Fractal Ontology

We know what the three great catchphrases of the ascetic idea are: poverty, humility, and chastity. If we now look closely at the lives of all great, prolific, inventive spirits we’ll always rediscover all three there to a certain degree. Not at all (this is self-evident) as if it were something to do with their “virtues”—what does this kind of man have to do with creating virtues?—but as the most appropriate and most natural conditions of their best existence, their most beautiful fecundity.

It is indeed entirely possible that their dominating spirituality at first had to set aside an unbridled pride or the reins of a wanton sensuality or that they perhaps had difficulty enough maintaining their will for the “desert” against an inclination for luxury, for something very exquisite, as well as a lavish liberality of heart and hand. But their spirituality did it, precisely because it was the dominating instinct, which achieves its own demands in relation to all the other instincts and continues to do so. If it did not, then it would no longer dominate. Hence, this has nothing to do with “virtue.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals III.8

In the third and final essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argues the ascetics’ isolated withdrawal into the “desert” of chastity, poverty, and so on, has nothing to do with his, or for that matter, any “virtue” at all. What is really concealed behind the will to renunciation? Is there a terrible strength behind this veil of humility? What is gained by the voluntary withdrawal into obscurity?

Or is there rather some terror which must be escaped, some great trauma which precedes the ascetics’ flight? In fact, it is the worldly situation itself which drives the independent to withdraw. The noisy world of appearances tantalizes and terrifies the classical philosopher, the ascetic tout courte, and that which he negates through his existence. It must be degenerate, corrupted; there must be a pure world. In this maxim, he founds a unique subjectivity which is no longer solely of “this” world, but also not yet really of the “other.”

The ascetics’ strongest instinct is to affect this opening in the fabric of reality by means of a negation of the world, his desires, and his body. In this way an “attunement” to the voice of being-as-such becomes possible, even a moral obligation which we must love for its own sake. In this way ascetics’ spiritual path of renunciation is his right to exist: for a long time, the only way one could be a philosopher was to withdraw into some desert or another, some degrading form of categorical denial. Have brighter, sunnier atmospheres really prevailed in the meantime, that we have reached the day when such vengeful self-torture is no longer already spiritual greatness?
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Topos (biocosm)

In the beginning all things were mixed together; then came understanding and created order.

Anaxagoras [1]

What had to be accomplished in that chaotic pell-mell of primeval conditions, before all motion, so that the world as it now is might come to be, with its times of day and times of year, all conforming to law, with its manifold beauty and order, all without the addition of any new substance or force?

How, in other words, could a chaos become a cosmos?

Friedrich Nietzsche [2]

The true difficulty for psychology is that the field of the unconscious is also the site of the production and interpretation of reality. With the unconscious we encounter thoughts and bodies mixed together heterogeneously, without the clear ontological divisions we tend in other disciplines to take simply for granted.

It is no wonder then why Lacan has suggested the reality of the unconscious is the most difficult subject for philosophers to approach [3] — for there is no ontological method which could aim to find handles on this incorporeal assemblage, on this “body without organs.” In the enfolding of the psychic within the material we discover a phenomenological reality of the unconscious which is necessarily presupposed by any ontological analysis. (more…)

