Template:M intro design symbol processing

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

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.

The thing about Shakespeare isn’t just code deposited in a database in the 1580s and left there inviolate. It is the body of work that has grown around it: the performances, the re-readings, the editions, the misinterpretations, its peculiar ability to leach into the vernacular. Shakespeare 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.

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.