Social Fiction:: Blogimpsest [a blog/blogject]

My blog is a Janus head, a 2-faced web0.0 monster. On one side it does what you would expect from the barest of bare-bones blogging systems (no HTML-formatting, no edits) but on the other side it does have a mind and purpose of its own; it is a blogject. Both faces share the same memory-filled palimpsest-styled head. A head that as a whole is a little mind, a symbiotic alliance; these two faces need to help each other to make the most of the limitations of their common resource. It is an experiment in grassroots AI.

A blogject, not to be confused with a slog (a sensor log), is the bot rephrased in the language of the blogosphere. Unlike bots, software-based attempts at making computers speak with us in our own language, that only have to respond on user input, blogjects in theory are pro-active and possess their own threshold function to decide when to produce something. Obviously, systems possessing artificial consciousness are non-existent, and bots and blogjects cannot but interpret/generate input of which is the meaning is always relative to templates in its database not relative to the outside world as you would suspect a true AI would.

One of the crowned writers in the crystalpunk library, Thomas DeQuincey, compared the human mind to a palimpsest in which nothing that ever fell on it is ever lost; those memories that are beyond conscious recall are accessible in dreams.

Quoting Wikipedia: "A palimpsest is a manuscript page, scroll, or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again. The word palimpsest comes through Latin from two Greek roots (palin + psEn) meaning 'scraped again.'" Historically the significance of the palimpsests has been to unintentionally preserve many ancient manuscripts otherwise lost. The most extreme case is the 'hyper-palimpsest' Novgorod Codex which contains more than 100 different texts, many unknown and in several languages, layered on top of each other. The nature of the palimpsest however dictates that the decipherment of overwritten texts can never be a literal rendition and that there will always be a certain amount of guessing-construction.

The neuro-sciences seem to confirm the validity of the 200 year old simile of DeQuincey. Memories are always constructions and dreams might well be the unintentional result of the brain interleaving memories, perhaps sometimes recovering memories isolated from common neural pathways activation (a lost track in your train of thinking). The human brain reconstructs its content over and over again, each time folding older memories inside new memories, like the folding of a that magic carpet that each time corners touch gives birth to a sun. The century-old observation of William James and others that you never have the same thought twice and consciousness must be a stream and not a direct mapping between key and value, seems a direct consequence of the mind as some sort of palimpsest.

At the moment I am writing a book on the collected crystalpunk philosophies of little minds and BacterioPoetics and unintentional intelligence and grassroots AI (or a longish essay at least), in this process revisiting books and testing ideas in writing, I intend to use this blogimpsest to discipline my thinking and will surrender my writing to my own self-coded little palimpsestic mind. For this same reason I want it the work as properly as I know how, because it will be the only copy of this writing. Writing more will destroy earlier writing, but on the upside a lot more text is given back by the system.

The blogimpsest never forgets anything. The latest memory will always be coherent. The total amount of memory has an upper limit above which it can never grow, the only thing that grows are the numbers of jumps from each individual segment to the next (text is stored as a chain of segments). But to this there is an upper-limit as well. New free space can (and must) be created by finding 2 segments of different chains with identical memory and interleaving the chains at this point, making them share a segment, freeing one segment. As this process unfolds in time it becomes harder and harder to decide when harvesting a memory what segment comes after another in the myriad of jumps possible from each segment. The quality of the memory stored diminishes with each new memory forced inside it.

Only those segments available at least twice, can be shared, the overall result is that the blogimpsest maximises novel segments; entries containing a lot of unusual segments are more likely to be remembered accurately.

This search for possible intersections constitutes the 'dreaming' and the trajectory of memory units it interleaves is the 'dream' and this is what the blogject blogs. This dream is the result of a practical need and like real dreams the meaning of the dream is to be found not in the dream in itself but in the dreamer's interpretations of it. The dreams will become richer as the interpretation of the palimpsest increases in ambiguity. Bigger minds dream larger dreams. The blogject will only start to work when the palimpsest has run out of empty space and needs to make some, the retrieval of entries from the palimpsest will only gradually become faulty as dreaming muddles the sequence of memories ever more.

Blogs demand a self (the blog-entry the canalisation of a state of excitement) and by extension, if a blogject wants to inspire to more than being a fancy slog or a debugging method of the function that generates it, it needs a self too, some sort of a ghost in the machine. What this blogimpsest proposes as its writer is a selfless self. Some author that like a dreams is at the same time part and not part of us. A blogject blogging, like the surrealists deploying automatic writing or William Burroughs using cut-ups or the Oulipo group composing poems with the Fibonacci-number series in hand. Mechanised permutations that are not random in process nor material, but maybe not fully in accordance with ordinary conventions like grammar, style and spelling. Automatism is a short-cut to discover associations and metaphors made from/within familiar input, in the hope they might serve to enlighten your own understanding of what you know and think you know. This blogject as such is automatic (re-)writing made public, automatic in 2 meanings of the word.

Current Map of Blogimpsest

Each cube represents a segment of a colour-coded memory. Each black dot represents a free segment. While the palimpsest has free segments entries are added from left to right and from top to bottom. When filled, dreaming commences (and the blogject will eject-text) to make space. This results in chains sharing a segment and releasing one in the process. The neat crystalline order inside the memory that exists in the beginning will slowly become chaotic. See history of growth of palimpsest.