"The Idea of the Ideas" TTIX 2009 Keynote Address

TTIX 2009 Presentation - “The Idea of the Idea”Chris LottMay/June 2009

[1][2][3][4][5]

When I was considering what to talk about here at TTIX, it seemedfitting at a conference whose raison d’etre is the exchange of ideas toconsider what ideas are, historically and conceptually, how they haveinformed (and been informed) by technological progress, and how oureducational system does (and does not) and can (and cannot) help ushave them.

The Idea of the Idea

For those who slept through intro to philosophy, I’ll begin with a brief history of the “idea of the idea” which spans two vastly differentconception of human industry and our place in the world.

Plato and Idealism

The term idea comes first from Plato and his Doctrine of Forms.Existence was comprised of two realms: the intelligible realm of perfect, eternal Ideas (Forms) and the sensible realm of familiar,concrete, solid objects like my head. The intelligible realm isnecessarily comprised of shadows and echoes and imperfect copies of these ideal forms (much like ideas as they circulate through theblogosphere)… the “-ness” of things that can’t be pinned down(particularly by slippery, somewhat shady philosophers) but that weknow exists: chair-ness and monkey-ness and bacon-ness… that kind of thing.So ideas were these perfect, invisible things outside of us. The highestcalling of men (and women, if you are one) was to reveal aspects of these forms, to uncover something of the essential nature of things.Our capacity to do so necessarily asymptotic, the dividing line comingarbitrarily close to-- but never quite transgressing-- the golden curvethat separates our intelligible realm from the realm of forms.Plato’s analogy of the cave illustrates our predicament. In this famousillustration, we in the intelligible realm are prisoners chained together

[6][7][8]

in a dark cave between a fire and the cave wall, our heads fixed so thatwe can only watch the play of shadows on the wall which, knowing nobetter, we believe to be “real things”... we can learn, at least, to freeourselves enough to turn our heads and see the actual things makingthe shadow-- the actors and puppets of this plane—recognizing thateven that herculean effort involved in this is not to actually access theideal realm, which is outside of the cave, represented by the sun, whichwe know from Phaethon’s ill-fated ride is beyond our grasp.Now, I don’t want to put Plato on too high a pedestal—he did, after all,famously expel the poets from his ideal Republic, accusing us of creating third-rate and third-removed imitations of an already mimeticworld—but this idea of the idea as an uncovering persisted andinformed our creative consciousness without serious competition forclose to 2000 years (which is about 1996 years longer than any ideaI’ve ever had has lasted), in part because—despite being conceivedduring that Godless Greek Interregnum—the theory of forms veryneatly dovetails with the significant religions that followed.And while not typically a literal philosophy held by many today, I’dargue that this conception remains, not just in religious refractions of the world, but underlying the complexities of many fields of thought,such as aesthetics, where our notion of the intensity of the beautifulpainting or tasty, delicious bacon is still in part derived from asubconscious, apposite frame of idealized beauty, again, beauty-nessand bacon-ness.

Humanism

It was as a reaction to the educational and philosophical traditions builtupon the Platonic ground that we were given our second idea of theidea (not to mention a new conception of education that continues toinform our graying and decrepit system). The Humanists, convincedthat the Greeks and Romans really had it going on… except for a few*tiny* caveats regarding the potential power and perfectibility of people… developed a new idea of the idea that put human creationsquarely at its center. The role of humans wasn't one of toil to uncover what was alreadythere, but to create as capably as possible, new, beautiful things thatmost powerfully realized our potential and divinity; rather than seek to

[9]

draw as close as possible to the sun outside the cave, instead moveincrementally toward increasingly sufficient mimesis. Those wild andwacky humanists maintained we could create new things that werecomposed of the human spirit and reflected, through realizing ourpotential, the "real" spirit of the god that gave that potential to us.Consider how fundamental this change is in understanding who (andwhat) we as humans are... In the humanist light we are makers, withcreative powers of our own, in our own small way made of the stuff of,not just by, the gods. It's no surprise that along with a new conceptionof ideas came the first instances of "creativity" as a discrete actionundertaken by humans, as a state of mind, as a happening.So, no matter how we put the pieces together now, the modern idea of the idea and the problematic of creativity are fundamentally aspects of the same undertaking.

Brief Technology Progression

Now, with that brief philosophical description in mind, consider theoutlines of the technological progression that brings us to this place:In the early 1700s, Jacques de Vaucanson is obsessed, essentially, withuniting these two visions of the idea through the creation of mechanicallife. He creates-- remember, this is the early 1700s-- stunningautomatons: The Flute Player is a life size reproduction of a shepherd,complete with flexible skin for fingering the flute, that could play 12different songs. His crowning masterpiece was The Digesting Duck,comprised of more than 400 moving parts, a replica which could flap itswings, drink, eat grain and even defecate. He believed that byreplicating every function of the duck he would be creating life becauseit would be indistinguishable from the real thing... perhaps the earliestinstance of the idea of the Turing Test.Inspired by Vaucanson's intricate creations, particularly the fluteplaying automaton, Joseph Jacquard creates a loom that weavespatterns based on punch cards, the holes in which determine wherehooks pull threads, creating the desired pattern. Jacquard wished toautomate the human action involved in a limited kind of creation. Andhe succeeded so well that he narrowly escaped with his life after beingattacked by a mob of weavers, who rightly feared they would be