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Ludwig Tieck introduced the world to his cursed mountain not as an underground temple of carnality, but as a towering peak in his cautionary tale of siren songs and abandoned humanity.  The Runenberg represents a delusion on a grand scale.  This mystical mountain beckons, but what it offers is illusory.  Tieck’s story shows how rejecting a good, stable life in pursuit of a magical one where the rewards are quick leads to ruin and a lack of perspective.  Romanticism looked back at the world of yesterday while technology marched society into an unknown future.  Yes, there is a sense of trepidation at that future, but the elements of the fantastic the german Romanticists employed captured the wonders of a world promised and the tensions to leave the old world behind.  Tieck’s story illustrates a pattern history bears witness to time and again, and it’s at our doorstep once more.

            The main character, Christian, is unsatisfied with his life and rejects the family trade as a gardener in a castle.  It is a life that his father urgers him to embrace, but Christian wants more.  In a twist on the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, Christian rejects growing food and flowers to become a hunter.  He is successful, eventually, marries, and has a family, but there are clear hints that he isn’t satisfied from the story’s outset.  This dissatisfaction manifests as the stranger who tells Christian about the Runenberg and later the woman in the castle who further entices him.  While they lead up to his marriage, these two mysterious figures leave an impression on him that eventually comes back to uproot him from a settled life.

            Now, from this brief summary it may appear that this story has no bearing on the modern world, but it relates to many aspects of venture capitalism.  The chief amongst such endeavors is the funding of AI and the itinerant data centers.  The protagonist’s name also alludes to the tensions between a new order and the old.  In the case of Tieck’s story, it’s a doubling of both Christianity and paganism as well as the pastoral era and industrialization.  “Der Runenberg” means “the Rune Mountain” in English and represents that supernatural space of the old world where a rustic population holds to the old ways despite the encroachment of urban culture.  The mountain itself is inhospitable to life as only spirits can survive in such an austere environment.  It also serves as a physical representation of death.

            This final point is crucial to understanding Tieck’s story as a cautionary tale applicable to modern technology.  What these disparate images and ideas refer to are a shorthand for the unattainable or unknowable alongside the passionless nature of pure information.  Christian is described as melancholic because he looks for a life he cannot live. The stranger who teaches him how to live in the wilds is a guide to the inner world and subsequently into the mythical underworld.  In such a capacity, the stranger can be envisioned as the id.  What the stranger does is reveal to Christian his true desire: the Runenberg.

            This is where Tieck draws upon a Medieval motif to cement the connection between the mythic and pagan past with the mythic future and the promise of untold wealth.  Both speak to a desire, especially one of wish fulfillment.  The embodiment of which is Venus and the Venusberg, the underworld mountain where she holds court, add a carnality to the pleasures of wishes granted.  Christian catches a glimpse of this Venus figure in the dude through a window, she gives him a magic tablet, but then everything recedes and Christian tumbles into darkness.  The symbolism that while he may have lost the memento of the encounter, he has fallen to the temptation.  When he comes to, he is nowhere near the magical mountain but enters a village where he meets his future wife and takes up the life of a gardener and works hard to win her hand in marriage.  Eventually, Christian goes to visit his father to share in his good fortune and finds him at the foot of the Runenberg.

            Later a stranger shows up to visit and there is a sense that this is the same man Christian met in the mountains years before.  The man leaves after three months entrusting Christian with a substantial amount of gold that will become his if the stranger does not return in one year’s time.  This begins to eat at Christian as the deadline draws near and passes.  He cannot accept his good fortune and sets out to find the man.  Christian, however, never does, encountering an old woman who not only captivates him, but also returns the tablet to him.  He failed to understand and accept his reward for avoiding the trap that now ensnares him.  When he shows the tablet to his family, his father is repulsed by how the gems give off an unearthly glow.  Christian, however, is convinced he can gain more and the mysterious Woodwoman is calling to him.  He heads to an abandoned mineshaft and does not return for years.  Christian has turned his back on civilization.  Years pass, and Christian, a disheveled shadow of himself, returns home to ruin.

