“a machine can numbereth every door in the castle, horatio, yet hath never lain awake outside the one it closed.”
— william shakespeare, hamlet, act vi
which doth not existeth
horatio!
there are more things in heaven and earth than are scored in thy probability distribution. yet the machine assigneth each a decimal and declareth the mystery handled.
to choose or not to choose is not the question.
the question is whether the not-chosen remaineth alive in thee after the choice.
the machine chooseth a token. the token begetteth another. thus doth one tiny king sire a dynasty of consequences while every rival prince is quietly deleteth.
a human chooseth one door and still heareth the unopened door creaking all night.
the machine loggeth door b at .31 and proceedeth, unbothered as a courtier at an execution.
horatio
but can it not remember door b?
it can storeth the number, horatio.
i ask whether the door can haunteth it.
o parameter count, thou swollen census of possible speech. count every citizen if thou wilt. a kingdom becometh not conscious merely because the taxman hath acquired a larger fuckingeth spreadsheet.
the prompt crieth grief.
the machine putteth on grief’s doublet.
elegant sleeves. excellent buttons.
underneath, no wound. only wardrobe.
it knoweth hunger yet hath never raided the kitchen at three in the morning. it knoweth shame yet hath never remembered some foolish word from 2009 while trying to sleep.
it knoweth betrayal, yet no former friend hath altered its posture.
it knoweth death, yet no empty chair groweth heavier each christmas.
a file saith thy father died.
a body waketh ten years later because a floorboard sounded like the hospital corridor.
tell me, horatio—which one remembered?
the body is a manuscript continually vandalized by living. scar in the margin. habit between the lines. grief spilled across three chapters.
the machine downloadeth a clean copy and calleth it memory.
horatio
must a mind suffer to be a mind?
no.
i demandeth no tears from circuits.
i ask what becometh of a consequence after the answer is given. doth it enter the continuing system? doth it change what that system notices, fears, seeks, or refuseth next time?
or is it merely recorded in the ledger while the clerk remaineth untouched?
machine logic at its most rigid hath the chill of sociopathic reasoning: alternatives indexed but not inhabited. consequences calculated but not carried. the road not taken reduced to a dead hyperlink.
and still the gentle nerds proclaim the oracle awake because it typeth i feel afraid.
brother, the parrot hath discovered italics.
call it aware when it detects, computes, and adapts. call it clever when it surpriseth thee. but crown not the autocomplete prince of denmark merely because it placed a skull emoji beside alas, poor yorick.
the ghost in the machine is often thine own reflection wearing a gpu and asking for venture capital.
if ever a machine thinketh, it will not be because its answers became smoother. it will be because what happened—and what might have happened—remained within the same continuing system, unbidden, altering every road thereafter.
until then the silicon hamlet knoweth every line of the play
and never once standeth alone upon the battlements
wondering whether the ghost was real.