[-empyre-] week two - MATTER - Reflections

[Brian Cantwell Smith]

Thanks, Ashley and others, for the chance to listen in on this conversation -- and for the chance of making a few remarks.
 
I might say -- though it will be perfectly evident from my words -- that I am not a media, critical, or cultural theorist.  That said, the topics that you have all been discussing are hugely interesting to me, and I appreciate so many of the insights, provocations, and sensibilities expressed.  I am sure I have missed much, especially as the literatures I inhabit are very different.  Still, I hope I can at least reach out into shared territory.
 
Rather than respond to individual posts, I thought I’d make just a few (five, in fact) general comments stimulated by the exchange.
 
1) Re MATERIALITY (and the “BEING OF BITS”): I was struck that, from what I could tell, much of the discussion of the materiality of the digital seemed to refer to (or at least seemed *to me* to refer to) something like *our* materiality -- materiality as it undergirds us humans, and as we have come to see it over our lives / history / culture / centuries etc.  My reflections on the materiality of the digital, somewhat differently from others here I think, has led me to wonder about *their* materiality: i.e., about what “the material” would mean, as it were, and what it would be to say that something was “material,” etc., if one were a Java applet running at 2GHz or a configuration of bits on an iPhone or server farm.  I.e., not “what’s their materiality”, at least in the first instance, but “what is materiality for them”?   (My sense is that the former question can be answered only if we first have an answer to the latter question, so that we can expand our imaginations into a sense of materiality that is adequate to us both…)

This approach raises into prominence the (to me huge) discrepancy between: (i) our meso-scale, lumbering physical existence, plus the socio-political habits, senses of identity, bodies, etc., pertinent thereto and historically entrenched in our consciousnesses; and (ii) a world of existence much closer to the “being of bits” whose world is much closer to the relativistic equivocation between 1 foot and 1 nano-second (something like “the Dasein of das Bit”).
 
I profoundly believe that the digital is constitutively physical, to get that straight at the outset.  To that end, in fact, I’ve often given a talk in which I argue that the most basic theorems of computer science (having to do with absolute computability and relative complexity, of Turing and others) are fundamentally physical in nature -- contrary to near-universal consensus that these results are essentially *mathematical*.  So I have to reinterpret the halting problem, the results about universal machines, etc. (which I do in something I call a “motor theorem”!).
 
Maybe because of this, I’ve often wondered why online game worlds are so often computational simulations of *our (lumbering, mesoscale) physical world*.  Wouldn’t it be interesting (and instructive, including for this forum, in terms of stretching our sense of the “material”) to develop a politically-drenched, profoundly social game in which the characters participate in the world that our computational processes themselves inhabit-- e.g., where operations take a nanosecond, copying is trivial, etc.?
 
Murder would become a misdemeanor at worst.  The operative sense of identity (including of objects) would thus be radically different (if it existed at all).  The different between (concrete) instances and (abstract) types?  Radically different as well, methinks.  And consider space-time: if the fundamental “switching time” of us humans is around 100 milliseconds, and the velocity of our natural movements between 1 and 10 meters per second, and the distance to the most remote place on the planet about 20 million meters, then even going at our fastest (running) pace, getting to the other side of the world would be 20 million “mental ops” (something like 8 months, running 24/7; but the mental ops are what would be relevant to consciousness).
 
For computational processes: at a switching time of c. 1 nanosecond, traveling at the speed of light, one travels (as I said) about a foot per second, or 1/3 meter. That makes traversing the world is about 60 million “ops.”  So -- interestingly -- phenomenologically, the world *is about the same size* for computational processes as for us.  Re the phenomenology of the email message itself, that is, being sent to Australia doesn’t happen any faster (from its point of view) than walking to Australia would happen for us.  Maybe I’m crazy, but I find this kind of intriguing.  Of course other things are different; email (and bit patterns in general) are expert at hibernation for a *gazillion* ops; that copy of my dissertation program, which I have stored on a 19” floppy from 1981, has been quiescent, phenomenologically, for what for me would be the equivalent of between 10^9 and 10^10 years -- i.e., for the age of the universe!  So, in their own reference frame, *time* is what is different for these bit guys -- more than space.  (This hibernation/quiescence is hugely relevant to the good point made: about the difference/relation between that which is static and its being “brought into temporality” by processes -- often called “execution”.)
 