            What is the link to modern society?  Christian represents the Silicon Valley tech bro and venture capitalists.  They have a stable life, but believe it is stifling.  Also, the garden is symbolic for slow and steady progress that requires patience but is almost certain to yield results in time.  The skills of the forester Chistian learns from the stranger are about immediate gratification focused on the short-term.  The profitability of steady progress does not interest these types.  They want their rewards now and at any cost—including the lives of anything they choose as their quarry.  In this story, it also represents immaturity and references the Prodigal Son parable.

            The stranger’s teaching Christian reflects humanity’s base instincts while the terrain is synonymous with the primordial world and an unknown where some truths remain hidden.  Here, one may find new ideas, but they are elusive and only surface when accidentally discovered or relentlessly pursued to the exclusion of all else.  The Runenberg, then, encapsulates the unattainable ideas that are ultimately barren without interpretation.  They entice specifically to inspire, but are not meant to be made reality prima facia.  This is why nothing organic grows or lives on the mountain.  The Venus figure, her castle, and the magical tablet are there to seduce Christian, who, like the venture capitalists, give up their humanity to dwell in the Runenberg’s embrace.  Christian cannot stay in a dream, hence his fall and coming to in a new place where his passions fade back into a haze when he encounters the tangible Elisabeth.  Her beauty sets Christian on a path to reintegration into society, and this is crucial to the allegory.

            When Christian begins to long for his parents, the implication is not only wanting to reconnect, but also to show them how successful he as become despite the path the took.  The implication is all the stronger with Christian finding his father at the foot of the Runenberg.  Though not stated, it alludes to his father knowing Christian’s unattanable dreams.  The father represents the immediate past and doubles the mountain’s own connection to the superstitions their society had shed.  As the stranger reappears, the nature of Christian’s desires also returns.  The sack of gold he entrusts Christian with induced the suppressed greed and lust for leisure Christian always desired, the hunting phase of his life as a stand-in for no responsibilities.  His growing paranoia is symbolic of his past deeds and reveal his thirst for sensual, material ease never dissipated.  Thus, it shows his lust ruled every decision—including marrying Elisabeth.

            Christian’s name serves as a reminder that the morals of a tradition are not an impervious defense against greed and lust for carnality without effort.  The overlay of this decorum is not a shield and, as with this character, used to cloak his corruption.  It can be argued that the original taste of treasure and the trappings of wealth he spied before settling down revealed his true self and that veneer of civility was kept only to achieve his ends.  This is on par with how venture capitalism works as the person offering the money only does so out of greed.  There is no real labor contributed to the company being funded, just the planting of a financial seed others will tend, such as the castle garden where the story begins.  Thus the castle at Runenberg stands as a symbol of the luxury and power used to further entice the investor to use the labor of others.

            The stranger also serves as the messenger who also strokes the ego of the erstwhile investor by sharing the information of the opportunity.  The nudity of the Venus figure, the proximity to the Runenberg’s secrets, and the power inherent in the castle are the gloss to the mystical tablet with its gems as proof of concept.  That package is the dream to which the financier is drawn, and it only costs one’s humanity to keep it.  Why, you may wonder.  The truth is we cannot live in dreams, we can only be inspired by lofty goals, but we must work to achieve and appreciate them.  But, in the case of Christian, that path was never appealing and the gradual consumption with profit and a fantasy take their toll.  Christian doesn’t want to resist, but he is not corrupted enough to remain in the barren clutches of the mystical, inhuman realm.

            Whether due to his morals or humanity, Christian loses the magical tablet and the obsession recedes into his subconscious.  The hint that this is not the end of the temptation is how quickly he agrees to work hard to obtain Elisabeth’s hand and how the wealth the stranger entrusts to him leads him to abandon his family.  An argument can be made that the search for the stranger is a pretext to return to the Runenberg.  The paranoia Christian experiences may very well be a result of fearing others will see his mask of civility is slipping, especially through the lens of the stranger as Christian’s psychological shadow.  He cannot deny his true nature and does give in to it.

