Michael Ray-Von, Tiny Tortures
Results
After 8 trials of the device before an audience, I was averaging a 10% success rate. The successful failure I expected. This was meant to exhibit the failure of machine intelligence to model a rare and valuable attribute of human cognition. Furthermore, I wanted to say that human thought exceeds the scope of language, and that by demonstrating the inability of human thought to align with a strictly linguistic computer cognition: the inherent failure of representation, even so-called “dematerialised” representation.
On the final trial, the room packed with people, I was successful at 18 attempts out of 20, 90% success. This figures too high to be coincidence and is a significant outlier, even if its only one instance. This is upsetting. I’m compelled to rethink my considerations of ESP, of human cognition. Working definition: Telepathy is to come into physical and/or mental concert with a foreign individual. Sophisticated tool use is telepathy. Typing is like a levitation act! When objects are acted upon they respond with direct symmetry making them perhaps the most able telepathic partners, if we can afford them that ability. The direct use of a tool is itself a telepathic act, so to attempt to enter into a psychic speech event with a computer is both a corruption of materiality and a sacrifice of my role as user. With these things in mind, and in service of my will to human might, I am led to a human solution in the periphery, I’m led believe that my success was due to a extended general awareness rather than a telepathic exchange with a specific individual/object. I found my successful attempts to frequently coincide with my not attempting to systematically discern the correct answer but rather by allowing the correct answer to unexpectedly arrive in thought. After my performances, it was common for an audience member to tell me how they are also attempting to guess and were even successful along with me. Was my high success rate in the final performance due to the large volume of people, a group mental concert? The extreme multiplicity of possible futures exist simultaneously until the past emerges revealed. The unobserved present remains uncertain. The revelation of the future-past is all that’s required to determine the present. The present is a matter of influence. Any practice carried out as such eventually yields influence of broader and more distant future-past determinations. To divine the future is to introduce the present. The radical activity is like this, it’s quickening the desired future. Or I was successful and the computer cognition is modeled to such a resemblance of my own that we share a common psychic language? Where does the delusion lie?
