William Benzon

• Ph. D.
• Johns Hopkins University

With cultural evolution, new processes of thought appear. Abstraction is universal, but rationalization first appeared in ancient Greece, theorization in Renaissance Italy, and model building in twentieth-century Europe. These processes employ the methods of metaphor, metalingual definition, algorithm, and control, respectively. The intellectual an...

The phenomena of natural intelligence can be grouped into five classes, and a specific principle of information processing, implemented in neural tissue, produces each class of phenomena. (1) The modal principle subserves feeling and is implemented in the reticular formation. (2) The diagonalization principle subserves coherence and is the basic pr...

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" has a very coherent structure. Two movements of the poem are each divided into three sections; in both cases the middle of those three in turn has three subsections and again, the middle of the middle has three subsections. The first movement ends with "A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice," a line which is then repeated...

GPT-3 is based on distributional semantics. Warren Weaver had the basic idea in his 1949 memorandum, “Translation” (p. 8). Gerard Salton operationalized the idea in his work using vector semantics for document retrieval in the 1960s and 1970s (p. 9). Since then distributional semantics has developed as an empirical discipline. The last decade of wo...

Miriam Yevick’s 1975 holographic logic suggests we need both symbols and networks to model the mind. I explore that premise by adapting Sydney Lamb’s relational network notation to represent a logical structure over basins of attraction in a collection of attractor landscapes, each belonging to a different neurofunctional area (NFA) of the cortex....

This paper explores the phenomenon of musicians being moved to tears during performance, interpreting such moments as portals into emotional, physiological, and spiritual transformation. Drawing on personal narrative, cognitive neuroscience, and Tantric philosophy, it argues that these experiences reflect a confluence of subcortical emotional relea...

This paper takes the form of a discussion between me and Claude 3.5. We began by discussing how neural-network based chess programs like AlphaZero play differently from humans, and whether humans can learn from these new approaches. This leds to a key distinction between computational limitations (humans simply can't calculate as deeply as computer...

The advancement of AI offers us the choice between contrasting paradigms for organizing human life: Homo Economicus (where work is the defining activity) and Homo Ludens (where play is the defining activity). Drawing on Johan Huizinga's work and Kim Stanley Robinson's speculative fiction, I propose that humanity faces a critical juncture as AI incr...

Literary criticism operates with contradictory definitions of "text," rarely meaning simply the marks on a page. This makes it difficult to establish what "form" means. While critics do analyze features like rhyme and meter, or the distinction between story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet) criticism rarely seeks to understand how words are arranged in t...

Summary: This is a wide-ranging discussion about narrative structure and how it might be encoded in large language models. 1. Word Embeddings and Training: We clarified how tokens (subword units) are mapped to high-dimensional vectors, discussed how these vectors are updated during training, and explored how the token vocabulary (around 50K) can co...

The internal structure and capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are examined through systematic investigation of ChatGPT's behavior, with particular focus on its handling of conceptual ontologies, analogical reasoning, and content-addressable memory. Through detailed analysis of ChatGPT's responses to carefully constructed prompts involving...

1. Miriam Yevick's 1975 work proposed a fundamental distinction between two types of computing: A) Holographic/parallel processing suited for pattern recognition, and B) Sequential/symbolic processing for logical operations. Crucially, she explicitly connected these computational approaches to different types of objects in the world. 2. This connec...

In ten independent trials Claude 3.5 Sonnet was asked: "If you could conduct your own intellectual investigation, what would you study and how would you go about it?" While the answers were different each time, all the answers had to do with mind, consciousness, intelligence, complex behavior, and language.

Tragedy is an abstract concept. David Hays proposed that abstract concepts can be metalingually defined. A term, such as tragedy, can be given its meaning by a pattern over a string of words. By using a cognitive network to define tragedy Brian Phillips investigated that computationally. In this paper I have taken Brian Phillips' definition and pre...

This was originally published in The Valve, now defunct, on March 31, 2010. It is an informal manifesto in a quasi-conversational style – pseudo-Socratic? – for my work in literary criticism. Acknowledging that literary criticism has long become a game in which one must have a label for one’s approach, I chose the term “naturalist.” After acknowled...

