Glass Beads
Aaron Zinger examines the thematic links between Hesse's "Das Glasperlenspiel" and Stephenson's "Anathem," highlighting the evolution of thought from failure to success in applying abstract knowledge to reality.
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In "Seven Glass Beads," Aaron Zinger explores the thematic connections between two significant 20th-century novels: Herman Hesse's "Das Glasperlenspiel" and Neal Stephenson's "Anathem." Hesse's work presents a fictional universe where intellectuals engage in a game symbolizing the synthesis of art, science, and philosophy, ultimately leading to the protagonist's tragic demise when he attempts to apply his knowledge to the real world. In contrast, Stephenson's narrative follows a similar intellectual journey but culminates in success, reflecting a shift in mindset regarding the relationship between abstract thought and practical application. Zinger also discusses the historical context of these works, including the impact of World War II and the development of technologies like the atomic bomb and early computing. He highlights the role of the Manhattan Project and the Bletchley Park codebreakers in shaping modern scientific thought, particularly through the lens of the MENACE project, an early machine learning prototype. The essay suggests that the evolution of thought from Hesse's era to Stephenson's reflects broader societal changes, where abstract ideas increasingly manifest in concrete, often dangerous, realities. This synthesis of thought and action is illustrated through the contrasting fates of the protagonists in both novels, emphasizing the importance of integrating theoretical knowledge with practical experience.
- Aaron Zinger analyzes the thematic connections between Hesse's and Stephenson's novels.
- Hesse's protagonist fails when applying abstract knowledge to reality, while Stephenson's succeeds.
- The historical context includes the impact of WWII and technological advancements.
- MENACE represents an early example of merging abstract thought with practical application.
- The essay reflects on the evolution of intellectual thought from the early to late 20th century.
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4 commentsThe "create a system to play a game" is actually referenced in one of Fred Saberhagen's "Berserker" short stories.
I find it really sad that Gibson didn't read Hesse --- almost as sad that I haven't met a person IRL who has since I was in the military.
Surprised to see this link here, since it speaks more to society and ethics and technical aspects --- which again, I'm bummed by because I've found the various thoughts about using "The Glass Bead Game" as a matrix/construct/template for programming and information systems fascinating, and have really wished that one would be workable for the population at large and become popular/influential.
The problem as I understand it is that the representation presentation is bounded by screen-sized chunks, so reviewing/parsing it creates this problem of which direction does one scroll in, and by how much --- but if you try to increase the density by modularizing with functions and subroutines then you return to the textual representation which presumably you were trying to escape from, just wrapped up in drawn boxes and highlighted by lines/nodes, because it seems to sideskip a fundamental question which we don't seem to have an answer for:
>What does an algorithm look like?
I've been trying to do this sort of thing for 3D:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/osge_cut...
but am currently working using a hacked-together Literate Programming system (see literati.sty in the above repository) which at least reduces scrolling to one dimension (up/down) and allows one to do it in a PDF which has a ToC, marginalia, hyperlinks, and indices --- all of which framing seems to reduce my cognitive load sufficiently that I'm hopeful one more re-write will get me to a point where I can evaluate if re-creating at least portions of it in OpenSCAD Graph Editor will be sufficiently expressive that including the images of the code will be worthwhile.
By way of contrast, the ethical problems of society are arguably solved by being awash in data and record-keeping --- recent conflicts have demonstrated that there is no need for military efforts against stateless actors, since instead, there is sufficient potential bandwidth in terms of individual legal action to put forward arrest warrants for those who have committed terrorist/criminal acts, which can then be acted on by law-abiding societies working in concert --- the problem of course is that that is a two-way street, and there are very few governments willing to subject themselves to such scrutiny. Hopefully, society as a whole will step forward and insist on such transparency and evaluation of legal proceedings, and punishment systems.
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