may all their pain be champagne

Well, this creative machine will have to be endowed with some equivalent to those laws and injunctions too. In addition, if it is to create in a way that we recognize it will also need to experience fear, love, hunger, and sadness. Our instincts and impulses, our gut feelings, are all part of how we think, how we make decisions and reason. We are guided by irrational impulses and emotions just as much as by logical analysis, so for a machine to truly think like us it will have to think emotionally at least as much as it does rationally. You can probably see where this argument is going.

- The Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

It’s a bit like sympathetic magic on a way: the usual Western presumption that “primitive” rituals mimic what they desire to achieve-that phallic objects might be believed to increase male potency and playacting rainfall might somehow bring it about. I am suspicious of such obvious connections and I suspect that the connections among things, people, and processes can be equally irrational. I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe-but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn’t be surprised if poetry-poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and reoccurring patterns, shapes, and designs-is how the world works. The world isn’t logical, it’s a song.

- The Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne