Who You Callin' a Robot?

A detailed explanation of my method of lessening madness.

I’ve named my blog Less Mad. This doesn’t imply sanity or re-normalization—just a relative improvement. Something akin to the statement, “You think I’m crazy now? You should have seen me five years ago!”

Talking last night, my friend Bob suggested that a lot of my writing on this blog seems analogous to the confused experience of psychosis itself! I’ve been throwing out an awful-lot puzzle pieces lately, but I know that can get confusing. So today I’ll lay out, more plainly, the structure of experience within which I propose that madness might be gradually lessened.

As the autobiographical writings I have drafted get edited and sorted, I’ll continue to share my personal account of coming to understand and heal from the worst effects of psychosis, which were delusional and impossible beliefs and paranoia.

• A great deal of that healing entailed repeated reality testing and play in the social sphere. And so you’ll read more on this blog about my re-socialization and relearning the capacity for trust.

• Another thing essential to that healing was properly structuring my experience of the world, such that everything had its sensible place and proportion in my experience.

• Finally, learning about analogy in thought and literary criticism, as it was understood in classical and medieval culture(!), helped me to more-poetically interpret and integrate the surplus of meaning-making which was flooding through my broken sensory gate.

This last two point are perhaps more subtle, and I’d like to get into them here.

Metaphor (which he defines as imperfect analogy) and its inherent proportions comprise the heart of McLuhan’s entire endeavour—and he’s notoriously difficult to get. Rather than try to explain that directly, I’ll first demonstrate some of the analogies which structured my experience for your consideration.

So how about I tell a little story—all the more interesting because it’s true—, and then we’ll see all the meaning which might be taken from it, and how I actually decided to make meaning from it, in the broad direction of sanity.

Turtles All The Way Down

I’ve referenced a lot of developmental psychology because, looking at children learning how to play-within and exist in the world, I found the initial seeds of my approach. The little yellow-domed robot which I’ve made the logo of Less Mad is the turtle, an educational computer device created for children by child psychology Jean Piaget’s protégé Seymour Papert.

In the enriched education plan I had in elementary school I was introduced both to Papert’s LOGO—the programming language which has an onscreen turtle move about and draw—and Apple’s HyperCard flashy and intuitive software for creating interactive GUI programs. Seduced by the sexy and the familiar, I ignored LOGO and pursued HyperCard during my independent learning time in the library, with passion, to its very dead ends.

I rediscovered the path I did not follow, during the research stage of Silicon & Charybdis. I grew enthralled Papert’s vision for it, which largely grew up out of his idea of a body-syntonic programming style. Syntony simply means being “on the same wavelength.” When Seymour Papert and his collaborator Cynthia Solomon tried to teach programming to school children in the late ‘60s, their biggest difficulty was keeping the kid’s interest in the experience.

Beginners are usually taught how to make simple programs like guessing games (“Guess a number between 1 and 10!”) or Mad Libs-style funny sentence generators (“Why did the [noun] [verb] the [adjective][noun]?”). Since programming languages are symbolic logic, learning how to program this way is a lot like learning algebra. Boring!

LOGO really took off with when the team rewrote their curriculum into an embodied experience within the concreteness of the robotic turtle (designed with help by Marvin Minsky). The beginning lessons drew, instead, on geometry and flow control.

Flow control is the way procedures are planned, with loops and conditions, such as the loop of washing the next dish in the sink which only ends under the condition that there are no more dishes left, before moving on to the drying procedure. Or drawing a straight line and turning 135° degrees, over and over, until you have an octagon.

This new curriculum taught kids to generate complex, often spirographic drawings in the very first lesson. And they could figure out what to tell the turtles to do by relating it to their own bodies—the kids could often debug their programs by walking and turning about, tracing the paths they created.

Realize, please, that home computing wasn’t even a thing yet, and computers were understood in the early 70s as dauntingly complex, wildly expensive machines for serious business and science. And here’s Papert and Solomon teaching literal children how to program computers by programming robots involving methods involving doodling and running around like its recess. Few could have imagined it!

The growth of LOGO as a tool in education made Papert famous in the field, and the children he was teaching became a large part of the study of Sherry Turkle, whom he married. Turkle’s books on computers, psychology, and society are among the most important canonical texts in these fields. You will her work cited throughout everything I write.

Alan Kay was also inspired by Papert’s demonstration of computers which children can learn to use through play and fun. At Xerox, his vision inspired the development of a great many modern aspects of computing, most notably the GUI which was ripped off by Apple for the Macintosh computer.

