2022 in Books with OpenAI Chat
I read a lot of great books this year so it was very tough to pick just a few. Here's the full list. Additionally, to make this year-end book review a bit more interesting I've decided to incorporate GPT's ChatBot for some basic analysis of the books I've chosen to talk about to see if I agree.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Here is what I asked OpenAI Chat about the book:
how does thomas pynchon use the concept of entropy to shape the crying of lot 49
Here is its response:
In Thomas Pynchon's novel "The Crying of Lot 49," the concept of entropy is used as a metaphor to explore themes of order and disorder, meaning and meaninglessness, and the inherent uncertainty of the universe. Pynchon employs this metaphor in a number of ways throughout the novel, including through the character of Oedipa Maas, who becomes increasingly disillusioned with her understanding of the world as she investigates the mysterious Tristero organization.
One of the primary ways in which Pynchon uses the concept of entropy in "The Crying of Lot 49" is through the portrayal of the Tristero organization as a sort of underground network that exists in parallel to mainstream society. This parallel network is characterized by its resistance to the forces of entropy, which represent the breakdown of order and the increasing chaos and disorder in the world. The Tristero is portrayed as a sort of counterforce to this entropy, offering the possibility of meaning and purpose in a world that is otherwise characterized by confusion and uncertainty.
Another way in which Pynchon uses the concept of entropy in the novel is through the portrayal of Oedipa Maas as a character struggling to make sense of the world and her place in it. As she investigates the Tristero and uncovers more and more clues about its existence, she becomes increasingly uncertain about what is real and what is not. This uncertainty is seen as a reflection of the increasing entropy in the world, as Oedipa's understanding of her own identity and the nature of reality becomes increasingly fragmented.
Overall, Pynchon's use of the concept of entropy in "The Crying of Lot 49" serves to underscore the themes of uncertainty and confusion that run throughout the novel, and to suggest that the forces of entropy are ultimately insurmountable and that it is impossible to find meaning or order in the world.
Wow, ChatBot off to a great start. That's a pretty solid summary in all honesty. The only points that I would add would be some discussions around Maxwell's Demon as a plot-shaping device in the book and the parallels between entropy in thermodynamics and information theory that come into that plot-shaping.
This book rocked. It fell into that wonderful category of books that I understand just enough on a first read to realize I missed some key huge details. After finishing it the first time I pondered a bit about the Tristero organization, the giant Jacobian play in the middle of the novel, and a very detailed description of Maxwell's Demon placed centrally within the novel and immediately reread it.
The book opened up on a second read like a supernova. And most importantly not all of my questions were answered. After reading Gravity's Rainbow I thought Pynchon's shortest novel would be no match for me and I'm elated to report that it kicked my ass and I've had a blast fighting with it since. CoL49 is myth in the purest sense and a phenomenal piece of fiction that's now one of my favorites. In 4,000 years maybe some far-advanced offshoot of humanity will be able to suss out our understanding of entropy from the plot laid down in this book. Or maybe it'll just still be annoying freshman lit majors at that point.
When We Cease To Understand The World by Benjamín Labatut
Here is what I asked OpenAI Chat about the book:
how does benjamin labatut use biography to describe humanity's relationship with technology in when we cease to understand the world
Here is its response:
It is not clear who Benjamin Labatut is or what the specific work "When We Cease to Understand the World" is, as there is no information available on these topics. It is possible that you may be mistaken about the name or details of the work you are referring to. It is also possible that you may be referring to a work that has not yet been published or is not widely known. In any case, without more information it is not possible to accurately answer your question.
Whoops! Looks like GPT-3 was trained before WWCtUtW came out! Guess I'll just have to give my inferior human answer.
Labatut assumes his readers are smart -- really smart. So it's no surprise that this book doesn't really feature any coherent connected plot -- just some coincidental details that happen to link on subject's life with another. The ideas of the author are conveyed through a collage of biographies, each of them feeling somewhat like a unique work. But when laid out as a whole cohesive piece, the network of these biographies gives the shape of When We Cease to Understand the World. And the shape is one of human beauty soaked in technology's melancholy.
If I had to summarize this book I would say that Labatut's goal is to create a vision of personal catastrophe striking individuals as they give their lives to monastic pursuit of technological advance. It presents an extremely bleak picture of the world and how we have affected it and each other, but nonetheless the picture is uniquely human. Instead of simply describing the technologies that have had negative impacts on the world he describes clearly evil discoveries like the invention of saran gas and its inventor along with more traditionally positive discoveries like Heisenberg's contributions to quantum mechanics. But good or evil all of the subjects of this book are doomed to be entrapped in the same web, positive advance leading to negative and back and forth.
