The Perspectival Limits of Computation: Researching the Present in Satin Island
Joel Mire · Intersect: The Stanford Journal of Science, Technology and Society · 2020
This paper examines a search for perspective amid globally networked computational systems that defy individual's desire for complete access and understanding. It also illuminates how science invokes literary forms to conceive and explain new concepts. Concretely, paper is oriented around Tom McCarthy's novel Satin Island and twentieth century computer scientist John Von Neumann's early research on modern computer. In Satin Island, search for an almost objective perspective or revelation runs up against incomprehensibility of information age. I consider two perspectives—an elevated, unmediated view as well as a more local, constrained, and mediated view—to relate perspectival limits in novel to larger considerations about limits of knowledge in context of technological mediation. My approach also looks to history of computing for both cultural attitudes and architectural paradigms that prefigure current state of information technology. For instance, I read pioneering computer scientist Von Neumann's lectures on his early theoretical work on modern computer to illuminate how he conceptualized computational forms of knowledge in relation to human brain. Additionally, I consider a model called cellular automata popularized by research program of Stephen Wolfram to explain perspectival limits of computational methods adopted by narrator of McCarthy's novel Satin Island. Finally, to think about unique status of novel and narrative in our time, I engage with narrative theory and recent critical conversations about status of the in field of contemporary literature. All of this is my effort to understand rationales, methods, and consequences of a research ethos committed to idea that computation should supplant other ways of knowing.