Objet Petit A

Mobius Strip

 We've talked a lot about Jacques Lacan. We have to realize he died in 1981 when he was 80. Stuff has happened in Neuroscience and those sort of areas since the simpler and infinitely more comprehensible times. One of the topics Lacan put high priority on was the moments when a person started developing a self image.

For Lacan this idea of self image was an attempt to make yourself into  a mirror image a bigger and more confident other. You built it as a protection against the terror of reality. All very well being frightfully clever but an honest appraisal of a self in the world, for Lacan, was an absolute recipe for anti-social, psychotic behaviors.

There were two sorts of images, or others for Lacan. He thought of these others as objects. The one object was a mirror image of what you as a person decided you needed and wanted to be in order to fit into the world as best you could.  You could look at yourself in this mirror and judge your progress. The other other, the other object, which he called objet petit a, was what you'd left behind of yourself in the process of turning yourself into something that mirrored this wonderful image of yourself. Good looking, tall, successful, fun to be around....

Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that to manage the day to day you'd turned yourself into a very fine, highly polished Wardrobe. Everyone loved it, envied it, though it was great. Your other object, the objet petit a, would be the sawdust, waste wood, unfinished cans of varnish and cigarette butts you'd left laying around, or hidden away somewhere.

Oh sure, the Jung's of this world could go on about the archetypes around which a desperate and self conscious self could model itself, and Jung did mention shadows, which is what he called his cigarette butts and sawdust, being an ominous presence in the psyche. Lacan, in his model, put much more than a mere shadow into his objet petit a, his other other.

First of all, Lacan didn't want people messing with what he'd called his other other. He wanted it written and understood just as it was. Objet petit a, as far as he was concerned, was as good as an algebraic formulation.

Secondly the objet petit a, would always be a remainder, it was definitely a left over bit of reality that both the conscious and the unconscious could sense. But for Lacan, the moment we people started using symbols to make a language that tried to enable us to communicate with the object petit a, this other other, like a vampire, would remain outside the mirror, it couldn't be trapped by language, it was for ever a lurking misfortune, an unwanted appendage. And yet, no doubt about it, there was something in the periphery that refused to be ignored, it was lurking around, making the odd wistful sound that verged on whimpering, it had some sort of point to make that lay outside the Symbolic Order, so probably best to prescribe Quaaludes.

Finally, the objet petit a, this other other, means we can never be whole, our mirror, when we looked into it to check progress would never reflect what we'd become

Noise Cancelling and Sums ain't got It All

 I wanted to use the word Randomness or "Entropy as Noise" to get our minds around the possibility of other ways of thinking about ourselves as we are in the world. To get where I want to go, I'll have to offer an explanation of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. And I want to use information technology's lossy compression to inform our understanding of the way meaning works, specifically as presented by the post structuralist understanding of symbolic order in words and sentences. I'll try to start with the dainty ideas in this flighty expression lossy compression.

Lossy Compression in information science is when an electronic file is compressed to make it smaller, allows it to require less bandwidth when transmitted and less space to store. In the process of compression information is lost. Hence Lossy.

There's a big lossy factor to the way our brains handle information. And why? Here we have "Entropy as Noise" and/or Randomness. If too much information was to attempt to fill our brain networks at the same time ir would become garbled. The information would lose cohesion it would become a bunch of random words. As a result, instead of a book of stamps I might leave the post office with a six by ten envelope handcuffed to the back seat of a Sheriff's cruiser. Entropy is a measure of order within a system, low entropy is tidy and neat, high entropy is messy.

We evolved from the primal ooze this way. We know a lot, we don't have to use all of it all the time. It's there in your mind, making it useful, or at least germane to the matter at hand, doesn't require you to go back to the genesis of your ultimate purpose in life. 

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem applies to all mathematics. What it said in 1931 to the shock and alarm of Empiricists like Bertrand Russell and what it still says is that there are things in math that cannot be proved by math. In other words, if Godel is right, there is no mathematical theory of everything.

Be brave, while math can slide between concepts in the same way language slides between meaning on a symbolic order, sums haven't got it all, hard to believe but there's still room in the world for whatever it is that might be going on between our aggravating little ears.

We do take short cuts and will continue to allow a library of vaguely defined words to carry meanings that slide between nuances of slippery understandings for us. Our means of transmission may well be lossy for purposes of efficiency, getting the basic message there quickly, at the same time they remain very imprecise when compared to numbers.

