Moribund Algorithm, or “How to learn the magic word that evokes the shape of things to come?” On Modalities of Sorcery

Operations with Algorithms are at the heart of disease prevention technologies. This is a follow-up article of those published in the 20 September, 13 October, and 6 November issues of VoegelinView.[1] As all this is related to the current COVID concerns, this piece is therefore also of considerable practical interest. The following offers first a brief introduction to Algorithms, emphasizing the problems of recursiveness and amplification, mimetism and new-thing-creation used by this particular technology, now widespread and largely influential in our lives.

The Algorithm is not the invention of modern technologies; nor is it peculiar to contemporary disease prevention and the media. Algorithms belong to the ‘vocabulary’ of magic and sorcery in almost every society, not only since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the natural sciences started to use infinite series, and when alchemy fused with technology made it possible to reproduce, mime, transform and multiply entities, but even when we first changed the molecules of grains and metals in the Neolithic and even further back, when carved images in stones. There are detailed descriptions of the method back in the Palaeolithic.[2] Everywhere, with its encircling steps the Algorithm was more than a simple instrument of magic: a kind of ‘communication with the dead’, as it intended not simply to have an interchange or transmitting sensuals but a union, the uniting of the realm of the dead with the living, in order to generate new beings. Magic brings forth new beings and was understood to have occult properties and secret powers over generation. Or, saying it better: Algorithms worked beyond human strength, gained power over nature by creating new species, producing a non-human existence.

The Algorithm is the dark fertile realm dealing with decaying matter, which has an unknown relationship to material reality.[3] The dispositions of this vast wasteland are without logical consistency, containing queasiness and producing insinuations, and though without shape and meaning they feed into and adapt to reality.[4] Reality and Algorithm interact with each other, but just wait enough time and it’s going to be the Algorithm all the way down. The magic word that with its contingency enters into the plans of the charming technological enthusiasts is equality in unity. This automatism was to continue its operation unlimited in time, but the magic word equality in unity itself has a history: for thousands of years it was quite constantly removing any entity from its context. Metallurgy, alchemy,[5] technology and other mechanisations all aimed at decontextualizing individuals into a new unity, that rendered Algorithmic modification inevitable, and where each output was discarded once it was entered into the next application. We call it progress, but this is probably ironical.

An Algorithm in itself is a soft, sticky mixture which behaves like viruses, the replicator that repeats itself in the host organism with a dangerous recursive function, that takes up the space of its host entity, parasitizing on its body, and paralysing it. In a recursive process this moribund creation takes up much more shapes than does the initial move, consequently it causes an overall radical amplification. What is more, this leads to the reorganization of the authentic structure – it becomes sickened and downtrodden, even degraded. It then keeps on producing an alternated version of reality without authenticity, when even the memory of the authentic one is consumed in overall dissolute disconnectedness. A downside of the demonic[6] is that it is unheard, incommensurable, unknown, and in fact its actual scientific discovery[7] is linked to magic in the nineteenth century, at the same time when an another Algorithmic variant, the invisible radiation[8] escaped from ghost stories (Blum 2006; Noakes 2019).

That of course would all be fine if something came out of it, but Algorithm is almost certainly a dead end, just a circle with loops, as its moribund infinity has not come up with anything useful other than the equality in elimination. Algorithm is a moribund mirror: while its surface is capable of reflecting images, it erases the face who had a glance into it. While it forms the image of a viewer placed in front of it, with the same instance it occupies the viewer’s place and character, thus evoking the shape of things to come, the image of the subject amplified through mimesis. Imitation clearly can go on forever, infinitely, but that is the problem and not the solution, as it only produces Hell on Earth.

We can capture the entire set by using the term ‘magical transformation’. One can look into it, as into a peephole, but then will become swallowed at once, this is how magic is brought into being. The place of the viewer is annihilated, destroyed and transformed into the void. This is not like Foucault’s famous description of Las Meninas by Velasquez at the start of his Order of Things, where the mirror hides as much as it reveals or – as it is described by Foucault – as producing an irruption rather than a reflection, a disturbance between subjects and objects. The Algorithm leaves a central void, with total destruction. This is why the proper word which opens it up is equality, the unity of conformity with all standards. Equality constitutes the entire mass of the of the union/unity, for everything there is in equal unity, the equality of death. So the question still is, whether those pleading propagators of Algorithm in the present disease prevention has knowledge about its moribund equality in dissolution, or they only became an unintentional part of its technologies that generate unconsidered anticipations.

