📚 Pulse Fiction
On a dusty shelf in the library of mind sits a book not very wide. Its title is short fiction, and every book’s inside. When you open up the pages it presents a strange surprise: that every letter’s different, these stories seem disguised.
To the untrained eye or those without time it’s a random stream of glyphs, but if you learn or make a language, you can map a story onto this. If you shared this tongue with others, then they can understand; they can read your story by proxy of your hand.
This impractical tome allows a tale to be known by those who share this code, but they don’t - and they won’t - well, it’s a point to be told. It’s a statement by its maker: that words aren’t ink or paper. They’re heard in your head, as they’re seen and they’re read. As to read, interact is a physical act, it stirs us; it moves us.
Binary’s look is a lot like this book, without a language map it’s a long stream
of crap - and it looks like random bits. It’s not a story for us humans, it’s
for computer chips. A machine’s codes are the words that it knows, and it’s a
tongue of circuit wires. Where we see jumbled digits, it feels mov eax, 5.
It reads and it makes sense of it, which shakes it deep inside. It knows,
interacts, in a physical act. This whirs it; it moves it.
To you or I its outputs, these words or sights or sounds. We feel and hear and see them, but no matter how profound, these concepts are our story, one a chip knows nothing of. It’s one it has no language for, ‘cause logic is enough. Our words could never move it, it just doesn’t have the kit. As meaning to computers is ons and offs of bits.
Screens can’t feel the smiles they show, we can’t feel the light they throw, and speakers they push to and fro, to music they could never know. A mic beside the tree that fell, it felt it hit the ground, but felt electric signals, and couldn’t hear a sound.
When a program outputs tales of thoughts, they exist in us not it. Stories heard in human words live in apes but not in chips. Even programs, they’re an us thing, our ballad of the bits. While clattering gates in silicon just switch vibrate and hiss. By the click of the clock it is trapped to the track, it’s a physical act, and that feeling’s all there is.