Self-Referential Machines

We are not dealing with trivial machines, which react according to the always same transformation function, but with self-referential machines, which determine themselves by their own operations, what they start from in the following operation, thus becoming always new machines from moment to moment.

Obviously, the semantics child is based on easily recognizable peculiarities of these beings in contrast to adults. Without this difference, which is visible in body size and behavior, there would be no children. Children are the construct of a Distinction. This distinction enables the designation of one side as a child, and the externalities of this black box enable a construction of what may be going on "inside". The distinction: children are not adults, adults are not children, replaces, so to speak, the (impossible) elucidation of this black box – and for this it is initially indifferent whether children are unknowable and uncontrollable according to old cybernetics (for lack of Requisite Variety) or according to new cybernetics (as self-referential, historical Machines). [⇒Machines Are Participating in Communication]

WEINSTEIN, Alexander, 2017. “Oomph-Making Machines”: An Interview with George Saunders. Pleiades: Literature in Context. 2017. Vol. 37, no. 1, p. 66–70. doi

[…] to deny the idea that works of fiction “represent” life in any sort of straightforward way. They are little self-referential machines that give off energy—but the relation of that energy to the reader’s actual life is mysterious. We feel that a good story “improves” us, or “makes us less lonely”—but the actual pleasure comes from the machine, and that machine is ornery. So in this model, a “dystopian” story is not saying that the author believes the universe is dystopian, but just that she believes she will find out the most interesting things about life by modeling it as being a dystopia. Kind of like: does a tango-composer believe life is a tango? No. He believes that immersion in that form will allow him to produce the most and/or more undeniable energy. That produced energy has something to do with life, and something to do with his vision of it—but that relation isn’t linear.

[…] Now, this gets a little complicated when taken with the stuff above about thinking of stories as “self-referential machines that give off energy.” Within that model, we just have something happen—could be “good,” could be “bad”—and then the grace component has to do with how well we “counter” (complicate/challenge) that initial energy. Say we have a story where a really sweet guy is completely sunny and generous and lives for others. (And such people do exist.) Well, in story-world, we’d want to ask: Are there any conditions under which those virtues might fail? The result might be something like “It’s a Wonderful Life.” George Bailey gets tested. Now, the particular view of the artist gets a chance to exert itself by the way in which it answers that question—in the case of the film, the auteur says that, when tested, George Bailey almost fails, but is saved. And we ask, “By what?” The answer contains the auteur’s essential vision of human good and evil. Which, in this case, is something like: “A good man, tested and on the brink of failing, is saved by a new understanding of what the world would have been like without him.” The answer also could have been otherwise—but this director’s view is essentially positive. George Bailey could have ignored Clarence and jumped off the bridge again, and so on. ... And that would have said something different about life—and arguably could have been just as true.