Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 35, No. 134. Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne Hosted by DH-Cologne www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org Date: 2021-07-12 07:31:15+00:00 From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk> Subject: once again unto the breach Let's consider again this notion (it is vague, I admit) of an oppositional AI. My objective in staging such opposition of human-with-problem versus a conceivably mischievous machine is, a folklorist might say and have examples to prove it, as old as the hills. For example, in their introduction to Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes (1996), Galit Hasan-Rokem and David Shulman write about a genre that comes to mind: > The riddle's form is dialogic, requiring the interaction of self and > other. Two levels are joined in the question, only to be disentangled > in the answer. The process involved is inherently enigmatic and also > transformative: the transition effected leaves reality changed, > restructured, its basic categories restated, recognized, affirmed. > This is no less true for the inner reality of consciousness than for > any external, "objectified" world. > > In short, the riddle, both in itself and in its contextual > embeddedness, is rich in existential content. The late Peter Clemoes likewise wrote in his masterful book, Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Poetry (1995), about how Anglo-Saxon riddling and the enigmatic language in Beowulf, The Wanderer &al, deliver "a lesson in the quirkiness to which a systematic relationship between potential and performance could be subject" (p. 105). OK, I am fishing... but from time to time I do think I can see the fish. To speak less metaphorically, I am thinking that it is, somehow, in the creative disruption of sedimented thought that the potential lies. But equally important if not more so is the question of where the disruption occurs. Surely we mistake things fundamentally in narrowing this question down to the machine in its precomputational sense. Surely the betweenness is where we must look -- in current jargon, in the 'space' between hardware and wetware? Clemoes especially furnishes a reminder of what we have to gain by remembering that in the digital humanities imaginative literature is not merely a domain of data to be processed but a way of thinking and being to be enacted. Comments? Yours, WM -- Willard McCarty, Professor emeritus, King's College London; Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist www.mccarty.org.uk _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php