Algorithm has a power of causing all instances, sensuals, feelings, vibrations, effluences, interactions to be reflected in the otherworld, to become animated and autonomous in sense making. The mirror, so to speak, becomes itself the generator of powerful and unknowable matters, for instance the recurrence of the thing called Artificial Intelligence which was even unconsidered. It magnifies and increases, it generates without finitude. A mirror of unknown composition, this is Algorithm, that takes the image of the viewer, copies it and replaces it with its own one step by step, while starting to replicate inside of it. The core of Algorithm is muck, it is filthy, it does not know resistance, border, individual form, logos, mind or consideration, a stack that grows forever into infinity, until overflowing its dark receptacle. In the wake of Newton, to acquire its peculiar modern magic, a new knowledge has grown that declared itself to be not based on charis, but on hate: ‘the spectacle of a nihilist stripping himself to the nude is embarrassing’,[9] producing a recursive hatred, because each addition is driven by the previous one.

There is an axiom which never fails: the one who does not think well of oneself, will never make the world to think well. We need charis, benevolence and comprehension, including logical consistency in its full sense, but this is not what Algorithm produces, as it rather continuously questions whatever counts as human, and tries to eliminate it. Our mind proceed alongside a linear line, about how to achieve goodness, and not in recursivity about hatred, where hatred is only reciprocated by hatred, as if in a vicious circle. In fact, in this sense philosophy and any social or natural science are not really about the empirical world itself, but about how ratio works – namely, when it explores the above axioms, when it works with facts or statements, which are accepted and are meaningful according to the charis principle.

Conclusion

In the first place, philosophy is useful and is an essential modelling tool of reality, but it is only a tool. Used badly, just like any other discipline, including mathematics or physics, it can take up erroneous assumptions about reality and conceal the underlying errors by making the model based on them mimic reality in its substituting outputs. They can completely misrepresent reality but nonetheless inform us about the demonic, as a substitute or second reality, just like the sorcery example of Hegel shows. Or, using another monstrous fallacy, if you substitute time with energy, and substitute space with mass, then it has a space and time relative universe in a recursive and non-linear energy operation. You get a bunch of nonsense.

Nonsenses have no property; even if they can evolve all the other properties of matter, space and time by magical Algorithm, they only produce parasitism. We’ll be lost in a void where nothing can be explained anymore.

The choice between charis and hateful recursive magic is ours.

 

References

Blum, Deborah (2006) Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, London: Penguin.

Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things, London, Tavistock.

Gell, Alfred (1988) ‘Technology and Magic’, Anthropology Today 4, 2: 6-9.

Grafton, Anthony (2005) Magic and Technology in Early Modern Europe, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Libraries.

Mauss, Marcel (2001) A General Theory of Magic, London: Routledge.

Noakes, Richard J. (2019) Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Voegelin, Eric (1972) ‘On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery’, in J. T. Fraser, F. Haber & G. Muller (eds.) The Study of Time, New York, NY: Springer, 418-51.

 

Notes

[1] Voegelin (1972: 425). The knowledge of this ‘magic word’ is through suffering, which renders all of us equals, according to Hegel, in Voegelin’ interpretation.

[2] For a particularly striking such image, see the ‘Herd of Reindeer’ image from La Grotte de la Mairie cave, Teyjat, Dordogne.

[3] In reality, everything is concrete, and has a meaning.

[4] Reality starts, keeps, and produces life.

[5] In both there is a molecular changes or transformation during the metallurgical/alchemical process, a decontextualization.

[6] See further Marcel Mauss (2001: 175) on how technology and magic is interwoven, as ‘since association with evil as an aspect of magical rites always provides humanity with a rough general notion of magic’ (2001: 11); Anthony Grafton (2005: 43) about the technological brand of magic, that not only rivalled, but actually outdid the creative powers of nature herself; and Alfred Gell (1988) on how magic incorporates into technological inventions: all closely rhyming with Voegelin’s interpretation of Hegel concerning the capacity of human sensations, sensuals and effluences to evoke magic, especially as these were taken further by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto.

[7] Infinite sequences were reused by simultaneously by Leibniz and Newton after Archimedes. The use of recursion in order to create is also exploited by mathematics. One such sequence is the set of natural (i.e. whole) numbers.

[8] Besides viruses, radiation also has an Algorithmic character. Similarly, it needs a host body (a medium) to be effective. Similarly, it damages the living cells, transforming them or making molecules die. Similarly, it multiplies inside the host. Similarly, unseen and incommensurable to human scale, is a copy replicator of the authentic one in its growing intensity.

[9] See Voegelin (1972: 424).