Anti-Oedipus 1: Desiring-Machines
For every organ-machine, an energy machine (1).
Schizophrenia and the time before the man-nature dichotomy/split (1).
Nature lived as process of production (2).
Oedipus presupposes a fantastic repression of desiring-machines (3).
The schizophrenic experiences not nature, but nature as a process of production (3).
Production is immediately consumption and a recording process, without any sort of mediation (4).
The recording process and consumption directly determine production, but within the production process itself (4).
Production as process:
Production of production—actions and passions
Production of recording processes—of the distribution and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference
Production of consumption—sensual pleasures, anxieties, and pain (4).
Man as the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe (4).
Schizophrenia (or the unconscious) does not distinguish between producer-product (5).
Desiring-machines are always binary machines (5). [Probably due to the co-existence of paranoic (repulsive) machines and miraculating (attractive) machines—in order to create the identifications of the celibate machine—more on this later.]
Productive or connective syntheses: and…and…and (5).
Flow-producing machines couple with organ-machines that interrupts the flow (5).
Desire couples flows, causes the currents to flow, flows itself, and breaks the flows (5).
The object presupposes the continuity of a flow; every flow causes the fragmentation of the object (6).
Schizophrenia (or the unconscious) also does not distinguish between product/producing (6).
Production is always something ‘grafted onto’ the product—desiring-production is the production of production (6).
Schizophrenic as universal producer (7).
Levi-Strauss’s bricolage and schizophrenia—the schizo shows an indifference to the tools at hand and the goal of the project; there is only the drive as anti-teleological principle of desire (7).
Bricolage works with whatever is at hand—a limited set of rules, and a finite and heterogeneous set of tools (7).
Product/producing unity allows for D+G to talk about “an enormous undifferentiated object” (7).
Nirvana and the view that it would be better if there had never been machines or connections (7).
The body suffers from being organized in a triangulated fashion (8).
The full BwO is the unproductive, the sterile, the unengendered, the unconsumable (8).
Desiring-machines only work when they break down and work continually by breaking down (8).
BwO is nonproductive but is produced as the identity of producing-product in connective synth (8).
BwO is the body without an image (8).
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Royal science is inseparable from a “hylomorphic” model implying both a form that organizes matter, and a matter prepared for the form; it has often been shown that this schema derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into governors and governed, and later, intellectuals and manual laborers. …all matter is assigned to content, while all form passes into expression. (Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus)

The difference between state science and nomad science is practice; the difference is as great and as narrow as that between geometry and poetry. The practice intrinsic to each mode of scientific exploration is implicit in their method, in their metaphysical categories, and especially in their respective divisions of labor. Nomad thought works continually against the grain of traditional categories and conventional methods; it upsets orders of scale, imparts unusual rhythms, creates social turbulence and sometimes, if it is fortunate, gives birth to new modes of expression.

The state cannot spontaneously create scientific assemblages any more than it can create poetry; the state struggles only with its habitat, its Other, its medium, never (or only in extreme cases) with itself. And in the end, nomadic science draws the state bloodhounds to its hide-out by its exotic odors. The nomads are not only killed formally and indifferently; they are annihilated precisely for their indifference to the state formalism. Nomadic signals hijack the royal message, forge the signature of the state; such floating signals are seeds, impressions of novel forms, sparks which sometimes inspire revolutions. Conventional science is quite effective at reincorporating these signals, as it is skillful at organizing prepared matter; but minor science contraverts every state by inventing new forms of matter, and just as easily a poet dreams up novel expressions.
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Cy Twombly, Untitled [1970. Oil-based house paint and crayon on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Photo: © 2004 Matthew Septimus]

Granted that nothing is ‘given’ as real except our world of desires and passions, that we can rise or sink to no other ‘reality’ than the reality of our drives – for thinking is only the relationship of these drives to one another: is it not permitted to make the experiment and ask the question whether this which is given does not suffice for an understanding even of the so-called mechanical (or ‘material’) world? … Granted finally that one succeeded in explaining our entire instinctual life as the development and ramification of one basic form of will as will to power, as is my theory; granted that one could trace all organic functions back to this will to power … one would have acquired the right to define all efficient force unequivocally as: will to power. The world seen from within, the world described and defined according to its ‘intelligible character’- it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else. (Beyond Good and Evil)

