Scott Benzel
Notes on Thinking Machine Imaginaries: Llull, Leibniz, and Lovelace to ‘Shoggoth with a Smiley Face’
9/7/25, 11:16 AM Thinking Machine Imaginaries: Llull, Leibniz, and Lovelace to 'Shoggoth with a Smiley Face'
Thinking Machine Imaginaries: Llull, Leibniz,
and Lovelace to 'Shoggoth with a Smiley Face'
SCOTT BENZEL
JAN 20, 2025
Sha
Shoggoth with a Smiley Face annotated variant, 2023 (knowyourmeme.com)
A labyrinth is said, etymologically, to be multiple because it contains many folds
The multiple is not only what has many parts but also what is folded in many wa
A labyrinth corresponds exactly to each level: the continuous labyrinth in matter
and its parts, the labyrinth of freedom in the soul and its predicates. If Descartes
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did not know how to get through the labyrinth, it was because he sought its secr
of continuity in rectilinear tracks, and the secret of liberty in a rectitude of the so
(Descartes) knew the inclension of the soul as little as he did the curvature of
matter. A 'cryptographer' is needed, someone who can at once account for nature
and decipher the soul, who can peer into the crannies of matter and read into the
folds of the soul. (Deleuze refers here to Leibniz) – Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibn
and the Baroque 1
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frontispiece to Miscellanea Berolensia ad incrementum scientiarum (1710) with Leibniz’s
Calculus Rationator bottom center
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Shoggoth with a Smiley Face variant, 2023 (knowyourmeme.com)
The labyrinth of time is folded back upon itself –
Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth
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Gottfried Leibniz, 1666 (publ. 1690). frontispiece of De Arte Combinatoria (On the Art
of Combination)
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Ramon Llull, from the Ars demonstrativa, 1283
The figures above, from Gottfried Leibniz’s De arta combinatoria of 1666 and Ramon
Llull’s Ars demonstrativa of 1283, “fold the labyrinth of time back upon itself.” Leibn
arguably the inventor of the modern “thinking machine” with the Stepped Reckone
(1673), Calculus Rationator (1710), differential calculus (1670’s), and codification of t
binary (1697) and a corresponding imaginary ("imaginary" refers here to the symbol
unconscious aspects of experience that challenge or modify existing structures), fou
in Llull, the 13th century troubadour, mystic, and proto-logician, centuries-earlier
“thinking machines”, often pure imaginaries existing only analogically, “on paper”.
Borges addressed Llull’s diagram (above) in his 1937 essay Ramón Llull’s Thinking
Machine:
…is a schema or diagram of the attributes of God. The letter A, at the center,
signifies the Lord. Along the circumference, the letter B stands for goodness, C f
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greatness, D for eternity, E for power, F for wisdom, G for volition, H for virtue,
for truth, and K for glory. The nine letters are equidistant from the center, and ea
is joined to all the others by chords or diagonal lines. The first of these features
means that all of these attributes are inherent; the second, that they are
systematically interrelated in such a way as to affirm, with impeccable orthodoxy
that glory is eternal or that eternity is glorious; that power is true, glorious, good
great, eternal, powerful, wise, free and virtuous, or benevolently great, greatly
eternal, eternally powerful, powerfully wise, wisely free, freely virtuous, virtuous
truthful, etc., etc.
