Paul Harland

@pabloredux

Evolution: it's nothing personal. (Sorry if I ask too many questions... Share nicely!) I'm here because you're here. (Profile photo: a faint shadow of me cast across a weathered lichen-marked stone wall by the sea.)

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Paul Harland@pabloredux· 12d

Update on my essay: finished painting the garden walls.

Paul Harland@pabloredux· Jul 3

Café Bustelo tasted burnt to me, had to adjust quantities (and found online there are real obsessives out there, the coffee "hifi" geeks). No high-class setup, mine. I mainly wanted to match the colour of the tiles.

Kettle on the left, on the right a plasticky household espresso machine with a pressure dial, buttons and lights, a couple of small cups upside down on top. In centre foreground, the handle of a basket filled with Café Bustelo grounds, a tin of which is open on a worktop messy with plastic coffee-preparation implements, a second open empty tin and two plastic lids. Small random-pattern square tiling on the wall behind, which has an electric socket busy with plugs and an adaptor. Wooden drawers below, bottom left.

Paul Harland@pabloredux· Jul 2

“It is characteristic of inspirations, whether preceded by ecstasy or not, that the new idea or purpose feels as if it had arrived independantly [sic] of the creator's volition and often as if it were communicated by someone or something else.” 'Ecstasy' by Marghanita Laski, 1961. E.g. pages 306-307

PRIMARY OVERBELIEF (II)
The new knowledge derives from an unnamed and unpersonified source: The questionnaire group provides some examples: something urgent that has got to be communicated ... not from myself, me only the channel (Q 18); 'something which appears to be given to you' (Q3s).
The new knowledge is communicated by a faculty whose function this is: From the questionnaire group: 'the creative faculty descends' (Q 19): 'an inward power that surges to the surface' (Q 46). From outside the groups, two examples are:
'the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master-something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself'.
'The themes have been dictated to him, intuitively and unconsciously, by his inner being, his native genius, his inspired soul.'
The new knowledge is created by a special faculty, as above, but this faculty is personified: 'I couldn't have done what I had done if I hadn't been inhabited by someone other than myself,' said Q 2; 'given to me by a being who was a poet' said Nichols (L 5), and outside the groups this form is extremely common. George Eliot told J. W. Cross
'that, in all that she considered her best writing, there was a "not herself" which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting'.
Dickens spoke of 'some beneficient power' that, when he sat down to his book, showed it all to him, Stevenson of his 'Brownies' that did all his work for him while he slept. Kipling named as his Daemon the creative voice that spoke to him, and commented, 'When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.' Goethe is said to have put his own experience into the mouth of Wilhelm in Die Wanderjahre when he wrote,
'It often seems to me as though an invisible genius were whispering something rhythmical to me'.
'It often seems to me as though-' None of these people believed...

COMMUNICATION AND CONTACT
someone other than themselves was 'giving' the material, and this impression was so strong that it seemed natural to give this 'someone' a personality and a name.
The new knowledge is believed to be communicated by someone else: It is believed that the communication does in fact come from someone other than the inspired person, which is to say that it comes from a supernatural being. Sometimes the belief may be no more than a matter of poetic imagery, as with the seraph who spoke to Tennyson (L 2), the Spirit of Life that illumined Richard Feverel (L 16) and the messenger of Hope who came to Emily Bronte (L 21).
But these are literary texts, and in the religious texts such claims are more than a matter of poetic imagery. Of text R 2, Underhill explains that St. Catherine of Siena attributed 'the intuitive perception of the deeper self' to 'the Divine Voice speaking in her soul'. We cannot doubt that Angela of Foligno believed it was indeed God who conversed with her (R 5a) or that Joseph Salmon believed he heard a voice 'that came from the throne of the heavenly Almightiness' (R 18).
Not only pregnant sentences but entire books may be believed to be communicated by divine voices and written at their behest.
'When our Divine Lord revealed to the saint [sc. St. Gertrude] it was His will she should commit her revelations to writing, her humility was exceedingly amazed.'
Boehme professed to write only what he had 'seen' by divine illumination and comments to God, 'Thou didst make me write with so great a detachment that I was obliged to leave off and begin again as Thou didst choose ... suddenly Thou wouldst cause me to write, then at once to cease, and then to begin again.'

