Nice posting on the Empyre list from Eugene Thacker (23 October 2007)

Ontology, what ontology?:

[1]

The question of being thus aims at an a priori condition of the possibility not only of the sciences which investigate beings of such and such a type - and are thereby already involved in an understanding of being; but it aims also at the condition of the possibility of the ontologies which precede the ontic sciences and found them. All ontology, no matter how rich and tightly knit a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains fundamentally blind and perverts its innermost intent if it has not previously clarified the meaning of being sufficiently and grasped this clarification as its fundamental task.

- Heidegger, Being and Time

[2]

We commit ourselves to an ontology containing number when we say there are prime numbers larger than a million; we commit ourselves to an ontology containing centaurs when we say there are centaurs; and we commit ourselves to an ontology containing Pegasus when we say Pegasus is. But we do not commit ourselves to an ontology containing Pegasus or the author of ‘Waverly’ or the round square cupola on Berkeley College when we say that Pegasus or the author of ‘Waverly’ or the cupola in question is *not*. We need no longer labor under the delusion that the meaningfulness of a statement containing a singular term presupposes an entity named by the term. A singular term need not name to be significant…To be assumed as an entity is, purely and simply, to be reckoned as the value of a variable.

- Quine, On What There Is

[3]

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

- Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

Daniel Dennett on memes and our mediated realities, in his recent book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon:

…it seems best to include all these replicators [computer virii and online scams/social engineering] under the rubric of memes, noting that some of them make only indirect use of human vectors, and hence are only indirectly elements of human culture. We are beginning to see this porous boundary crossed in the other direction as well: it used to be true that the differential replication of such classic memes as songs, poems and recipes depended on their winning the competition for residence in human brains, but now that a multitude of search engines on the Web have interposed themselves between authors and their (human) audiences, competing with one another for reputation as high-quality sources of cultural items, significant fitness differences between memes can accumulate independently of any human appreciation or cognizance at all. The day may soon come when a cleverly turned phrase in a book gets indexed by many search engines, and thereupon enters the language as a new cliché, without anybody human having read the book.

[My emphasis]

Indeed. And more generally, the many weirdnesses of words, halt-footed bearers of heavy memes that they are, when processed through dumb tech. From some of our recent work, it’s become very clear that issues around search engines and memes will loom large into our near future — one of the challenges for anyone trying to track the spread and evolution of (human-generated) memes online is the attempt to identify the current lexical correlates of a particular meme, and to understand how and when that lexical structure changes over time as the meme itself mutates. It’s a hard problem — something like building a parse tree for a Gerald Manley Hopkins poem, maybe (recommended reading: Lexical Ambiguity in Poetry). Only over time. Harder.

And for those of us in the communications business — in the absence of real automated semantic analysis — there’s the challenge of trying to instrument our messages with trackable terms or phrases which survive intact as the messages themselves spread and mutate in the (human and digital) wilds.

Early days. Having just read both Dennett and Hamlet’s Mill on holiday, it’s pretty clear that for true memetic (not simply lexical) invariance over time, we need to engineer myth. Then build search engines which interrogate mythic structures.

It’s all getting a bit Snow Crash. Whatever. Count me in.