While reading Louisa Hall’s Speak, I was reminded of an essay on the connection between golems & computers that I’d intended to write. Hall acknowledges George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral as providing inspiration for her project, and I’d also hoped to draw material from Dyson’s book for my essay.
I’d been convinced by William Poundstone’s review of Turing’s Cathedral that there would be a lot about words in it: “For the first time, numbers could mean numbers or instructions. Data could be a noun or a verb.”
Unfortunately, Turing’s Cathedral did not match my expectations. Not that it wasn’t good. I simply had in mind a very specific thing that I wanted the book to say: something about words summoning forth the universe, maybe paralleling Max Tegmark’s idea (described in Our Mathematical Universe) that the underlying descriptive mathematics create the world. His idea was, in effect, “we exist because numbers can describe us.”
Of course, Tegmark is a physicist, a math brain, so it makes sense that he’d propose that numbers would create reality. Hall, the author of Speak, has a Ph.D. in English, and so, in her book, words do it.
Indeed, within the context of novels, words do create reality. Her characters exist because her descriptive language make them so. For some twelve thousand years at least, Homo sapiens have been spinning myths with language. Creating worlds, and in the meantime reshaping our own.
I wanted to write about that generative power. Several years ago I filled three pages of my notebook (my handwriting is very small, so this took me several days) with notes for an elaborate analogy between Turing machines and golems, linguistically-created life forms both. And I wanted so badly to cram it into my novel, but there was simply no way for it to fit it in without risking the adjective “sprawling,” which I don’t see as a positive characteristic in literature.
In brief, Turing machines are lent life because their data also serves as words. Although the commands are written in a partial script (a numerical versus verbal language), each command can also be treated as a thing to be manipulated. Golems are also given life by the power of a word. Plus, the traditional golem myth prominently features the compelling power of the word death, which nicely mirrors the Ramayana — can you tell how badly I wanted all of this to fit in my book? Math and words and robots and the Ramayana!
I suppose I have a bit of explaining to do. Here’s a summary of the golem story: Clay man was built. Clay man was inscribed with the word truth (in Hebrew, “emet”) on his forehead. Clay man, computer-like, would follow instructions with no flexibility or human intuition. This led to problems, clay man had to be killed, a letter on his forehead was erased (leaving the Hebrew “met,” death or dead), clay man was a man no more.
And here’s a summary of the original invocation of the Ramayana, also featuring the word death: A brigand was robbing and killing to support his family. One day he was about to kill some monks and one asked, “Your family shares the money you bring home, do they also share your guilt?”
Obviously, I think they should — prospering from evil should transitively mark you with that evil, which in my opinion is the wellspring of the argument that reparations should be paid even now, many years after the end of the most egregious abuses — but the brigand went home and asked his family their opinion and they said, “No. You do the killing. Your soul is tarnished. We simply eat the food you bring. We are still good.”
The brigand didn’t like the sound of that so he gave up killing (and abandoned his family) and became a traveling bard. He was chosen by the gods to sing the most glorious epic myth, The Ramayana, but to summon this story from wherever myths live he needed to chant the hero’s name. This chant would apparently infuse his mind with all the necessary details and plot twists and whatever. His job was to say “Rama Rama Rama” until, bam!, he knew the story well enough to rattle it off in metered verse.
But he said he couldn’t. He’d done all that killing and whatnot, remember? So he told the gods, “It would be an honor, but, no, I am too impure to speak his name.” Couldn’t chant Rama. So the gods instructed him to chant “death death death” instead (in Sanskrit, “mara mara mara”), and the syllables bled into one another and, “mara mara ma ra ma ra ma rama rama rama,” he found himself chanting the name by accident and the story came to him.
To the best of my knowledge, computers cannot be manipulated this way. As far as I know, trying to trick your computer with a palindromic pointer might cause the wrong area of memory to be modified, which could cause further instructions to be mistargeted, and the entire hard drive could be made fubar… but maybe it’s my ignorance that gives me this suspicion. Maybe computer scientists know secret power words to summon forth the magic.
Frank Brown Cloud 