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[ by Charles Cameron — Escher, Borges, simulating the future, wargames, A Pattern Language, Sembl ]
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Ridiculous phrase, a library of windows. Unless you think, as I do, of books as windows onto different worlds, in which case it makes a whole lot of sense, and a decent library has more windows onto more profoundly different worlds than any physical room — and here we are getting into the territory of Jorge Luis Borges (links to Library of Babel) and Maurits Escher (image above).

And let me just state for the record that Godel Escher Bach could just as well have been Escher Carroll Borges, and that a comparison between the logics of Escher and Borges is one of the desiderata of our times.

That’s a Sembl move.

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Let’s expand the concept of window to include the sort of inter-worldview glimpse that Haaretz describes today here:

Last week, in a small beit midrash (study hall) named after Rabbi Meir Kahane in Jerusalem’s Shmuel Hanavi neighborhood, an emergency meeting was convened to discuss instigating freedom of religion and worship on the Temple Mount. It was a closed meeting attended by representatives of the Temple Institute, HaTenu’ah LeChinun HaMikdash (the Movement to Rebuild the Holy Temple) and the Temple Mount Faithful, as well as two representatives of Women for the Mikdash, and others. The activists met to try to understand how they could overcome the authorities, who they believe are plotting against them, and return to the Temple Mount. At this meeting, Haaretz was offered a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of the most ardent activists in the battle to Judaize the Temple Mount.

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Here’s the meat of the post, as yet uncooked. Back in 2005, but brought to my attention today by Rex Brynen at Paxsims, is this piece from Strategy Page:

After eight years of effort, and spending over $300 million, the U.S. Army has officially received its new wargame (WARSIM) for training battalion, brigade, division, and as big as you want to get, commanders, and their staffs. Now even the most elaborate commercial wargame would not get $300 million for development, and eight years to create the system. But wargames for professional soldiers have different requirements, and a troublesome Department of Defense bureaucracy to deal with. First, the requirements. Commercial wargames shield the player from all the boring stuff (support functions, especially logistics.) But professional wargames must deal with these support activities, because in a real war, these are the things commanders spend most of their time tending too. …

WARSIM covers a lot of complex activities that a commander must deal with to achieve battlefield success. Besides logistics, there’s intelligence. Trying to figure out what the enemy is up to is, next to logistics, the commanders most time consuming chore.

— which in turn was referenced by Michael Peck writing in a Kotaku piece today titled Why It’s So Hard to Make a Game Out of the 21st Century:

Let’s build a game. Let’s make it a strategy game. We will realistically simulate global politics in the 2030s. Perhaps a sort of Civ or Supreme Ruler 2020-type system.

Where shall we start? How about something easy, like choosing the nations in the game? It’s simple enough to consult an atlas. We’ll start with Britain…but wait! Scotland is on the brink of declaring independence from the United Kingdom. Should Britain be a single power, or should England and Scotland be depicted as a separate nation? What about Belgium splitting into Flemish and Walloon states? And these are old, established European nations. How will states like Syria and Nigeria look in two decades? It was only a bit over 20 years ago that the Soviet Union appeared to be a unshakeable superpower that controlled Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

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Let’s cook that meat, let’s make a meal of it.

Peck’s piece goes into many other ways in which predictive gaming isn’t terribly productive.

But it left me asking the question, what would I do with a game-sized budget, if my aim was to push military and intelligence towards greater insight.

And my answer would be to embed information in walls. In corridors…

To build windows at sparse and irregular intervals into the internal corridors that connect any given office in the Pentagon or three-letter agency — or my local preference (hush, I know it’s the Glorious Fourth tomorrow) MI-5 and -6 — through which analysts and decision makers can glimpse snippets of information.

Which can then fall into the deep well of memory.

It is deep within that well of half-forgotten knowledge, ST Coleridge tells us, that the “hooks-and-eyes of memory” link one thought with another to build a creative third.

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A wall, then. I would build a wall embedded with facts and fancies, maps and illustrations, graphs and stats, film clips and news clips, anecdotes and quotes — even, perhaps, tiny alcoves here and there with books free for the taking, music CDs, DVDs of movies, old, new, celebrated, strange…

And I would be constantly shifting and rearranging the “views” from my windows, so that what was seen yesterday would not be what would be seen tomorrow — yet with a powerful index of words, topics, themes, memes, image contents, names of actors, newscasters, authors and so forth, so that what was once seem and dimly recalled could be recaptured.

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The concept here is pretty much the exact opposite of having a huge black poster proclaiming Creativity Matters!