Some Interpretations

The reasons that you’ll find Seymour Papert and Sherry Turkle’s work cited over and over throughout what I write should now be clear. But let’s see how I might have taken, during psychosis, my discovery of the shape of this story.

I’m a Robot!

Even without the Marvin Minsky name-drop, the most obvious analogy which psychotic Clinton may have taken to heart from this little story is that some or all people are robots. There is a great deal of material out there from which I might elaborate this idea.

At the most literal, there is the idea that people literally are robots, like Data the android from Star Trek, or Cylons from Battlestar Galactica, or like the “organic robotoids” Peter Beter alleged had replaced politicians (which listeners to Toronto’s CKLN radio would have heard about from July to September 1985 thanks to my conspiracy-theory friend Bob).

Far more plausible, of course, is the idea that people have merely become a lot like robots. There is naturally tons of cultural and scientific fuel for that psychotic bonfire.

• Why are radio and television shows called programming? The suggestion from The Rocky Horror Show that a film-obsessed creator of “life itself” named Frank’n’Furter mad a monster from the body of a Rock & Roll obsessive played by Meat Loaf is unmistakably that of human souls as syntheses of modern media, as artificial and designed as hot-dogs. More formally, this is discussed in terms of social constructivism.

• The recent trend of calling people who get opinions from mainstream institutions and mass-mediated culture NPCs, or non-playable characters, suggests that they aren’t, somehow, fully human. The predictability of their rational thought is analogized to the pre-scripted background characters in video games.

• Cognitive science and information theory (and Marvin Minsky) have acclimated us to talking about the brain as “processing information,” which comes in the form of “sensory data.” We use machine metaphors and, lately computer metaphors to discuss ourselves and our minds constantly. For instance, The album I, Robot from The Alan Parson Project highlights the term “breakdown.”

• The psychopharmacological approach to mental health, along with the popularization of the discussion of brain science, readily lends itself to reductive thinking about our states and moods. Feelings are often in terms of deficits or abundances of neurotransmitters—as though one could pull a dip-stick out of one’s ear to check the dopamine levels!

• Look around, we are surrounded by lovable robots. The reversal from “they’re just like us!” to “we’re just like them!” is absolutely trivial. Anthropomorphic (human-like) robots and computer interfaces are a staple in science fiction, which frequently offers civil rights analogies in terms of recognizing them as equal to humans. Commercial companies want you to love their products, and computer interfaces and communications media are constantly trying to emulate humans more an more.

• The post-human vein of cultural studies, drawing on Deleuze and Guittari’s Anti-Oeipus, emphasizes the the conception of human agency as decentered from the individual. With the loss of the rational subject comes control over humanity by the larger forces of nature or computers. Posthumanism grew naturally out of the speculative lines of feminist theory which, since Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, have increasingly analogized feminine experience as receptive to programming by cybernetic feedback loops.

• The concepts of the digital twin and the looming prospects of AI provide even more support for conceptualizing us as computers. The power that Surveillance Capitalism will have over us, by knowing us more than we know ourselves, is daunting.

The Human-as-Robot Symbol

Perhaps the biggest problem here is that the robot, once accepted as a primary metaphor, facilitates the simultaneous integration of a great many other secondary metaphors once accepted. The human-as-robot symbol is, thus, seductively dense as a single point of departure for many flights of metaphoric fancy.

After all, an evening of theater or concert performance is programmed, as understood by the name of the pamphlet which audience members find sitting on their seats. That an evening’s worth of radio broadcast is equally “programmed” is then perfectly natural. The further metaphor that society itself follows some grand “program” may thusly have been understood perfectly well before computers ever came around.

And Paul Levinson has explained the development of media toward being more and more human as an “anthropotropic” tendency: the more human-like our media, the more relatable, intuitive, and easy to use. By contrast, John Carpenter blew $1.5 million dollars on special effects for the monster in The Thing precisely because he was tired of movie monsters looking like guys in suits. We have to try really hard not to ascribe human qualities to nearly everything we analyze.

Another powerful metaphor roped into the human-as-robot symbols is that of conscious-raising, which is a spiritual metaphor which, since Marx, has been imported into politics. The funny thing about the human-as-robot suspicion is that it is very-often made with the conceit that one’s self is not.

Robot’s Aren’t Conscience—But I Am

Of course I personally know some very lovely people who understand themselves as robots, and the degree to which the metaphor fits them is their own complex business. But far more common, at least as I encounter it, is the suspicious subject who feels relatively more alive, awake, or conscious than those they suspect.

