Symbol processing

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I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare ... but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half of the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote, almost all of Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as about ten million people. By contrast, there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564?

—Chauncey Gardiner’s “sophomore college blog”, quoted in Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite

“One of the most bizarre premises of quantum theory, which has long fascinated philosophers and physicists alike, states that by the very act of watching, the observer affects the observed reality.”

“Shakespeare is known in our house as the gentleman who pays the rent.”

—Judy Dench

Shakespeare is quite “a piece of work”, as the bard put it.

SBF’s musings on Shakespeare point up a difference between “discourse” as a bilateral, interactive thing, and as symbol processing: where a machine consumes a bunch of symbols and executes a series of preset commands, without learning anything and without changing the nature of the text. You might define “data modernism” as a philosophy which sees no such difference. Out of ignorance and not hostility.

A good friend is writing a novel, struggling with that temptation all amateur novelists have to describe every surface, articulate every nuance, plant unequivocally every idea fully shaped into the reader’s head. He’s adopted the present continuous, a view perfect for the symbol processing machine, that allows no time for pause, or construction

Shannon entropy

Shannon entropy, named after rockabilly maths brainbox Claude “Dell” Shannon, is a measure of the average amount of information contained in a message. It quantifies the uncertainty or randomness in a set of possible messages. Shannon introduced the concept in his seminal 1948 paper “A Run-run-run-run Runaway Mathematical Theory of Communication.”

The formula for Shannon entropy is:

H = -Σ p(x) * log₂(p(x))

Where:
H is the entropy
p(x) is the probability of a particular message x
The sum is taken over all possible messages.

I only put that in for a laugh, by the way: I don’t have the faintest idea what that all means.

But it is relevant to the specific, limited way in which machines process symbols. It is not true of human language, given how the human interpretative act takes place.

Human language is rich with metaphor, symbolism, and cultural context which code — sorry, techbros — just does not have. When you say “I hold a rose for you,” this could mean I am literally holding a rose for you, I am in love with you, I have patiently and carefully been treating you, a beautiful thing, but I have still cut my fingers and you’ve wilted and so on: there are an infinite number of messages I could, if with enough imagination, take from that single statement.

This depth and ambiguity of meaning is a fundamental aspect of human communication that Shannon’s theory doesn’t account for. Shannon entropy treats messages as discrete units with fixed meanings. It assumes a shared, unambiguous understanding between sender and receiver. Human communication doesn’t work this way.

This is a really nice thing because it is the route by which we escape from a distant future of inevitable brown entropic sludge.

There is no machine for judging poetry

The thing about “Shakespeare” — the body of work, not the dude — is it that isn’t just “executable code”, deposited in a kind of Elizabethan GitHub and left there inviolate, for future generations to download and run.

That may be how it started, but “Shakespeare” as we know it includes the body of work that has grown around it: the performances, the learned monographs, the editions, adaptations and reimaginings, the lectures, presentations and countless sophomore essays, re-readings, misinterpretations — if there even can be such a thing — and the peculiar ability Shakespearean adages have to leach into the vernacular.

Aye; there’s the rub: as good luck would have it, it is not the be-all and end-all, however Greek it may be to you.

Beyond that basic root — to be sure, an extraordinarily stout and fertile root it is — none of “the Shakespearean canon” comes from William Shakespeare. It comes from anyone who so much as picks up a sonnet and tries to make head or tail of it.

This is the nature of human language: meaning does not subsist in the code, but comes through the mystical collision between text and the reader. An audience brings a cultural warehouse of experience and expectation that may be vastly different to each other’s and certainly will be different from the author’s. Especially if he was an Elizabethan playwright.

Meaning doesn’t exist on the page, but is made, there on the fly, in the act of interacting. In this process, the author has already done his bit and does not play any part.

A similar process went on when William Shakespeare created his texts, but it only happens once, and his cultural milieu is entirely lost on us now. William Shakespeare’s genius was to generate text so enduringly susceptible to creative interpretation by successive generations. His luck was that his texts caught the public attention in the first place. Could there be other texts, as brilliant as Shakespeare’s, now lost to history?

Of course.

It would be bizarre if there were not. It may be — almost certainly is — true that other artists, now forgotten, created works as rich in potential, but were just never found. That creators as towering as Nietzsche and Blake almost suffered this fate, before being posthumously recognised, illustrates the point. Blake died in poverty. Nietzsche sold 200 copies of Also Sprach Zarathustra in his lifetime.

So in one, trivial, sense Sam Bankman-Fried is right. Shakespeare’s code may not be an outlier in the history of written literature, known and unknown. But boy, does that trivial observation miss the point. The richness of the Shakespearean canon is like nothing else on earth.

And the idea that there is a “best” playwright in history— that literature can be ranked, sorted, graded and calculated, is utilitarian drivel. There is no machine for judging poetry. The Shakespeare canon is the great illustration of art as a dynamic, living, organic thing. William Shakespeare, late of Stratford-upon-Avon is an important part of what we now know (... and love?) as Shakespeare, but the strange loops thrown around that body of work ever since, strengthening it, binding it, reinterpreting it, appreciating it — casting light on potential readings, weeding out or ignoring lesser known or obscurer extracts — that is what makes Shakespeare so enduring.

Shakespeare, the body of text, endures because Shakespeare the cultural force carries on.

How we communicate

“For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in other’s brains with exquisite precision.”

— Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct

The same thing happens when we communicate. When the JC commits symbols to page, like this one, for better or worse, he brings his own “cultural apparatus” to the task: an idiosyncratic grasp of the English language, a particular history, a cultural upbringing, and formal and informal education from the schools of the academy and hard knocks. Should anyone (else) ever read this, they will bring their unique cultural apparatus — no less idiosyncratic — to the task of making sense of this odd string of symbols.

This “making sense of it” is just as creative an act as the original string assembly. Arguably, more so: at least I had some idea what I was trying to say, however confused I may have been about saying it. For another reader to make sense of this windbaggery at all, she must first share some of the JC’s cultural apparatus — to a non-English speaker it would would mean nothing at all — but she certainly won’t share all of it. Almost certainly there will “basis” between text transmitted and meaning “constructed”.

So Steven Pinker’s proposition, that there is a perfect, hi-fidelity transmission of ideas between our heads — that “we can shape events in other’s brains with exquisite precision” — misses what is so special about human communication. We do not read each other inertly, as if scanning barcodes: our interaction through the medium of language creates a dynamic new thing between us that we can play with, refine and adjust for the future. Language does not chain us to the past: it opens a door to the future. Language is design space. It is how we keep the game going.

Depending on why we write, we are more or less intent on conveying a specific message: a commercial lawyer is extremely intent on that; a rock lyricist, who benefits from wistful ambiguity, much less so, and will happily string together pages of doggerel which means little but can be made, by wanton fans, to mean anything.

By interacting with the world in this way, we change it. Our world, after a linguistic interaction, is permanent altered as has the “work” — as long as we regard the work as the shared cultural experience, and not the code compiled on GitHub.

This is very different to the symbol processing routine of a Turing machine.

I am writing on a Turing machine: each keystroke executes a new command that the machine obeys, producing text on screen. The processor in this phone needs not understand anything. It does not need a theory of the world. It does not need shared culture with me or this application; there are no puzzles involved: no world need be created. It follows binary instructions: if this, then that. A Turing machine interpreting a linear string of symbols is no such thing. It leaves its material untouched, uninterpreted, unbettered. It does not interact with its environment the way human languages oblige us to.