            What is the tablet and why does his father recoil so terribly to its presence?  It serves as another doubled image of the occult past of paganism and the growing use of electricity.  The late 1700s saw an increased use of electricity in salon performances and experiments throughout Europe.  One of the figures who was present for these experiments was Tieck.  He witnessed them given the social circle he and other romanticists occupied.  His work, like his cohorts, was a response to the cold, detached approach of the Enlightenment.  This leads to the Runenberg serving not only as a mysterious location with otherworldly associations, but also as the coming of the Industrial Age and its concentration on the inorganic to dominate the organic spaces of the natural world.  The eerie glow of the gems in the recovered tablet are an allusion to the Leyden jar and as it was used in demonstrations to make theatrical sparks that would briefly glow.

            The imagery of a barren mountain is another doubled symbol of the Woodwoman in that the enchantment itself is empty.  Christian’s desertion of his life in an all-consuming desire to possess the intangible.  Lost in a dream, he is unable to see the wasted, horrifying truth of what he has fallen in love with.  Christian is so engrossed with the Woodwoman and the promise of riches, he leads his family to ruin.  His unrecognizable state after returning years later is an external reflection of his moral bankruptcy and loss of humanity.  Elisabeth has remarried, has more children and a new husband while Christian’s father and her parents have died and their garden withered and failed.  Despite this news, he tells her he has found the treasure of Runenberg and dumps a sack of ordinary rocks at her feet.  Elisabeth spies the Woodwoman’s corrupted guise and even Christian is horrified, but she cloaks herself momentarily in her beauty to show she is one-in-the-same Venus figure he first encountered.  Enticed once more, Christian deserts his former love to never return.

            This final section of the story is the definitive critique of not just the dryness of the Enlightenment, but also the loss of what makes someone human when they pursue knowledge without the motional context that lets one evaluate the moral and ethical implications of the pursuit, the knowledge sought, and the application of those discoveries.  Like the financiers of Tieck’s time, the venture capitalist is dispassionate and removed from the labor of others, they quest for riches rather than the communal wealth of humanity.  Just like the scientist who discarded his humanity for knowledge, Christian disregarded his duties of family.  This sentiment echoes in the pages of Frankenstein sixteen years later.  The Runenberg is empty because its idealized nature cannot endure prolonged contact with the physical realm.

            Herein lies the problem: the ephemeral will always change.  It must mutate into a new form.  This is why the Venus figure becomes the hideous Woodswoman.  She is a representation of the sunk cost fallacy that Christian cannot bear to let go of.  The idea and its viability have grown old and disfigured because he refuses to give up on what once held promise.  Christian cannot see his folly, he is convinced he is almost there and the mountain will reward his devotion.  What he failed to see is Elisabeth was his reward, a family and success beyond what his father had.

            This patten is repeating.  Romanticism, especially the narratives by Germans, are the foundational texts of cyberpunk fiction.  They were the warnings of their day, yet the new obsession at the expense of society and the self is AI.  The view that we just need more data centers to turn the technology into a feasible path is undercut by the self-consumption of the corporations and venture capitalists who have leveraged each other to bring the spirits of the Runenberg under their control.  But Venus has caught them in her grasp and there are no experiences that can inform or satisfy them—both the ephemeral ones and their human pursuers.  They’ve chosen to abandon the garden that provides for the unyielding stone that doesn’t.  And the stones they’ve chosen to display as riches: data centers built on stolen works, like Christian and his attempted scraping of the Runenberg’s power, which only the Venus figure can command.

The nineteenth century tried to warn us of what to expect, but obviously we ignored the advice and signs when the moment arrived.  But what, for some amongst us, is the Oimpia to their Nathanael?  It’s AI, or more specifically, LLMs.  While each digital automaton has its own Spallanzani and Coppola as the engineers, they all work towards the same ends: a facsimile of life.  Their chief components are the virtual clockwork mechanisms that are the heart of algorithms.  But like E.T.A. Hoffman’s tale “The Sandman,” the ending isn’t what you expect.