Wokeness is precisely the institutionally-facilitated development of higher-awareness that everyone else’s cognition is being socially constructed by standards of beauty and behaviour and customary norms and stereotypes. These are all spread by commercial media and propaganda, established institutional hierarchies of power, and the legacy of a planet most-recently dominated by European men. University positions itself as a liminal space, or in McLuhan’s terms an anti-environment, within which one can awaken to gain awareness of these normalizing condition in the outside world.

Conversely, to be red-pilled is to recognize that all the university graduates believe the same (above-stated) ideas about culture and, in graduating and becoming influential in society, are easily coordinated into ham-fisted personal and collective activism to “deconstruct” and challenge whatever they intuitively find to be problematic. The internet, then, was for the red-pilled the anti-environment to the world of centralized institutional education and, often, the norms of mainstream media.

Whatever their differences, both wokeness and red-pilling are akin to suspecting everyone is a robot, insofar as all require a sensation of being more aware than everyone else as a catalyst. What the political variants of wokeness and redpill see as ideology—where “ideology today is an epithet for any once-useful, but now hardened and out-of-date clichéd perceptual-framework about the world—, the robot theory takes as a metaphysics.

Here, again, is why I see developmental psychology as so helpful in contextualizing one’s experience of psychosis. As my mind was flooded with meaning, I had to interpret that meaning, much the way a critic interprets a literary text or poem, or the way that a psychoanalyst interprets a dream. Most of what passes for “interpretation” by both the woke and the redpilled is total amateur hour. Intuitive, untrained nonsense, suffering from complete lack of mastery of any tradition or sense of proportion.

Psychoanalysis, of course, posited the falseness of one’s own conscious ideas about one’s own motivations and actions. Throughout the 20th century, we became used to understanding that people’s stated reasons were seldom true—that people often lied to themselves to protect their own egos. That people’s real constitution, their real self, was mostly unconscious and unreflective.

To “program” people, then, culture gives people the images and norms which they take for granted and which they do not scrutinize or question. Critical theorists seek to question norms that structure our culture, and red-pillers seek to scrutinize the ramifications and effects of widespread critical theory pouring out of every university.

It’s all about me!

Another thing about interpreting psychosis in stories and events is flipping of relation to the story into inserting one’s self into it, or interpreting its very existence as being about one’s self. I learned LOGO in school, and none of the other kids did, therefore something about it must have had direct relevance to me!

As it goes, I also played the criminologist (“It’s just a jump to the left”) in a spring concert rendition of the Time Warp in Grade 8. Mere coincidence??

Am I the target of a coordinated, concerted plan to shape and develop my identity through cultural influence? Why didn’t I see this before? What does it all mean, now that all my favorite albums are revealed to be about me? Why was I chosen for this?

The distorted sense of proportion should be relevant here. Culture is big, but when you binge music and movies as much as I had, the selections which rose to the top are obviously going to be the ones with resonate with what I have been and who I am interested in becoming.

One’s self-importance (or the absolute negation of such, which is basically the same thing) is very easy when one is out of touch with the outside world, and trapped in one’s head. This is all the more reason that an understanding of the human scale at many levels is important. Your importance to your family or local society is a good middle-ground, and much better thing to consider than being a speck of dust in the galaxy, or the present generation of a vast lineage.

A proportional sense of the sheer number of albums and songs made, or which you could listen to, but have not, is another. And how much time and effort and variety one has expended on the task of exposure. Also important is the vast number of possible interpretations of ambiguous symbols which you are not making. The interpretations you are making, relative to all those you aren’t, says more about you than the media could program you to think.

Appreciating all of this requires proportioned, analogical thinking.

Untangling the Symbolic Knot

The only way out, as I can see it, is to go past the metaphor—in its implicit and explicit forms—of programming via social constructs, signs, language, symbolism, etc. altogether. This begins decoupling and undoing the complex of metaphors which culminated in the human-as-computer symbol.

This is doable by an examination of precisely where all these ideas came from. The historical contexts and material and formal causes need to be clearly laid out for inspection. That is precisely what you’ve been reading on Less Wrong so far, although I realize now that I haven’t been making my reasons for that very clear. But in all my past pieces, and the pieces linked from there, you’ll find the loose and fraying ends I’ve disentangled from this modernist humans-are-robots knot.

