In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Byron prophesied that
his voice would one day blend with the future visions of his daughter, and
in ways that he never have anticipated he turned out to be proved right.
In her letters,
Ada Lovelace compares her work as an analyst with her father's as a poet.
And claims to have, in fact, a very high order of poetical genius.
Even wondering if one day poetry might be her destiny or ultimate line.
Today I want to argue that the poetical consciousness that Lovelace brings to her
understanding of the analytical engine, proves to be the genesis of some of her
most original mathematical and scientific ideas.
We can find traces of romantic and poetic thought in her argument that the engine
might be adapted to ends other than calculation, in her recognition that it
enables an embodiment of what she turns the science of operations.
In her longing to develop a calculus of the nervous system, and
in her commentary on the problematic nature of originality.
Like Manfred and Astarte, Lovelace and
Byron shared many of the same lone thoughts and wanderings.
A quest for hidden knowledge and a mind to comprehend the universe.
But through translating her poetical inheritance into a mathematical and
scientific sphere, Lovelace is able to bring a startlingly unique perspective to
bear on Babbage's engines, which allowed her to conceptualize them in ways that
nobody else at the time had dreamed of.
What recently observed in the innovators that Lovelace has subsequently become
somewhat associated with the question of whether or
not man made machines can ever truly think.
I want to inject however whether the question perhaps better formulated to
her actual interest is whether or not they can produce works of art.
Arguably, Lovelace's greatest contribution to computer science was her realization
that the analytical engine had a certain universality.
That it could be adapted to operate upon things other than numbers.
That it might for instance, compose elaborate and
scientific pieces of music, of any degree or complexity or extent.
Nor is the engine's artistic scope necessarily limited to music.
Lovelace describes the engine weaving algebraical patterns just as the weaves
flowers and leaves and also points out the highly complex desire that the Jackard
loom was capable of itself suggesting a possible encroachment on the visual arts.
Now Byron once described his own poetry as words woven into song.
If the engine could read algebraic patterns might it also, or some future
iteration of it, likewise weave poetry by acting upon words instead of numbers.
Now this suggestion doesn't explicitly appear in Lovelace's writing but
the concept of machine made literature
turns up surprisingly frequently in the 19th century.
The best known attempt at actually creating something like this was
John Clark's eureka machine which composed Latin examples by randomly combining
various words to fill a pre-arranged metrical and grammatical structure.
According to the inventor in an article in the Athenaeum,
the machine contains letters in alphabetical arrangement
which the machine selects to form lines of poetry.
Quote [COUGH] through the medium of numbers,
rendered intangible by being expressed on real work.
More frequently however this idea of machine made is raised in a satirical
context, in 1844 a few years after Lovelace's influential notes and
I think possibly even influenced by the suggestion that the engine could be
adapted to ends other than calculation.
The magazine Punch lampooned Babbage's productions.
With the suggestion of a new patent mechanical novel writer.
Adapted to all styles and all subjects.
Pointed, pathetic, historic, silver fork, and Minerva.
Which would allow the writer to turn out a three volume novel in a mere 48 hours.
Needing to do nothing more than throw in some dozen of the most popular
works of the day.
And draw forth a spick and span new and original novel.
And I always find this comic particularly amusing in light of the fact that
Babbage himself once considered composing a three volume novel in order to use
the proceeds from this to finance the difference engine.
And fortunately, before he got to the stage of actually attempting this,
he discussed it with a literary friend.
Who convinced him that this would be a terrible idea financially,
[LAUGH] but perhaps the mechanical novel writer could've been
the solution to all of his financial woes.
In any case there are also earlier romantic
engagements with this notion of mechanized writing, so and
what could almost be a premonition of the eureka machine,
writes that language had come to resemble a series of larger and smaller stereotype
pieces which required only an ordinary portion of ingenuity to very indefinitely.
And yet still produce something which if not sensed,
would be [INAUDIBLE] to do as well.
That had become mechanized as it were into a barrel organ, suggests that
Coleridge perhaps shared Babbage's notorious distaste for street musicians.
[LAUGH] As Lovelace writes,
the analytical engine may act upon any objects whose mutual
fundamental relations could be expressed by the abstract science of operations.
If language is degenerated into a series of conventional stereotypes of
the kind suggested by Coleridge.
Then it too might be capable of mechanization.
This possibility is also dramatized by Sir Walter Scott
in his preface to The Betrothed.
Now in this curious fictionalized preface,
Scott represents his own series of Waverley novels as the product of
a collective of authors all publishing under the same name.
The preface takes the form of minutes to a meeting in which they're discussing
the possibility that at the expense of little mechanism,
some part of the labor of composing these novels might be saved by the use of steam.
