Template:M intro design symbol processing: Difference between revisions

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.<ref>Quantum Theory Demonstrated: Observation Affects Reality, ''{{plainlink|https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/02/980227055013.htm|ScienceDaily.com}}''</ref>}}

SBF’s insightful musings on the bard call to mind the difference between the [[data modernists]] and the rest of us: the nature of discourse as a bilateral, interactive thing, as compared to 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.

[[Symbol processing|The thing]] about “Shakespeare” — the body of work, not the dude —is it that isn’t just “code” deposited in a  kind of Elizabethethan GitHub database and left there inviolate, for future generations to download and run. That  may be its root, but “Shakespeare” as we know it is the body of work that has grown around it: the performances, the learned monographs, the university lectures and countless sophomore essays, the re-readings, the editions, the adaptations and reimaginings, the ''mis''interpretations — if there even can be such a thing — the peculiar ability of oh Shakespearean adages and idioms to leach into the vernacular. Beyond that root — to be sure, an extraordinarily stout and fertile root it is — none of the Shakespearean canon comes from William Shakespeare.

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 — this is what makes Shakespeare so enduring. Shakespeare endures because ''Shakespeare is not dead''.

{{quote|“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]], {{br|The Language Instinct}}}}