“I Know Not Seems”: Dangerous Speech & the Techno-Hamlets

“Asking only workman's wages, I come looking for a job…” — Paul Simon, “The Boxer” (Simon & Garfunkel, 1969)

I have written a great deal about literature, and have woven observations about Shakespeare through most of my books and essays and websites, but this morning I learned something I had only anticipated, but knew nothing about.

This follows one of my own rules for writing, one which breaks with many cultural traditions.

I write to learn: deliberately selecting a subject about which I know little, and understand even less. For the past eight years I have written daily essays, many books, and have designed a constellation of websites.

What a piece of work is man, how dangerous in speech, how divided in brain, how easy to manipulate and fool. Speak ghost, and speak truth to fortune. How deeply inverted has become thy speech. Linguistic inversion is something most of us have never heard about, and yet it is a major factor in human civilization. If I were to teach Shakespeare today, the course would be titled: Shakespeare and the Weaponization of Language.

However on this day I happen to be creating a scaffolding of words, words which can either potentially create or destroy the very conceptual framework I am trying to build. A state of not knowing, of recognizing our own ignorance, is a great place to begin the building of a possible new science with mere words - as words are never mere words - but are stand ins for the thoughts which create them.

If one is going to make up a new science one might as well get the words right.

A Proactive Action Word - Naming of a Science

Quantum Constructionism implies that there is a process of construction to be followed and learned from - a proactive verb to contain the nuts and bolts of this Quantum Paradigm. A proactive verb for a proactive process, undertaken by a proactive species. Just a reminder that even though we humans like to see ourselves as a noun, we are an action word - a verb.

Here we must return to Thomas Kuhn, whose term fruitfulness describes the leap a founder must make before there is any proof or even any ghost of a proof in evidence. What it names is something which I used a different phrase to describe.

To be struck by lightning one must stand out in the storm. Kuhn's phrase is much better as it nails the concept I have been following: epistemological dialogue with another intelligence, sufficient to allow something new to come into being. Never to force something into being but to allow it to unfold.

As an early adopter of engineered intelligence there were many speed bumps to endure, but it placed me in an epistemological exchange with another kind of intelligence altogether. It is these kinds of interactions, at a borderline, or seam, between two different sources of intelligence which made this project possible.

To manage this at all I had to be willing to transform into a different person than I was when I began. To purposefully and mindfully let go of the elements of what I call a self, elements which no longer served my purposes or anyone's purposes.