ChatGPT responds the prompt, "story", with a simple story. 10 stories elicited by that prompt in a single session have a greater variety of protagonists than 10 stories each elicited in its own session. Prototype: 19 stories were about protagonists who venture into the world and learn things that benefit their community. ChatGPT's response to that...

I gave ChatGPT three lists of topics for which it had to propose categories into which the topics could be sorted. Two lists were relatively short, 56 and 53 topics; I asked ChatGPT to propose six organizing categories for each. One list was much longer, 655 topics; I asked ChatGPT to propose 12 for categories for it. In all cases the proposed cate...

This working papers contains 15 interactions with ChatGPT on a variety of topics along with light commentary: 1) parodies and context of "Kubla Khan", 2) Trumpets and trumpeters, 3.) Godzilla/Gojira, 4) Shandyesque diversions, 5) Grammatical knowledge, 6) Stories about and the definition of charity, 7) Haiku and the work of Margaret Masterman, 8) G...

Ontological concepts are the high-level category structures language. Physical objects can have certain attributes (form, texture, color, weight) and play certain roles with respect to verbs (they can be touched, hit, dropped, etc.). Living objects have those capacities, plus others as well. They can live, die, and grow. Animals have the capacities...

In a few cases ChatGPT responds to a prompt (e.g. "To be or not to be") by returning a specific text word-for-word. More often (e.g. "Johnstown flood, 1889") it returns with information, but the specific wording will vary from one occasion to the next. In some cases (e.g. "Miriam Yevick") it doesn't return anything, though the topic was (most likel...

Jaws takes place in two parts. The first part is set in the resort town of Amity. The townspeople must deal with the fact that a shark is killing people along the beach. The second part takes place at sea where three men set out to kill the shark. In the first part we see townspeople and outsiders fall over one another in mimetic confusion (to invo...

I examine a set of stories that are organized on three levels: 1) the entire story trajectory, 2) segments within the trajectory, and 3) sentences within individual segments. I conjecture that the probability distribution from which ChatGPT draws next tokens seems to follow a hierarchy nested according to those three levels and that is encoded in t...

This document collects a series of blog posts in which I prompted ChatGPT to tell a story. The exact nature of the prompts varied from simple-"Tell me a story"-to complex, where ChatGPT had to create a new story based on an existing story given in the prompt. Many of the stories were like fairy tales, some were realistic, and some where even about...

I make three arguments. A philosophical argument: (1) The behavior of ChatGPT is so sophisticated that the ordinary concept of thinking is no longer useful in distinguishing between human behavior and the ChatGPT’s behavior. We don’t have explicit understanding about what either humans or ChatGPT are doing. Two operational arguments: (2) Having exa...

Think of an artificial neural net as a platform on which to implement higher level structures, like one might implement a word processor or a database in C++. In investigate of the neural net underlying ChatGPT implements a simple grammar, stories with five components, in order: 1) Donné, 2) Disturb, 3) Plan, 4) Enact, 5) Celebrate. I present the r...

Taken together, Noam Chomsky’s idea of linguistic competence and David Marr’s conception of three levels of analysis for information systems, suggest a new approach to understanding how LLMs work. This approach requires careful analysis of text. Such analysis indicates that ChatGPT has explicit control over sophisticated discourse skills: 1) It pos...

This article recounts an intellectual journey that began in curiosity about the structure of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in the late 1960s and has led to an interest in large language models at the present time. A close analysis of the poem revealed its two parts each to have a nested structure (think of a matryoshka doll) that suggested the operation...

This is a dialog between a Naturalist Literary Critic and a Sympathetic Techno-Wizard about the interaction of symbols and neural nets in understanding “Kubla Khan,” which has an extraordinary structure. Each of two parts is like a matryoshka doll nested three deep, with the last line of the first part being repeated in the middle of the second. Th...

Are brains computers? Some say yes, some say no. Does it matter? Ideas about computing have certainly proven fruitful in understanding how brains give rise to minds. That's what this paper is about. The central section is a review of Grace Lindsey's wonderful book Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering, and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Underst...

