That T-shaped fragment lodged between the two lobes of the maker's brain, the edges of which she is mapping, has interesting overtones. Cross-shaped, it is the nexus between the horizontal and the vertical dimensions of life. For a generation wounded by experiences outside of culture, the mind worries at this intersection like a tongue at a sore tooth. Are hearts merely organs or can you "believe with your heart" that the footage is going somewhere? Is there a providence that masquerades as coincidence?

Bigend doesn't think so about the heart. He said, "..the heart is a muscle Cayce. You know in your limbic brain..." But I think he meant the same thing, instinct. He just wanted to own the conversation by pointing out where the instinctual thought is currently believed to originate.

Reread "All Tomorrow's Parties" to have another look at Silencio, a character with a particular genius who is used by other interests to their own end. Cayce wonders whether Bigend may have known about Volkov all along. Is there merit in looking at the Cayce character as an exploration of the Silencio character from the inside?

...He has been colonized by an order uncomprehended --Silencio (p.73)pretty serious patterning happening here.

Interesting idea. There's certainly a WG theme going on there. A thing that made the Silencio text particularly strong is its brevity. WG doesn't describe or speculate how he came to have the capability. (And I'm not sure genius is right - doesn't this feel more like a kind of savantic behaviour?)

Is it human evolution?

quote:

Originally posted by Prism:
Reread "All Tomorrow's Parties" to have another look at Silencio, a character with a particular genius who is used by other interests to their own end. Cayce wonders whether Bigend may have known about Volkov all along. Is there merit in looking at the Cayce character as an exploration of the Silencio character from the inside?

...He has been colonized by an order uncomprehended --Silencio (p.73)pretty serious patterning happening here.

Cayce's sensitivity to branding smacks of savantic behaviour.

The name "Cayce" started niggling at me when I read the scene where the maker of the footage begins to edit the video she was working on before her injury. She starts cutting till she has reduced it down to one frame.

Isn't that what is happening in Graham Greene's "A Burn't-out Case" (Cayce)? In leprosy, a burnt-out case is one where the disease has run its course and all the extremities the disease can take are gone.

People are about pattern reconition, but how do we avoid apophenia? Faced with that bind, Greene's protagonist chooses suicide. Cayce undertakes her search for the maker with incredible resolve, clinging, as her father suggested, to the possibiity of coincidence. Finding the .ru URL is the only bit of wiggle room which allows her to believe in the possiblity of coincidence.

The possiblity of coincidence suggests that maybe we do well to allow that we all have a bit of "savant" in us. Is that what the maker is looking for when she begins to show an interest in, and begins to edit footage from everyday mundane life?

quote:

Originally posted by Prism:
People are about pattern reconition, but how do we avoid apophenia? Faced with that bind, Greene's protagonist chooses suicide. Cayce undertakes her search for the maker with incredible resolve, clinging, as her father suggested, to the possibiity of coincidence. Finding the .ru URL is the only bit of wiggle room which allows her to believe in the possiblity of coincidence.

Splitting the real patterns from apophenia is just humanity becoming more and more complex. People, both individually and as a whole, -know- more than they did in generations past. It's overwhelming, sometimes. My parents needed a mnemonic to recall seven digit phone numbers (CEdar 4-9533). My brain recalls ten digit phone numbers. What upgrade did I receive? The younger technicians I know remember dotted quad inet addresses and ethernet addresses.

Science fiction, I think, is taking pattern recognition and extrapolating where these patterns could lead. The good stuff, anyway. Watching and predicting patterns is what drives most geeks; and how that extrapolation relates to the human condition is so much harder to predict than the future capacity of hard drives. And so much more fascinating.

Coincidence figures in as the buggaboo in separating real pattern recognition from apophenia. It hints at something mystic, something unseen. Whether that is The Maker or someone in a booth at the IntenSecure can never really be clear, can it? We've all seen it, something anomolous that clearly effects a pattern we've seen and thought we understood. Coincience is what makes us question if what we thought of as an astutely recognized pattern is actually goose looney apophenia.

Do we think, though, that at the extreme level we're seeing it in the WG books, this intuitive pattern recognition capability is the result of evolution or some kind of epigenetic effect?

And I know that the times in which PR and ATP are set are quite different, but if there is a connection between Cayce and Silencio, and if there are to be one or more sequels to PR, could both characters be brought together. Maybe she's Silencio's Grandmother.

God I love this shit.

I had the impression that Silencio came from a horrible home, where he never learned his own name, but was constantly being told "silencio!" Cayce seems too together to subject offspring to such a life.

Of course, this little fragment of back story is my own; I don't believe WG ever filled that bit in. There is something in the work of William Gibson that allows me to imagine vastly detailed back-stories without effort. I rarely find that in the work of other authors.



Moonage, isn't evolution driven by epigenic mutations? Is Cayce a mutant because she can sense the pattern from the random? Or is she just an early adapter, part of a coming awareness of networks and patterns that we can only now see through our periphery?

quote:

Coincidence figures in as the buggaboo in separating real pattern recognition from apophenia. It hints at something mystic, something unseen. Whether that is The Maker or someone in a booth at the IntenSecure can never really be clear, can it? We've all seen it, something anomolous that clearly effects a pattern we've seen and thought we understood. Coincience is what makes us question if what we thought of as an astutely recognized pattern is actually goose looney apophenia.

