Marginal, Local and Time-Bound

"What are the questions that fascinate you? What do you want to know?" Personal questions, personal answers.

The questions that often haunt me and that I pursue with some passion are marginal, local and time-bound. They are like a small beam of light traveling along a time path, illuminating here and there a small and imponderable detail. And it is undoubtedly because my passions are local that they are time-bound. I mean that, since they seem to attach themselves to details, they necessarily change with time. Furthermore, I am convinced that, because they are local and time-bound, it is quite delusional to believe there are satisfactorily precise answers to them; answers, in other words, that do away with the luxury of approximation, conjecture or speculation.

Here is as an example from a recent past. In working on a paper on Poe, I discovered that he knew well the work of Charles Babbage, a British mathematician who is claimed by many to be the inventor of what we call today the computer. In 1822, Babbage, who was recalculating astronomical tables, found the process so repetitive that he conceived a machine and had it built to do the calculations for him. He then sought funds to improve anddevelop his "engine." His project soon took a rather obsessive (and sometimes paranoid) turn. Since the government had cut his funds, his second machine—the "Analytical Engine," as he called it—was never completed in his lifetime. In 1840 Babbage gave a lecture on his projected machine in Italy. In the audience was a young engineer (and future prime minister of Italy) by the name L. F. Menabrea who, in 1842, published an article in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, describing the machine and its capabilities. Ada Lovelace Byron (trained in mathematics by her mother to ward off the poetic —and presumably evil— influence of her dead father, Lord Byron) and a close friend of Babbage, almost 25 years her senior, translated that article in 1843 and published it in Scientific Memoirs with a set of startlingly visionary notes (available at http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html). It is on the basis of this article and Ada's accompanying notes that Babbage's still unrealized Analytical Engine is claimed to be the clear forerunner of today's universal computer.

That Poe was influenced by his knowledge of Babbage's work is evident. We find a lengthy discussion of Babbage's machine in "Maelzel's Chess Player" (1836), an essay to demonstrate that a supposed chess-playing apparatus actually hides a human player and is therefore a hoax. One can safely assume that Poe's interest in "ratiocination" has its origin in his encounter with Babbage's work. After his first mention of Babbage in 1836, there is a flood of texts that explore the workings of the mind, the highlights of which are the three Dupin stories (1841, 1842, 1844), "A Few Words on Secret Writing" (1841), "The Gold Bug" (1843), "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), Eureka (1848), and "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" (1850), where he mentions Babbage a second time. That he intuited the implications of Babbage's machine for the comprehension of the workings of the mind—what has come to be known as Artificial Intelligence— and its implications in the development in the "computational model" in the cognitive science is a speculation that is a bit stretched, but a nice case could be made for it. That he intuited also the dissatisfaction that some contemporary cognitive scientists are starting to feel with that model and that he proposed an alternative with his parts/whole problem, very similar to the present day "connectionist," "embodied" and "emergent" models, is another speculation one can make—albeit probably a little less safe than the preceding one—based on his description of the good player of whist in "Marie Rogêt" and his discussion of the difference between mathematical analysis and the analytic faculty...