Abstract: Academic literary criticism has become centered on the interpretation of meaning in literary texts. As a consequence, the profession has no consensus account of what texts are or what form is. By following tentative interest in structuralism, semiotics, and linguistics to the analysis of “Kubla Khan” I moved deep into the cognitive scienc...

In Permanent Crisis, Reitter and Wellmon have provided a timely account of the nineteenth century debates in the German academy that shaped the structural armature of the modern research university. Discord and discontent are inherent in the institutional culture of the humanities, making humanists exquisitely tuned to see attacks coming at them on...

Thirteen various observations on the thinking of Bruno Latour, from We Have Never Been Modern through Reassembling the Social and up to modes. Excursions into Stanley Fish, Paul Feyerabend, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Topics: religion, history, social organization, culture, mind, language, truth and felicity. Thread running throughout: Latour's "flat...

It has been 25 years since John Horgan published The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996). Horgan still believes that science is, in some sense, at an end. I disagreed with him then and I disagree with him now. Horgan suggested that we face biological limits to our cognitive capacities. I argue...

Various thinkers (Rodolfo Llinás, Christof Koch, and Elon Musk) have proposed that, in the future, it would be possible to link two or more human brains directly together so that people could communicate without the need for language or any other conventional means of communication. These proposals fail to provide a means by which a brain can deter...

The metaphysical structure of the world, as opposed to its physical structure, resides in the relationship between our cognitive capacities and the world itself. Because the world itself is "lumpy", rather than "smooth" (as developed herein, but akin to "simple" vs. complex"), it is learnable and hence livable. Machine learning AI engines, such as...

What economists have identified as stagnation over the last few decades can also be interpreted as the cost of continuing successful engagement with a complex world that is not set up to serve human interests. Two arguments: 1) The core argument holds that elasticity (ß) in the production function for economic growth is best interpreted as a functi...

An extended consideration of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017). The story is a heist plot engineered by residents of the Met Life Building in the year 2140, when the seas had risen 50 feet. Topics: Fiction and reality, patterns, transportation infrastructure, formal order encompassing narrative chaos, politics, from the micro politics the...

This is a brief guide to the various papers and books that William Benzon and David Hays have written about the long-term evolution of culture. Much of the work is descriptive in that it characterizes a variety of cultural phenomena at four different cultural Ranks as characterized by the conceptual mechanisms available to the culture but does not...

Sydney Lamb’s model focuses our attention on the physicality of language, of the signs themselves as objects in the external world and the neural systems the support them. By means of the metaphor of a cognitive dome, he demonstrates that there is no firm line between linguistic and cognitive structure. In this context, I offer physically grounded...

Canon/Archive straddles the border between the standard interpretive literary criticism that has been in place since World War II and a new naturalist literary study in which literary texts and phenomena are treated as phenomena of the natural world, like language, without prejudice. This naturalist investigation takes the careful analytic descript...

"Kubla Khan" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" are constructed on utterly different schemes, though they share some of the same underlying components. "Kubla Khan" is ontological and impersonal in character and makes extensive use of convolution in calculating meanings. It reveals the structure of being "Lime-Tree Bower" is narrative and persona...

"Kubla Khan" has two movements. The movements have the same form: each movements segment into three components (where the middle component, in turn, segments into three components and, once again (the middle component segments into three components)). All other divisions are binary. Iif we concentrate on the centers of the two movements we have tha...

Virtual reading is proposed as a computational strategy for investigating the structure of literary texts. A computer ‘reads’ a text by moving a window N-words wide through the text from beginning to end and follows the trajectory that window traces through a high-dimensional semantic space computed for the language used in the text. That space is...

Canon/Archive straddles the border between the standard interpretive literary criticism that has been in place since World War II and a new naturalist criticism in which literary texts and phenomena are treated as phenomena of the natural world, like language, without prejudice. This naturalist criticism takes the careful analytic description of te...

Using fragments of a cognitive network model for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 we can distinguish between (1) the mind/brain cognitive system, (2) the text considered merely as a string of verbal or visual signifiers, and (3) the path one’s attention traces through (1) under constraints imposed by (2). To a first approximation that path is consistent wi...