Facilitated by the fact that many of these novels are composed out of commonplaces.
To quote, by placing the words and
phrases technically implored on these subjects in a sort of framework and
changing them by such as a mechanical processes as that which readers of Damask
alter their patterns many new and happy combinations cannot fail to occur.
While the author, tired of pumping his own brains,
may have an agreeable relaxation in the use of his fingers.
It's worth noting, by the way, that this preface was published in 1825.
So long before Babbage made any plans to incorporate
features of the Jacquard loom into the analytical engine.
So Scott actually comes up with this idea first.
I think it's also interesting that the author of Waverly as referenced in
the punch comic that I was talking about earlier.
Which I think makes it clear that contemporary audiences were supposed to
connect the two.
All of these descriptions seem to presuppose that any type of
literature capable of mechanization must necessarily be bad or derivative.
Composed of randomly compiled hackneyed tropes and tripe components.
As Lovelace notes, the analytical engine cannot originate anything.
It can only do what we know how to order it to perform.
And as it cannot produce new ideas, it would have at the most
the capacity only to rearrange and recombine ones that already existed.
Can such products really be called artworks?
We should consider, however, whether the engine's inability to originate ideas
really renders it substantially different from the human mind.
As Alan Turing observed in response to what he dubbed Lady Lovelace's objection,
who can be certain that original work that he's done was not simply the growth of
the seed planted in him by teaching or the effect of following well known principles.
Or as the poet Shelly puts it, every man's mind is modified by
all the objects of a nature and art, but every word and
every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness.
This relationship between consciousness, agency, originality and
artistic production was a vexed one for the romantic poets.
As a youth, Coleridge was a disciple of David Hartley's associationism or
psychological determinism.
A theory which argued that, since the component particles of the human
body are subjected to the same subtle laws as other material entities.
The power of generating ideas must also arise from corporeal causes.
Coleridge early on declared himself an advocate for the automatism of man.
And a believer in the corporeality of thought itself.
He later became disillusioned with this theory although unfortunately after
he had named his first born son Hartley.
Expostulating that under this model, all acts of will, thought, and
attention became parts and products of a blind mechanisms.
And that the whole universe cooperates to produce the minutest stroke
of every letter.
Save only that I myself and I alone have nothing to do with it.
But merely the causeless and effectless beholding of it when it is done.
Hartley's associationist model of the mind posed the danger of reducing
even Shakespeare to an automaton of genius.
And attributed no more originality to the human mind
than could be found in the analytical engine.
Many of the anxiety surrounding Hartley's deterministic model of the mind
come to be embodied in romantic poetry and the figure of the Aeolian harp.
Now and Aeolian harp is an instrument which is often placed in
the casement of the window.
So that the breeze is allowed to sweep across it.
And so it's played by the wind alone.
Untouched by human hand.
Swept into musical expression by the movement of the air.
Coleridge is aware likewise just organic harps which tremble into
thought as the intellectual breeze sweeps through us, Shelly describes the mind as
an instrument over which external and internal impressions are driven
like the alternations of an ever changing wind over the Aeolian land.
This quintessentially romantic figure of chaotic politic expression might seem at
first to have little in common with Babbage's analytical engine, however in
the separate context they both crystallize a number of concerns surrounding
the relationship between the material world and the processes of the mind.
Neither the harp nor the engine can think, per se, but in producing music or
performing calculations, they do perform, in Buxton's words,
certain offices of thought.
Suggesting that some mathematical or
artistic processes might be able to take place through purely mechanical means.
They are both material passive objects, but
are nevertheless roused into artistical mathematical production by outside forces.
Now Lovelace was incidentally an accomplished harpist.
Sometimes practicing four or five hours a day.
And occasionally even to the detriment of her mathematics.
It's interesting that in describing her own scientific abilities, she represents
herself in terms which simultaneously evoke both of these figures,
the harp and the engine.
She describes herself in several places as being fundamentally passive,
acted upon by divine or external forces and requiring very powerful and
continually acting external stimulants to excite her into activity.
She refer to herself in one memorable passage as,
not a bit my own agent into my own scientific progress on objects.
But simply the instrument for divine purposes to act on and through.
She merely speaks the voice that she's inspired with.
And functions as a vocal organ for
the ears of mortals on behalf of God and His agents.
She goes on to state that she might refuse this mission.
But that she would be thrown out of gear with the heavenly.
Now her use of the word instrument in this passage is particularly clever
because it could evoke either a scientific or a musical instrument.
