All posts filed under: Science / Mathematics / Technology

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 […]

Simondon and the Machine: Technology, Individuation, Reality

Tuesday, November 20, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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biology / crystal / cybernetics / form / individuation / knowledge / machine / physics / psychology / Science / Mathematics / Technology / Simondon / structure / technology / tension

Fractal Effervescence (2006), David April   Simondon and the Theory of Individuation There is something eternal in a technical scheme… and it is that which is always present, and can be conserved in a thing. Gilbert Simondon Gilbert Simondon’s reformulation of information theory on the basis of a new philosophy of technology has, in comparison to earlier attempts, at least the following major advantages to its credit: – His thought introduces us to an entirely […]

Cyborg Nietzsche: Conscience, Affect, Transvaluation

Saturday, November 17, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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algebra / complexity / decay / diagnosis / ethics / insanity / language / literature / machine / mathematics / Nietzsche / Politics / prejudice / psychoanalysis / schizophrenia / Science / Mathematics / Technology / society / structure / transformation / truth / unconscious

Part One: Criticism and Untruth-Machines A. Neurosis and Transcendence: the Algebra of Bad Conscience We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.  Marcel Proust For Nietzsche, uncovering the peculiar logic of the unconscious, revealing the function of this or that unobserved striving, would only form part of the analysts’ role. A rich, analytic transformation of the real space of mental (political) activity is the full meaning of diagnostic criticism. Any real […]

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

Wednesday, November 14, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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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
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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 […]

Symmetry within Chaos: On Science and Difference

Sunday, November 4, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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certainty / chaos / complexity / creative / decay / ontology / Science / Mathematics / Technology / space / structure / symmetry / theory / time / universe

Symmetric Relations A scientific theory classifies phenomena based on a universal set of structural relationships. Experiments and theories which deserve the name scientific thus share a coherent set of properties. First, they are systematic, meaning that phenomena as presented possess certain structural or virtual unities despite actual or potential diversities. A fully systematic theory is also complete in that nothing is arbitrarily left out of the universe of discourse. Events, spaces and processes are presented […]

Nomads: Space, Solitude, Science

Monday, October 15, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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becoming / chaos / culture / Deleuze / desire / multiplicity / nomad / reason / Science / Mathematics / Technology / Serres / space / state / unity

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 […]

Empiricism and Power

Tuesday, October 9, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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becoming / control / empirical / fascism / freedom / health / history / liberalism / power / Science / Mathematics / Technology / tradition / transhuman

The modern break with the authority of the past begins with critical history and the possibility of an empirical investigation into reality. A clinical eye belongs to the properly empirical, trans-historical observer — the one who is provocatively “unpersuaded” by traditional interpretations, metaphysical narratives of becoming, who is skeptical of all foundation myths. Through empirical investigation one discovers the curious historical double-articulation of religion and philosophy, i.e., spiritual or psychic forms and collective authority or […]

A Question for Institutions

Tuesday, September 4, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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culture / identity / institution / Science / Mathematics / Technology / speed / survival

Establishment always occurs simultaneously with a change in focus, a reconstitution at a higher level of analysis. The origin of institution lies in an emergent super-organization, capable of responding to abstract summarizations of events, persisting as a kind of discipline, a higher and orderly vantage point with which to regard the chaos of local ecosystemic coordinations. Institution is a concept-State: its function is to designate a new layer of coordinated activity which is to established […]

‘A Chain of Necessary Rings of Culture’: Nietzsche and the Ability of Science

Thursday, August 30, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
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aesthetics / culture / Eternal Return / Human All Too Human / Nietzsche / religion / Science / Mathematics / Technology / universal politics

In sections 4 and 5 of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche develops a non-linear train of thought that attempts to analyze and reconstruct the experiences and concepts of religion, art and science. There are developmental factors and connections among these three, for “art raises its head when religion relaxes its hold,” and the “scientific man is the further evolution of the artistic” (150; 223). Poets, for example, construct bridges to distant ages and dying religions, […]

Irony and Science

Sunday, August 19, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
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being / domination / irony / numbers / Science / Mathematics / Technology / truth / violence

0. Empiricism lives and studies in the future anterior; thus order and number appear, as though already in their most sublime perfection, and involve themsleves in the experiment as though always fully formed from the outside. They are a key to the symbolic universe and thus a virtual island of hope — but survival demands we must be harder than mere forms. Faith in number, the pure form of being, isn’t even ironic; it’s messianic, […]