Thoughts
- AI Introspections - the scenes of long dialogues between Hiro and the Librarian are great demonstrations of the power of AI dialogue to accelerate conceptual development in the story, challenge the narrative/character viewpoint, and basically throw a spanner in the works for the plot.
Quotes
[260] "...not entirely cognizant of the creative and transformational powers of language? Lagos believed that Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language at least it was in Sumer five thousand years ago."
"A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking"
"Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate with. out misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom Scholem's translation, "The speech of men is connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name.! The practical kabbal-ists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name?"
"The machine language of the world," Hiro says.
"Is this another analogy?"
"Computers speak machine language," Hiro says. "It's written in ones and zeroes —binary code. At the lowest level, all computers are programmed with strings of ones and zeroes. When you program in machine language, you are controlling the computer at its brainstem, the root of its existence. It's the tongue of Eden. But it's very difficult to work in machine language because you go crazy after a while, working at such a minute level. So a whole Babel of computer languages has been created for programmers: FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, LISP, Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk to the computer in one of these languages, and a piece of software called a compiler converts it into machine language. But you never can tell exactly what the compiler is doing. It doesn't always come out the way you want. Like a dusty pane or warped mirror. A really advanced hacker comes to understand the true inner workings of the machine he sees through the language he's working in and glimpses the secret functioning of the binary code becomes a Ba'al Shem of sorts."
"Lagos believed that the legends about the tongue of Eden were exaggerated versions of true events," the Librarian says.
"These legends reflected nostalgia for a time when people spoke Sumerian, a tongue that was superior to anything that came afterward."
"Is Sumerian really that good?"
"Not as far as modern-day linguists can tell," the Librarian says. "As I mentioned, it is largely impossible for us to grasp.
Lagos suspected that words worked differently in those days. If one's native tongue influences the physical structure of the developing brain, then it is fair to say that the Sumerians who spoke a language radically different from anything in existence today had fundamentally different brains from yours. Lagos believed that for this reason, Sumerian was a language ideally suited to the creation and propagation of viruses. That a virus, once released into Sumer, would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone."
"Maybe Enki knew that also," Hiro says. "Maybe the nam-shub of Enki wasn't such a bad thing. Maybe Babel was the best thing that ever happened to us."