From Literature to Biterature

From Literature to Biterature

From Literature to Biterature is based on the premise that in the foreseeable future computers will become capable of creating works of literature. Among hundreds of other questions, it considers: Under which conditions would machines become capable of creative writing? Given that computer evolution will exceed the pace of natural evolution a million-fold, what will such a state of affairs entail in terms of art, culture, social life, and even nonhuman rights? Drawing a map of impending literary, cultural, social, and technological revolutions, Peter Swirski boldly assumes that computers will leap from mere syntax-driven processing to semantically rich understanding. He argues that acknowledging biterature as a species of literature will involve adopting the same range of attitudes to computer authors (computhors) as to human ones and that it will be necessary to approach them as agents with internal states and creative intentions. Ranging from the metafiction of Stanislaw Lem to the ‘Turing test’ (familiar to scientists working in Artificial Intelligence and the philosophers of mind) to the evolutionary trends of culture and machines, Swirski’s scenarios lay the groundwork for a new area of study on the cusp of literary futurology, evolutionary cognition, and philosophy of the future.

From Literature to Biterature

Something Reckless

Something Reckless

Prim, headstrong, and beautiful Penelope is determined to expose the licentious affairs of the ton’s randiest rakes. Now one of their powerful numberthe unrepentant libertine Jeremy Vaughn, Duke of Kilgrathhas been selected to put an end to the prudish lady’s interference. Jeremy’s plan is devilishly clever: He will join Penelope’s war against immorality, fighting passionately by her side, all the while showering her with anonymous erotic missives designed to titillate even the coldest, most unwilling maid. He will break down her defenses and inflame her repressed desires by escorting her (in the interests of their ‘noble campaign’) to London’s most notorious pleasure palaces. And he will visit her boudoirmaskedduring the night to school her in the deliciously sinful arts she wishes to abolish. Then he will expose her hypocrisy to the world.

Something Reckless

The De-Mathematisation of Logic

The De-Mathematisation of Logic

This book collects together several articles by the author, to which a certain recent RATIO paper of his relates, with that paper as an introduction to the whole. It displays a major failure in the disposition of the logicians who have followed on from Frege, principally through their attachment to mathematics, and their subsequent neglect of natural language, and its basic grammar. Thus these logicians as a whole have confused, in substantial ways, categories like use with mention, identity with equivalence, predicates with functions, predicates with their nominalisations, sentences with nominals, sentences with propositions, propositions with functions, propositions with sets, properties with states of affairs, direct speech with indirect speech, reference with description, objects with facts, pronouns with nouns, mereological sums with (mathematical) sets, numbers with sets, count terms with mass terms, amounts with numbers, and also units of measure with objects, amongst other things. The book consists in fourteen chapters, with eleven of them being as they have been, or will be, when published in central journals, and other collections. Two further chapters extend the work in another two published papers, while one chapter is quite new. The chapter titles are: ‘Logic and Grammar’, ‘Completing Russell’s Logic’, ‘Logic and Arithmetic’, ‘Natural Language Sets’, ‘Namely Riders: an Update’, ‘Concept and Object in Frege’, ‘Frege’s Hidden Assumption’, ‘A Poor Concept Script’, ‘Motivation by De Se Beliefs’, ‘Out of the Liar Tangle’, ‘Ramseying Liars’, ‘Proving that 2+3=5′, ‘Harmonising Natural Deduction’, and ‘Dialetheias are Mental Confusions’.

The De-Mathematisation of Logic