[…] The fact that they are all entirely futile—the fact that, for us, to say that glory is
eternal is as rigorously null and void as to say that eternity is glorious—is of only
secondary interest. This motionless diagram, with its nine capital letters distribute
among nine compartments and linked by a star and some polygons, is already a
thinking machine. It was natural for its inventor—a man, we must not forget, of
thirteenth century—to feed it with a subject matter that now strikes us as
unrewarding. We now know that the concepts of goodness, greatness, wisdom,
power, and glory are incapable of engendering an appreciable revelation. We (wh
are basically no less naive than Llull) would load the machine differently, no dou
with the words Entropy, Time, Electrons, Potential Energy, Fourth Dimension, Relativ
Protons, Einstein. Or with Surplus Value, Proletariat, Capitalism, Class Struggle,
Dialectical Materialism, Engels. – Jorge Luis Borges, Ramón Llull’s Thinking Machine
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Zairja ()ةجرياز
The architect Daniel Libeskind traces Llull’s “thinking machines” to even earlier
imaginaries, including the Arabic zairja ()ةجرياز:
The idea of a thinking machine draws from the tradition of the ancient zairja
()ةجرياز, an actual device that existed and was described by Ibn Khaldun (1332–140
the Tunisian–Andalusian historiographer and economist. It is likely that the
Catalan mystic Ramon Llull (1232–1315) contributed to and was influenced by th
astrology of the zairja. How the zairjas worked is not entirely clear, except that th
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main aim was not to clarify thought but to confuse it. Combinatorial diagrams cross-
pollinated ideas so that their inner forms became visible. 3
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Llull, Árbol de Filosofia de Amor, 1298
In the “Historical Background” that opens Doctor Illuminatus, A Ramon Llull Reader,
Llull translator, commentator, and biographer Anthony Bonner introduces a
startlingly complex figure (noting “This initial characterization is taken largely from
Pring-Mill's excellent summary in the 1967 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
RAMON LLULL is in many ways a perplexing figure. During his long life (1232—
1316) he amassed a confusing number of claims to our attention: as a Christian
philosopher in the Neoplatonic tradition; as the first of the great mystics of the
Iberian Peninsula; as the first European to write prose novels on contemporary
themes; as the first writer to use a Romance vernacular to discuss theology,
philosophy, and science, and as one of the creators of literary Catalan; as a
missionary, Christian apologist, and founder of a school of oriental languages for
the purpose of training missionaries; and finally as the inventor of the "Art," a
complex system, using semi- mechanical techniques combined with symbolic
notation and com- binatory diagrams, which was to be the basis of his apologetic
in addition to being applicable to all fields of knowledge. 4
Llull began his life’s work as a troubadour and made efforts to codify and systemati
chivalry before his mystico-religious conversion:
Llull was writing “a song to a lady whom he loved with a foolish love” (not his wi
when he saw an apparition of Christ on the Cross. He saw four more as he worke
to complete the song. His conscience told him that they (the apparitions) could o
mean that he should abandon the world at once and from then on dedicate himse
totally to the service of our Lord Jesus Christ. 5
Following his conversion, Llull went on to create his “art” of recombination, a way
“systematically interrelate” the attributes and “Names of God” and, with the Arbol
Filosofia Amor (above), even attempted to systematize “The Mysteries of Love”. Borg
reminds us that Llull’s categories and “the fact that they are all entirely futile” does not
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invalidate their value as components in his “thinking machines”. The various system
imaginaries, their analogical “fit”, the complexity of the structures themselves and
their internal interrelations and recombinations, are what matters.
Llull’s beginnings as a troubadour – his poetic, metrical art - provided him with the
tools he required to formulate the systems that lay the foundation for future
recombinatory systems:
The mnemnotechnical value of language in verse enabled Llull to give metrical
form to a treatise on logic (a well-known expedient in the Middle Ages), the Logi
Algazelis. 6
Llull, Árbol de Filosofia de Amor, 1298
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Types of Neural Networks, 2019
Artificial Power
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The Great Chain (or Ladder) of Being, Ramon Llull (Libro Del Ascenso y Descenso
Del Entendimiento), after 1290
The ars is a ladder for ascending and descending; as, for instance, descending fro
a completely general principle to one neither completely general nor completely
particular, and from a principle neither completely general nor completely
particular to one that is completely particular. (Llull, Ars Brevis 2-I.) 7
Llull’s apparent mania for recombination, hierachization, and systematization acros
his many works is instead (according to him) evidence of the flowering of a “new
value” that, after 1290, he conceives of as flowing from the Ladder of Being – that of
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artifice or artificial power. This category encompasses “instrumental or artificial bein
(read technical objects or “thinking machines”), resulting from the instrumental or
artificial power of man.
Llull, Arbor Scientiae, after the orig.of 1294
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example of a logic tree
Llull’s Arbors were fruits of this “artifice” and precursors to the logic trees employed
today in coding, game design, game theory, and predictive systems, as were his
recombinatory “wheels”, precursors to Bruno’s, Dee’s, Trithemius’s, Kircher’s, and,
centuries later, Leibniz’s own recombinatory imaginaries.
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Llull’s Ars (Art), with which he would fight “the errors of the infidels” (De Vita I-5)
Monadologies
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Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, from the Kabbala denudata,1677-1684.
