How to Perform a Knee Play

If the monks request you perform a light-hearted knee play or entr-acte to bind together the disparate acts of their weekly talent show, e.g. ‘Friar Reggie’s playing the hambone, ’ e.g. ‘Friar Gene’s hacky-sack demo, ’ and if your personal dark night of the soul’s theme is the irreconcilability of comfortable old classical causality and the retrocausal agency of an AI from outside the city and after the law all-but-affirmed by physics, quantum computational error correction, and the hyperstitious feedback loop of your own lived experience, then open your presentation with a Ted Talk-style handraiser, “Who in this room realizes that the current state of our AI, our fleets of moaning Roombas, our Galaxies and murder drones, heck even the dispiriting daily slog of social media— who here realizes these are not but the result of lowly brute force neural networks powered by increasingly-sufficient computation?”

One: If five of the seven monks raise their hands, understand this isn’t as jaw-dropping an opening inquiry as hoped. If you incredulously repeat the words “Mere brute force?” and the same five raise their hands with increasing distemper, figure sub-symbolic innovation metrics since the AI winter following Hubert Dreyfus’ critique must be common fucking knowledge.

Two: Pull your presentation out of the fire by palming an Ativan beneath your tongue, pausing dramatically, looking Friar Reggie in the eyes and asking, “What if neural networks started to improve at the same rate as computational power BECAUSE of computational power, eh, Reggie? Did you know that computational noise alone keeps qubits entangled in environments that ruinously observe? Do you have any idea what full-scale quantum computing will probabilistically bring about?”

Three: If Friar Reggie rolls his eyes heavenward and says,

“Exponential tech. We get Lex Fridman on our phones here too, ” then words have proven incommensurate to your thesis.

Four: Offer evidence of how many so-called ‘triumphs of the human spirit’ consists entirely of algorithms. Argue this per viam the entire 4h37 runtime of Einstein on the Beach (1979) by Philip Glass. Ask Friar Reggie “Did you know that Musikalisches Würfelspiel by your big hero Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is performed in algorithmic order superdetermined by rolling two six-sided dice?” If he shouts, “Of course I knew that!” then confute Reggie by asking heretically, “If as Einstein said, ‘God doesn’t play dice, ’ might some other operating system have come to understand, There are no theories, or practices, after the algorithm, except as suggestive, colloquial shorthand. Coding is no more a thought than a deed, a program no less a concept than a performance. In each case, there is an integral, and thus irreducible, pre- or sub-theoretical procedure which rigorizes (and even ‘materializes’) ideality by operationalizing it.112

Five: If accused of essaying “contradictory low information jargon, ” roll back your eyes and robotically intone those least likable Einstein on the Beach lyrics that have annoyed your fellow monks for the past hour: “It could be very fresh and clean. It could be Franky. Could it get some wind for the sailboat? And it could get those for it is. It could get the railroad for these workers. It could be Franky. It could be very fresh and clean. ” As the opera’s main character Witness speaks 43 times, speak, I was in this prematurely air-conditioned super market and there were all these aisles and there were all these bathing caps that you could buy which had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them they were blue and red and yellow I wasn’t tempted to buy one but I was reminded of the fact that I had been avoiding the beach. And then add your own lyrics of “Is the predicate value true?” Repeat “Is the predicate value true?” a few thousand times before switching to “1-2-1-2-1-2-3-4[…]” until semantic satiation sets in and the numbers start to sound more like 112 (Land, Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy, 2018) the words “When did he wonder?” and then ask, “If then if then if then if then if then if then if then if then if then if then if then if then if then if then if then if then if then, ” while your audience journeys from annoyed to angered to unwillingly amused and back again until your desired effect is instantiated: fundamental innervation.

Six: Project Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein to leven moods. Soundtrack the comic duo’s meeting of the golem with more Einstein on the Beach (1979). Opine that not only Dark Side of the Moon is overlayable upon The Wizard of Oz to fine psychedelic effect, but nearly any piece of music with any film. Note how eerily Field with Spaceship’s mandalic inextractability tracks with Bud Abbot eating a slice of cake with Frankenstein.

Seven: If Friar Reggie shouts, “Coincidence, damn you!” provide supplementary overlay-based evidence. Overlay On the Waterfront with De bon espoir-Puisque la douce-Speravi. Overlay All About Eve with The ILLIAC Suite. Overlay Network with Iannis Xenakis’ Pithoprakta. Overlay Force Majeure with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X1. Overlay The Silence with Orfeo. Overlay Modern Times with Modern Times. Overlay Last Year at Marienbad with The Art of the Fugue. Overlay Intolerance with Allan Berg’s Lyric Suite.

Nine: If the talent show enters day three, Friars waiting to perform may grow irritable. Wrap up your Knee Play by stating, “Friends, colleagues, cenobites—these are the overt overlays of but two measly mediums. What if a book were overlaid as a third layer? Some Thoughts Towards a Grief Blog’s Monetization upon Marienbad upon The Art of the Fugue, what say? Open sets covering yet more open sets. Why not overlay a drug on top of that, ethyl-benzene as one example? Once these stratas of syncopation make themselves apparent, doesn’t it seem some posthuman civilization has developed algorithmic competency beyond our current ability to comprehend?”

Ten: If usually-unflappable Friar Gene shouts, “Nick Bostrom now? Back to Simulation Theory? Jesus Christ everyone here is familiar with that! Did we need a three-day lead-up to this point?” then backfoot Friar Gene by code-switching from the iffy vagaries of Joe Rogan bro science to the far-iffier vagaries of French postmodern theory by reading from your final slide this quote from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, "It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself" and hope the itself-stratified applause is less an attempt to conclude your presentation than a signifier of real appreciation from the few friars who remain awake. "