Claw Machines and the Question of Truth

My father used to teach an undergraduate chemistry course for non-majors that he semi-affectionately dubbed “Chemistry for Poets.” All of us—the chemists, the poets, and everyone in between—can imagine what that class was like; we can imagine—circa 1975—the kind of student that class would have attracted. I can well imagine his frequent exasperation; I know well enough how I treated my introductory geology course in college.

I bring this up not to bore you with anecdotes from my family’s past, but to serve as one example of the strife—sometimes major, sometimes minor—that occurs when the domain of the right brain and the domain of the left brain feel as though they’re enduring too much togetherness.

It’s this particular split—the two ways of thinking, the two kinds of people—that I’ve been thinking about this week as I read through Martin Davis’ The Universal Computer. As an origin story, it’s a successful outing through several centuries of history—which of course means that it problematizes and complicates all manner of concepts and objects for the reader. Even just typing this post is a more complex activity than it would have been last week—now that I finally understand what RAM is and what Random Access Memory actually means, I can imagine the well of data buzzing in my laptop, the precision of direct accessibility. (I should say that now when I try to picture the inner workings of my computer, I imagine one of those arcade claw machines, reaching for just the right file or string of code…)

Clearly, this book has just been one more enabler for my non sequitur metaphors. 

But there’s something to this intermingling of the knowledge styles, isn’t there? In fact, it seems to me that the entire story of the computer, the centuries-long grappling with questions of infinity and truth and the physicality of numbers, is one that has required a total engagement of all the brain’s reasoning. If I gleaned anything from this book, it was the sheer messiness of generating something that, from the outside, has always seemed incredibly precise. Really, what’s more imaginative than essentially trying to recreate the brain outside of the body?

To get back to the actual history for a moment, let me share this brief quote from Davis:

“[Leibniz] dreamt of an encyclopedic compilation, of a universal artificial mathematical language in which every facet of knowledge could be expressed, of calculational rules which would reveal all the logical interrelationships among these propositions. Finally, he dreamed of machines capable of carrying out calculations, freeing the mind for creative thought” (4). (Emphasis added.)

It is remarkable to me that Leibniz didn’t envision his logical work, his “wonderful idea” of a symbolic alphabet, as being itself “creative thought.” Regardless of its eventual use or the background of its inventor, the initiation of a new language is always a creative act. For all that language has grammar, and for all that grammar is a logical structure, the impetus must always be more nuanced than that. (Besides, anyone who argues that the rules of English grammar are 100% logical is delusional and should not be trusted.)

Really, he seems to have been a paradoxical thinker in a number of ways. The ideas he put forth—the exhaustive compendium of human knowledge, the universal characteristic, the eventual automation—were creative; new ways of answering mathematical questions. At the same time, Leibniz saw everything—everything—as part of God’s best possible world, each action and connection in some way necessitated.

I wonder about the moment when he realized that he wasn’t going to see all his questions answered; I wonder if he ever questioned the combination of his religion and his research, the ways that they complement and contradict each other.

Leibniz wasn’t even close to the first one to ask questions that stretched beyond his time, but I think his style of questioning—proposing concepts that seem both supremely rational and supremely out-of-reach—is what we continue to rely on.

It also seems to me that we’re all trying to talk about truth—truth as it lives inside the human mind, or truth as it lives inside a set of numbers; truth as something a machine can enable us to realize, or something we can teach it to recognize. If we bear that it mind, our future questions might all have more interesting answers.