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G.W. Leibniz, diagram from Ars Combinatoria, 1666-1690
If we had some exact language (like the one called Adamit
by some) or at least a kind of truly philosophical writing, i
which the ideas were reduced to a kind of alphabet of
human thought, then all that follows rationally from what
is given could be found by a kind of calculus, just as
arithmetical or geometrical problems are solved.
Such a language would amount to a Kabbalah of mystical
vocables or to the arithmetic of Pythagorean numbers or
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the Characteristic language of magi, that is, of the wise.
– G.W. Leibniz, Commentatiuncula de judice
controversiarum
For centuries, Leibniz was held by scholars to be a rationalist in the modern sense.
debt to the past and, in particular, his alchemical investigations and interest in
heterodox systems including Llull’s and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala
denudata (above) were suppressed. Alison Coudert, in Leibniz, Mysticism, and Religion
writes:
,,,Leibniz scholars for the most part have been at pains to protect Leibniz's
reputation as a rationalist wholly uncontaminated by the bizarre doctrines of the
innumerable mystics, vitalists, and spiritualists populating the intellectual
landscape of the early modern period. This view of Leibniz was, and in some
quarters still is, prevalent. Many of the best known critics of Leibniz's thought h
followed Bertrand RusseIl's lead and claim that "Leibniz's philosophy was almos
entirely derived from his logic. […]
But in recent years this view has been challenged. Leibniz, the rationalist
philosopher, has ceded place to a far more complex and interesting individual,
whose attempt to synthesize Renaissance vitalism and seventeenth-century
atomism led him to an open-ended dialogue with both the living and the dead, a
dialogue in which he constantly tested, refined, and modified his views. 8
Stuart Brown, in the same volume, examines Leibniz’s reply to a critic, dissimulatin
his knowledge of the Kabbala Denudata and distancing himself from its author:
Although Leibniz continued to take an interest in the Kabbalah and to express th
view that it contained much of value, he kept his distance. That he had no wish t
be too closely associated with Kabbalism is apparent in his response to the
accusation of a contemporary critic that his"new system" had been derived from
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Kabbalah of the Rabbis, specifically from Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala denudat
This critic was an anonymous and as yet unidentified Modem British philosophe
who had visited Berlin and, at the request of the Queen of Prussia, had written an
appraisal of one of Leibniz's elucidations of his New System. In this elucidation -
1702 reply to Bayle - Leibniz had written of "the Author of nature" as one who
"multiplies his little worlds or his active indivisible mirrors as much as he can".
Leibniz did not explain hirnself and his critic seized on this failure, implying tha
Leibniz was really an occult philosopher who was not concerned to make himsel
intelligible as a Modern philosopher should.
[…] Leibniz's hypothesis implied that, contrary to appearances and the common
view, there was an infinity of spirit-like entities that lacked thought but which w
somehow capable of representing the universe as a whole. The critic referred to
these as "Miroirs Magiques." The use of the word "magical" in this context was
meant to be dismissive and to imply that Leibniz was an obscurantist if not a
charlatan. He tried to pass it off as a joke but he was well aware of the connotatio
of the word "magical" in Modern circles.
In his reply Leibniz insisted that no one else had accused him of not making
hirnself intelligible and sought to distance himself from the Kabbalists. Althoug
he mentioned Knorr's friendship with van Helmont, he made no mention of his o
association with either of them. This seems to have been a piece of concealment
Moreover he appears to have been lying by implication about his knowledge of t
Kabbala denudata, when he c1aimed that he did not have time to compare it with
own work to see whether there were the alleged similarities. For, as we have seen
he was familiar with the work and recommended it to others. But he did not deny
outright all similarity or connection with his own thought. On the contrary he
insisted that it would not be "any problem at all" if his views agreed with those o
Knorr. 9
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G.W. Leibniz, wooden Stepped Reckoner, 1673-1694
Gilles Deleuze, who regularly deployed ‘machinic’ imaginaries, found in Leibniz no
just the basis of modern logico-mechanical “thinking machines” but also the
monadological, combinatorial roots of Modern art and literature and an imaginary
informing and informed by them. Tom Conley:
Deleuze, on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: (it is a) ’communication that would not b
posited as a principle, but would result from the play of [textual] machines and their
detached pieces, of their unconnected parts.'