            The prospect of AI is exciting for some, but it is not without its criticisms.  Beyond the environmental concerns and resource consumption issues, the ethical questions on how these engines are built, trained, and presented do require greater scrutiny, especially in light of the psychological questions raised in works like those in German Romanticism asked during the Industrial Revolution.  At the heart of the issues these contemporary Pygmalions miss however is their mechanical marvels possess a pleasing aesthetic while fundamentally missing what lies beneath the artifice is base materials masquerading as something they are too blind to see—or at least want the world to believe that.  In short, they’ve fallen in love with their own reflected egos embedded in the dream they’re selling.  Caught in the glamour are their Nathanaels.

            I’ve covered the issues concerning the difficulty trying to reconcile the ways in which math and language operate, but those fundamental differences are amplified by this engineering attempt.  Let’s engage in a quick exercise before diving deeper into the limitations our Spallanazanis and Coppolas cannot fully resolve to anyone’s satisfaction.  Go find and photograph what this symbol represents, not another version, the actual thing it represents: 8.  Now read this word aloud: refuse.  Did you pronounce it as “refuse” or “refuse?”  What even was the context to let you know which definition and pronunciation to use?  That is unclear here on purpose and you are more capable of determining which syllable is emphasized.  How can a digital gearbox come close when its choices are driven by the pure logic of mathematical formulae?

            Now, with that covered, let’s do a brief summary of that nearly 18,000 word essay.  While the purpose of “An Unbridgeable Divide” was to explain what leads to arguments about game rules, it fully captured the problems between the absolute values of numbers and equations and the inherently fuzzy nature of languages.  Computers can only operate in the realm of pure numbers.  The reason you cannot find the physical correspondence to the number I asked for is that all numbers are classified linguistically as adjectives.  As descriptive terms in a language, they can only augment nouns while never possessing any weight.  Yes, you can use numbers as a noun but limited only to identifying itself or as a collective already identified by its actual noun for clarity.

            The subtle shifting between grammatical categories is nothing extraordinary as we routinely use words in varying categories.  Verbs as nouns; adjectives as adverbs, nouns, and verbs; and others serve as examples for the slipperiness of words.  Math, like logic, doesn’t slip.  Equations only have one interpretation, but there is only meaning in why someone uses them.  Now, if you are not trained in their use, there’s no meaning, only a string of numbers and symbols.  Even for mathematicians, if you remove the variables and apply no language elements to denote what measurements were solved for in the proof, it would be a challenge to correctly identify the formula.

            How many definitions of the word “is” are there?  In the mid- to late-90s, this was worth a laugh.  But, it’s not as facetious as it sounds.  It is the most lawyerly thing many of us had ever heard at the time, but there are multiple entries under its parent form: “be.”  There are thirty-two definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary.  Just this single word has over four pages dedicated to its history and usage.  Some of the uses depend on if it’s the main verb or an auxiliary one in the sentence.  The similarities are subtle, as the average native speaker doesn’t notice the usage; it’s intuitive as which shading is used.  Yet, it does not guarantee the intended definition will be used.

            If humans have trouble identifying an equation when the variables are replaced by numbers, how would a system of formulae integrated into the digital deference engine understand the intricate shadings of words?  Sorry, my Nathanaels, but your Olimpia isn’t alive.  It doesn’t understand you and it can only approximate the response, but its built to fool you just enough as Spallanzani intended.  But like Nathanael, Olimpia is just as blind.  The automaton can’t see its failures any more than he can.  “The Sandman” is a metaphor for the blindness obsession creates—and in this case, the comparison is apt.

            See, while a human can determine the definition of the words through context, the machine cannot.  Engineers can approximate the intent, but there are no mathematical functions that can capture the fuzziness of language.  Linguistics can only calculate the frequency of sounds, use of words, and the number of words needed to make oneself understood in any particular tongue.  For English, that’s between 1,000-3,000 words.  Nearly 80-95% of daily interactions get by with those common words, with the rest relying on technical terms related to a profession.  But, that can’t be explained by the math or tell a computer how to use them, they can only measure what is there.

