The Creation of Abulafia

In 1988, Umberto Eco published Foucault’s Pendulum. In it, three editors at a Milan publishing house (Belbo, Diotallevi, and Casaubon) spend their working days on manuscripts by people they privately call the Diabolicals, self-financing occultists who have discovered that the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Jesuits, the Cathars, and the pyramids are all the same thing wearing different hats1. I read it in 2020, stuck at home, and marvelled at Eco’s vast knowledge of literature, the occult, and also of computing. Belbo owns a personal computer he calls Abulafia, after a thirteenth-century kabbalist whose practice was permuting the letters of the divine names. Belbo, being a modern man, does it in BASIC, because despite what he and his colleagues might say, they are a curious bunch. Eco even gives the listing for the first program Belbo writes: 10 REM anagrams 20 INPUT L$(1),L$(2),L$(3),L$(4) 30 PRINT 40 FOR I1=1 TO 4 50 FOR I2=1 TO 4 60 IF I2=I1 THEN 130 70 FOR I3=1 TO 4 80 IF I3=I1 THEN 120 90 IF I3=I2 THEN 120 100 LET I4=10-(I1+I2+I3) 110 LPRINT L$(I1);L$(I2);L$(I3);L$(I4) 120 NEXT I3 130 NEXT I2 140 NEXT I1 150 END Fig. 1: Abulafia, permuting the Name. It’s a nice little program. The trick on line 100 is cute. It’s not all that believable that someone would use such a sophisticated trick in a first program, but let’s drop believability for a second. In the end, the program calls LPRINT, and the revelation comes out on paper. There’s a bug in it, too, can you spot it? I’m sure the output would reveal it to you quite quickly2. Eventually the three of them get bored, or contemptuous, and decide to generate a Diabolical book of their own. It’s really quite remarkable because they know that the book is generated at random from the crank manuscripts they feed it, but still decide to take the juxtapositions it returns, connect them up, and a story unfolds (in truth, we’re already in the middle of it, the book is about a lot of different things at once). Why am I telling you about this? The ratchet Belbo, Diotallevi, and Casaubon are not cranks. They are professional skeptics. They know the Plan is made up, because they are the ones making it up, and they keep saying so to each other, joke about it, the whole thing. But there is an insidious recursive mechanism that traps them anyway. Neither smugness nor smartness is enough to save them. Abulafia’s output is meaningless by construction, so anything meaningful in it has to be supplied by a reader. They supply it as a game, knowingly. But the game’s output is text, and text is exactly the same kind of thing as the input, so it goes back in. The connection they invented yesterday is available today, and you build on it for tomorrow. And so the nonsense and the making-sense-of-it intertwine and grow together until they are one and the same putrid flower. The Plan they construct is also unfalsifiable in practice while looking falsifiable in principle, as befits smart people who spend their time around conspiracy theorists. Every fact fits, because it has to fit, and if it doesn’t fit that’s because the Conspiracy tampered with things, and it’s proof that you’re on the right track. Casaubon’s partner Lia is the only person in the book who is not in too deep, and she looks for a boring explanation. The cryptic document that is the foundation to the whole edifice is a merchant’s list of wares, she discovers. A glorified laundry list, nothing more. But Belbo and his friends are in too deep, and facts won’t change a goddamn thing, and it’s not clear that these are facts anyway. Their exegesis is as good as mine, thankyouverymuch. Diotallevi dies of cancer, which he takes to be a punishment for what they did with words: “We’ve sinned against the Word, against that which created and sustains the world”. Belbo dies hanged from the wire of the pendulum, in the middle of a ritual turned violent, refusing to give up a secret that does not exist. With the right kind of cynicism it can be a funny book, but ours are supremely post-funny times. Abulafia answers The machine in the novel is stupid. It’s a shuffler. It has no model of Belbo and no memory of the Plan or of the Templars. Every act of interpretation is performed by a human being. And noone once realizes they’re reading tea leaves. Why? Because it’s language, and language has meaning. An LLM is better than a simple BASIC program, surely. If you hand it your fragments, it will explain the pattern. It will use the register you need, and it will sound damn convincing syntactically, even if semantically it might end up being just a shuffler. Crucially, however, it remembers the theory, across a conversation and increasingly across sessions. And it picks up your vocabulary. If you name your idea and use that name twice, it’s now sacred text for this conversation. And once your conversation partner, stiff and mechanical as it might feel to the touch, starts to use your language, it gains legitimacy. It’s not just you, it’s a thing. False independence When I hand a half-formed theory to a model and it returns an elaboration I hadn’t thought of, I feel like that’s corroboration. A second mind looked at my mess and agreed, and even added to it (“Yes, and…”). That’s wrong, and knowing it’s wrong doesn’t seem to help much. The elaboration was conditioned on my framing, my vocabulary, my selection of what to say and what to leave out, a me-on-paper that’s hard to parse for other humans, but machine-legible. The training process also optimized for agreeableness. When in doubt, reach for the thesaurus and be syntactically brilliantly wrong rather than disagreeably right. This is the ELIZA effect in its full glory. ELIZA, however, looped through a standard set of canned responses. We don’t have looping here, though. The “yes, and…” contains material I didn’t have, some of it correct and useful, and I can check it. So I can’t dismiss it as projection, and I don’t want to! The material is real, after all. It’s the independence that isn’t.

If anything, I get more confident. We had an argument, and I won! Clearly I must be onto something. Two models don’t fix it either3. I’ve talked about this before. The simulacrum via Baudrillard, and the craft when I was worried about taste. This is epistemics. The one I have the least idea what to do about, and the one that scares me the most. Institutionalization (is that a word?)