The reader is left doing a lot of the heavy lifting which adds to the brilliance of this book's <200 page run. When we have pieces of data laid out before us we have no choice but to look at them as an aggregate and consider the constellation they create and give it our own meaning. I don't blame ChatBot for not being up to the challenge quite yet. Though I'll chalk this one up to lack of training data.
The System of Objects / Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
Here is what I asked OpenAI Chat about the books:
how did jean baudrillard view our grammar of objects in the context of modern technology
Here is its response:
Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher and cultural theorist who is known for his writings on the impact of modern technology on society and culture. In his view, the proliferation of modern technology has led to significant changes in the way that we relate to the world around us, including the objects that we encounter in our daily lives.
Baudrillard argued that the "grammar of objects" in modern society is shaped by the mass production, consumption, and disposal of goods, which has led to a reduction of objects to their functional value. He believed that this emphasis on functional value has led to a disconnection from the symbolic and cultural meanings that objects once held, and that this has had a profound impact on our sense of identity and our relationship to the world.
According to Baudrillard, the "grammar of objects" in modern society is characterized by a focus on efficiency, productivity, and the manipulation of the environment for the purposes of control and domination. He argued that this has led to a situation in which humans have become estranged from the natural world and from their own senses and experiences, and that this has contributed to a sense of alienation and disconnection in modern society.
Overall, Baudrillard viewed the "grammar of objects" in modern society as being shaped by the influence of technology and the values of consumer capitalism, and he argued that this has had a significant impact on the way that we relate to the world and to each other.
Another impressive one by Chatbot. Though I cheated a bit to make the answer less comprehensive since I included both books in my entry but only really themes from SoO in my prompt.
This was my first foray into Baudrillard and maybe the best attestation of the value of these books is that I thoroughly annotated both of them for inability to understand on a cursory read. And that I also reread System of Objects almost in its entirely.
Baudrillard has a really fascinating ability to summarize the Postmodern condition. His insights are not derisive but it is clear that he thinks we can do so much better as a species. His influence from Saussure and the structuralists/post-structuralists creates a fascinating framework to analyze how we interact with the objects around us. He analogizes our attempts to communicate via objects to a formal grammar like we've imposed within language. And of course, with grammar comes the ability to analyze overarching structure of the language being used and framed by that grammar. He demonstrates that we've created rules around our interactions with objects and tries to use examples to determine the underlying source of these axioms.
SoO has really fed my mind around the concept of the creation of models and the series that instantiate those models. The book highlights that the second you create a mental model for a phenomenon or behavior then you immediately start to perceive things which are outside that model as incorrect. This is tough to grok for a software engineer sometimes, but I like to think that within the world of programmatic types and category theory I'm safe to impose my little world orders. :) Though it comes with a heavy responsibility of understanding the scale at which it stops becoming acceptable to create rigid models and allow for chaos to enter organically.
Speaking specifically to Simulacra and Simulation, perhaps the more famous of the two, Baudrillard extends the ideas in SoO much further and introduces the idea of hyperreality. Now that I understand the Postmodern origin of that term I'll likely take a dive into Umberto Eco's collected nonfiction that I've been meaning to get around to: Travels in Hyperreality. But infinite reading list digressions aside, it was nice to be able to finally give some personal context to this text that I've seen referenced so frequently. It's worth the hype and has been forcing me to think much more about the gestural systems that we create. I want to analyze when technology and how people interact with it are going to be inherently alienating or if we can create tools that help us impact reality as humans rather than replace the gestures that we enact on the world. For now I suppose we'll continue to create unfinished all too human grammars and impose them on the world either way. Sometimes it's good to give ourselves over to the profane, to the violent, to the utterly dismally human, to avoid the sterility with which we tend to contaminate the world.
To Live and Think Like Pigs by Gilles Châtelet
Here is what I asked OpenAI Chat about the book:
how does "to live and think like pigs" relate the concept of the average man and to market democracy and chaos theory
Here is its response:
It is not clear what the specific work "To Live and Think Like Pigs" is or how it relates to the concept of the "average man" and to market democracy and chaos theory. Without more information about the context in which these ideas are presented, it is not possible to accurately answer your question. It is possible that "To Live and Think Like Pigs" is a work of fiction, non-fiction, or a work in another genre, and that it may explore these concepts in a variety of ways. If you are looking for more information about this work and its themes, it might be helpful to try conducting further research using reliable sources or by seeking out reviews or summaries of the work.
Foiled again! Maybe ChatBot's just trying to defer because it knows Châtelet wouldn't have had a very optimistic opinion about such technology interpreting his work!
