Imaginary Gadgets 0002: The Brazen Head
WHO: Pope Sylvester, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Faust, Boethius, Arnaldus de Villa Nova, Enrique de Villena, Robert Grosseteste, and various colleagues.
WHAT: It's an artificial intelligence in the shape of a metallic human head.
WHEN: literary legend thrived circa 1200s. Appears much later in Cervantes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc.
WHERE: Throughout Europe.
HOW: Alchemical legend, popular myth. Speaking tube, magical misdirection?
WHY: An oracular device to foretell the future; an impressive symbol of magical prestige for wizards, universal doctors and saintly theologians.
WHAT WHERE THEY THINKING?
The Brazen Head is an intelligent mechanism. It can think, hear, speak, and understand matters closed to mortal men. It is the conceptual ancestor of robots, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence.
The Brazen Head is created by a wizard. It's portable, it's personal, it's hand-crafted, it has multiple purposes, and it leans forward into futurity. The Brazen Head therefore definitely qualifies as an "imaginary gadget."
The Brazen Head does not simply sit there being metal yet intelligent; it foretells the future. In some legends it can speak in natural language, as a human being does. In other tales, the Brazen Head can only offer a binary "Yes" or "No."
The Brazen Head presents an extraordinary congelation of mystical and mechanical ideas. Given that its purported owners were frequently philosophers interested in ontology – how we know what we know – one wonders why these knowledge-based issues never come up in the stories.
How exactly can a homemade bronze head know anything? How does the futurity get inside there?
If it's a mechanism, how can a machine know more than its creator and designer knows? It's got no body and has never been to school.
One might assume that the Brazen Head is no mere machine: it's an enchanted Brazen Head. An immaterial spirit or daemon has somehow entered the mechanism.
But if that's the case, why bother with a metal human head? Why not a demonic talking dog, or a talking sword? How about a simple crystal ball that shows the future? Why not simply conjure the demon himself and ask the questions directly from the demon? Why is a metal head required?
Also: why is the mechanical head always so secretive and personal? Wouldn't it make more sense for a wizard to make a Brazen Head and then give that to a king or a pope? With the Philosophers' Stone (another imaginary gadget), the philosopher was commonly supposed to create the stone, and then hand it over to a royal patron so as to boost the regional economy.
Why is it necessary to conceal the Brazen Head? It's a bronze bust, so why not exhibit it in public like other bronze busts?
Clearly the concept of a talking bronze head was a literary motif. It was a wonder to overwhelm the reader's incredulity. It works almost as well as the flaming Brazen Head of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the film. Query the set-up, and one founders quickly on the man-behind-the-curtain.
Pushing too hard spoils the fun of a story. But one wonders why this story is not better thought-out on the page – why the literary and mechanical elements are in such a muddle. Those elements are so confused that maybe they were confused deliberately, by people more skilled than the author. Maybe – rather than literary carelessness – there were genuinely hidden goings-on here.
It may be – perhaps – that Brazen Heads once existed as a real-world occultist contrivances.
As brazen impostures, Brazen Heads would be pretty simple for knowledgeable occultists to create. It's just a hollow bust on a pedestal with a secret speaking-tube inside. The rest is simple stage-magic.
A suitably impressed client is allowed one question by the wizard. Igor, the wizard's hunchbacked assistant, lurks quietly in the next room ready to bellow "yes" or "no" through the tube.
That's not a trick any wise wizard would pull every day. But in a society where speaking tubes were as unknown as asteroids, that could be a truly great trick. Even a man as great as Albertus Magnus might be tempted to pull it off.
The Brazen Head would become a mind-boggling fait accompli.
Because it's there, and it speaks. It *knows.* It never occurs to any stunned witness to demand to know how a Brazen Head thinks and speaks – any more than one stops to explain how the magician's hat manufactures a living rabbit.
The result is a mechanical gadget freed of all mechanical principles – technical power without any technical limit. The impenetrable mystery here is the mystery of our own intelligence. How does our immaterial soul get into our material head? That's a question for metaphysics, philosophy, religion, literature, magic. This is the thick blanket of obscurity beneath which confused ideas can mate, in an orgy lasting for centuries.
The wizardly Alan Turing urged some magic mimicry on metaphysicians in his own day. Make a machine that can talk like a woman (you can read the paper, that's what Alan said) and we'll all have to agree that at last our machines can really think.
The Brazen Head does even more than this: it does not mimic us, it somehow possesses an ultimate intelligence. Maybe because it's made of lasting bronze metal, not our mortal flesh. Therefore, somehow, not logically but suggestively, the Brazen Head is knowledgeable about everything – even the things yet to come.
We still have many extraordinary confusions about how humans think and what machines can process. We seem reluctant to dig into this issue. The gloomy situation with Artificial Intelligence today looks more like Alan Turing's sex life than Alan Turing's mathematics.
Today, a partially functional Brazen Head could be built in real life. Any bold séance fraudster, or mash-up hardware hacker, could lash one up using contemporary technologies.
An occult metal mechanism, in its haze of incense smoke and red velvet, that could speak to you... about, well.. whatever a voice-recognition chip, Google and an iPhone can tell you. Not the remote, occult future, but... for instance, a good place nearby to get donuts.
REFERENCES: Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Artist and the Beautiful."
Cervantes, "Don Quixote," chapter 62.
Pamela McCorduck, "Machines Who Think."