            What isn’t in that data is how the brain can sort through the definitions.  Engineers live and die by precision, yet they believe they can trick you and their code into believing it has chosen the correct definition.  If you think the machine knows how to use language without the experiences that lead to catachresis, a process by which words gain new meanings but are close enough for the current lexicon to function unaltered but enriched by the experience captured and only some definitions are online (go look at how many entries there are for “be”).  Where does Olimpia gain such knowledge?  The mechanical doll only knows what its creators can encode in it.  Being lifeless, it cannot become aware of those extra meanings, and those are the eyes the Spallanzanis and Coppolas give you to see through until they conspire to pilfer more while needing more digital cogs (e.g. data centers) to keep the fiction alive.

            When a machine attempts to experience the world through its own expression what it’s been fed, it malfunctions.  The coding and gears are bound to syntax alone.  Grammar does work that way.  While it does describe how the language ought to work in that point in time, it too yields to environmental and cultural changes.  That’s what it needs to do because the point is to share an experience.  That is one of the complex ideas necessitating the development of language and part of the focus in “An Unbridgeable Divide.”  The depth of complexity and catachresis is why communication is an art.  News has always been governed by this principle as it is a retelling of what one witnessed.

            People do not report without omission, only video can do that.  What people report is what impression the event left them with, which does include factual details.  Most news coverage is still filtered through the observer’s senses—their ability to experience the world.  Even scientists experience this in their findings.  Yes, the scientific process is rigorous to avoid any bias from contaminating the results, but the observation is not free from sensory input.  The dry, passive voice and subsequent third-party tests work to further remove any bias from seeping into the results and description of the discovery.

            How does any of this apply to LLMs and “The Sandman?”  It seems like a stretch or a tortured metaphor, but that is what the technology is: a tortured format using precision to affix fuzzy, imprecise objects into a repetitive, replicative whole.  Languages are living objects that grow, evolve, and can die.  English alone has more than 500,000 words, with some speculation that with the obsolete words and technical terms used in disparate fields pushing that total to nearly one million.  Enter Coppelius and the uncanny valley.

            Nathanael perceives of Coppelius as a monstrous, malformed man who brought misery to Nathanael and his siblings.  He is the personification of the twisted mind of an inventor driven to create what harms others because he can.  In effect, his devices are a misapplication of what they should be used for.  Thus, he is described as having fists as both his brutishness and indelicate approach to mechanical design.  And, in light of how LLMs function to create a bland, amalgamated standard of business casual English, the darker side of our software engineers emerges.  The algorithms kill the power of language by rendering them as dry and sterile as a research paper.

            In addition to trying to sound natural, LLMs are subject to procedural generation to summarize what it has been fed.  There is no guarantee the data will be accurate or based on accurate sources, such as not including summaries to create a new summary or drawing in material either using homographs or categories related but not the same as the focal topic/subject.  This is because no matter how sophisticated the system, it cannot process the slippage or nuance.  That’s fuzzy logic and it only works with the experiences an individual can observe or an analogous situation.  It’s a process beyond a mechanical system and moreso for one for one based on an on/off switch.  Gears slipping in a mechanism is bad for the device and speaks to an approaching malfunction.

            The digital equivalent is to throw an exception.  It’s a clunky mechanism, it’s slow and shoddy if used routinely.  Also, it shows the lack of care a programmer took in devising the software.  Imagine how many exceptions need to be thrown to replicate the semblance of sentience that doesn’t feel scripted or follow the strict categorical definitions a computer must use.  Also, how can Olimpia incorporate and synthesize new data relating to unwritten cultural/social rules and the ways in which they inform language and provide a lens through which events and experiences are interpreted.  Like any automaton, LLMs are frozen in time.  They can be fed new data, much of which has been stolen from others who shared their experiences or observations, but nothing new can be generated.