Joan of Arc Patron Saint of Soldiers

Sybil Thorndike, 1929 as Joan

 in Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan

 The lovely forms of Francis Hutcheson's six senses, inspired as they were by the grace of an honest and distant God, have the slope-like qualities of the German Idealists. An arc of history curving toward justice. A star in the East bringing good news. Destiny or divine guidance. 

I say slope-like to take benefit from the Agincourt Effect Incline. In their attack on the English, overconfident French Knights, who greatly outnumbered the uncivilized English were moving up a gentle hill in heavy mud. It's what the military call a killing ground, the Pride of France fell prey to the English Archers.

It took a good 15 years of defeat after defeat, and France in the person of a French King would have been lost at the Siege of Orléans, had it not been for a very young peasant girl dressed as an armored maiden with sword on a mission from god. She was a very competent and fanatical leader of men who was able to drum some sense into the Dauphin Charles who was standing in for his dad who was safe in Paris having one of his manic episodes - Dauphin is French for the French King's Eldest Son, and also for the Dolphins that appear on his coat of arms.  Amongst her other talents Joan was able to influence wind direction which was rather critical.

When things settled down, when she was about 19 years old, despite the influence she'd had on the course of the 100 Years War in France's favor, Joan was basically accused of being a heretic by French Authorities for wearing men's clothes. Had she been able to stick to it and admit that wearing boys clothes was wrong she'd have done time and then, as long as she wore women's clothes, probably found a future in the church as a leader of Crusades, but there was something about Joan that pissed off the boys. While in jail she was taunted, raped by a nobleman and what with one thing and another she started wearing boys clothes again. French Authorities handed her over to the English, and for this brave, patriotic, loyal, fierce French soldier, who refused to fight on Sunday, the Arc of history curved toward a Justices that convicted her to be burned at the stake. 

 You might think well, well, well and ask for a reminder of Bernard Shaw's portrayal of her as a deeply intense challenge to the institutions of the church and of the state. For the State she was a female of no apparent lineage, a loose canon who could rouse the soldiers which was just downright dangerous. For the Church she appeared to have a direct communication with God, which put her at odds with a church that saw its role as maintaining a unity of doctrine by keeping for itself the hard work of interpreting the word of god. 

Anyway, Joan was burned to death in 1431, her conviction was overturned in 1456 and not until May 16th 1920 was she canonized as a Saint.

Recursive

Interpretive Dance Class 1949

 I wanted to talk about the word "recursive." It's a word that's come up a lot, and because it sounds a little like a Times Table, I have glossed over it once too often. The trouble is when "they" talk about neural networks of the various gradations of complexity, from simple to complex, in the evolution of neural networks, the most complex allow for "recursion."  This means that to wax lyrical and with tremendous elan on the role communication has played on the Genesis of Species I have to know what recursion means when applied to cognitive function, so I don't stick my foot down my throat.

To avoid an error of comprehension in the definitions here, my own thoughts return to the Post Structural European thinkers who began to understand the words in language as Jacques Lacan's irascible Symbolic Form notable for its fluidity that was better understood as an order of meaning rather than anything that had the nerve to claim a certainty of meaning. What did we use to say in those happier days?

We found faith in Lacan. For him language is a vast network of words, sounds, structures that shape our reality, forms the unconscious, gives structure to the world around us, it's where meaning arises, and of course in this tidal pool of interactions between something and emptiness words happen and become lodged in the memory.

Neural Networks are pathways in the brain for processing information. There's a backwards and forwards, up and down. The word recursive in a Recursive Neural Network, whether the network is artificial as in the big computer or in part of a body that belongs to you or I, puts an equal weight on the backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards of bits of information that's traveling around the network and as a result the network builds hierarchical tree like structures like sentences, not vague half backed whiffs that go around and round just thoroughly enjoying a symbol-less expression of itself for which, aggravatingly and possibly neurotically, there is no explanation. 

In our minds, recursion is something that makes sense or begins to make enough sense to pass as sense. In the new world of automation, failure of "recursion" as it currently stands means insufficient data to achieve a solution. And the thing about our Recurring Neural Networks, as opposed to those other ones, as long as we are alive our constant symbolizing of the real never actually comes to a comfortable end. Instead of ending to it all as quickly as possible and switching ourselves off, we come up with things like interpretive dance and  when that's not available we call forth words like curiosity, creativity, special, passionate and onwards.