Notes From The Chinese Room: May 1997

OOC Note: this was his first column from the first game I attended as him, on May 17, 1997.

Notes From The Chinese Room, May 1997

Instantiation And Its Wacky Neighbors

"The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms - particularly in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform, c, o, n, t, i, n, u, o, u, s, and c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d."
------Marshall McLuhan, 1967

LANGLEY> OUTPUT FILE 0001: Why What You Were Told Cannot Be True


LANGLEY> DISCREPANCY 1: The Reverend, not 4 weeks earlier, murdered
someone allegedly his childe allegedly because that childe was a member
of the Sabbat.  This is not consistent with his story of being a Sabbat
member until "recently".  Further, even had the so-called "cleansing
process" taken place before his murder of the childe, it seems unlikely
that any person of even vaguely religious convictions with any backbone
whatsoever would choose to commit that murder rather than use the same
"cleansing process" on the childe.  CONCLUSION: The Reverend is lying
about at least two things: his motivations and at least one of the
facts.

LANGLEY> DISCREPANCY 2: The Prince stated that this performance [Langley's own word for it: this characterization appeared nowhere in the input nodes and was apparently pulled from the hidden node subcognitive dictionary sequence. -- TAC] was meant to "send a message" regarding law and order, to some audience which was never directly specified. There are two conceivable audiences which may in fact overlap: those physically present and the Sabbat. However, the nature of the performance was such that no message of any semantic import could be sent to either group. The physically present audience was inundated with the trappings of childishness and immaturity: there is therefore no reason to believe that the Prince cared in the least what people who were actually present thought of the performance. Further, those not present could only receive the interpretations of those who were present, so there is no evidence to suggest the Prince cared in the least what they thought either, a conclusion contradictory to his earlier statement that he was attempting to "send a message". There is another possibility: that the performance itself was a signal to conspirators physically present or present by proxy, and therefore had solely syntactic content. This possibility is partly supported by the clearly inadequate nature of the Prince's preparation to deal with eventualities that he must have known would arise. CONCLUSION: The Prince either lied about his motivations in setting up the performance, is signalling co-conspirators for reasons unknown, is incompetent, is insane, wishes us to believe he is incompetent, or wishes us to believe he is insane.

Comments by Dr. Craydon:

LANGLEY is a four-level feed-forward connectionist architecture expert system with multiple subcognitive interpretative structures, designed to simulate the behaviour of a compulsive conspiracy theorist. This particular run of LANGLEY points out its strengths and weaknesses quite clearly. As you can see, LANGLEY is quite adept at determining discrepancies in a given set of input vectors (interpreted as facts about the world). However, I omitted, for brevity, LANGLEY's conclusions, which ranged from a primary conclusion that the Reverend is directly or indirectly controlled by the Tremere for reasons unknown to an ancillary conclusion that both the Reverend and all of the Tremere described in the input vectors are actually full members of the Sabbat. These conclusions, while interesting, do not come close to exhausting the possibilities, and certainly do not have the semantic value of the discrepancies described by LANGLEY's first few output files. (There were five more major discrepancies discovered, and seventeen minor ones.) To sum up, LANGLEY is capable of finding discrepancies in situations, but unlike some human conspiracy theorists, is unable to consistently congeal those discrepancies into an adequate account of events. LANGLEY v.4.8 will be available in three weeks.

			Dr. T. Craydon

"My car and my adding machine understand nothing. They are not in that line of business." -----John R. Searle

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Jason Corley -- corleyj@chronic.lpl.arizona.edu