Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature: A Logical Proof and a Narrative

Abstract

In response to Franco Moretti's project of distant reading and other recent developments in the Digital Humanities, this article offers a proof that computers will never learn to read or write literature. The proof has three main components: (1) computer artificial intelligences (including machine-learning algorithms) run on the CPU's Arithmetic Logic Unit, which performs all of its computations using symbolic logic; (2) symbolic logic is incapable of causal reasoning; and (3) causal reasoning is required for processing the narrative components of literature, including plot, character, style, and voice. This proof is presented both in logical form and as a narrative. The narrative's beginning traces the origin of automated symbolic-logic literature processors back before modern computing to the 1930s Cambridge scholar I. A. Richards. The middle recounts how these processors became a basis of New Criticism, Cultural Poetics, and other twentieth-and twenty-first-century theories of literary "interpretation. " And the end explores how those theories' preference for symbolic logic over causal reasoning leaves them vulnerable to the same blind spot that early modern scientists detected in medieval universities: the inability to explain why literature (or anything else) works-and therefore the inability to comprehend how to use it.

A new method for training creativity: narrative as an alternative to divergent thinking

“…Fire, in other words, becomes a symbol (fire) that signals the necessary existence of smoke, rather than a material action that produces smoke. As a result, the physical processes involved in action are lost, deleting the causal mechanisms that makes narrative into narrative. The same contradiction recurs when computation attempts to generate narrative: it is forced to render causation as correlation, thereby making action symbolic, distorting physics into semiotics, and replicating the magical thinking of late medieval science 131,132 …”

“…The same contradiction recurs when computation attempts to generate narrative: it is forced to render causation as correlation, thereby making action symbolic, distorting physics into semiotics, and replicating the magical thinking of late medieval science 131,132 …”

“…The same contradiction recurs when computation attempts to generate narrative: it is forced to render causation as correlation, thereby making action symbolic, distorting physics into semiotics, and replicating the magical thinking of late medieval science. 131,132 In our day and age, when computation is the most well-articulated and pervasive analogy for reductionist models of human cognition, the claim that narrative is a mental act that cannot be computed may seem a prelude to invoking emergent properties, consciousness, or even the ineffable. But many mechanical problem-solving processes (e.g., sawing, hammering, wrenching, and screwing) are noncomputational, and the same goes for narrative cognition's process of thinking from causes to effects.…”