Page 353 - Data Science Algorithms in a Week

334 Bert Olivier

‘Rei’s only reality is the realm of ongoing serial creation,’ Rez said. ‘Entirely
process; infinitely more than the combined sum of her various selves. The platforms
sink beneath her, one after another, as she grows denser and more complex…’

And the idoru’s “agent/creator”, Kuwayama, tells Laney (1996: 238):

‘Do you know that our [Japanese] word for ‘nature’ is of quite recent coinage? It
is scarcely a hundred years old. We have never developed a sinister view of
technology, Mr Laney. It is an aspect of the natural, of oneness. Through our efforts,
oneness perfects itself.’ Kuwayama smiled. ‘And popular culture,’ he said, ‘is the
testbed of our futurity’.

Such a notion of technology is right up the alley of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
(1983; 1987). The latter two philosophers regarded all of reality as being fundamentally
process, as did Henri Bergson before them. Furthermore, Gibson writes in an idiom that
resonates with their ontology of “desiring machines” constituted by “flows of desire”,
where Kuwayama (presumably alluding to the idoru) says something to Rez about
(Gibson 1996: 178):

‘… the result of an array of elaborate constructs that we refer to as ‘desiring
machines’ … [N]ot in any literal sense … but please envision aggregates of subjective
desire. It was decided that the modular array would ideally constitute an architecture of
articulated longing …’

Gibson’s description of the ‘artificially intelligent’ idoru as the ‘musically narrative’
manifestation of prodigious masses of information resonates with the biological theory of
Rupert Sheldrake (1994: 129), known as “morphic resonance”, which might lead one to
posit a similarity between living things (including, pertinently, humans) and artificial
intelligence. In Sheldrake’s theory organisms that learn something during their lifetimes
‘pass on’ this knowledge through the mediation of some kind of ‘collective memory’
(which he compares to Jung’s theory of the ‘collective unconscious’) to others of their
kind, even if there has never been any contact between them and those that come after
them. This happens through the process of ‘morphic resonance’, which means that a kind
of ‘memory field’ is created by the experiences of organisms, in which subsequent
generations of such organisms (for example chickens) share. This displays a similarity
with what we learn about the idoru in Gibson’s novel, insofar as she is the expression of
colossal amounts of ‘information’, or, for that matter, ‘memory’. She could be described
as a vast field of memory, and if this is the case, there seems to be grounds for claiming
that, at least in these terms, there is no crucial difference between living beings like
humans and this particular form of artificial intelligence. After all, the idoru manifests as