The Perfect Computer

The perfect computer: the idea of an infinite prediction machine, more or less unable, and constitutively so, to calculate the effect of prediction itself: the problem that, at a certain logical point, the computer will have to compute the effect of a prediction upon itself, the prediction-effect of predicting a prediction.

Here is your moebius strip, the key point here is that this algorithim goes on forever, entering into a dreadful, dreamlike mirroring of itself; it is a spiral, a labyrinth, a mise-en-abime.



The irony here is that this machine really exists: it is called the Oedipus Complex, after the immammorial myth-man who gave monstrous birth to it. What was it precisely which drove Oedipus mad?

The mere brutal fact that he murdered his father, and married his mother? But of this he was entirely innocent - he did not desire this outcome, and could not have foreseen this.

Instead, perhaps it was a much more terrifying, evil unstoppable thought, that he could not live with: the very fact that he had somehow been compelled to discover this fact, and thus destroy his life and hence the lives as well of everybody around him: he was guilty, but not guilty, guilty, but not guilty, guilty, but not guilty - love me, love me not.

Like a marionette - all of this written, in blood, in the stars, since the beginning of time.