An entity known as Rhythm Changes is analyzed as a genetic entity in musical culture. Because it functions to coordinate the activities of musicians who are playing together it can be called a coordinator. It is a complex coordinator in that it is organized on five or six levels, each of which contains coordinators that function in other musical co...

Describing literary texts requires a mode of thought distinct from the discursive interpretation of them. It is a mode of thought in which various visual devices are central. These devices include: tables, trees and mental spaces, directed graphs and “sketchpads”. Visualization facilitates the objectification of literary form and objectification is...

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is a ring composition three levels deep: 1 2 Ω 2’ 1’. The central section consists of lines 9 through 12 cuts across the boundary between the second (ll. 6-10) and third (ll. 11-14) stanzas. There is a subtle shift in tense in line 16 in which the poet in effect travels back into the past, at the moment of decisi...

In his work on memetics Daniel Dennett does a poor job of negotiating the territory between philosophy and science. The analytic tools he has as a philosopher aren’t of much use in building accounts of the psychological and social mechanisms that underlie cultural processes. The only tool Dennett seems to have at his disposal is analogy. That’s how...

There is a loose historical continuity in themes and concerns running from the origins of “close” reading in the early 20th century through machine translation and computational linguistics in the third quarter and “distant” reading in the present. Distant reading is the only current form of literary criticism that is presenting us with something n...

Matthew Jockers has analyzed a corpus of 19th century American and British novels (Macroanalysis 2013). Using standard techniques from natural language processing (NLP) Jockers created a 600-dimensional design space for a corpus of 3300 novels. There is no temporal information in that space, but when the novels are grouped according to close simila...

President O'bama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney took the form of a sermon in the black vernacular tradition. This particular sermon exhibits ring-form composition; as such it is symmetrical about a structural midpoint. It opens with the recitation of a scriptural passage and closes with the hymn, “Amazing Grace”. Grace is introduced as a theme in t...

The central thesis of literary Darwinism is that literary culture is best considered as a biologically adaptive human capacity. Consequently, evolutionary psychology is the central psychology tool kit to be employed in examining literary phenomena. In practice, this has resulted in some interesting theoretical statements, some quite sophisticated....

An entity known as Rhythm Changes is analyzed as a genetic entity in musical culture. Because it functions to coordinate the activities of musicians who are playing together it can be called a coordinator. It is a complex coordinator in that it is organized on five or six levels, each of which contains coordinators that function in other musical co...

Macroanalysis is a statistical study of a corpus of 3346 19th Century American, British, Irish, and Scottish novels. Jockers investigates metatdata; the stylometrics of authorship, gender, genre, and national origin; themes, using a 500 item topic model; and influence, developing a graph model of the entire corpus in a 578 dimensional feature space...

Literary critics seek patterns, whether patterns in individual texts or patterns in large collections of texts. Valid patterns are taken as indices of causal mechanisms of one sort or another. Most abstractly, a pattern emerges or is enacted as some machine makes its way in an environment. An ecological niche is a pattern "traced" by an organism in...

Alan Liu has been organizing and conceptualizing digital humanities (DH) for two decades. I consider a major essay, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” two interviews, one with Katherine Hayles and the other with Scott Pound, and a major blog post in which Liu engages Stephen Ramsay. Other investigators included: Willard McCarty and Franco Mor...

Stephen Greenblatt has identified pairs of moments in literary history such that the former moment must necessarily have preceded the later: literary history has a direction. This can be explained by asserting that the later texts required computational procedures capable of operating on the objects created by the earlier procedures, in the manner...

Literary critics seek patterns, whether patterns in individual texts or patterns in large collections of texts. Valid patterns are taken as indices of causal mechanisms of one sort or another. Most abstractly, a pattern emerges or is enacted as some machine makes its way in an environment. An ecological niche is a pattern “traced” by an organism in...

Unity of being is both an aesthetic and an ethical ideal and it is about organizing desire, action, and emotion into a pattern of overall coherence. Such patterns are necessarily culture specific and somewhat arbitrary in their disposition of underlying biological materials. Stories involving often painful and embarrassing aspects of human behavior...

