Chaosophy - autonomous learning

The artistic and literary imagination conceives a great number
of absurd machines: whether through the indeterminate character
of the motor or energy source, through the physical impossibility of
the organization of the working parts, or through the logical impossibility
of the mechanism of transmission. For example, Man Ray's
Dancer-Danger, subtitled "impossibility," offers two degrees of
absurdity,: neither the clusters of cog-wheels nor the large transmission
wheel are able to function. Insofar as this machine is supposed to
represent the whirl of a Spanish dancer, it can be said that it expresses
mechanically, by means of the absurd, the impossibility for a
machine to execute such a movement (the dancer is not a machine).
But one can also say: there must be a dancer here who functions as
a part of a machine; this machine component can only be a dancer;
here is the machine of which the dancer is a component part. The
object is no longer to compare humans and the machine in order to
evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, the possible or impossible
substitutions of the ones for the other, but to bring them into
communication in order to show how humans are a component part
of the machine, or combine with something else to constitute a
machine. The other thing can be a tool, or even an animal, or other
humans. We are not using a metaphor, however, when we speak of
machines: humans constitute a machine as soon as this nature is communicated
by recurrence to the ensemble of which they form a part
under specific conditions. The human-horsebow ensemble forms a
nomadic war machine under the conditions of the steppe. Men
form a labor machine under the bureaucratic conditions of the great
empires. The Greek foot-soldier together with his arms constitute a
machine under the conditions of the phalanx. The dancer combines
with the floor to compose a machine under the perilous conditions
of love and death ... We do not start from a metaphorical usage of
the word machine, but from a (confused) hypothesis concerning
origins: the way in which heterogeneous elements are determined
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