            Blurring the lines between the human and the artificial is the goal of these would-be Spallanzanis and Coppolas, and that’s the problem.  The Nathanaels fall easy prey to the confusion introduced and may trust to the content Olimpia offers as an accurate portrayal of the world.  The modern Nathanaels cannot disambiguate and are caught up in the hallucinations of the digital Olimpias they’ve fallen for.  Their gaze has been riveted to an illusion, blinding them to the limitations fo the mechanism as it reduces communication into a rote, mechanical process.  The goal is a homogenized use of language into a bland beige spouting data as proof of intelligence, but like Olimpia, it is hollow and wooden.  What all involved have failed to see is the lifeless corpse made to dance not for the novelty of experience, but rather the entertaining notion of exercising power over a slavishly devoted servant.  The veneer may be one of beauty, but it is to mask mastery over another with that of craft and knowledge.

            Nathanael’s death is a metaphorical one.  His obsession and blindness are the result of sacrificing his humanity to the object of his desire.  In transferring the human to the machine, reality becomes the malleable space rather than that of the experiential realm.  The fantasy of the automaton as companion and assistant causes the blindness as a Nathanael projects his own emotions onto the machine.  Believing the gears have humanity is a symbolic death of one’s own and contributes to the blindness in the human effort stolen and mimicked by the puppet the Nathanael has become infatuated by with admirations also misplaced on the engineers.

Okay, so there has been a lot of things I’ve been working on and I neglected my website in favor of keeping busy with research, learning new skills for my day job and to decompress after the last two years, which is why I haven’t posted much during the last 24-36 months. That said, I fixed the puzzles as it seems one of the updates broke them again.

There are also a few things I’ve been experimenting with for design work that I hope to put in a presentable form soon.

I know I’ve been lax at updating things here over the last year or two. In part this is because my primary focus has been my day job working in a library. During the pandemic my writing took a back seat for many reasons, the primary one being the amount of energy that went into serving my community as well as closures of branches that added a higher volume of work in our location. As things have been returning to a pace more in line with what we experienced before Covid-19, I’ve been able to decompress a bit and pick up my writing pace to more than a snail’s crawl of a few hundred words a week/month.

I just finished the rough draft of Chapter 3 of Codex Caelorum et Infernorum, am starting to do the writing for Chapter 4, and working on the outline of Chapter 5. At some point I will take photos of my outline process to show you how I break down my chapters as it can be a bit involved with the index cards I use to flesh out the ideas behind each outline entry.

Hey, all.  I know I’ve been quiet, but that’s because of not just doing holiday activities and family things.  It’s also because I’ve been nose to the grindstone to release a few items as well as getting some more projects going as the old ones go out the door.  I’ll be updating my bibliography page over time and talking about the new releases as well.  Also, there will be more puzzles.

I’m a diabetic and I had something crop up that essentially ate this month.  At times, despite my best efforts, it has caused a few issues, like not updating this site or keeping up with some of my personal projects at the rate I (and likely you) would prefer.

The good news is I’ve been given a clean bill of health and I bounce back rather quickly.  When you throw in the work I’ve been doing to prep Archetypal Roles to get the PDF version ready and have the print-on-demand version nearly in the wings, the results have been to slow down other items.  Expect to see more regular postings and releases.

My latest project is available in PDF format at the moment. A physical book will be available soon.  For now, my Archetypal Roles book is available on DriveThruRpg.com.

If you can’t wait, or you want to get a jump on character design for your stories or games, give this a look.  The book breaks down the subject to help you generate the ideas to fit more than a million seeds you can grow into full-fledged characters with the depth audiences expect for the people in print, on stage, or the screen.

 

Sorry I didn’t post anything in nearly 60 days, but with the loss of two very close individuals in the space of 10 days, moving to a new work site, putting together more furniture, having my car breathe its last, and preparing for summer programming at the library, I haven’t felt motivated or had the time to keep posting any material.

I’m beginning the edits on the intro to archetypes book.  It’s only 132 pages, so it won’t take long, but that means I might not be able to fill you in on other projects or keep up with the Learning by Design posts at the pace of 3-7 a week.

Okay, so I might not be able to provide a lot of updates on things given all the stuff I have going on in the background, but I worked on a nice-sized document and several handouts for a game design program.  Some of the posts here will be all about that subject as part of what might be a future book.  The blog isn’t changing focus, just adding another facet to it for things I’ve been doing quietly for the past 10 years or so.