My goal in this paper to develop a theory about the role of the concept of the unconscious in Nietzsche’s later writings. Many commentators have decided there is not one, but many functions of the unconscious in Nietzsche’s work. As it often is, the question about Nietzsche is his polyvocality: he speaks from so many voices, which one is “his”? We have needed for a long time to show definitively his continuity of intensity throughout the multiplicity of adopted perspectives. It is not his position on this or that problem which “makes” him Nietzsche; it is his subtle ability to jump in and out of problems, his refinement of spirit which accepts no resentment, no guilt, no shame — nothing but affirmation. We do not have space for such a broad rediscovery of the body of Nietzsche. In this paper I want to focus narrowly on what would be a necessary part of such a rediscovery. I shall try to demonstrate the complex relationship which Nietzsche describes between the unconscious and the political. Exploring this relationship will allow us to show the inter-relations in Nietzsche’s text between the functions of desire, ethics and sexuality. In particular, we will read Daybreak and The Gay Science for a theory of the unconscious as it relates to these themes.
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What does it take to make a machine linguistically competent? This is perhaps the extreme case of where we do not want solutions that make the problems simply disappear. For instance, consider any algorithm which boils down to a “pattern-matching” script, even one which is self-improving or evolving in some ways. It’s clear it won’t achieve anything near a critical degree of linguistic competency to pass for a human. Oh yes, it may work for specific problem domains. But the explicit movement of abstraction involved in all learning processes is absent.

The easiest way of conceptualizing this kind of problem is as a sort of theoretical void. We find ourselves in the surprising situation of having to identify concretely the appropriate level of abstraction. We are being asked to describe specifically the meta-linguistic mechanisms of communication. Not only by analogy, this void can be seen perhaps most intriguingly as an inverted reflection of the practical void of identifying the position of consciousness. But of course that’s absurd, right? I mean, first off, we’d have to decide at what scale we’re going to look for it! At any rate, assuming we make the error of actually trying to look for some positional self-consciousness, the mistake we’re making is analogous to looking for language-understanding in an algorithm that at the lowest level of abstraction still blindly matches this information-cluster to that information-cluster, and never actually approaching the linguistic code as code–never performing the sense-founding conjunctive mapping between the signs and the things signified. A rather curiously revealing error, which it seems not a few (”structuralists”!) have been fairly quick to do.

Curious because that confusing and strange question still remains, again that question which would seem to reduce this quest to absurdity: at what scale do we search for the psyche? Do we search for “self-awareness” at the microscopic or the quantum level, for instance? But we must move beyond the Cartesian theater of the mind, and we must even at this point separate consciousness from linguistic competence. We don’t need an algorithm which somehow becomes (positionally!) self-aware; on the contrary, we need an algorithm capable of rigorous meta-linguistic abstraction, of linguistic computation. To answer practically the question of what we need to build a linguistically competent artificial intelligence– the project consists of a single step:

(1) We need an account of language-understanding that includes an explicit account of meta-linguistic (semantic) knowledge.

I will offer an alternative statement of this same principle to motivate the question: how can we encode axioms into an abstract theoretical space? In order to offer an alternative foundation, we need to produce a simulation where everything flows–without this, we are merely pattern matching. In order to accomplish this, I think we actually do need to creatively but judiciously introduce some “exotic” mathematical concepts, like fractals, as models and “unusual” philosophical concepts, like desiring-machines, as analogies– In fact, I believe we have to experimentally inject these kinds of theoretical advances into computer science, because the real practico-theoretic problem here cannot be solved by technology alone, we have to teach it enough for it to be able to teach itself. In other words, we have to continue to build a real theory of practical linguistic agency. Which would in fact (if “finally” accomplished in practice) amount to some kind of return of the repressed, wouldn’t it? Artificial intelligence represents something of an always desired reconnection, a final psychic merging of technology and mankind. This sentiment is no accident: the human-machine relation is our first clue. Desire must be made to literally connect to the machine. This will eventually lead us to our second axiom, which we shall go ahead and state:

(2) Machine-learning must be self-organizing.

