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FIGURE 1.
cal logico-deductive proposition that was always used as an example in the
Middle Ages is the famous proposition “All men are mortal.” So you arrive
at an “All men are mortal”-trivial machine. If you shove a person into it on
one side, a corpse comes out the other. Take Socrates—“Socrates is a
man”—, shove him in on one side and—bam!—out comes a dead Socrates
on the other. But you don't need people, you don't need Socrates, you could
even work with letters.
Here I have represented an “anagrammaton,” a machine that calculates
anagrams (Figure 1). As you know, an anagram is something that replaces
one letter with another.
To make this example as simple as possible, I'd like to propose an agram-
maton the alphabet of which consists of only four letters (
A
,
B
,
C
,
D
) and
which in accordance with the table in Figure 1 makes a
B
out of an
A
,a
C
out of a
B
,a
D
out of a
C
, and finally an
A
out of a
D
. When I was just a
kid and sent loveletters to my girlfriend, I of course agreed with her on an
anagram so that our parents couldn't read what we wrote. But of course
such anagrams are very easy to solve. For example, how many anagrams
can one construct altogether with 4 letters? As you know, that's simply the
number of permutations of the letters
A
,
B
,
C
and
D
. Which is 4 times 3
times 2, therefore 4!, which results in 24 anagrams (Figure 2).
Here I have exactly 24 anagrams at my disposal, and if you want to make
an experiment to find out which of these is our own anagrammaton, then
you need only four trials. You give it
A
,
B
comes out; you give it
B
,
C
comes
out; give it
C
,
D
comes out; and finally
A
results from giving it
D
. So you've
solved the problem. Trivial machines are, therefore, as formulated in
Proposition 01, synthetically determined (we have in fact just built one);
independent of the past (we could put ours on the shelf for years and years);
analytically determinable (we just did that); and, therefore, predictable.
Now you understand the great love affair of western culture for trivial
machines. I could give you example after example of trivial machines. When
you buy an automobile, you of course demand of the seller a trivializations-
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