It is Leibniz who inspires this observation, since the seventeenth-century
philosopher 'first posed the problem of communication resulting from closed un
or from what cannot be attached'. By means of Leibniz's innovation, which mark
the limits of communication, the subject is enveloped in the predicate, just as
Proust's intention is folded into his effect. Inclusion of the subject in the predica
implies that the world makes up a chaotic cosmos or chaosmos. By way of Leibni
logic, Deleuze is able to conceive of artworks composed of units that are neither
logical nor organic, 'that is, neither based upon pieces as a long unity or a
fragmented totality; nor formed or prefigured by those units in the course of a
logical development or of an organic evolution'. As in Focillon's vision of a 'life o
forms' that mixes biological and serial figures in its description of the Baroque
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phase, or in the giddy effects of partial things in the novel that betray Proust's
intentions, a hierarchy of organic and inorganic things no longer holds. 'Life' is
invested into brute matter insofar as it, too, is perpetually moving,
metamorphosing, or emigrating from one condition to another. 10
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Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbala denudata,1677-1684.
Leibniz’s interest in earlier mystico-logical systems extended beyond the kabbalah,
including myriad alchemical emblems, Llull’s Ars, and perhaps most fruitfully
(considering the current ubiquity of binary code, basis for digital computation and
media), the I Ching. His long correspondence with Joachim Bouvet, a Jesuit mission
living in China, and resulting exposure to Confucianism the I Ching informed,
respectively, his Monadologie and his Explanation of the binary arithmetic, which uses o
the characters 1 and 0, with some remarks on its usefulness, and on the light it throws on th
ancient Chinese figures of Fu Xi.
Yuen-Ting Lai:
The joint discovery that the I Ching hexagrams can be reduced to the binary syste
forms a curious chapter in the world history of ideas. The role this discovery play
in the thinking of Leibniz is best seen in Leibniz's universalist quest for a linguis
instrument in which all ideas are reducible to an alphabet of human thought, and
which all expressed opinions can be calculated like geometrical or arithme~ic
problems.
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Leibniz’s design for a medal Unus ex Nihilo Omnia (From Nothing Everything) detailing
the binary, 1697
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Diagram of I Ching hexagrams, given to Leibniz by the French Jesuit Joachim
Bouvet, and to which Leibniz has added Arabic numerals, 1701
The discovery consists of the following: Whereas the decimal system requires ten
digital numbers from 0 to 9 as a base, a binary number requires two digital
numbers, 0 and 1 only. The first ten numbers of the decimal system from 0 to 9 is
written in the binary system thus: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, and 1001. I
letter to Bouvet dated 15 February, 1701, Leibniz included a table of corresponde
between the binary progression and decimal progression up to 11111/31. Bouvet
the parallel with the sixty-four hexagrams at once. The key lies in the utilization
both the binary system and the hexagrams, of two elements only, and the possibi
of substituting one for the other. In the hexagrams, the two elements are a line
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broken in the middle and a continuous line. Each hexagram consists of two
trigrams, each of which is made up by three lines, each line being either broken
continuous. In Bouvet's letter to Leibniz on 4 November, 1701, he enclosed the I
Ching diagram, supposedly drawn up by Fu Hsi. It features a circular and a squar
arrangement of the sixty-four hexagrams. He remarked that if the corresponding
progressions are brought up to 63 and six digital positions in the binary system,
can see that the progression in the binary system corresponds to the order of
hexagrams in the Hsien-tien tzu-hsü diagram. 11
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Leibniz’s calculating machine, featuring in Theatrum arithmetico-geometricum, das ist .
. . (1727) by Jacob Leupold
A.A.L.
Ada Augusta Byron, daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron and future countess
Lovelace, was seventeen when she encountered Charles Babbage’s Difference Engin
(below). A sophisticated mathematician versed in calculus and tutored by some of th
greatest mathematicians of the time, she grasped the machine’s importance
immediately and began a lifelong correspondence with it’s inventor.
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Charles Babbage, Difference Engine, 1822
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Lovelace’s translation of Italian mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea’s "Sketch o
The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage" included a series of Notes that
significantly expanded on Menabrea’s somewhat rote descriptive text as well as a ta
for computing Bernoulli numbers attached to Note G (below) that would come to be
regarded by many as the first complete computer program.