[ Notes omitted for lack of space – see Internet Archive https://archive.org/search?query=laski+ecstasy&tab=all ]

Paul Harland@pabloredux· Jun 28

Point 3 made me think of Derrida (again) @davidgunkel.bsky.social... I've yet (if ever) to read Of Grammatology, but I note he mentions cybernetics within it. What did he gain (and lose) from it?

... these activities themselves. It is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and pro-gram in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts--including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory--which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed. Even before being determined as human (with all the distinctive characteristics that have always been attributed to man and the entire system of significations that they imply) or nonhuman, the grammè--or the grapheme--would thus name the element. An element without simplicity. An element, whether it is understood as the medium or as the irreducible atom, of the arche-synthesis in general, of what one must forbid oneself to define within the system of oppositions of metaphysics, of what consequently one should not even call experience in general, that is to say the origin of meaning in general.

This situation has always already been announced. Why is it today in the process of making itself known as such and after the fact? This question would call forth an interminable analysis. Let us simply choose some points...

Paul Harland@pabloredux· Jun 4

I have, I have! Although checking it out again now, I must've paid more attention to the coffee story than Figure 1. But I ended up with a similar example (see the paper I drew them from) and a somewhat related argument asynchronies.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/a... except I'm happy to keep "qualia".

From Dennett's "Quining Qualia". Figure 1 shows two visual illusions where people commonly interpret shaped empty spaces as representing a solid missing shape.
Text above has been talking about changed experiences of coffee taste over time.

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 31

The US President demonstrating his usual calculated indifference to facts.

Caption of Trump talking in Oval Office, three weeks ago: "[we've] basically wiped out their military in about 2 weeks..."

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 31

Thanks, but that didn't seem to fix it for me.

Screenshot of Google search bar, the query being: How many k's in Google? -ai

First result: Al Overview

There is 1 "k" in the word "Google".

It is the second-to-last letter, following the two "o"s and before the "e".

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 31

You can only imagine how great I look in two pairs of cheap glasses, one with a lens missing - 'cos no way am I posting a photo of me. I'm doing the best I can, though - I hope! - with no free will.

Messy desk.
On left: tablet keyboard with two pairs of glasses resting on it, slid one on top of the other.
To the right: computer mouse, Bic pen and a novel by Marghanita on top of a book of screenplays (including Brief Encounter).
Centre left: tablet screen with typed-up reading notes (Comments on Ecstasy).
Above and behind: the bottom of a wide computer monitor filled with images (of pages from Ecstasy). Underneath the big screen, towards the top right of the desk, are some more pairs of glasses, a disconnected mouse and a small mess of wires.

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 30

I'd better get out now without wading ignorantly into "reference, intention, and meaning" too. I could sign off, "Thank you for your attention to this matter!" but instead will leave you with this postcard, a faded memory, extended. Probably the only time my father was addressed as Apple Apple!

Dear Apple Apple,
Have shortened the new trousers and have succeeded in getting them up and down with one hand when I tried them on myself - also thought you might manage the same with velcro on the grey ones.
Lots of love.

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 30

But does that mean @davidgunkel.bsky.social the book will not be pursuing the possible lines of enquiry indicated in your original essay, 'The différance engine: large language models and poststructuralism', but instead turning back towards Derrida's formulations?

6.3 LLMs and the question of meaning

A third limitation-related to and directly proceeding from the previous one-concerns the consequences of a central claim advanced in this essay: that LLMs do not merely imitate human language use, but expose the very logics that underlie its functioning. Taken seriously, this could suggest that human language use itself might be explicable, at least in part, in terms of the operations of these generative models.