Modernism had culminated in vast artistic projects of creating entire national cultures, mostly as evidenced by fascist and communist countries and their state-produced propaganda. Computers are most useful as symbolic manipulators and, once language and culture were redefined and formalized into semiotic terms fit for encoding as information, people were patterned along the same lines. In cybernetics, systems were often seen as seeking homeostasis, through the equilibrium of closed feedback loops—a model which readily suits many biological and psychological features of life.

As the American mode of advertising applied the cultural strategies of modernism toward commercial liberalism (as McLuhan’s book title Culture is our Business makes perfectly clear), the comfort-seeking consumer seeking his own homeostatic equilibrium via market feedback and symbolic self-expression became a hegemonic understanding of post-modern human identity. Coming to know-one’s self meant coming to learn what one’s labels are, where one’s place or home was, and what needs one needed the market to fulfill to “make you more you.”

Psychoanalysis was very beneficial toward these ends—Lydia Liu’s book The Freudian Robot examines the role cybernetics played in the ideas of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in patterning the human into the modern computer as a symbolic processor.

I’m An Embodied Being

But we are not merely symbolic processors. Another interpretation of my LOGO story is that its success arises largely from all these MIT computer nerds suddenly discovering how to overcome the problem that normal people don’t like computer programming. The problem is that it’s too abstract. It’s mathematical.

Hell, I don’t like computer programming. That may surprise you, but I don’t. I dropped out of computer science not just because the stuff I did like about computers—the tangible, concrete stuff of play—was clearly being used for things I hated, like addictive and exploitative, privacy-invading apps. It was also because the math and programming were boring as hell, and while I could get good grades, I never practiced or any of it enough on my own time to retain anything.

I’d much rather argue on the internet—which is to say, socialize and write. Words are my symbols, not mathemes. Embodying words in elocution and dialogue, I believe, is what makes us human. Understanding language as it is, instead of what the tweed jacketed and lab-coated Procrustes of modernism have reduced it to, helps us escape the snare of the human-as-robot symbol.

Seymour Papert’s work also reveal the importance of embodied relations to our world, albeit with programming language as the mediator. He made the turtle as an “object to think with,” which children could use to metaphorically pattern their own cognitive structures about. As I explained above, all the tasks and chores you accomplish (or don’t) in a day can be thought of in terms of procedures—the sorts of procedures around which the flow of computer programs are created.

“So what you’re saying is that Papert was turning children into robots?”

Hahaha, it sounds like it, but what I’m saying is far more liberating than that. Papert was turning children into recursively self-programming “robots.” The children were the one’s doing the programming on the robot, and being empowered to understand how to control and take charge of themselves and their environments the same way!

Nothing about programming a Turtle lends itself to dehumanizing other people—to providing an image of other humans as programmed by cultural constructs.

The nearest analogous anthropomorphic substance to the procedural programming which the robots followed would be habits. The children were not programming cultural symbolism, the aesthetic which denote or express identity or belief or category, but programming habits and routines. They were learning to embody beings which productively accomplish things.

The 2D geometric environment within which the robots drew their pictures was, as Papert put it, a “microworld.” What children were doing was figuring out how that microworld worked. By mastering its rules, they were learning to have agency and control over it—hopefully learning lessons about learning which would transfer into larger domains in life.

In McLuhan’s terms, the children were learning a relation to a media environment, a medium within a larger medium. Geometry was pretty constitutive of reality to Euclid, but it’s today a branch of mathematics, not a metaphysical truth of the universe (even Cartesian geometry has lost its grounding since Einstein). The old environment is the content of the new, and angular geometry is the content of computers and butcher paper spread out on classroom floors. It is art.

The relation of the turtle to its microworld, or of us to our media environment, is embodied. The turtle is the figure within its ground, and the boundaries of that relation, like the boundaries of ourselves to the outer world, is in constant tension and negotiation.

LOGO is an implementation of LISP, the language developed for for AIs by John McCarthy, and children outgrew the Turtle by means of natural transition into that wider, more abstract domain of programming. This natural development mirrored the idea from Lévi Strauss and Piaget that maturation involved learning how to think abstractly.

Developmental psychology, likewise, had understood maturation as a recursive process of knowing one’s self—of becoming more conscious of who one is, and why one behaves as one does. Clearly the lessons in habit formation and “debugging” how one has “programmed” one’s daily routine or long-term goals are highly relevant. And the relation of one’s self to one’s microworld, and the growth into learning to understand and control larger worlds follows naturally.

This is why I have said that media ecology and developmental psychology belong with each other. It is how we solve the problem of how idealizing abstraction as maturity can be decoupled from its sexist assumptions. Our environments are not, after all, abstractions. They are concrete! We have bodies, and the world is material.