A Mathematician friend has been reading Edmund Husserl's thinking on phenomenology. He is convinced that all patterns, even the ones accepted as mathematical laws, are subject to deconstruction. The patterns we recognize are relative to our experience.

A recent film festival offered five short videos from France in a collection called "Light As Flesh." The pieces were rooted in phenomenlogy. The makers treated the eye as an organ that breathes light and emphazised that the sense we make of the world is "mediated?" by our bodies.

We like to think that we are highly evolved and live in our conscious minds, but Bigend reminds Cayce of the massive subcontinent that is the mammalian brain. We are bodies after all and we live in particular places and in particular times.

So, back to editing the footage of everyday life. That's where we are embodied.

I meant has the characteristic come about as a result of environmental or genetic causes in the development of these individuals? Epigentic completely the wrong term - some molecular biologist I am. No wonder I got fired.

quote:

Originally posted by DataMojo:
I had the impression that Silencio came from a horrible home, where he never learned his own name, but was constantly being told "silencio!" Cayce seems too together to subject offspring to such a life.

Of course, this little fragment of back story is my own; I don't believe WG ever filled that bit in. There is something in the work of William Gibson that allows me to imagine vastly detailed back-stories without effort. I rarely find that in the work of other authors.



Moonage, isn't evolution driven by epigenic mutations? Is Cayce a mutant because she can sense the pattern from the random? Or is she just an early adapter, part of a coming awareness of networks and patterns that we can only now see through our periphery?

I like the idea of her being an early adapter, though. However the capability arises, it manifests in her because she's present when the OPPORTUNITY emerges - networks and patterns of a type and complexity that are new.

quote:

Originally posted by DataMojo:
I had the impression that Silencio came from a horrible home, where he never learned his own name, but was constantly being told "silencio!" Cayce seems too together to subject offspring to such a life.

Of course, this little fragment of back story is my own; I don't believe WG ever filled that bit in. There is something in the work of William Gibson that allows me to imagine vastly detailed back-stories without effort. I rarely find that in the work of other authors.



Moonage, isn't evolution driven by epigenic mutations? Is Cayce a mutant because she can sense the pattern from the random? Or is she just an early adapter, part of a coming awareness of networks and patterns that we can only now see through our periphery?

There's another relevant WG reference, I think. I can't be arsed to look for it, but doesn't Neuromancer talk to Case about the patterns he imagines he can see on the street being real?

Difference of course is that be Cayce and Silencio both focus on brands and products.

quote:

`No. I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes imagined you could detect in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real. I am complex enough, in my narrow ways, to read those dances. Far better than Wintermute can. I saw her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of the lock on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane's account with a Hongkong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the shadow of a tumor to a surgeon studying a patient's scan. When she took your Hitachi to her boy, to try to access it -- she had no idea what it carried, still less how she might sell it, and her deepest wish was that you would pursue and punish her -- I intervened. My methods are far more subtle than Wintermute's. I brought her here. Into myself.'

It was the Brazilian Neuromancer. But I agree, it is relevant.

The similarities between Neuromancer's relationship with Linda Lee said and Laney's relationship with Alison Shires just now clicked for me.

I've been re-reading PR (and taking lots and lots of notes), and, let's face it: those "patterns," the "dance," etc., are just about an obsession for our Author, here.

It's actually fun re-reading PR. I forgot that it was *really fucking good.* Things slow down, and then there's a passage that kicks my ass.

Like this one (certainly something that encapsulates a 9/11 experience extraordinarily well):

quote:

Cayce herself had been in SoHo that morning, at the time of the impact of the first plane, and had witnessed a micro-event that seemed in retrospect to have announced, however privately and secretly, that the world itself had taken a duck in the face. (135)

She had just heard a plane, incredibly loud and, she'd assumed, low. She thought she'd glimpsed something, over West Broadway, but then it had been gone. They must be making a film. (135)

"The television is on, CNN, volume up, and as she steps past him, uninvited but feeling the need to do something, she sees, on the screen beneath the unused leatherette ice bucket, the impact of the second plane.

And looks up, to the window that frames the towers. And what she will retain is that the exploding fuel burns with a tinge of green that she will never see or hear described.

Cayce and the German designer will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it.

It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority.

An experience outside of culture" (137).

That's a good one Justy.
_Toward a Definiton of Interiority_

Been thinking about Cayce on the day she learns about steganography and her reflection that maybe she has a watermark in the fabric of her existence (not an exact quote - let a friend have my book for a while).

Seems like phi (1.618) is a ratio that is embedded in the fabric of life. Plato's perfect rectangle exemplifies that ratio and the spirals related to it are apparent in some sea shells and in the patterns of seeds in the head of a sunflower.

In terms of pattern recognition, what intrigues me is that the human eye finds that proportion pleasing. Is this a pattern that we are drawn to by virtue of it being watermarked in the way things are alive on this planet?

I'm a rank novice at Mathematics and architecture, so I would reference http://www.seephi.org/

This one:

quote:

Eyes closed, she finds herself imagining a symbol, something watermarking the lower right-hand corner of her existence. It is there, just beyond some periphery, beyond the physical, beyond vision, and it marks her as … what?

That rectangle is close enough to the 1.66:1 ratio of most widescreen televisions, funny enough.