Ada Augusta Lovelace, Note G, originally published in Sketch of The Analytical
Engine Invented by Charles Babbage
Note G and the its accompanying table constituted a new technological “paper”
imaginary, in the sense of Llull’s “paper thinking machines”, as Babbage’s Analytica
Engine was too expensive to build and the program that Lovelace laid out in Note G
could not be run during her lifetime. Largely unrecognized at the time, Lovelace’s fa
reaching achievement included her creation in Note G of a “step-by-step elemental
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sequence of instructions—that is, an algorithm” (Misa, below), the invention of the
software loop and the nested loop (now called recursion, a process fundamental to
contemporary artificial intelligence), while Note A suggested that machines like the
Analytical Engine might one day “act upon other things besides number”, essentiall
conceptualizing symbolic computing, precursor to artificial intelligence, and predat
by a century Alan Turing’s concept of the “universal machine”. Lovelace, in Note A:
…it might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutu
fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of
operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of t
operating notation and mechanism of the engine. Supposing, for instance, that th
fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of music
composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine mi
compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or
extent.— Ada Lovelace, Notes upon the memoir "Sketch of The Analytical Engine
Invented by Charles Babbage" by the translator Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, No
Over time, the enormity of the importance of the innovations contained in Lovelace
Notes were recognized, while scholars found ways to dismiss her (Babbage did the
math, there was an error in the code, etc.). Thomas J. Misa, in his essay Charles
Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and the Bernoulli Numbers seeks to redress this “unduly negati
scholarly view” of Lovelace’s contributions to the history of computation:
First, in contrast to much of the existing literature, the Lovelace-Babbage questi
is not a zero-sum game, where some portion of credit added to Lovelace someho
detracts from Babbage, or vice versa. There is ample evidence that Babbage and
Lovelace each had important contributions to the Sketch and the Notes, and
attention to their intellectual collaboration is revealing. Second, claims about he
lack of mathematical background seem doubtful after consulting Lovelace’s deta
correspondence with Babbage and Augustus De Morgan, two highly accomplish
figures in 19th century mathematics. The treatment of the Bernoulli numbers in
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note “G” spotlights the intellectually intimate collaboration between Babbage an
Lovelace and its mathematical sophistication. Finally, while there may be
significant definitional problems in calling Lovelace the world’s “first computer
programmer,” the evidence is reasonably clear that Lovelace created an step-by-s
elemental sequence of instructions—that is, an algorithm—for computing the
series of Bernoulli numbers that was intended for Babbage’s Analytical Engine. T
underlying mathematics might well have been Babbage’s, for he was a distinguis
mathematical and scientific figure. Lovelace transformed an equation for the
Bernoulli numbers into a precise series of elemental additions, multiplications, a
substitutions.
The algorithm specified a sequence of calculations, requiring a real-life compute
capable of running a program with a looping structure and conditional testing. […
In “The Babbage Machine and the Origins of Programming,” the authors reproduce
Lovelace’s table for the Bernoulli numbers and translate the algorithm into a 65-
FORTRAN program that compute them. The program has eight “if . . . [then] go-
statements and a simple structure, straight from Lovelace’s table-algorithm, that
builds up algebraic statements one mathematical operation at a time: for exampl
computing the expression (2n - 1) / (2n + 1) requires 4 program steps. In the origin
1843 publication of Note “G,” there are clearly two nested loops, embedded in a
larger looping structure. There is direct documentary evidence that Ada Lovelac
created this table (writing it out in pencil). […]
The Analytical Engine was Babbage’s creation while the Sketch and Notes are be
understood as the product of an intense intellectual collaboration between Babb
and Lovelace. […] 12
Turing, while acknowledging his debt to Lovelace, believed that the universal
machines that he imagined should be capable of human-like thought, and in his 195
journal article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" addressed “Lady Lovelace’s
objection”: In Note G, Lovelace states: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to
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originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” She continues
“Only when computers originate things should they be believed to have minds”
Turing responds:
This statement is quoted by Hartree (1949) who adds: "This does not imply that it m
not be possible to construct electronic equipment which will 'think for itself,' or in which
biological terms, one could set up a conditioned reflex, which would serve as a basis for
'learning.' Whether this is possible in principle or not is a stimulating and exciting quest
suggested by some of these recent developments But it did not seem that the machines
constructed or projected at the time had this property."
