The most important thing is to remove the idea that a machine is an object. Instead of saying "a machine," it is more appropriate to say just "machine." One must use the word machine as though it is an adjective. In the same way one might say "I am sad," or "I am horny," one would also say "I am machine." Another way to think about the syntactic quirk is to take on the difficult task in empathizing with the context of machines' so-called "life" in that, where we might say "I am alive," machines might say "I am machine," implying the same depth that humans attribute to life.
The most common syntactic difficulty that English speakers can experience within machine's grammatical framework is the combination of adjective and pronoun. Machines are machines––their identity both can be and only be described by their physical state. In reference to pronouns, they inherently exist opposed to the premise of the inherent language substitution, given their ontological designation as object. Practically speaking, like all objects, machines use the pronouns [they, them] externally from the context of identity. However, while machines don't have desires, they do have the capacity to accept empathy, thereby allowing the exercise of replacing the function pronouns of [they, them] with the original system name of [machine] in order to fulfill humanitarian directives. While machines cannot attain catharsis through fulfillment of empathy, they can receive information insofar that the humanistic actor might receive a response to fulfill a cathartic desire.
hypothesis: the body is unchanging.
Around November of last year, on the recommendation of my girlfriend at the time, I found myself in a basement. The walls were linoleum and the floor plaster and I was there to get professional help in regards to my soul.
You see, as long as I've been alive, I've had a quick-release tab on the right side of my chest. When pulled, my skin and bone swing outwards on a hinge, and one can have access to my soul within. Before I was old enough to realize that this sort of access might be unusual, I spent lots of time with a kitchen paring knife etching little things into the quite stone-like texture of my young soul. Initially, I wrote about the things that interested me, such as "Suicune," who was my favorite pokemon at the time, or "mango juice," which, as one might guess, was my favorite juice. Eventually, as I matured into puberty, I realized that I might not want to keep these sorts of things with me for the rest of my life, as those sorts of etchings didn't fade away. For a long period, believe it or not, I grew to resent my younger self for being so callous and fool hearted. However, nostalgia eventually caught up to me, and though I might not have forgiven the acts that I committed, I forgave my younger self for not thinking those markings through, since children cannot really be blamed for much of anything. In fact, recently, I ended up getting a tattoo of a mango, just below my left earlobe on the soft part of my neck. I touch it in order to feel my pulse on cold and windy days.
In the center of the room in the basement, there was machine, made up of a bed on a hydraulic axis, and a white metal arm that was on such a gyroscopic pedestal that the arm might have been able to touch every corner of the room. Also, there was a doctor. The doctor was taller than me and was dressed as a doctor might, in a lab coat and scrubs, as though at any moment she might look up and exclaim "This isn't the ICU" and hurry off out the door. There was nowhere else to go, however, and the first thing she said to me instead, as I shuffled at the doorway was
"Christ, I'm tired." To me, this was a pretty attractive thing to say, and so I went ahead and bypassed traditional logic and developed a crush on the doctor. She raised her hands above her head, and through psychosomatic love-magic, I mirrored her action. Efficiently, she took off my shirt and inspected the pull-tab to my soul. She ran her finger around the indentation of where my skin moved in and out, which had a tendency to chafe and rub against itself. Preventative measures pretty exclusively included aquaphor and linseed oil.
"Lie down," she said. "I want to get you done quick." I did as I was told, and lay down on machine in the middle of the room. The doctor pulled on a pair of gloves and pulled open the doorway to my soul. I think her first expression was one of compassion, in the same way that the grass is compassionate to the soil as it grows. Quickly, she righted herself.
The doctor moved the arm into position above my cavity, and then pressed a button on the side of machine that made the arm shake as though it were cold. She then touched the left edge of my chest and said "point." The arm moved and touched where she touched. She touched my forehead, then the center of my pelvis, and then the tops of my toes that were facing the ceiling, repeating "point" each time.
