'Ghost In The Shell' (GITS), in Japanese 攻殻機動隊 (Kōkaku kidōtai) is a famous animation movie directed by Mamoru Oshii that came out in 1995. 'Man's Fate' (1933, 'La condition humaine' in French) is a novel by André Malraux that is no less well-known (at least in France). Both of these works deeply impressed me. After some maturation time, I was astonished to see some parallels emerge and that is what I would like to share with you here.
Read'Luminous' is a science-fiction short story published by Greg Egan in 1995. Starting as a dark thriller, it leads us very quickly on a trail of surprising ideas about mathematics, physics and what we call 'truth'.
ReadHuman languages share few features that distinguish them from other form of animal communication. One of the most famous is recursion. In any language one can always form an arbitrarily long sentence. Always? Not quite. According to Daniel Everett, up to now the only non-native of the Pirahã Amazonian tribe who has ever understood their language, the Pirahã language does have a sentence of maximal length. Of course this statement stirred a durable controverse among linguists and prompted Noam Chomsky to criticize him as a 'charlatan'. Yet his story is interesting and, in my opinion, worth listening to.
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