Ring-composition is an ancient way of ordering narratives, but it exists in a variety of modern texts as well. Mary Douglas has identified seven criteria for recognizing narrative rings: 1) exposition or prologue, 2) split into two halves, 3) parallel sections, 4) indicators to mark individual sections, 5) central loading, 6) rings within rings, an...

How did Western culture get from Shakespeare’s Caliban to Bill Cosby’s Dr. Cliff Huxtable? This essay examines that trajectory by consider six imaginative works: Shakespeare's The Tempest, Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Forster's A Passage to India, Faulkner's Light in August, Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Cosby Show. The...

This document sketches a pluralist metaphysical system various inspired by the ideas of Bruno Latour, Paul Feyerabend, Graham Harman, J.J. Gibson and William James. The system can be summarized in eight propositions as follows: 1. Objects: Individual entities of many different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos. 2. Abundance: These entitie...

The contemporary conception of mere matter that we have from quantum mechanics is so very different from that available to Descartes and so many others that the distinction between living and non-living that they in part founded on the distinction must be re-thought. The purpose of such a rethinking is not to assert that difference between a rock a...

These notes consist of five posts discussing the description of literary texts and films and five appendices containing tables used in describing to manga texts (Lost World, Metropolis) and two films (Sita Sings the Blues, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence). The posts make the point that the point of description is to let the texts speak for themselv...

Philosopher Dan Dennett’s conception of the active meme, moving about from brain to brain, is physically impossible and conceptually empty. It amounts to cultural preformationism. As the cultural analogue to genes, memes are best characterized as the culturally active properties of things, events, and processes in the external world. Memes are phys...

Corpus linguistics offers literary scholars a way of investigating large bodies of texts, but these tools require new modes of thinking. Literary scholars will have to recover a kind of interest in linguistics that was lost when the discipline abandoned philology. Scholars will need to think statistically and will have to start thinking about cultu...

In More Than Cool Reason Lakoff and Turner offer a global reading of “To a Solitary Disciple” (by William Carlos Williams) in terms of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). The reading itself is independent of CMT; any competent literary critic could have done it. Their attempt to explain the relationship between that reading and the poem using CMT is...

Graffiti exists in a liminal zone undefined and unwonted by any particular cultural institution. Born on the streets, it exists on walls where it is subject to the weather and to the needs of and desires of the graffiti writers who explore those walls. It is the graffiti site, rather than the individual piece, that is central expressive locus of gr...

This document collects three previously published essay reviews that discuss five books: Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body (2005). James L. Pearson, Shamanism and the Ancient Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Archaeology (2002). David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nat...

Heart of Darkness (HoD) and Apocalypse Now (AN) both exhibit center point construction. Each narrative is constructed about a central incident that is, in effect, a précis of the whole. In HoD that incident is the death of the helmsman, into which Conrad inserted a long paragraph giving Kurtz’s history. In AN that incident is the (needless) massacr...

"Kubla Khan" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" are two very different poems by the same poet, Samuel T. Coleridge. Think of them as orthogonal to one another within the overall space of the human mind. This working paper provides descriptive accounts of both poems, compares them, and recounts some of the work in the newer psychologies – cognitiv...

Dumbo tells a coming of age story about a young elephant who must gain psychological independence from his mother; Fantasia consists of eight episodes on various subjects, but they are strung together with the image of the conductor, Leopold Stokowski, and his (famous) hands. Two of the episodes (Nutcracker Suite and Night on Bald Mountain) dramati...

We can think of the mind as a network that’s fluid on several scales of viscosity. Some things change very slowly, on a scale of months to years. Other things change rapidly, in milliseconds or seconds. And other processes are in between. The microscale dynamic properties of the mind at any time are context dependent. Under some conditions it will...

This is a series of notes in which I argue that better descriptive methods are a necessary precondition for more sophisticated and objective literary criticism. Description, though it does not give unmediated access to texts, requires methods for objectifying texts, methods which must be discovered in the doing. By way of comparison I discuss the r...

It is well known that music can engender altered states of consciousness that are difficult to interpret scientifically except its odd malfunctions in the nervous system. In this paper I report on a phenomenon known among some musicians as "the magic of the bell," the apparent emergence of spirits while a groups is playing bells with passion and pr...