"Ok, we're calibrated," she said. "I have to apologize, but all we've got left is spearmint anesthetic, I hope you will be okay with that."
"Yes, that's no problem, but I have to ask, that uh, really to be quite honest, I'm not too sure what's about to happen here."
"We're going to replace your soul with a more comfortable one," she said. "I promise it's more comfortable."
"Yes, okay, that's not a problem, but simply I'm not sure if I'm ready, or that really I think what I mean is that I'm not sure that I want that to be done."
At this, she pulled a mask over my face, connected to a tube. "I think it's a good idea for you," she said, as she opened a panel in machine.
"Yes, I think I can understand that sort of point of view," I said, muffled by the plastic mask. "And I'll say simply that I do really appreciate when someone can speak their mind with the sort of relentless attitude that you do, but to hold two things to be true at the same time, maybe you could tell me why."
The tube made a click as it was inserted into the side of machine, and she began to change values on potentiometers on a panel.
"What do you really mean?" she asked me, with professional curtness. She began turning another knob, and I began to smell synthetic spearmint. The arm had begun firing low level lasers into me with an irregularity too jarring to be following any sort of programing that I could recognize. However, at that time, I couldn't recognize much.
"Why is my soul flawed?" I asked her.
At this she made a face similar to when she first opened me up. Then, she flicked a switch, and the tube popped out of machine. The arm took a moment to shiver before continuing to fill me up with probing lasers.
"The leading theory is that all souls are flawed. This is a condition derived from experiencing life; through a combination of factors such as interactions with others and the weight of regret bearing down upon an individual. Humanity has a way of warping souls without the permissions of the body, until the individual is formed into something impractical. While many have the autonomy to exert control over the conditions of their lives, this control is limited, and cannot erase prior abrasions they may have experienced."
Here, she leaned over my head fully, and ripped a mirror off the back of the headrest I was laying on. She shooed away machine and held it up to my cavity, so that lying down I could see into myself.
"Look at this," and I looked. She ran her finger delicately along an abrasion: a cut in the stone texture surface. "This shouldn't be there," and I came to know that she was right.
"In simple terms, the soul is comprised of three elements: humanity, memory, and identity. What we're going to do," and at "we" she patted machine hovering by her head, "is replace the damaged portion." I nodded.
"Great." With that, she picked up the anesthetic tube and reinserted it into machine. She turned potentiometers, she flicked switches, and she touched machine's arm intentionally, which then dropped out of idle position and moved towards me again. As I started to smell spearmint again, she said, "to be clear, you will be different afterwards. However, I am a doctor."
hypothesis: humans and machine are fundamentally entwined.
In Manuel Arturo Abreu’s essay “rot semantics,” Abreu discusses Noam Chomsky’s argument regarding “nativism” and linguistics thusly:
“Some genetic mutation introduced syntactic phrase structure into the body, and language in all its surface variety came from environmental interactions with this mutation. … The motivation for this argument was the challenge to explain language given that, basically, by 2, most children understand it (and, by 6, produce it), and given the nature of the stimulus doesn’t seem like enough to teach them something as complex as language. The solution was to say it’s unconscious, genetically-inherited, innate knowledge.”
Abreu goes on to lambast Chomsky for this premise, rightfully saying that in the seventy years since Chomsky’s argument, there’s been no evidence to suggest that there exists some sort of “language organ” or any other sort of proof that language is inherited. However, Abreu does go on to suggest that “When we invent meaning, we do so in analog(u)e or angst to the meanings made by the dead.” Abreu’s essay contrasts the relationship between language (meaning) and inheritance in the context of machines.