This opens an important line of inquiry: what, if anything, do LLMs reveal about the structures of human thought and language use? And how might this affect our understanding not only of meaning but of ourselves? One possible response, consistent with the strategy of deconstruction, would be to resist the binary opposition that has been situated between the "we are all just stochastic parrots now" and "we are not parrots, because we know what words mean." Rather than choosing sides in this dispute, Derrida's work can be read as charting a third path-one that deconstructs the metaphysical terms of the debate itself.

While the present essay gestures toward this possibility, a full elaboration of it exceeds the scope of the current inquiry. To pursue it seriously would require a separate and sustained engagement not only with Derrida's corpus but also with contemporary debates in philosophy of language, cognitive science, and computational linguistics. In short, this essay simply set out to connect-the-dots between différance and LLMs, but what this ultimately means for human thought and language use is a different, albeit related, undertaking, and one that must, for now at least, be deferred.

Springer

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 27

No, "h", surely?

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 27

I've decided @davidgunkel.bsky.social that Death of the Author is (significantly?) a red herring. I almost overlooked this footnote in an earlier Barthes essay pointing towards Umberto Eco on games in Bond: cockburndj.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/i... (Of course, Barthes gets it almost back to front!)

Roland Barthes' Image-Music-Text, chapter on Structural Analysis of Narrative, page 109, footnote 1.

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 27

Latest essay update: garden wall now falling behind schedule too! Tomorrow, I hope to finish wall-cleaning and near the end of typing up notes.

Garden wall with areas of loose paint scraped off.

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 13

Interesting on how you arrived at that particular phrase. Did you know that Jefferson, in his 1949 public lecture, published in the BMJ - which Turing responded to in his 1950 "imitation game" paper - used a very similar parrot argument, taken from Descartes (as he says earlier in the lecture)...?

June 25, 1949 - THE MIND OF MECHANICAL MAN

"It is not enough, therefore, to build a machine that could use words (if that were possible), it would have to be able to create concepts and to find for itself suitable words in which to express additions to knowledge that it brought
about. Otherwise it would be no more than a cleverer parrot, an improvement on the typewriting monkeys which would accidentally in the course of centuries write Hamlet."

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 9

#Turing #Non-binary #Library

Two books side by side on a library display shelf. Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age, by B. Jack Copeland; Non-Binary Lives: an Anthology of Intersecting Identities, edited by Jos Twist, Ben Vincent, Meg-John Barker and Kat Gupta.

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 9

As part of my own little writing game, I'm avoiding reading Camera Lucida, but I found a puncture mark, a pinhole on the page into the future through which one could picture it "precisely", inverted, as in a camera obscura, and that may have to suffice.

The Death of the Author | 147

Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book. and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyché, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained' - victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today undermined along with the Author. In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases - reason, science, law.

Let us come back to the Balzac sentence. No one, no 'person', says it: its source, its voice, is not the true place of the writing, which is reading. Another - very precise -

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 9

Predicted National Vote Share over time, from www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"BBC analysis suggests a five-way split..." etc, etc, down to table with "Predicted National Vote Share over time", from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0ljrp76ywxo

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 7

Sign:

POLLING
STATION

⬅️ WAY IN

My finger pointing to the left, thumbs up!

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 7

I was feeling guilty about how I'd left him last night, but... yes? Maybe...? Better not to make it a yes/no question. What kind of bullshit did he write? What kind of "large language model" did he use? Although he speaks of the preterite and the bourgeoisie, he must suspect it might apply to him.

WRITING AND THE NOVEL

intolerable in the preterite as used in the Novel: it is a lie made manifest, it delineates an area of plausibility which reveals the possible in the very act of unmasking it as false. The teleology common to the Novel and to narrated History is the alienation of the facts: the preterite is the very act by which society affirms its possession of its past and its possibility. It creates a content credible, yet flaunted as an illusion; it is the ultimate term of a formal dialectics which clothes an unreal fact in the garb first of truth then of a lie denounced as such. This has to be related to a certain mythology of the universal typifying the bourgeois society of which the Novel is a characteristic product; it involves giving to the imaginary the formal guarantee of the real, but while preserving in the sign the ambiguity of a double object, at once believable and false. This operation occurs constantly in the whole of Western art, in which the false is equal to the true, not through any agnosticism or poetic duplicity, but because the true is supposed to contain a germ of the universal, or to put it differently, an essence capable of fecundating by mere reproduction, several orders of things among which some differ by their remoteness and some by their fictitious character.