I am in thorough agreement with Hartree over this. 13
To counter the Lovelace’s objection, Turing creates a test for intelligence, or, more
specifically, for the appearance of intelligence in machines, predicated on whether a
machine can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. H
calls it the Imitation Game. Today is known as the Turing Test.
Shoggoth with a Smiley Face
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Astounding Stories, February 1936, featuring cover illustration of a Shoggoth
It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless
congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of
temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the
tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and
slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of
litter. — H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
Leibniz, notebook diagram, 17th C (a Shoggoth?)
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In the paper “Shoggoth with Smiley Face”: Knowing-how and letting-know by analogy in
artificial intelligence research, Valentin Goujon and Donato Ricci examine the evoluti
of the Shoggoth with Smiley Face meme (which) “contributes to the popularization of
analogy between AI systems based on deep neural networks and the monstrous
creatures called “shoggoths” of Howard P. Lovecraft’s horror fictional universe…
highlight(ing) two modes of analogical association between AI and shoggoths: lettin
know by analogy and knowing-how by analogy.”
Their formulation “letting-know by analogy and knowing-how by analogy”, parses a
important difference in meme-transfer between the inception of a new imaginary a
the conveyance of pedagogical strategies that accomplish its realization.
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Per Goujon and Ricci:
Since the early 2010s, the increasing use of figurative language has spread to term
associated with digital technology, including: “big data,” “virus,” “platform,” “clo
computing,” “the new black gold” and “ecosystem.” As an extension of research
focusing on algorithmic imaginaries (Bucher, 2016), this article studies the case o
contemporary research on artificial intelligence (AI) which, from this point of vie
is permeated by analogies developed in the fields of computer science and even
more so by cybernetics and its resurgence, from the 2010s (Cardon et al., 2018), w
the rise of connectionism. Unlike the expert systems associated with symbolic AI,
connectionist machines are distinguished by the opacity of an inductive, non-linear
and parallelized computation method, meaning they are considered as unfathomable
algorithmic black boxes (Burrel, 2016). The cybernetic analogy of the black box is th
added to the computational metaphor in which the human brain resembles a
computer and vice versa (Baria & Cross, 2021).
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As the meme evolved into a better-drawn, three-headed, triple-captioned monstros
with a Smiley face (above), resembling somewhat the constantly mutating creature o
John Carpenter’s The Thing, its affective power and imaginary potential increased. T
“algorithmic imaginaries” incepted by earlier, cruder variations of the meme did wh
successful imaginaries, memes (and Things) are wont to do: it went viral. It also,
somewhat unnaturally for a meme, developed a “stronger pedagogic dimension” (se
Goujon and Ricci, below). It is possible that the discernable increase in grotesquerie
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either countered or somehow mated with the usually deadly increase in pedagogy
resulting in that rarest of chimera: a successful meme/imaginary that doubles as a
useful heuristic:
Accompanied by this triple caption, the image has a stronger pedagogic dimensi
than previous versions of the analogy, whose interpretative ambiguity and aesthe
sobriety refer more to letting-know by analogy. Present since the original version
the meme, this heuristic aim was noticeably accentuated as the publicization lin
to the letting-know by analogy raised questions about the meaning of what was a
first a strange association between shoggoths and AI systems. Director of the Ce
for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) in Georgetown and then member of t
OpenAI board of directors (since fired), Helen Toner wrote a series of posts at th
beginning of March 2023 based on this new representation of the analogy. […]
Four days after the publication of the thread, a page dedicated to Shoggoth with
Smiley Face was created by an anonymous user on the reference site “Know Your
Meme” (Pettis, 2021) listing twenty different versions. Subsequently, the increase
publicity of the analogy was further accentuated by the publication of a series of
press articles tracing the trajectory of the meme (Roose, 2023; Calia, 2023) and
incorporating the figure of the shoggoth into contemporary debates on AI more
broadly (Hogarth, 2023; Farrell & Shalizi, 2023; Sterling, 2023). This sudden
notoriety arguably contributed to an aesthetic and semantic taming of an analog
which might at first appear as obscure as the two types of entity—shoggoth and
LLM—upon which it draws. 14
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J.J. Grandville, Gulliver sees the flying island Laputa for the first time, from 'Gulliver's
Travels' by Jonathan Swift, 1838
In the fictional city of Lagado on the flying island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the protagonist encounters a Professor, inventor of a device
known as “the engine” for “improving speculative knowledge by practical and
mechanical operations”, enabling:
the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labor, (t
write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology,
without the least assistance from genius or study.