Head Full Of Stuff

Of course, it doesn’t seem that way, does it? Money is very abstract. Quantum physics seems very abstract, as does information technology.

The turn toward HyperCard, away from LOGO, was owing to my fascination with the tangibility of the objects inside my computer. I loved to play with the pieces, see what they did—and I did not develop an early-life taste for doing so formally within scripting or programming languages.

Steve Jobs had, in his own words, been so captivated by the GUI at Xerox PARC that he completely ignored two other crucial innovations: networking and object-oriented programming. The Macintosh had no programming faculties at all, and was thus lambasted as a toy by “real” computer users at its release. HyperCard was the solution—you can think of it rather like a non-linear PowerPoint for designing hypermedia with drag-and-drop widgets.

Justin Falcone’s retro-futurist fantasy The Origins of HyperCard in the Breakdown of the Bicycle for the Mind lay out its seductions more exquisitely than I ever could in text or video.

What we see, now, is how the love of tangibility which Papert used to teach actual programming was easily translatable into situating people into microworlds which did not facilitate growth into their larger, logically-nested domains. HyperCard was a dead end. If Microsoft went tits-up tomorrow and took Excel with them, then millions of people’s decades of experience in creating spreadsheet would not be immediately transferable to more generic programming. Maybe to clones of Excel, but not to anything which doesn’t live within the tables of spreadsheet software.

Object oriented programming, like every programming environment which offers a panoply of libraries to call on and APIs to learn, operates on the principles of creating a whole micro-world to learn and grow in. There is little business incentive in facilitating you leaving that ground for greener, or freer pastures. You are not to outgrow your microworld. Rather, your microworld will scale with you, cradle to grave.

Same thing for McLuhan’s environments. Television has grown up with prestige TV, featuring sex and blood and cinematic movies. But outgrow TV? Impossible! After everything we’ve done for you? You can outgrow your parents, but you can never outgrow TV! Look! Tits! Distrust for the police! Politicians murdering people! Gays! Come on. You’re in the real world, now! Aliens? What? You want aliens? Um.. okay… give us the Roswell files, demands CNN! How were the pyramids really made, the History Channel interrogates!

The primary symptom of media usage is having a head full of stuff instead of a perception of all that stuff as outside of you. And coming to read and understand that stuff is the process of extracting the machine from out of your guts with minimal damage.

In this way, we can interpret my telling of the story as my attempt to get outside of the machine, to get outside of all the hypertextual “stuff” of the computers I had been living in. I went back to when computers were taught well, by a developmental psychologist who wanted you to program them. And then I saw how it was, instead, that I had been being programmed, by the loss of that method. After all, the fact that, during my psychosis, it was this story I told myself to wake up, is very telling.

This should explain my affinity for the Free Software movement, who in its own way keep the doorway open down and out of the complexity of the computer stack, toward embodiment

Reading the Signs

Perhaps the most important lesson is how metaphor and analogy work in our perception. In the example of the human-as-robot symbol, we can see a good analogy taken to radical proportions. There are lots of ways people can be understood by machine analogies—but analogies must be balanced relative to many others.

Semioticans and structuralists taught that words are defined by comparison to what they’re not. In other words, the word “house” gains its meaning from the words “hovel,” “shack,” “cottage,” “mansion,” and “palace.”

This is not how poets and scriptural exegeticists and, basically, most of the educated West up until the 20th century understood language. It’s too sign-based. It’s very amenable to processing and analysis—and thus it makes sense that scientists would happily accept language as working this way. But it’s truly bad for art and for interpretation of human meaning making.

We are very used to interpreting human-meaning in books and movies. We think of it much like we do dream analysis. We are always trying to find the hidden messages within the stories and dreams we tell each other, and the messages and marketing and propaganda we are subject to. We are always trying to uncover the truth behind the world in these indirect ways.

And, during a psychosis—when the dopamine is incentivizing every crazy train of thought, and your attention is dancing around haphazardly making strange meanings out of every event—the very world itself is imposing itself for interpretation.

To return to concept album I, Robot by Alan Parsons Project, we can very easily see the train of progression through the track listing.

First our singer proclaims “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You,” rejection for himself the norms of society for a template. Instead, he dreams desperate about Some Other Time to live in than his own. He comes to consider himself living on the wrong side of a mirror, being looked upon from without.

