If we can get the gizmo guts of the Automaton in proper order and find the key that gets it working, we can somehow take a huge step toward fixing everything that’s broken. The Parisian train station, the Gare Montparnasse in the 1930s and the setting for Hugo, is detached from the world around it and becomes the clock that runs, not without problems, the mechanism we observe. And reasons are never totally represented by purpose nor reasonable in every location. I had to be here for some reason.” We discover, however, that his apprenticeship is not to the world as a machine but to the world as a living organism whose parts have neither fixed place nor limited purpose. So I figured if the entire world was one big machine. They always come with the exact amount they need. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. One of the people who has the idea that nature was just a giant clock is young Hugo Cabret, our interlocutor in Hugo, who tells us: “I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. People got the idea that nature was just a giant clock, not a living organism, but a machine.” Michel and tells her companions that the clock “became the model of the cosmos, and then they mistook the model for the real thing. In the 1990 film Mindwalk, Liv Ullmann, playing the part of a disaffected quantum physicist, visits the clock room at Mont. Otherwise, consciousness has all the presence that the world it interacts within gives it. Individuals interact within society, plants and animals interact within an ecosystem, our atoms are, as Carl Sagan reminded us, “star stuff.” Consciousness is a “ghost in the machine” only when we see ourselves as machines. What works or is broken can never be isolated in its impact from what lies outside its own constituent parts. There is in fact an intermediate stage, one in which systems thinking expands the mechanism of the clock to all surrounding influences and connections. Is it not fascinating, however, that this piece of intricate clockwork, of gears, springs, rivets, pulleys, click wheels, pendulums, and so on, this Automaton of windup, cranky speed visits us like a ghostly monstrosity when we are moving at digital hi-speed through cyberspace? There is an antiquated appeal here that may perhaps reflect a nostalgia for a lost model of a physical and not virtual world, a world built and running like a machine rather than an online cyber consciousness. And if this is so - that the Automaton is a numinous transmission - no argument or penetrating critique can establish its importance in the film or even suggest its meaning. Its presence shadows the plot, its silent predigital enchantment mocks the most skillful computer mediation of reality. It’s eerie in the sense of awesome, awesome in the sense of both numinous and creepy in the sense of uncanny, weird and ghastly, corpselike, preternatural, preterhuman, unearthly, macabre. The mesmerizing character at the still center of Martin Scorsese’s film Hugo is the Automaton. Lewis”Becoming a cyborg is the ultimate goal.” - Kevin Warwick on Singularity Hub “With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous.” - C.S.
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