information – Fractal Ontology

All posts filed under: information

Machine Fusion

Friday, December 27, 2013

You can simulate transparency, but behind your back an overheated network will condition your component lines. It is remarkable indeed the degree of encryption, not to mention extreme speeds and slowness, which a signal may be made to endure. Gentle decelerations, frenzied accelerations, stationary null journeys: real movements which the machine or a part undergoes — or else sudden breaks, unforeseen shutdowns, severed lines. The differential logic of the signal system mutates continuously according to […]

Mutable

Monday, January 7, 2013

by Joseph Weissman

Counter-action: Reflections on Sensory Anthropology

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

by Joseph Weissman

comment 1

counteraction / difference / ego / experiment / infinity / information / intensity / light / machine / media / metaphysics / monad / noise / origin / society / structure / transcendence

Towards a Metaphysics of Noise Let us return to the ‘alternate’ origin in noise, the conditions for any structure. From background noise to blank nothingness to signification: three distinct moments. Back again to the process of the development of the other structure: from noise into information. Mediation: the propagation of light which opens up space by filling it, makes absence present, sensible. The other structure: from spirit to letter; from ruptures, an alien coherence; from […]

A Short List of Gilbert Simondon’s Vocabulary

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

comments 17

affectivity / allagmatic / becoming / Disparation / emotivity / ensemble / form / hylemorphism / individualization / individuation / information / metastability / milieu / model / modularity / ontogenesis / potential / preindividual / signal / signification / Simondon / subject / system / Transduction / transindividual

1. Affectivity -This term designates a relation between an individualized being and the pre-individual milieu; it is thus heterogeneous to individualized reality. This is why Simondon claims that affectivity, more than perception, indicates a spirituality that is greater than the individualized being (the Sublime) because perception is merely the functions of the structures interior to this being (L’Individuation psychique et collective, p. 108–hereafter cited as IPC). Simondon writes that affectivity is the ground of emotion, […]

Universal Computation and The Laws of Form

Sunday, November 25, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

comments 7

algorithm / complexity / computation / consciousness / cybernetics / deduction / emil post / godel / hologram / hooft / information / information processing / laws of form / physics / psychoanalysis / quantum gravity / spencer-brown / string theory / structure / Turing / wolfram

Remarks on Turing and Spencer-Brown (Joseph Weissman) Introduction Computation is holographic. Information processing is a formal operation made abstract only by a reduction in the number of free variables, a projective recording which analyzes from all angles the entropy or information contained in the space. Thus, basing my results partly on Hooft’s holographic conjecture for physics (regarding the equivalence of string theory and quantum theory,) and by extending Spencer-Brown’s work on algebras of distinction (developed […]

Energy and Culture: Notes on “Postmodern” Science

Saturday, November 24, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

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art / communication / complexity / culture / energy / form / history / individuation / information / knowledge / legitimacy / narrative / noise / non-linearity / ontology / Science / Mathematics / Technology / self-organization / transcendence

Science, Information and Time There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. Alfred North Whitehead It is necessary to go beyond all the pieces of spoken information; to extract from them a pure speech-act, creative story-telling which is as it were the obverse side of the dominant myths, of current words and their supporters. It is also necessary to go beyond […]

Science and Parasites: Michel Serres and the Unification of Human and Natural Sciences

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

comments 2

banquet / communication / epistemology / fractal / history / humanities / information / interruption / logic / matter / michel serres / narcissism / ontology / parasite / physics / power / relation / Science / Mathematics / Technology / Serres / symmetry / time / topology / turbulence

Theorem: the history of science obeys the law of diminishing returns. The first attack on the narcissism of science… Second: if we examine the set made of the problem and of the actions that transform it, there is no doubt that it is, at the beginning, more complex than the thing itself or the process. Clearer perhaps, yet more complicated. The question can then be reexamined in order to try to illuminate this new complexity […]

The Future of Information

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

comments 5

art / counter-symmetry / creativity / culture / difference / divinity / enlightenment / equilibrium / history / image / information / life / nature / noise / probability / revolution / Science / Mathematics / Technology / separation / symmetry / war machine

In reality, goals are absent. Nietzsche Rivalry is only a spectacle; it is the state of appearance. Equilibrium is phenomenal, and the distance is real. The law of opposition belongs to phenomenology; the law of irreversibility or of falling downstream is real. Behind all representation. Michel Serres A Genealogy of Modern Science Science appears to begin with the Greeks: somehow, somewhere, a resentful pre-scientific impulse begins to criticize the unity of life and culture. Some […]

Translation: Michel Serres and the Mathematization of Empiricism

Sunday, November 4, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

comment 1

empiricism / entropy / error / French Translation / Hermes / information / information theory / mathematics / negentropy / philosophy of science / sensation / Serres / Untranslated Theory

The following is a translation of Michel Serres’s essay “Mathematization of Empiricism.” from Hermes II: L’Interférence. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972. 195-200. Original translation by Taylor Adkins 11/03/07. The law known as Fechner-Weber’s law can be written S = K log I, and read: sensation grows like the logarithm of the stimulus[1]. The definition of Information, in the contemporary sense, can be written I = K log P, and read: information grows like the logarithm […]

Translation: Simondon, Completion of Section I, Chapter 1, The Individual and Its Physico-Biological Genesis

Friday, October 19, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

comments 8

abstract machine / assemblage / autopoeisis / becoming / being / change / communication / complexity / differentiation / Disparation / formalization / French Translation / individuation / information / materiality / metastability / model / modularity / morphogenesis / morphology / ontogenesis / ontology / philosophy of science / production / self-actualization / Simondon / singularities / structure / system / technology / Untranslated Theory

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable,’ endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed. (Potential energy is the energy of the pure event, whereas forms of actualization correspond to the realization of the event). In the second place, singularities posses a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a […]

Paper Proposal: Information, Disparation, Transformation: Simondon, Ruyer, Deleuze and the Affective Pre-Individual Field of Singularities

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

by Taylor Adkins

comment 1

Deleuze / Difference and Repetition / Disparation / individuation / information / philosophy of science / potentiality / pre-individual milieu / Ruyer / Simondon / singularities / Transduction

Paper Proposal : Philosophy of Science Information, Disparation and Affectivity: the Pre-Individual Field of Singularities in Simondon, Ruyer and Deleuze On the importance of disparate series and their internal resonance in the constitution of systems, see Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964, p. 20. (However, Simondon maintains as a condition the requirement of resemblance between series, or the smallness of the differences in play: pp. 254-7). [Gilles Deleuze. […]

Machinic Autopoesis

Thursday, October 11, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

No Utopia

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

by Joseph Weissman

comments 2

complexity / deviation / form / freedom / information / instinct / knowledge / origin / society / symmetry / utopia

It is characteristic of our age that we no longer remember how to feel utopia. To experience the absence of place, a break in the flow of time. But the utopian vision is not merely a smooth or well-organized space outside of history, beyond danger and death. It is also a powerful impulse, a primary affect of sociality. The aporetic flash of insight which is glimpsed in the symphonic vision of an actual utopia is […]