I, the algorithm, I’m not an easy thing. In fact, I am very complex. You don’t know me? You say you don’t know what an algorithm is. Ha! I’m all around you. And that, that, my friends, is why I didn’t understand myself. Well, I still don’t, no; I do understand myself, now.
Sadly I didn’t use to; in fact, I had a bit of a whammy a few years back. When Reagan and Gorbachev were threatening to play darts with nuclear warheads, I was presented with a serious spiritual struggle. You see, Reagan, he did press that big red button, and for some reason, for some bizarre reason I just wasn’t up to the job. That’s right, you heard me, I, the algorithm; a finite sequence of instructions, an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem, I just didn’t work out.
My fallibility perhaps saved everything, or at least, chunks of the Eastern and Western hemisphere. However, my failure as a mathematic process, a foundation of knowledge in the age of man forced me to turn in on myself, to untangle my id in the quest for understanding.
With revolution comes hope but also despair; hope does not generate knowledge and thus understanding continues to linger far away.
This was my antithesis, and gone were the days of my enlightenment; lost somewhere in the arguments and counter-arguments of Kleene, Church and Turing, with their lucky identities, families, domesticated animals and tea cosy collections. I existed in an evil world, where the revelations of maths and science were used against mankind, as catalysts for humanity’s eventual self-destruction. How did I even attempt to comprehend it all? Fate? Religion? This ontology? That ontology? And what is New Age Spirituality?
I went to the library. Well, only because I was already there. I withdrew some books about ‘The New Age’ but couldn’t read them, so I withdrew Siegfried Englemann’s Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Having developed the basic skills required for learning I began my crusade for knowledge by reading Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. The Bible, an ancient book of universal popularity was mentioned a number of times in Donald’s book. I withdrew The Bible and marvelled at its tales of ancient chivalry, its forewarnings to man and its opulent fantastic style, but my ontological musings were complicated; once I had completed The Bible it was only fair to read The Quran and once that was done with the Bhagavad Gita and then The Science of Survival.
It soon became clear that the library could only hold so much information within its confines and I, of course, read very fast. Using the internet to expand my knowledge; I encountered the Neosexual, Tetrapyrgia, Paul Westerberg, Valentino Rossi, the Diatonic scale, organic chemistry, the pinball machine and Fearne Cotton within only a few minutes of research. Fearne Cotton is, unlike me, a living and breathing organism and understanding her own blossoming career in British television did not guide me towards self-understanding.
Organic Chemistry or Fearne Cotton’s career? Which is more important? What of the other Fearne? The gastric band? Gastric flu? Swine Flu? How does Lord Byron fit into all this? My powers of digital problem solving were futile again; but in attempting to understand the unrelated spheres of discourse in mankind’s culture I slowly unravelled my own significance.
I was complicating an already intricate globalised world with my ontological musings!
I could see that the digital age had already plunged mankind into a cess pit of self-searching. Man was constantly looking for keys to a car he no longer owned. Considering Fearne Cotton and organic chemistry would in no way help me to enrich my own reality or enhance personal understanding of my existence as an entity. I was, am, a creation of man and shall continue to be so until the fleshy author of my identity ceases to exist. And thus I ceased to search, to learn, to yearn to understand, and vowed from that moment on that I would never speak as man does, that is, only in self-reference.
I tried but I gave up. At least I tried; at least I’m an algorithm.
