Library as Brain

Context: Take a look at this bizarrely beautiful library inspired by the human brain.

Fascinating idea – a library inspired by the brain. Of course, all libraries are always and already inspired and purposefully inflated by the needs and activities of brains and their products of hyper-extended cognition in – and as – language, culture, communication and technology.

What might be usefully missing here amongst all the aesthetic noise is that we find ourselves quite easily bewitched by (the language of) morphometric contingency, of aspirationally objective functionality and neuroanatomical specificity. Specific areas of a brain can and indeed do assert unique or particular interpreted purposes but this is only really in as much as the optimal patterns of complexity compression represent what did occur, not what necessarily must have.

The point? Beyond interesting architectural concepts, the activities of embodied intelligence are rarely isolated or purely rationalised away from their contexts – both within and between craniums. As reflexive microcosm, the purpose and meaningfulness of a library-as-brain – or vice versa – is not located in the items on the shelves or any other curated (hence – explicable, intelligible) structural taxonomy of the parts. It is precisely in the resonant harmony of indefinitely-extensible logical self-reference in which the parts engage – in gestalt – that meaning, sentience and intelligence emerges.

This is why Artificial General Intelligence remains unassailable by brute force methods. The global properties of holistic systems lie quite concretely as an effective logical self-containment in what exists beyond the grammatical games and tribal affectations of language, institution, paradigm or technology. It is not out of reach – it is just that it can not be comprehensively captured by any closed symbolic system or abbreviated theorem and this, like the empty, unknown and enigmatic spaces that make libraries (and, arguably, intelligence) useful, is what breathes life into it.

Less affective rhetorical sophistry, more alternative ontology: asserting epistemological closure by its own absence. A breaking symmetry – form follows function but function follows logic, not form. Information (and, or as, energy) processing and encoding in embodied knowledge, experience or intelligence is much less bound by any Linnean catalogue, cognitive model or material location than we might otherwise prefer to believe.