All posts filed under: evolution

Mutable

Monday, January 7, 2013
by Joseph Weissman
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boundary / catastrophe / evolution / information / language / machine / noise / ontology / production

The movement of the signifier through history is toxic, viral, plastic — a fiery line of abolition interposing nullity into intensity, linking pure space to the absolute threshold. It is only in following an escape-trajectory out from language, from the territory, and in concert with a dynamically consolidated assemblage of enunciation, that the sign reveals an intimate and internal logic of affirmation: dispassionate and frozen core of the signifier smoking beneath the burning skin of […]

Transparency

Friday, December 19, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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activity / alterity / birth / break / darkness / event / evolution / individuation / matter / network / neurosis / sexuality / speech / transformation / world

      The world is hollow. In-itself anything is precisely nothing.  A thing exists positively only in the precise sense that it exhibits certain forces, that it forms connections or disjunctions with other things, or assemblages of things, in such and such a way.  Moreover, is it not necessary that at some point in the process of any machine, there is something that may and must become reduced to a generic and redundant unit?  […]

The Language Mechanism: Notes on de Saussure

Wednesday, February 6, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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continuity / diachrony / evolution / institution / language / linearity / linguistics / logic / sign / synchrony / time

A language thus has this curious and striking feature. It has no immediately perceptible entities. And yet one cannot doubt that they exist, or that the interplay of these units is what constitutes linguistic structure. That is undoubtedly a characteristic which distinguishes languages from all other semiological institutions. Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics, 105) After having investigated the physiological mechanisms of speech, Saussure turns to consider the nature of linguistic signs. In his […]

On Fractal Geometry

Sunday, January 20, 2008
by Joseph Weissman
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boundary / continuity / dimension / disorder / evolution / fractal / mathematics / mobius / rupture / science / topology / turbulence

Fractals are an example of a discovery from what claims to be a very new kind of science — a science of feedback, turbulence and emergence — which harnesses an old but ubiquitous species of chaos. A fractal can informally be defined as a recursively self-similar figure. They are not extrapolated from a geometric logic based on units. Rather fractals are constructed on the basis of an infinite program, such that the result ‘overflows’ any […]

Blogosphere Kinships: Activity at Massthink

Friday, November 2, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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Arthur Danto / Darwinism / Deleuze / Deleuze and Guattari / evolution / hylomorph / identity / Manuel DeLanda / massthink / Nietzsche / philosophy blog / Theory / Philosophy / Uncategorized

I’ve been visiting the massthink blog (populated by Ryan and Aless) for a couple of months now, but, as a bad reader, I failed to leave comments. I was thrilled not only with the content, but more so with the way in which these two have organized their site. I was inspired to see their text page (which encouraged me to put up the bibliography, still under construction) and by the way in which they […]

The Genealogy of the Unconscious: Evolution, Awareness, Creativity

Thursday, October 18, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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affirmation / creativity / Dionysos / drives / evolution / human / libido / metaphor / morality / Nietzsche / reality / relation / truth / unconscious / will

“What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw […]

Machines, Morphogenesis and Complexity

Tuesday, October 16, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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abstract machine / atomism / autopoeisis / chaos / code / complexity / Deleuze / differentiation / digital space / evolution / form / individuation / modularity / molecularity / morphogenesis / network / self-organization / Serres / speed

Cellular automata The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty. D’arcy Thompson All organisms are modular: life always consists of sub-organisms which are involved together in a biological network. The interrelations between organ and organism form a series of feedback loops, forming a cascading and complex surface. Each organ parasites off […]

Remarks on Computational Creativity

Friday, September 21, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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artificial intelligence / complexity / creativity / evolution / immanence / interface / machine / network / nomads / self-organization / virtual

Artificial intelligence stands in need of a fresh thought: a new thinking of complexity, of the virtual, and of machines. Instead of a virtual founded upon forms which remain forever the same, we need an idea of the virtual founded upon difference itself. We need a creative virtuality. The task of building a robot demands a lucid and algorithmic way of grasping the frame problem. An adaptive principle of distinguishing problem spaces, some genetic evolution […]

General Relativity and Self-Reference

Monday, July 23, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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black holes / cosmos / differential geometry / einstein / evolution / transversal

Recent theories of galaxy-formation and cosmic evolution are inching closer to embracing the radical geometry of general relativity. In the decades since the publication of the Schwarzchild solutions to the Einstein field equations as given in his theory of general relativity, many physicists have staked and made their professional careers on the seemingly abstruse mathematical issues involved at the heart of the debate. Scholars have been fascinated and even sometimes ‘consumed’ by the study of […]