It is thanks to an expedient of the same kind ...

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 6

After the Rose of Nevada at the Picturehouse, back to the "ambiguous function disclosed in the preterite" (less disclosed than announced by Roland). Slow start to this chapter! Luckily, a pint of Old Peculier should smooth over our little differences. At least he's finally got round to a novel.

As described above, but through two mismatched pairs of spectacles.

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 6

Is "writing the opposite of speech"? Nah! But let Barthes enjoy his excessive contrasts, his youthful extremes — "all; in no way; not; only; whole; perpetually; conversely; on the contrary; always; nothing but; alone; ceaselessly; an essence" — while I appreciate his insights in this short chapter.

POLITICAL MODES OF WRITING

All modes of writing have in common the fact of being 'closed' and thus different from spoken language. Writing is in no way an instrument for communication, it is not an open route through which there passes only the intention to speak. A whole disorder flows through speech and gives it this self-devouring momentum which keeps it in a perpetually suspended state. Conversely, writing is a hardened language which is self-contained and is in no way meant to deliver to its own duration a mobile series of approximations. It is on the contrary meant to impose, thanks to the shadow cast by its system of signs, the image of a speech which had a structure even before it came into existence. What makes writing the opposite of speech is that the former always appears symbolical, introverted, ostensibly turned towards an occult side of language, whereas the second is nothing but a flow of empty signs...

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 5

The movie felt like my corporate, computerised past flashing before me. I never imagined the shallow culture of smug bosses and smart underlings would be so mindlessly automated unchecked. As @davidgunkel.bsky.social says, Frankenstein's monster is capitalism unbound - and it just wants to be loved!

David Gunkel: AI problems are really just good old capitalism problems.

David Gunkel: The alternative story that's in Frankenstein.

Sonam Kachru: There's something about artificial life that serves as a lens or a magnifying glass.

Paul Harland@pabloredux· May 3

Most accessible, were I not forbidden — by my own imposition — from unfettered access. Most revealing about the author, had the author not already died — at his own hand — long before he did. Writing Degree Zero, forever introducing an end to the History of Writing, for a Barthes writing in 1953.

Two sets of spectacles, one labelled: Opulize.

Inside back cover of a book. Blurb reads:-

ROLAND BARTHES was born in 1915 and studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Romania and Egypt, he joined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted himself to research in sociology and lexicology. He was a Professor at the Collège de France until his death in 1980.

MYTHOLOGIES
'I readily proclaim that Mythologies is a kind of masterpiece, a fascinating book, the meaning of which swells in the mind and can lend itself to all sorts of applications.' John Weightman, Observer

SADE/FOURIER/LOYOLA
'It's a witty and colourful book. Barthes's writing is so clear and bracing ... and really accessible to anyone who has the faintest notion of recent French criticism.' Peter Ackroyd, Spectator

CAMERA LUCIDA
'Of all his works it is the most accessible in language and the most revealing about the Author. And effortlessly, as if in passing, his reflections on photography raise questions and doubts which will permanently affect the vision of the reader.' Caroline Tisdall, Guardian

EMPIRE OF SIGNS
'Exquisitely cadenced, shimmering with allusions, puns, cross-hatchings like shot silk.' George Steiner, Sunday Times silk

A BARTHES READER
'With A Barthes Reader we have a sort of Michelin guide to one of the most beguiling minds of our era... samples Barthes's achievement over three decades.' William Plummer, Newsweek

ISBN 0 224 02267 9

Paul Harland@pabloredux· Apr 15

Bournemouth Book of the Week, April '36! Sequel to Carson's pre-war novel that got me reading Laski's wartime one (also a Persephone reprint) instead. Note the Nazi robot brain theme that was still there in the post-war UK machine mind debate. @davidgunkel.bsky.social @svennyholm.bsky.social