Don’t get me wrong, creativity does matter (get that poster and others here), but it “works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform” — and the way to entice it is to see things out of the corner of the eye…

The windows I’m looking for, therefore, offer glimpses you wouldn’t necessarily notice if you were deep in thought or conversation, and conversely, wouldn’t see twice and grow so familiarized to that they’d become irrelevant by repetition. They’d be glimpsed in passing, their esthetic would be that of Christopher Alexander’s Zen View, pattern 134 in his brilliant work — the closest we have to a Western I Ching — Pattern Language:

The idea, then, is to seed the memory with half-conscious concepts, patterns, facts and images, carefully selected and randomly presented — so that those hooks and eyes have the maximum chance of connecting some scrap of curious information with a pressing problem.

Which is how creativity tends to work.

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That way each corridor becomes a game-board — but it is in the analyst’s focused mind that the game is played and won.

What you’d get, in effect, would be community-wide, ongoing free-form gameplay in complete alignment with the web-based game we’re currently developing at Sembl. Games of this genre will also have powerful application in conflict resolution.

And peace.

[ by Charles Cameron — Timbuctu, Bamiyan, iconoclasm, dissolution of the monasteries, conceptual mapping, ethics, aesthetics, Venice ]
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Zen called the Ansar al-Din “The Taliban of the Mahgreb” today, pointing to an article on the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and that’s an equation of a sort: destruction of the Sufi shrines in Mali compares with and in some ways equates to destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

The similarity lies in the destruction by Islamic zealots of images considered idolatrous — and as Curtis reminded us, a Chritian expression of the same concept also motivated the Iconoclastic movement in Orthodoxy.

To some extent, the dissolution of the monasteries in Henry‘s England under Thomas Cromwell carries a similar resonance.

Which brings me to two tweets I received in my Twitterfeed today.

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Here’s Tweet Number One, as Dr Seuss might have said:

RT @Ed_Husain: A Danish cartoonist upsets us Muslims, but Sufi shrines attacked in Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Iraq. No similar outcry.

— Aaron Y. Zelin (@azelin) July 3, 2012

And Tweet Number Two:

Interesting it is only when treasures are destroyed – rather than lives, people & families – that northern Mali moved to the front pages

— Ian Birrell (@ianbirrell) July 3, 2012

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Between the two of them, and with an eye to Zen’s remark, I get the idea that there’s a style of mental mapping that I can just about see out of the corner of my eye — a mapping that would interest me if I could figure out more about how to take it from being implicit and verbal and make it graphical and visible.

In this mapping, we would lay out the manner in which things presumed equal are treated differently.

I suspect the mapping might initially look something like the graphic at the head of this post — which I’ve borrowed from the materials on an interesting “Co-Revolutionary War Game” devised by Alidade in 2003 or thereabouts.

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Arguably the publication of blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet upsets many Muslims more than does the destruction of Sufi shrines. Likewise, the publication of Salman Rushdie‘s Satanic Verses upsets many Muslims more than does the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. The burning of Qur’ans seems to upset many Afghans more than the deaths of nine Afghan children… And likewise, the loss of human lives in Mali seemingly pales in comparison to the loss of the Timbuctu shrines of saints in the eyes of the western press.

Throw in the Bamiyan Buddhas, and you have a first cluster of data-points that might be mapped in terms of public outrage — Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, cultural, political. the peaks and valleys will differ according to the perspectives chosen, and mapping the differences too would be of considerable interest.

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The question has become something of a classic among ethicists, I believe: whether to rescue an unknown human child — who may if saved, as they say, grow into a Mao or a Michelangelo — or a great masterpiece of painting, if both are swirling past you in the same Venetian flood…

My instinct is with the child, but oh! — my temptation goes towards the painting…

[ by Charles Cameron — exploring a possible parallel between the interpretation of prophecies and the simulation of irregular operations ]
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Well, not exactly, but you get the drift…

We seem to have been in the business of prophesying or predicting the future, especially with regard to warfare, for millennia. Wargaming and scenario planning are at least arguably just the latest souped-up, hi-tech versions of an age-old trade…

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The other day on Zenpundit, I quoted Bernard McGinn, the dean of apocalyptic studies, contrasting Martin Luther‘s approach to interpreting Revelation with that of such earlier eschatologists as Joachim of Fiore:

Earlier interpreters, such as Joachim (but not Augustine), had also claimed to find a consonance between Revelation’s prophecies and the events of Church history, but they had begun with Scripture and used it as a key to unlock history. Paradoxically, Luther, the great champion of the biblical word, claimed that history enabled him to make sense of Revelation…

Translating that into contemporary terms – does the believer scour the news media in search of evidence of “where we are” in an already defined end times scenario based on Revelation, or search Revelation to find a way to make sense of current events and breaking news?

That may seem a tricky question, and the empirical answer may be that believers shift back and forth between scripture and news, constantly adjusting their interpretation of each to fit the other.

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And yet there are some issues where the question comes more sharply into focus. If the 1948 creation of the State of Israel is a significant marker in the prophetic timeline –- as it is both for many Christian readers of apocalyptic literature and for many Muslims too -– then certain other things must happen.