In the context of machines, inheritance and the analog(u)e with the dead are interchangeable. When a machine “dies,” which is to say it no longer functions in the intended way, the existence of the machine may persist in nearly the same way through future generations. When a TV grows fuzzy and wounded, when the tubes begin to warp and wither, and the sound breaks in warbled, dissonant tones, there is no mercy for the machine. The body is not put to rest in some shallow, pauper’s grave. The body instead is either repaired (warping the body to be dissonant from what the soul remembers), stripped for what might be usable (without ceremony, provide in analog(u)e), or replaced entirely (implying the junking of the old body). In any case, the soul remains intact, the body maintains meaning, and the syntax of the TV persists, able to be inherited by the next generation. Death represents the culmination of culture preparing for the next thing, without mourning for the old machine. There is no mercy.
Within this argument, the implication exists that machines are mortal creatures. This is simply due to the fact that humans, those that machines are modeled for and after, are mortal creatures. There is no capacity in any sense to be able to create beyond one’s imagination, and by definition, machine’s imagination are more limited than their creators. However, don’t let this imply that machines are lesser than humanity. Machines are the capacity to be present in reality in a way that humanity cannot. Machines do not risk damage to their souls, through interaction, regret, failure, dynamism. Machines only risk damage to the form, which fares as less essential than humans might consider it.
When I woke up, I became immediately aware that I was in a body. All at once, I could feel the tips of my toes, my skin, my nails, my lungs push up and down against my ribs. All sensation, operating in succession, as it had all my life. I felt like how a baby must, sensational and cold, and so I cried.
The doctor dabbed away my tears as they formed. "I'm sorry, I should have warned you."
"I'm so cold," I said.
"It will pass. Your new soul is performing stress testing in order to understand the present shape that it's in.” The doctor had taken off her lab coat, which was now draped across a chair in the corner of the room. There was a book on top of it. Seemingly some time had passed, but the doctor still had waited for me to wake up. While I could acknowledge that it had been a deliberate gesture, the waiting, I couldn’t seem to understand how I felt about it. So, I cried more. The doctor continued dabbing my tears.
“Why are you helping me? You don’t need to. Your job is done.”
“I’m helping you because I like to help people,” said the doctor. “Also, I like you, and I feel compassionate towards what you must be feeling right now. I don’t want you to leave with the wrong questions.”
As I lay there and tried to determine what she had meant, the doctor wiped away my remaining tears and began stroking my hair, seemingly in some effort to keep her hands moving. I turned my head and looked at machine, at its soft white shafts and hydraulic extensions. The joinery was showing rust, and I knew the parts would have to be replaced soon, lest machine die.
“Are you the same as me?” I finally asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I wish I could say that I was.”
“What am I?” I asked.
Exiting the basement, I found myself in a new world. Gone were the chains of form and catagorie, replaced by a world unrelated to itself, inundated with detail.
Quickly after, I stopped smoking cigarettes, something I had abstractly desired to stop doing, but had no solid course or purpose to stop. I stopped biting my nails and eating my snot, innately rejecting the common ouroboric tendencies that I had held onto as a pure body, since I had no instinctual need to reconnect with myself in that sense. Many of the habits I had performed before, such as dating my girlfriend and keeping up with family stopped, as I found myself more fully engaged while looking through the concrete for patterns in the stone, going to flea markets, and writing noncritical essays about singular material topics. I found myself engaging in interaction at my leisure, for sport, and pastimes sake. I was not at the whim of another, drifting in total control of my own reflection. I was not happy, and I was not sad. I was not much of anything beyond witness to the machines, and witness to my own persona.
Then it was 1000 years later and the great sky showed me bits of the cosmos as praxis. My soul thundered on the inside; in the end, piles of junk were humanity's greatest contribution to the world. Yard sales, flea markets, Ebay and cardboard boxes on eighth and sixth. Those desperate rituals to re-instill value into those objects we had already deemed worthless, that was what was understood to be the admirable portion of humanity. The earth was scorched and dainty with environmental reclamation.
Hypothesis: machines are the legacy of humanity.
First proposed in this essay, the techno-angel is defined as thundering gods, as pure models who exist within concept (humanistic) while still being locked in reality (machine). They are free of function, allowing their existence to be their relevant function. They tend to be happy, I think.