Page 3 of the Persephone Pamphlet No.4, Spring/Summer 2026:

The Prisoner was widely reviewed. In March 1936, the London Daily News told its readers that 'the atmosphere of suspicion, hatred, spying and lunatic enthusiasm - all these are rendered with a pitiless verisimilitude. While in April, the Bournemouth Graphic said about its Book of the Week: 'Sally Carson, who gave us such a vivid picture of Germany inside with her clever book Crooked Cross, has given her readers another wonderful story showing the terrible crisis through which the German nation is passing today in spite of the mad enthusiasm so often displayed. Miss Carson's new work is entitled The Prisoner and, if anything, it takes the reader more deeply into the painful sheep-like life of the average German family today. Although presented as a story, the reader cannot get away from the feeling that all the time he is reading the true drama of a great nation which appears to have made a god of its present leader.

'The book shows how the German mother, father, son and daughter, whose family life won the admiration of thousands of Britishers in the years of long ago, now seem humans with the brains of a robot. Almost mechanical in their action, they are willing to be led anywhere and anyhow as the Leader directs. Initiative and real affection - the very foundation of family life seem non-existent. The German may go here and there, but wherever he goes the reader of this compelling volume will feel that he or she is a prisoner. They are prisoners within themselves and each with a distrust of his fellow man. Miss Carson has given the English-speaking race something to think about, but above all it should fill every Britisher with determination that we shall never be reduced to such an appalling condition as revealed in these pages.'

Paul Harland@pabloredux· Apr 10

Yes, you could be right. Before the op, it was the other way round as obviously they did the worse one first. From some old prescription sunglasses I've kept the left lens, swapping the right one for a lens from (as it happens) slightly darker regular sunglasses. Looks odd but balances it out!

Sunglasses held out in front to show view of chair on patio, grass behind, garage wall to side. Left lens makes everything much smaller as it corrects short sight. Right lens is for normal vision. (Also slightly darker brown - see post.)

Paul Harland@pabloredux· Apr 9

Also in the same Popular Mechanics issue are articles on a "bombsight that thinks" (its computer has a watchlike mechanism) and a gunsight with 'several computers — the electronic "brains" of the system — which aim the guns.' I suppose that's narrow AI with HCI, plus BBC-scaring anthropomorphism?

'Between the sighting stations are several computers — the electronic "brains" of the system — which aim the guns at a point in space where bullets and enemy plane will meet. Ballistic factors which are solved by the computer in a split second include lead, windage, gravity and parallax.

Information that must be re-layed to the computer by electrical impulses includes range and speed of the enemy plane, its angle from the B-29, air density and speed of the bomber.'

Paul Harland@pabloredux· Apr 7

"Cybernetics. A word invented by Professor Wiener to describe the field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal. None of the authors quite understands what the word means, so it has not been used in this book."

Part of page 411, the Glossary to 'Faster Than Thought', edited by BV Bowden, 1953. Copy available online at https://archive.org/details/fasterthanthough00bvbo

As well as the Cybernetics entry quoted in the post, it also has, 'Computor. "Bad spelling of computer" — Oxford English Dictionary.'

Paul Harland@pabloredux· Apr 5

You get a mention, @amitav.bsky.social I notice you came to Bluesky over a year before me but are no longer active. Worth another look...? The stats have improved since then, but it could really do with a wider range of users to sustain itself.

Bluesky stats from https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Paul Harland@pabloredux· Mar 30

Can't read beyond the abstract, just poking my nose in! I thought affordances were from the direct perception school, where there was no role for representations? The apples that topped and tailed 'Robin & Marian' had definitely lost their ripeness-affordances but unsure what affordance was gained.

3 wrinkled apples, from the Robin and Marian (1975) title sequence.

Paul Harland@pabloredux· Mar 28

Games... been thinking of my (false? must be 1966-7) ending... and then I was reading this... bsky.app/profile/pabl... (4E gets in) and staring at table 2 and telling myself I was getting lazy about game elements. Don't forget players' physical conditions, weather conditions, cultural conditions.