Perhaps even more of a dismal view of Postmodernity than Baudrillard, Châtelet's text was another read that required me to follow along with a pen. But the background research for this book is everything so I was glad to have done so. He makes reference to Thomas Hobbes' texts on energy and the existence of Robinson Crusoe as the first capitalist adventurer, Bergson's Creative Energy and how it inspired modern French philosophers, and the concepts of libertarianism, chaos theory, and much more.
Like Labatut above, Châtelet operates under the assumption that his reader is smart -- that they are able to interpolate the data that they are given. Or if they're not smart, that they're willing to look through other texts to fill in some background and figure out what he is talking about. Therein lies the minimalist beauty of this book. He's able to synthesize with so little text the ideas of other thinkers and how he adapts their thoughts to a polemic interpretation of the world around us. He creates a collage, not by showing a completed image, but by giving just enough information for us to tease out the overarching ideas.
The book is an absolutely scathing review of the capitalist libertarianism that has infected the modern world and a mathematical tearing down of the axioms upon which those structures were built. Châtelet was a mathematician before becoming a philosopher and it gives his negative interpretations so much more weight as he annihilates the concept of "chaotizing" and the pretense that libertarianism embraces chaos down to its pseudoscientific roots. He uplifts the historical demonstrations of the conditions that have led to real generation-level technological advance and puts those conditions squarely in opposition with the fake meritocracy that market democracies have created today.
Centering his argument is the aversion to the imposed "average man" that market democracies force on the world. Everywhere around us we see models a la Baudrillard contained in advertisement. We judge ourselves on deviation from a hyperreal mean and at the core of all of this social engineering we find at the helm those people meant to represent us giving their signet rings to lobbyists.
Even though I spent a lot of time on plato.stanford because of this book (sarcasm) I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The Latro Series by Gene Wolfe
Here is what I asked OpenAI Chat about the book:
how does gene wolfe mix herodotus, unreliable narration, and mythology in the latro series
Here is its response:
In the Latro series by Gene Wolfe, the historical figure of Herodotus and the concept of unreliable narration are used in combination with elements of mythology to explore themes of memory, identity, and the nature of reality.
Herodotus, who was a Greek historian of the 5th century BCE, is referenced in the Latro series as a source of knowledge about the ancient world. The character of Latro, who is the main protagonist of the series, is a soldier who has lost his memory and is attempting to piece together his past and his identity. In this context, the references to Herodotus and his historical accounts serve to provide a sense of context and historical background for Latro's story.
The concept of unreliable narration is also central to the Latro series, as Latro's accounts of his experiences are presented as written records that he has made in order to try to remember and understand what has happened to him. The fact that Latro has lost his memory adds an element of uncertainty to his accounts, as it is not clear how reliable his recollections are or how much of his story can be trusted. This use of unreliable narration serves to create a sense of mystery and ambiguity in the series and adds to the overall sense of uncertainty about the nature of reality and the truth of Latro's experiences.
Finally, the Latro series also incorporates elements of mythology, including references to Greek gods and goddesses and to ancient mythological stories. These mythological elements serve to add depth and complexity to the series and to provide a framework for exploring the themes of memory, identity, and the nature of reality.
Overall, the combination of references to Herodotus, unreliable narration, and mythology in the Latro series creates a rich and multi-layered narrative that explores a range of philosophical and metaphysical themes in a thought-provoking and imaginative way.
Geez, ChatBot finishing strong and taking most of my thunder! I agree with almost all of what it's said. Wolfe makes constant allusions to Herodotus in the book and you can tell his heart is captured by the first historian through his homages to the pieced-together history we get from the Halicarnassan. The book inspired me so much I also read The Histories this year. But I admit I had less fun reading it than any of the books in the Solider in the Mist series.
There's not much to say about this book in the context of his other books that I've read other than that he's done it again. Wolfe is able to give a colloquial feel that makes you actually feel like you're listening to people from the 5th century BC talk about current events and describe real relations with the gods. He never says "Apollo" he says "the Destroyer". He never says "I can't read the letter written here" but instead calls it the "ox". His attention to detail make the piece feel real in a way that so much historical fiction is not. He is able to pull common literary themes into the book in a way that feel timely and relevant. The book contains spells performed by magi and werewolves but neither has a remotely familiar feel to modern fiction -- he is able to bring the reader to his world, never stepping to far to our aid.
And at the core of Latro is of course unreliable narration. Wolfe doesn't write books, he writes tapestries that can be read and reread over and over again with new interpretations each time. He is the ultimate literary collagist. This is historical fiction at its absolute peak. This is Gene Wolfe at his peak.
And that's it. I Hope the summaries were even a fraction as fun to read as the books themselves! I'm also interested in trying to incorporate GPT-3 into more posts like this so I may brainstorm some other ideas to see how I can use it to elevate and support human writing rather than to replace it.