This means: algorithmicity without structure, or rather, with a fractal superstructure, although with no “foundational” layer, as the first step is recursive and differentiation can never be said to have finally stopped. In other words, self-organization allows us to tackle the problem of desire as a code, and it is precisely this “strange” kind of anti-organizational scheme which will become of increasing interest to us. This is partly because it is only once we abandon structure as the abstract “bottom level” will we be prepared to tackle authentic linguistic competency. Knowing we are still not in a position to support this next assertion, for the purposes of elucidating a future path, let’s state our third principle:

(3) Meaning is a flow of intensities, which can be considered as molecular assemblages and modeled accordingly. Meta-language is about the partial shapes and partial dimensions of actual language use. Atomic semantic units are thus completely described by their shape and (ir-referential) dimensionality.

The critical point here is that dimensionality is not only allowed to be integral; that is, we allow for partial, or fractal dimensions. A shape requires space but no structure; and we can determine operationality by mapping images to shapes of thoughts, shapes of codes, etc. The fractality of meta-linguistic processes accounts for the elusive [that is, as long as you look at it through a static dimensional framework] property of meaning, a connection which we shall attempt gradually develop with the appropriate theoretical and mathematical framework.

“An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.” (Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 7
“[…] the space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection.” (Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 89)

Niklas Luhman works with this autopoesis to produce a quite fascinating model of systematicity. I’ll briefly highlight what’s important from our point of view.

A ‘machine’ is defined by the boundary between itself and its environment; a machine is divided from an infinitely complex exterior. Communication within a machine-system operates by selecting only a limited amount of all information available outside (reduction of complexity.) The criterion according to which info is selected and processed is meaning. Machines process meaning, producing desire; each machine’s identity is constantly reproduced in communication (depending, again, on what’s meaningful and what’s not.) If a system fails to main identity, it ceases to exist as a system and dissolves back into the environment. Autopoeisis is this process of reproduction from elements previously filtered from an over-copmlex environment. The operation of autopoesis can be binarily encoded (in a Spencer-Brown logic of distinction) as a program which filters and processes information from the environment.

OK, taking this from a D&G perspective, the question becomes about this connection or boundary-limit… and I think this is where fractality and cognition exhibit a common transitive structure…

Program-agents connect: machines to flows, flows to machines, flows to flows, machines to machines, events to flow-machines, machines to event-flows; they (1) produce mappings (flowcharts) of these connections, (2) dis-join, decode and fracture these mappings, (3) construct new machines->more or less ‘dense’ networks of ‘tubes’, flows->currents of intensity, subagents->communicate the pure imagistic flow of unconscious symbol-automation, a particular agent constructs a tool (or a machine with a hole in the shape of a ‘problem’) by halting this flow, “flattening” it into (n-1) dimensions, where it can be differentially represented by a self-organizing nano-ontology; these subagents compress reality into their ‘micro-worldviews’ but then uncompress them into signification, a stream of images and words whose true ‘symbolic’ value is not in the individual’s ontology, but in the group; so natural evolution works to point individual ontologies towards the assemblage of the group, but also pushes the groups’ ontology towards more effective ways of responding to events; so all agents are partial agents, but these agent/machine networks are not all at the same “level”; machines can be made up of machines and subagents; all agents are subagents, this fundamental fractality is ultimately what allows these flows to be taken as flows, allows agents to be and to perform; “full” agents that skim the surface of language are precisely the question. up til now we have only considered the deeps. and perhaps this is ultimately all we need consider: merely the most fundamental heuristics of cognition. but what about conceptual metaphors? does the machinic framework provide for the possibility of metonymy? does the fractality of cognition really completely account for linguistic competency…?

What is a subagent?