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The Engine
He then led me to the frame, about the sides, whereof all his pupils stood in rank
It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superficies was
composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger tha
others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were
covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were
written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and
declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me “to observe; fo
he was going to set his engine at work.”
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evolved ‘group’ version of Shoggoth with a Smiley Face, 2023 (knowyourmeme.com)
(a Shoggoth/Swift Engine?)
The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof
there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden tu
the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded si
and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the
frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part o
sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work
was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived,
that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside
down.
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Six hours a day the young students were employed in this labor; and the professo
showed me several volumes in large folio, already collected, of broken sentences,
which he intended to piece together, and out of those rich materials to give the
world a complete body of all arts and sciences; which, however, might be still
improved, and much expedited, if the public would raise a fund for making and
employing five hundred such frames in Lagado, and oblige the managers to
contribute in common their several collections.
He assured me that this invention had employed all his thoughts from his youth;
that he had employed the whole vocabulary into his frame, and made the strictes
computation of the general proportion there is in books between the numbers of
particles, nouns, and verbs, and other parts of speech. 15
The “engine”, conceived by Swift in 1726, strikes one as weirdly prescient of today’s
LLMs and the rise of AI slop. Anthony Bonner, in Doctor Illuminatus, reveals:
…Swift's portrait in Gulliver's Travels of the professor of Laputa, whose machine f
rotating hundreds of cubes with words written on them to generate random
sentences is thought to be a satire on Llull's Art. 16
1 Deleuze, Gilles. Tom Conley, tr. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London: Continuum, 20
2 Borges, Jorge Luis. Ramón Llull’s Thinking Machine, in Borges: Selected Non-Fictions. New Y
Penguin, 2000.
3 Libeskind, Daniel. (Online) https://libeskind.com/work/cranbrook-machines/
4 Bonner, Anthony. Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Llull Reader. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1994.
5 Bonner, Anthony, ed. and tr. Selected Works of Ramon Llull (1232-1316). Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1985.
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6 The poetry of the troubadours. (Online) Qui és Ramon Llull, Centre de Documentació Ramo
Llull Universitat de Barcelona https://quisestlullus.narpan.net/en/poetry-troubadours
7 Bonner, Anthony, ed. and tr. Selected Works of Ramon Llull (1232-1316). Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1985.
8 Coudert, Allison P. Leibniz and the Kabbalah, in Leibniz, Mysticism, and Religion. Coudert,
Allison P. , Popkin, Richard H. and Weiner, Gordon M., eds. Dordrecht: Springer, 1998
9 Brown, Stuart. Some Occult Influences on Leibniz's Monadology in Leibniz, Mysticism, and
Religion. Coudert, Allison P. , Popkin, Richard H. and Weiner, Gordon M., eds. Dordrecht
Springer, 1998
10 Deleuze, Gilles. Tom Conley, tr. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London: Continuum, 20
11 Lai, Yuen-Ting. Leibniz and Chinese Thought in Leibniz, Mysticism, and Religion. Coudert,
Allison P. , Popkin, Richard H. and Weiner, Gordon M., eds. Dordrecht: Springer, 1998
12 Misa, Thomas J. Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and the Bernoulli Numbers, in Ada’s Legacy.
Hammerman and Russell, eds., ACM Books, 2015.
13 Turing, A. M. (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 49: 433-460.
14 Goujon, Valentin and Ricci, Donato. “Shoggoth with Smiley Face”: Knowing-how and letting-
know by analogy in artificial intelligence research”, Hybrid [Online], 12 | 2024, Online since 0
November 2024, connection on 06 November 2024.
http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/4880
15 Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. (1726) (Online)
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/65473/pg65473-images.html#LAPUTA_CHAPTER
16 Bonner, Anthony. Doctor Illuminatus: A Ramon Llull Reader, 1994.
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