Re: [-empyre-] metaphor

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Henry Warwick wrote:

> > There are numerous logics and mathematics, but
> > they're all fundamnetally
> > related.
>
> Agreed, but they are all flawed (Goedel) and it has
> not been determined whether or not our brain is even
> capable of understanding anything of what it purports
> to understand about everything, anyway.
>
"Flawed" is an anthropomorphic word of course; you can have mathematics
without consistency that works in the small. Large numbers, Goedel
mappings, etc. aren't physical objects that bang into one another! The
fact that inconsistent or contradictory results can be produced - isn't
for me (and wasn't for Goedel for that matter) a problem.

> I guess I'm a bit of an agnostic that way. I agree
> with Dehaene: higher math is a product of our brain's
> lanugage function based on quantities we find in the
> universe. One could say that countable quantities are
> real, but something like tensor equations are not.
>
This of course means that somewhere you have ontology-switching from one
domain to another - where?

Re: Higher dimensions - of course they're back in string theory.

Where is all of this coming from in relation to empyre?

In terms of codework (and I wish Florian were participating here) - there
is a relationship; to the extent that codework deals with the problematics
of codes, protocols, parasites, noise, emergences, etc. etc. - it relates
to the perception of the world in relation to its semantics and syntax (as
if the two were attempting, unsuccessfully, to unentangle). Codework is
among other things an analysis of this tangling.

In this way, oddly enough, strong AI (which I strongly disagree with)
comes to the foreground - if one might argue for the mathesis of the real,
then one might extend this to neural algorithms.

Instead I think whatever neural processes exist, they're not algorithmic
or neural, although, on a much smaller level, they're locally structured
(Heisenberg etc.).

So all of this gets back to what I began with - that codework, at least my
work, attempts to look at the relationship between formal systems and the
real vis-a-vis consciousness, interpretations, hermeneutics,
phenomenology, etc.

What I do wish is that others were participating in this, or that we can
change the subject - I feel the obscurity of this, even though for me it's
a bit central -

Alan