Thus J. Daniel Hays and colleagues write in the Dictionary of Biblical Prophecy and End Times (Zondervan, 2009):

One of the more popular views among Christians in the United States and Canada is that the creation of the modern state of Israel is a literal fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. In this view, a literal understanding of the Old Testament prophecies of the end times demands a physical state of Israel in Palestine; thus the creation of this state after hundreds of years is seen not only as a fulfillment, but as a sign that the end times are drawing near.

Many writers, primarily classic dispensationalists, state that with the formation of modern Israel, the world political stage is set for the unfolding of end-time events (see DISPENSATIONALISM, CLASSICAL). Some early writers went so far as to argue that when Israel was created in 1948, an end-times “time clock” began that would be fulfilled within one generation. They derived this understanding primarily from Mark 13:30, where after speaking of the end times, Jesus stated that “this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened.” Some writers believed that the end would come before 1988, or forty years (ie, one generation) after 1948.

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In line with this, Hal Lindsey discusses the fig tree parable of Matthew 24.32-34 in his best-selling Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970:

Now learn the parable from the fig tree: when its branch has already become tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near; so, you too, when you see all these things, recognize that He is near, right at the door. Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.

Lindsey then writes:

But the most important sign in Matthew has to be the restoration of the Jews to the land in the rebirth of Israel… When the Jewish people, after nearly 2,000 years of exile, under relentless persecutiomn, became a nation again on 14 May 1948 the “fig tree” put forth its first leaves.

Jesus said that this would indicate that He was “at the door,” ready to return. Then He said, “Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matthew 24:34 NASB).

What generation? Obviously, in context, the generation that would see the signs – chief among them the rebirth of Israel. A generation in the Bible is something like forty years. If this is a correct deduction, then within forty years or so of 1948, all these things could take place…

Within forty years or so of 1948 — and now it’s 2012.

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Indeed, one of Lindsey’s readers quoted Lindsey’s Late Great Plan Earth in his own book, The Day of Wrath, published at the tun of the millennium in 2000:

The large Jewish presence in Palestine which has not been seen in two thousand years. Hal Lindsey says in The Late Great Planet Earth that before the establishment of the State of Israel none of the future events were clearly understood, but now that that has occurred, the countdown has begun for the occurrence of the indicator events connected to all of the types of prophecy, and on the basis of the prophecies, the entire world will focus on the middle-east, and especially Israel in the last days.

That reader was Sheikh Safar al-Hawali — a writer known to bin Laden, who had read at least one of his earlier books — and in The Day of Wrath al-Hawali, using techniques of scriptural interpretation he borrowed from Hal Lindsey, calculated that the victorious armies of the jihad would re-take Jerusalem in 2012.

Which would fit nicely with a certain hadith — al-Hawali does not mention it — which describes a victorious army sweeping from Khorasan to Jerusalem under black banners …

Happily, both authors are wise enough to note that their own scriptures declare that “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone” (Matthew 24.36) and “Verily the knowledge of the Hour is with Allah alone” (Qur’an 31.34).

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And all this is what sprang to mind, when I read NDU CASL roundtable and talk in Rex Bynum Rex Brynen‘s fine PAXsims blog today.

Perhaps that’s not so surprising: the human mind is still the human mind, still driven by what al-Hawali calls the “innate yearning of mankind to unveil the future”.

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Bynum Brynen’s post describes Mike Markowitz of the Center for Naval Analyses talking about some research CNA had been doing into wargaming “irregular operations” and notes:

In his presentation, Mike drew a distinction at one point between simulation “modeling” and “representation,” the former more appropriate for the physics of kinetic operations, while the latter highlights the importance of narrative (as well as the inherent “fuzziness” of diplomatic, social, and economic factors — especially in irregular warfare). A large part of Joe’s presentation also touched upon the challenge of validating simulations of insurgency with their substantial DIME (Diplomatic/ Information/Military/Economic) or PMESII (Political/Military/Economic/Social/Infrastructure/ Information) elements.

We’re getting pretty close to the qualitative modeling or mapping of thoughts here, which interests me a great deal as the designer of “thinking games” — so Bynum Brynen definitely had my attention here.

But it was his next point that seemed to me to offer a close parallel to Bernard McGinn’s contrast between Joachim’s and Luther’s methods of interpreting Revelation:

With regard to gaming COIN, then, one is faced with a challenge. Does one build dynamics into the game that reflect doctrinal assumptions about the way the world works? Or does one build a model of the world and then see how doctrine (or alternative doctrinal approaches) work, thereby encouraging original, critical thinking? In the former case, how does one avoid building a simulation that confirms existing approaches because it is, in essence, biased from the outset to do so? In the latter case, where does one derive that alternative model from?

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Obviously, in both cases it’s best to find a shoe that fits the foot, rather than to shoe-horn a foot into a shoe that really doesn’t fit it.

But the same question needs to be answered in each case: which is to be the shoe, and which the foot?