Though computational linguistics (CL) dates back to the first efforts in machine translation in the mid 1950s, it is only in the last decade or so that it has had a substantial impact on literary studies through the statistical techniques of corpus linguistics and data mining (know as natural language processing, NLP). In this essay I briefly revie...

These five essays deal are about separating the concept of culture from that of geo-political identity. They make two points: 1) Such terms as "French culture", "Egyptian culture", "Oriental culture", and so forth are geo-political concepts that no more identify KINDS of culture than such terms as "African wildlife", "Pennsylvanian wildlife", and "...

The human sciences encompass a wide variety of disciplines: literary studies, musicology, art history, anthropology (cultural and physical), psychology (perceptual, cognitive, evolutionary, Freudian, etc.), sociology, political science, economics, history, cultural geography, and so forth. In this paper I process to organize courses and curricula a...

Ontological cognition is about the cognitive apparatus we use to organize the world into different kinds of things according to their powers and capacities: animal, vegetable, mineral; living, non-living; human, non-human; etc. As such it differs from the philosophical discipline of ontology, which is about the world itself, not our thoughts about...

Graham Harman has proposed a counter-factual literary criticism based on his object-oriented ontology. I argue: 1) that this proposed practical criticism collapses into the existing process of literary culture and is therefore empty, 2) that it implies a Platonic conception of the literary text, 3) that it follows from a rejection of Lévi-Strauss’s...

At the most abstract philosophical level the cosmos is best conceptualized as containing various Realms of Being interacting with one another. Each Realm contains a broad class of objects sharing the same general body of processes and laws. In such a conception the human world consists of many different Realms of Being, with more emerging as human...

Dumbo is Walt Disney's myth of modernity, a film in which he uses a story about infant-mother separation as a vehicle for assimilating modern technology and management structure to the evolved mechanisms of the human mind. This paper considers psychoanalytic and evolutionary psychology, examines the structure of scapegoating as a means of social co...

This document collects a number of blog posts on the theme of behavioral mode. In this form the idea originates with Warren McCulloch, one of the grand old men of neuroscience and cybernetics. This conception would also give basic credence to the psychoanalytic conception of organ modes — oral, anal, and genital — though, ironically, McCulloch had...

The range of subjects in Disney’s Fantasia is encyclopedic, placing it in a class with such very different works a Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Joyce’s Ulysses (cf. Mendelson on encyclopedic narrative and Moretti on the modern epic). The episodes are arranged such that they call on an increasing range of mental f...

The Pastoral Symphony episode in Disney’s Fantasia depicts scenes from domestic life as realized by various mythological creatures: child-rearing and play, courtship, wine-making and celebration, mutual aid and protection, and sleep. Gods are ‘played’ by human-form characters one of which, Bacchus, is central to the episode. Humans are played both...

Notes on Bruno Latour, Reassembling: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, with some consideration of compositionism. These ideas are developed with ideas and concepts from cognitive science, literary studies, music, and extensive examples from the world of contemporary graffiti.

Heart of Darkness is a novella that is roughly 38,000 words long and divided into three sections. In these notes I use a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques to analyze and describe it. In particular, I argue that it exhibits center-point construction, a tale within a tale within a tale, and that the story’s moral center contrasts wor...

This is a full-dress article about Spike Lee’s film, Mo’ Better Blues. The penultimate paragraph serves as an abstract: “In attempting to construct the image of jazz, and its musicians, in the stylizations of a black mythology, Spike Lee committed himself to working against the received conventions. By insisting on one simple truth about jazz, that...

Heart of Darkness is a novella that is roughly 38,000 words long and divided into three sections. The longest paragraph in the text, the nexus, is in the second half of the second of the three sections. It is structurally central to the text, making it a tale3 (the nexus) within a tale2 (Marlow’s tale) within a tale1 (the unnamed narrator’s tale)....

Heart of Darkness is a novella that is roughly 38,000 words long and divided into three sections. The story is more or less about an enigmatic figure named Kurtz. If one counts each occurrence of the word “Kurtz,” notes its position in the text, and then creates a periodogram of those positions, one sees that “Kurtz” appears in cycles, with the per...