When she alludes to becoming a vocal organ or being inspired with the voice,
she seems to hint towards the aeolian harper, a musical instrument.
Her use of the word inspire in particular from the Latin inspirare to breathe or
blow into also suggests the surge of the divine sweeping through the lair.
However the reference to being thrown out of gear with the heavenly clearly
evokes Babbage's engines which were designed to jam
immediately if they were ever thrown out of gear.
For Lovelace then the harp and the engine are almost interchangeable metaphors which
emerges together to help describe her own creative and scientific production.
Lovelace's letters suggest that her own views of phycology might've tended towards
something similar to Hartley's psychological determinism.
She describes herself as a molecular laboratory,
a portion of the material forces of the word entitled The Body of AAL.
And refers to one of her correspondents as a chaotic mass of various androgynous
atoms, organic and inorganic.
She was interested in German research on the microscopical structure and changes in
the brain, nervous matter and also in the blood and had her hopes of one day getting
cerebral phenomena such that she could put them into mathematical equations.
In short a law or laws for the mutual actions of the molecules of.
She hoped bequeathed to the generations a calculus of the nervous system.
The implications of this ambition are quite astounding, if she had been able to
develop a system of this sort such that it could be programmed into an engine,
then Dyonassi proclamation that the powers of thought had been thrown
into real work would've been generally realized.
Now Lovelace of course never completed her calculus of the nervous system.
However the analytical engine did still make some inroads into the processes of
human thought.
As Lovelace writes, the analytical engine is capable of both analysis and synthesis.
To processes which even the romantic poets conceded to be legitimate components of
poetic production.
Shelley begins his defense of poetry, for instance, by defining synthesis and
analysis precisely as the two principle classes of mental action.
Reason, he writes, is the principle of analysis.
The process by which the mind contemplates the relation
borne by one thought to another.
Like algebraichal representations which conduct a certain general results, and
this is his words.
Imagination, on the other hand, is the principal of synthesis, which allows
the mind to compose from those thoughts, as from elements of the thoughts.
According to Shelley, poetry creates by combination and representation.
Poetical abstractions,
as he writes in his preface of Prometheus Unbound, are beautiful and new
not because the portions of which they're composed had no previous existence.
But because of the combinations which can be produced from these basic elements.
Lovelace also conveniently wrote an essay on the imagination and fragmentary form.
In which she too defines the combining faculty
as one of its two principle functions.
A faculty which brings together things, facts, ideas,
conceptions In new, original, endless epivariant combination.
Even if the analytical engine can't originate anything in its capacity for
combination at the very least it does participate for both Lovelace and
Shelly in some of the most important aspects of imaginative creation.
And I'd actually like to pinch a quotation for
Sharon Rosson's talk on at the graduate workshop on Tuesday.
I hope you don't mind.
This time for Mary Shelley and her introduction to Frankenstein.
Invention doesn't consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos.
The materials must, in the first place, be afforded.
The workings of the analytical engine, therefore, seem not entirely divorced from
the processes by which the mind produces poetry.
In fact, for Lovelace, for
whom mathematics was characterized by an intrinsic beauty and symmetry.
The engines mathematical productions are almost artistic in their own right,
like poetry or language, mathematics represents the world using symbols.
Lovelace often describes mathematics as a language in fact,
the language of unseen relations between things or the language through which alone
we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world.
And read the creator's works.
In these descriptions she occurs an idea which we find throughout all romantic
poetry, the idea that the world is a text of some sort which can be made legible for
mankind through the means of language, mathematics or other types of symbol.
Coleridge for example writes that the universe in the most
literal sense is God's written language or the transcript of the omnipotent.
In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Byron's narrative desires to
quit man's works again to read his Maker's spread about me.
This idea that the world is a text composed out of a sort of language,
mathematical or otherwise, produces a rather unusual and akin but
none the less powerful idea in both Lovelace and her romantic precursors.
As Humberta Echo writes in The Search for the Perfect Language,
if it were true that the universe was constructed from letters and numbers.
It would follow that whoever knew the mathematical rules behind this
construction might act directly on the universe.
This leads to the desire, I'd think, as Coleridge phrases it,
to destroy the old antithesis of words and things.
Elevating, as it were, words into things.
And living things, too.
A desire to imbue language or mathematics with a concreteness
that would allow it to retain a kind of reality in itself.
We find this in Kublai Khan when Coleridge aspires to a song so
powerful that it would manifest itself as a dome in the air.
Byron too longs for words which are things, as he says.
He writes in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, could I embody and
unbosom now that which is most within me.
Could I reap my thoughts upon expression and thus through soul, heart,
mind, passions, feeling strong or weak.
