A few days

The trouble with wild, abstract theorizing about life and art is that one tends to feel silly in retrospect. This is a problem with a lot of pop postmodernism—I heart Huckabee’s makes fun of that sort of thing, in a friendly way. But it must be said that it’s a lot of fun, though often incoherent.

The notion of code presents the opportunity to reach new heights of speculation. Theory, up to a point, allows us to assign a “real” ontological value to signifying constructs like those expressed in code, even though they may not exist in our physical reality—or rather it devalues physical reality up to a point, so that “reality” is an adjustable term, because all terms are adjustable. The term “code,” for example, refers in computing (to drastically oversimplify something I probably don’t understand very well—I just took some Q-basic and MS-DOS in middle school, and I’ve forgotten that quite efficiently) to a sequence of distinct values employed by the machine to transform a given input into a desired output. Anyway, let’s say that within the bounds of this blog post, that’s basically what code does. Nothing happens without a motive force coming in at some point, whether it be fingers on a keyboard/mouse or dropping a coin to make a Rube Goldberg machine start working. These can both be interpreted in light of code—a keyboard applies to computer code, obviously, but can’t Nature’s less obvious functioning be interpreted in terms of code as well? With a given START position of “above the ground” a piece of rubber, which is a reasonably definite term, will fall UNLESS it’s a balloon filled with helium, or some similar inanity.

That example was pretty bad, but if we accept that anything can be interpreted in light of code, human existence takes on an interestingly malleable form. We are, after all, walking processors—receiving floods of information, picking through it, and responding, based on both built-in and modifiable code. Saussure and his ilk proposed a world that was entirely made of language, as far as it affects us—but that’s an insufficiently complex view. It’s also made out of funny things like cells and organs. If we maintain, however, that the I is fundamentally separated from the “real” world by our physical existence—that is, that the construction of consciousness can only encounter reality through a mediating interface—we can wonder whether the code of the flesh could be unlocked, and every nerve impulse understood in relation to the whole machine. Whether the interface could be upgraded, or modified. Human language is a kind of interface, and it’s all we can use to understand our bodies—God’s interface, to put it one way. Computers are amazing because they’re the most complicated code we have consciously come up with. Now we can propose that there is a code of reality, and a code of language subordinate to it (which is the one we think in), and now a code of computers, the most complex code entirely subordinate to language. Doesn’t it seem like there would be significant correlation? I try to talk about these things and sound schizophrenic.