Snakes devouring themselves tail-first
appear in medieval engravings, Celtic sculptures, Egyptian scrolls, Aztec
glyphs, and most importantly, on the set of "Conan the Barbarian"
(pictured above). The archetypal power of the image is not difficult to
grasp - snakes are some of the most provocative creatures in human
experience, signifiers of things fearsome, enigmatic, and forbidden, whose
sinuous shapes and movements are fascinating because they are so unlike
ours. Imagined in an act of paradoxical and unending autophagy, this
already-symbolic beast cannot help but create new meanings in the
receptive mind: "self-fecundation; disintegration and re-integration;
truth and cognition complete...the potential before the spark of creation;
the undifferentiated; the Totality; primordial unity; self-sufficiency,
and the idea of the beginning and the end as being a continuous unending
principle...It is a single image with the entire actions of a life cycle -
it begets, weds, impregnates, and slays itself, but in a cyclical sense,
rather than linear." (4) Beyond this, it has always seemed to me a
metaphor for the vast promise and the terrifying vagaries of human thought
- emblem of those self-nourishing cognitive cycles that may lead with
equal surety to masterworks or to madness.
But for me such
symbolism extends beyond human thought to artificial intelligence. For
technology is subject to its own recursive processes – what might be
termed “machine neuroses” – that like their biological counterparts can
consume vast energies while leading nowhere, or even backwards. Examples
of such phenomena are myriad and various; one with which I am personally
familiar involved a vast database organized into subject-specific
categories. When a particular category was deemed relevant to another
category, it could be connected to it via a linking program within the
database. Usually this worked quite satisfactorily, and category A would
show up in category B in accordance with their logical relationship.
Things became vexing, however, when category A was linked to B and B in
turn was linked back to A, forming a serpentine loop. When the program ran
into such a relationship, it would become hopelessly stuck following the
loop from A to B and back again, bringing the entire system to a halt. The
only way to correct the problem was to remove the recursive connection,
thereby preventing the database from biting its own tail, so to speak.
Even if the connection made perfect sense within the context of A and B,
the proper functioning of the larger system required that it be severed.
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continued
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