Re: <eyebeam><blast> Human=Computer

[Philippe Codognet <codognet@csl.sony.fr>]

I would like to answer back some messages by Simon Biggs. Sorry to be
late in doing this, but I went through a backlog of Eyebeamers only
recently ...

I was interested by Simon's reference to Frances Yates's book, and I
will follow the traditional Eyebeam manner of
(1) giving more references and
(2) advertising my own work ...

For those interested in the history of ideas and reading French or
Italian, Paolo Rossi's Clavis Universalis (written in 1960) is a must,
as is the more easy to read book by U. Eco (In search of the perfect
language, 94). The idea of the computer as language is indeed not so
new, it has been proposed, in the context of digital image creation, by
Philippe Queau in 86. Basically all this relates to the long conflicting
relation between philosophers and machines, and references here are  P.
Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era,
1970, and H. Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the
Machine, 1995.

I have written a paper entitled "ancient art and new technologies : the
semiotics of the web" for a conference two years ago. As I do not think
Jordan would allow me to start a 15 pages long paper here, nor to attach
a word version of the paper (we are in a Gates-free zone), you can have
a look at a text-only version at
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~codognet/newweb.html or you can find an older
version with images at http://pauillac.inria.fr/~codognet/web.html.

It is about the history of hyperlinks and indexical images, looking back
to the Art of Memory, illustrated printed books of the XVIth century,
Leibniz and the characteristica universalis, Jesuit paintings and
Comenius in the XVIIth, etc.Up to Sony's VRML 3D Browser... It also
include some discussion about the computer as a language, going back to
Leibniz, etc.

BTW, I think that Simon's idea "the computer is an idea, a paradigm
concerning the nature of writing" is best explained by Leibniz
distinction about Logic (and we all know about the importance of the
logicist tradition on computer science, not to mention the mandatory
reference to our dear Turing) : Lingua characteristica versus calculus
ratiocinator. This debate has been continued by J. van Heijrenhoort
seminal paper "Logic as calculus versus logic as language" in the 60's
and the writtings of Jaakko Hintikka.

Cheers,
Philippe



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