[Newspoetry] Swapping lies to test Intellects?

[DL Emerick]

Oh, by the way, taking into account rhyme, which could be programmed, and fit of
subject matter, likewise computable, and even meter, echoes of dither's ditto,
the preceding "poem" could have been produced by a machine, when given some
answering algorithm.

 

The trick would be to design a computing standard for a personal question.  What
do you want to know and why?  Well, that's a formula of sorts - pretty vague,
perhaps.  I suggest the formula is more like this "What do you want to believe
and why, in the face of facts already known (almost, ie, believed)?"  Now, here,
there is a hint of the fact that an intelligent question hunts after that which
is not known, while an intelligent answer states what is already known.

 

Experientially, for knowing, we cold substitute all the other sensory
experiences, of touching, seeing, hearing, and so forth.  Always, that is, we
would be defining good questions by how man is affected by his experiences of
some quest.  We would never imagine there to be any other senses of the
sensible.  We would be succumbing to the homocentric character of our own
natures - even though most of what comes to be known is usually (always?)
advanced as a matter of finding new and reliable, trustworthy methods of
extending our sensory ranges.

 

I only need to name the classical technologies, the telescope or the microscope,
for instance, to prove this point indisputably, and beyond refutation, so I
would dare to claim.  What is beyond knowing can not be reached, or pursued,
without some new way of knowing.  The rest, ala Kuhn, is derivative work, a kind
of cleaning up the lab after an experiment has blown up, into something novel
and unexpected.  A good question pushes aside old answers, revising and amending
them, but also extending them, into successor questions.

 

Poetry, perhaps, does that as well.  News does that routinely every day - for it
purports to tell what was unknown yesterday, namely, what (in fact) may have
happened yesterday, the actual occurrence of which none of us could forecast,
and the occurrence of which must surely shape all future answers, but never all
future questions!

 

Newspoetry would have to be judged good or bad, not as poetry nor even as news,
but by how it shows us better how we might be expecting something new, or why we
might like a better world.  Newspoetry would be, then, either disenchanting (a
low standard, for what else does man do but ever moan?) or enchanting (a high
standard, sometimes).  Newspoetry is magic by yet another name, under new rules,
perhaps, but still the magic of any rememberable and remembering experience.

 

That's what intelligence is: it bows to a magic that it has not yet explained,
by questioning whether magic itself is the only possible answer, and finding
some new magic to dispel the old.

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