Gibson. Part of the novelist's job, and particularly the science fiction writer's job, is to find the seeds of the future in the present. Science fiction does not claim to predict what will actually happen ten, or a hundred, or a thousand years from now. Rather, it explores the vast reservoirs of potentiality that lie hidden, already, in the here and now... The other half is Gibson the narrator, the weaver of fictions. Laney is basically a passive figure, obsessively caught in the grip of the patterns he apprehends. But Gibson, as a novelist, actively shapes and reworks those patterns. He gives us characters, plots, and situations, focusing our hopes and desires and fears. And in some ironic manner, Gibson's novels are even helping to mold the future which they apprehend."
Gibson himself acknowledges his connection with Laney in this interview with Literascape: "'The nodal point is probably at some level a metaphor for what I feel I do. Laney and I have the same job, looking for faces in the clouds.'"
"I think what I'm doing there is calling the species-wide concept of history into question. And it's sort of like the butterfly in the butterfly effect... I think that in the end of the novel (All Tomorrow's Parties) when the naked Japanese girl steps out of fax machines in every 7-Eleven on the planet -- the world ends right then. That's it. The singularity has happened. But the characters get up and make love and have breakfast and look for jobs. So yeah, nobody notices." /Gettingit.com/
Nodal points are emergent patterns in nested aggregates of data, clearly enough to make predictions. The key to the pattern is the person whose personality gives coherence to the data. A friend who does "cybersleuthing" tells me it is nearly impossible to eradicate the pattern created by our choices. She has helped to create identities from whole cloth for people in the witness protection program, but says there is nearly always some leakage. She once tracked a man who had changed identities three times as he moved across the country. He could not erase his preference for petite brunettes, and that factor led her to him. In a world in which the patterns of our behavior are updated daily in massive databanks, what does it mean to be free?
Chaotic Cognizance continues: "The most obvious realm that this ability applies to is that of coders and hackers. They immerse themselves in the internal workings of some immense project and try to hold the entire functionality in their mind at once; it makes coding easier when you know exactly what each part of the program can do and where its code is located. When I am in ‘hack-mode,’ sometimes there comes a moment when I recognize that the code base is no longer a beautiful thing; and that by realigning my perspective I can remedy it. I feel like these flashes of correctable elegance come to me due to recognizing nodal points while immersed in the program’s entrails."
"In Idoru by William Gibson, ... Laney is a quantitative analyst with a concentration deficit that he can adjust 'into a state of pathological hyperfocus,' thus enabling him to be 'an extremely good researcher' (Gibson 30)... Laney's employers view him as an instrument to do research. Nominally a 'research assistant on a project' at DatAmerica, a group of French scientists teaches Laney to detect 'nodal points' within masses of unorganized data (Gibson 31)." /Idoru Essays/
"Laney finds 'nodal points,' or 'emergent systems of history,' 'the shapes from which history emerges,' in 'vast floes of undifferentiated data'; 'he palps nodes of potentiality, strung along lines that are histories of the happened becoming the not-yet.'" /Introducing William Gibson/
"Colin Laney, I'd like to say, is half of William Gibson. Part of the novelist's job, and particularly the science fiction writer's job, is to find the seeds of the future in the present. Science fiction does not claim to predict what will actually happen ten, or a hundred, or a thousand years from now. Rather, it explores the vast reservoirs of potentiality that lie hidden, already, in the here and now... The other half is Gibson the narrator, the weaver of fictions. Laney is basically a passive figure, obsessively caught in the grip of the patterns he apprehends. But Gibson, as a novelist, actively shapes and reworks those patterns. He gives us characters, plots, and situations, focusing our hopes and desires and fears. And in some ironic manner, Gibson's novels are even helping to mold the future which they apprehend."
Gibson himself acknowledges his connection with Laney in this interview with Literascape: "'The nodal point is probably at some level a metaphor for what I feel I do. Laney and I have the same job, looking for faces in the clouds.'"
"I think what I'm doing there is calling the species-wide concept of history into question. And it's sort of like the butterfly in the butterfly effect... I think that in the end of the novel (All Tomorrow's Parties) when the naked Japanese girl steps out of fax machines in every 7-Eleven on the planet -- the world ends right then. That's it. The singularity has happened. But the characters get up and make love and have breakfast and look for jobs. So yeah, nobody notices." /Gettingit.com/