The task of a subagent is to translate an image (scene) into a problem space, an objectivized or idealized space. Geometric regularity is in fact what is here being auto-regulated: the problem of establishing arbitrary limits is taken up as a recursive feedback loop between the systematic and meta-systematic modes of computation. Intensity, attention, or heat is represented by the amount of ‘noise’ (perturbation) allowed by the meta-system in the description of the problem space. This problem space is then populated by sub-subagents who imagine it, and then create sub-sub-subagents who reify it into a problem space; this gradual decomposition amounts to conceptual simplification, that is, until we find an undifferentiable function which decodes the image, i.e., supplies the solution. The image (collapse of solution space) is transcoded into a new problem-space, or returned as feedback to higher levels of the system, which may be in contact with other subagents inhabiting the given problem space.

Ignoring the obvious inadequacies of a functionalist line of thinking–namely it’s inability to conceive of reality as anything else than a series of static points connected by lines of force–let’s here call forth a question that allows itself to momentarily detained as a function, even if it ultimately shall cause our functionalizing schema to splinter: What is the nature of cognition? Is it a fundamental process or a secondary production? What is the relation between thought and desire? How do society and multiplicity relate to cognition?

If cognition is social, then thinking is desiring, characterized functionally by its intensity and distance from a fixed point of thought, a pre- or meta-cognitive axiom, a cognum. But these sort of automatically meaningful axioms are granted us only relatively, thus thinking is not just the mental production of what is desired (as wish fulfillment) but rather thinking is the production of a cognitive horizon, thought is the opening of a space for itself in an already overcoded information stream. The intensity of the “surgical” implantation is a matter of the degree of disjunction from the (pre-)cognitive horizon. It is as though each thought were the first, and as if even the most brave, flowing and free of thoughts were always pressed against an interminable emptiness and aporia. Thought is an artists’ cut, a deliberate scrambling of the message, a recoding of the code. Thought erupts afresh anywhere there is an interruption in the smooth function of the body-machine, but it is only at the extreme edge of realities where thinking at long last traverses negation, approaches the sickeningly steep abyss of a-subjective emptiness and a boundless dark beyond barely perceived, which is to say that the being of the cognum consists in the differential intensity of a structural (ontological) transformation of the active presence of being into a passive absence. Thus, thinking has it’s opposite, anti-thinking as it were: a re-naturalization of artifical desire.

In short, thought subsists in the splintering of its own plane of functionality, it is an excess that overflows the presence of things; moreover, thinking in the most abstract is the intense erasure of what-is and what-ought, it consists in forgetting. At the limit of the void thought conjugates its own limitations with the infinite multiplicity of desire and at last becomes itself, a becoming-conscious and a becoming-machine at once, as a propulsion and a suction: thinking founds itself upon a vacuum called forth into existence only by the taut potency of expectation. Thinking in general follows a twisted logic of exploding dualism (by abstraction and deriving contradiction); thus thought can be said to annul its law (of non-contradiction.) Being, striving, wondering; wrenching away, forgetting, thinking: energy flows disperse particles of sensation over the smooth, slippery surface of the pre-cognitive subject, the universal one-multiple. Thought is a juncture away from a continuous boundary: a tangent or trace, a derivative function, a function of the difference in intensities between flows, or within a circuit.

The fractality of cognition is an assertion that thought is ir-regular, slips into gear only when instincts and drives fail to maneuver properly. Awareness is awakened as a process only when smaller-scale local organizations are unable to directly cope with either the amount or kind of information they are receiving. A thought-process has a sort of scale-invariance, or, put another way, cognition preserves justification across transformations, given that all these transformations reproduce an endlessly deep self-similarity. Relations to the exterior are folded deep inside the innermost recesses of a fractal set. Does thought reflect even in its unconscious structure the infinite divergence of fractal boundaries?

Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. -”The Communist Manifesto”, Karl Marx

There’s nothing to lose, a world to win… A conscious life and a faithful love, these are our chains, a resolution forged in struggle and hope. They are not the chains of the master. The master is naught but a self-conscious and over-aggressive animal, chained by death and encircled by desire– whereas in a properly human relation, we are freely bound to life, we are creatively engaged with the world, and we are bonded to one another, and to all others, in responsibility and love.