Clarke’s novel is one deeply invested in rationalism. As Shulman argues, “Clarke isn’t interested in dark lords and good versus evil per se. For her, the dichotomy is between madness and reason” and the fairy world is connected to madness (mad people can see fairies, for example). According to Faber, “Clarke is ultimately an arch-rationalist… supernatural aid is a lethal trap, the search for mystical enlightenment mimics the degradations of drug addiction, a charmed life is a Kafkaesque nightmare”.
It strikes me that approaches like that would have led us to create flying machines that flap their wings and had mechanical analogues to feathers. I really believe that machine intelligence will follow a path not unlike that which aircraft took – to really understand the underlying physics of uplift and drag and the aerodynamics of flight and then create machines that were optimal in some sense given the available materials.
Is it a valid idea that EVERYTHING is patterns? Are colors represented as patterns in the brain? A different pattern for each frequency of the incoming light rays? And then they’re matched up based on the timing between photon pulses.
We could apply mindfulness wherever we now apply electricity.
The findings suggest that amino acids could have formed when lightning struck pools of gas on the flanks of volcanoes, and are a fitting coda for the late father of prebiotic chemistry.
It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if his song is surpassingly beautiful. Other men may be in raptures at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or a dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it. But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.
— Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell)