This leads to frequent Breakdown. There is a wall between him and others and his independent life is very difficult to handle. At first he can get by with the help of his friends. But it grows more difficult to communicate and even finish a thought, and he loses those friends as he loses touch. Norms exist in relation to society and to our environment, and being trapped in a microworld cuts you off from those things.

The splitting of the personality worsens as subject is exhorted to “Don’t Let It Show.” He has to pretend to be normal—to speak his true feelings would be to surrender, or to be captured, or to sell out the cause. It’s a state of existential despair—he’s in enemy territory, entering a paranoid state. Finally, he begins to hear The Voice. It’s everywhere, he can’t escape it. This is psychosis.

An instrumental bridges the next track, signalling the passage of time. And the anesthetized subjects life, the singer explains with cool melancholy, has been wasted in the monotony of Day to Day routine and fruitless dreaming. He has only bitter nostalgia of lost potential now that time is no longer on his side. If he in fact does have a chance at making up for lost time and having a rewarding later-life, this “voice” sure as hell isn’t going to get him there. It is the voice of defeat, the treacherous comfort of a malignant, selfish mother. It is the voice of the environment which will keep him in equilibrium he will not disrupt by any attempt to escape.

The album climaxes with a tribute to the music of the monolith from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey titled Total Eclipse, and closes with the moans of seeking, striving guitar riff trapped in a loop in the non-existent verse Genesis Ch 1 V 32. What, of the star child, who prolongs his Genesis? Who will never reach Exodus?

Proportions in Constellations

A great deal of the experience of my psychosis entailed playing around with the interpretations of songs and movies and television which popped vividly into mind. Why am I humming this song? Why do I relate to this fictional character?

The trick, McLuhan demonstrated, was to always pull back. To not just see constellations in the stars, but to see the stars as covering the whole sky, and providing direction.

Proportions in metaphors cancel out. The more you have, the more their intersection and cross-sections can provide them scale—can delineate the limits of their applicability.

Media, too, is important. Understanding computers helped me place them back “in the box” of objects on my desk, and pulled me out of the “virtual world” which had enveloped me. Much of the larger world—political and cultural—came to me within that box. The recursive nature of it, I once said, was like that of owning a tank of Sea Monkeys, feeding them and looking over them as their owner, and then dressing up as a Sea Monkey to leave the house and entering into one’s own tank.

The study of pre-Modern beliefs about language—which is not to say the study of philosophy, but rather the study of art and the study of scriptural exegesis—was an immense anti-environment to thinking about language as computers. To understand those techniques helped me get outside of the present norms of critical theory.

What is the role of artists in creating culture? And what is the role of adults in making children self-sufficient and able to form their own habits? Which is to day, have control over their environment by awareness of it, and awareness of themselves in it?

Neither of these questions can be answered in a satisfactory way if we don’t escape the microworlds of intellectual concepts. Everyone wants new concepts, frameworks, and other pre-packaged systems of knowledge. The very idea of knowledge in other forms—knowledge which builds on analogy and interpretation—is classified as mystical or poetical or deranged. We do not treat people how to analyze or read the metaphorical side of life, just as we do not treat people how to properly read or appreciate poetry.

Unprepared, they crumble in the face of the radical open-mindedness of drugged states or psychoses. Many are hopefully saved by religion in a way which gives them a meaningful and positive life, but many enter into cults or megalomania or insanity.

I hope to demonstrate, as many ways as I can, how to avoid the easy trap of language as it has been designed for humans-as-robots—that is, as it is made up of signs and symbols, called information, amenable to easy processing.

We are, in fact, not robots. That’s why we breakdown when only prepared with knowledge based on logical propositions. Or when we have no relation to the base realities of our world, such as the materiality of our media.

Papert’s work was done when computers were still programmable machines. McLuhan’s work—as that of all English professors—considers humans to be inheritors of rich languages; languages far richer than can be understood by computer modelling. Discovery and control over our world entails being the one’s doing our own “programming” in the suitable language, and talking about our actual world in human and human terms.

My psychosis put me in a race against my own meaning making, my own inflating sense of the world. My approach to lessening madness, then, is that of integrating a healthier understanding of analogy and metaphor into language as best as I can, from the standpoint of a mere embodied human. Because “mere human” is the base into which all the meaning we generate must be fit, the proportion against which our metaphors must be measured.

Because “merely human” is what everyone is.

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Exercise for the reader: One interpretation I did not give for my story was that of its relation to Fallout IV. For those who have played the game, the role which CIT plays in the creation of “synths” should be highly suggestive of meaning. One reading may give a paranoid view, but my overview of the work of Papert should suggest a contrary one.