All that I would have sought and all I seek ban nerve feel and yet
breathe into one word and that one word were lightning I would speak.
This seems like a strange notion and it's easy to dismiss as matterful but
this longing that it might be possible to produce a language so
powerful that it could break out into the physical world like a bolt of lightning,
embodied in reality has existed throughout the ages in the forms of
beliefs in the efficacy of spells and incantations.
In the religious tradition of the primal creative.
It's what speaks of when he describes the superstitious utility of poetry,
which through the hypnotic quality of it's rhythm led
people to believe that they could throw it around the gods like a magic noose.
And what laments when he writes that language is liked a cracked kettle
on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to.
While all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
As Byron writes, why should not the mind act with and upon the universe.
As portions of it act upon and with the congregated dust called mankind.
See how one man acts upon himself and others or upon multitudes.
The same agency in a higher and purer degree may act upon the stars, etc.
Ad infinitum.
In a way this is almost the inverse of the problem that we were considering in
relation to Hartley's associationism.
Hartley's theory dealt with how the physical world shaped or
affected the mind, but
Byron is interested in how the mind might act upon the physical world.
The hero of Mantrid achieves an agency of this nature.
Which renders the earth, ocean, air, night and mountains at his beck and bidding.
A poem that significantly he executes through language, a written charm.
Lovelace is not immune to these sorts of fantasies.
She maintains that she has mysterious powers over others,
selling herself a fairy and the High Priestess of Babbage's Engine.
Babbage himself referred to her as an enchantress who has thrown her magic
spell around the most abstract of sciences.
In a letter to her mother, she declared that she will in time be an autocrat.
Commanding marshalled regiments and harmoniously disciplined troops.
Consisting of vast numbers marching in irresistible power to the sound of music.
Rather than desiring to command nature or spirits with words, spells and
enchantments, she longs to command machinery through the science of
operations and her claim to autocratic dominion through the powers of mathematics
is as fantastic and imaginative as that of her literary predecessors.
In addition to this fairyism however she perceives an analytical engine,
a practical means of enacting some of the incarnational or
materializing possibilities that Coleridge and Byron yearned for in literature.
The analytical engine literally incarnates mathematical
operations into the movements of its physical metallic structure.
Impressed into the turning of its wheels.
Numbers and operations are represented physically on cogs and on punch cards.
And when the handle is cranked,
they're combined and woven together in physical space.
Tracing out in their movement the very mathematical operations that they're
actually undergoing.
As such, the analytical engine establishes, in Lovelace's words,
a uniting link between the operations of matter and the most abstract
mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science.
It brings the mental and material into more intimate and
affective connection with each other.
It translates the principles of mathematics into explicit practical forms.
It is as she says an embodying of the science of operations, the material and
mechanical representative of analysis.
It manages in its own way to destroy the anthesis not between words and things, but
between things and mathematical symbols.
Before I finish I want to return to a passage from Babbage's Ninth
Bridgewater Treatise, which Richard Holmes also quoted yesterday.
Babbage describes how the vibrations of the human voice impress the air with
pulsations, so that each of atom retains the motions of all the words that have
ever reverberated within it.
The air he writes is one vast library, through of mutable but
characters recording everything that has ever been spoken.
Byron longed for a word that would strike lightening from the sky.
But as Babbage explains,
all words in fact are forever indelibly impressed upon the air.
The operator of the analytical engine likewise would send
ripples through it's mechanism,
and the difference engine in motion if you've seen it literally does ripple.
Just like the reverberations of a voice in the air or
like a breeze sweeping through the Aeolian harp.
But with a permanency and
a solidity which preserved it's sorts for human as well as cosmic record.
The analytical engine gives us that which Wordsworth longed for in the prelude.
Some element for
the mind to stamp an image on in nature somewhat nearer to her own.
Lovelace's approach to the powers of analytical engine is rooted, I think,
in modes of thinking which we more often associated with poetry.
It's because of this that she was able to conceive of the analytical
engine in a radically inefficient way.
As a mechanism capable of analyzing, synthesizing, and
combining not only mathematics, but music, art, potentially even language.
She sees the engine not just as a calculating tool, but
as the fulfillment of the romantic dream of poetic embodiment.
Lovelace was in truth her father's heir, and she likewise bestows on the analytical
engine, the poetical inheritance of the Aeolian harp.
Lovelace imagines the intellectual breeze sweeping through the engine just as it
sweeps through Alia, producing music, mathematics and other works of art and
beauty as it passes, incarnating them into its physical structure of brass,
as such her work deserves.
Owns the title that she aspired to, that of a poetical science.
>> [APPLAUSE]