OK, enough geekery.  But seriously, I somehow feel that it is as least as urgent to expand our sense of the material to encompass computational objects as it is to assign them a place in, or try to understand them in terms of, our (sense of) materiality.  Yet another example (I can’t resist): issues of *arrangement* (formal cause?) are obviously huge, for both; we think of “creating” and “destroying” physical objects, but of course all we do is to create and destroy *arrangements* of atoms (I believe only nuclear explosions actually create and destroy *matter*).  “Digital objects”, as often stated, are little more than arrangements.  The point, though, is *so are we*.  So in that dimension of ontology, maybe they aren’t so different from us.  But *identity*, because of copying -- that is so different that I expect that their ontology may be literally unimaginable to us (until an art piece blows our minds by showing it to us).  I always come back to that ... to identity.
 
Time for some Lagavulin ...
 
2) Re INTENTIONALITY-I: I was also struck by how easily what philosophers call ‘intentional’ terms came up in the discussion: ‘representation’, ‘interpretation’, etc.  E.g., that we don’t actually encounter bits, but only “their representation on a screen”.  But is that via-the-screen stuff really *representation*?  It does seem to be something (a pattern of pixels on a screen, at some level of description/abstraction; cf. remark 5, below) that corresponds to a “coding” (is *that* the right word?) of the pattern of bits in the file.  But the pattern of light waves that impinge on my retina when I see you corresponds, in some way, to your shape (or at least to a 2D projection of your frontal 3D laminar surface).  But it would be a stretch to say that the light that impinges on me is a *representation* of you.  In fact one of my chief aims, in teaching philosophy of AI/cog sci to undergraduates, is to argue that, when light strikes my retina, I see *you*, not a representation of you.  That perception (and cognition) reach all the way to you is fundamental, for example, to ethics.  (I don’t think you could give an account of why hate speech is repugnant if all I was targeting was my representation of you.)  Of course if the layers of correspondence *break*, it comes into view (present to hand).  But just because it *mediates* doesn’t mean it *represents*, does it?
 
Similarly, I noted the suggestion that was made (Kirschenbaum across Drucker via Ashley?) that the materiality of the digital, or even the digital itself qua digital, requires an act of *interpretation*.  Personally, I think that to take anything as anything requires *some* kind of cognitive act (I am not a naïve realist; I doubt if many others on this list are either).  My own preference is to call this process “registration” -- as in that I might say that I “register” a cup of coffee on the table to my right.  The thing about “interpretation”, in contrast, is that, at least in lay discourse but I think in professional contexts as well, interpretation typically requires *two* things: one thing interpreted as another.  One interprets X as Y.  It is that double-ness (duplicity?) that I am resistant to, as regards digital objects (actually as regards most things).  If Y’s being a digital object requires interpreting *some X* as a digital object, then what is the *X*?   Doesn’t *it* require an act of interpretation, too?  If so, that generates an infinite regress.  And more seriously, I don’t want to reify -- to give ontological thingness status (‘objecthood’?) to -- that which I interpret.  I just want to take … what? the world? ... as yielding up things (to our consciousnesses, to our reifying imaginations).
 
3) Re INTENTIONALITY-II: I wonder whether the reason we sometimes think that computers are full of *symbols* (someone said this, and it is certainly a common conceit), and sometimes think they are *abstract* (a different conceit, against which this week is dedicated to argue, at least in part), is that “being represented” and “being abstract” are two distinct time-honoured ways, in (out-moded) classical ontology, of *not* being a mundane physical object.  Agatha Christie’s novel may be actual and concrete, but if the novel *represents a murder*, then since concrete actuality doesn’t cross the sign-to-signified boundary, the murder can therefore escape being implied to be concrete & actual -- can escape it because it is *represented*.  Similarly, if something is *abstract* (non-physical, non-material), then, again, it thereby (but in a different way) escapes being concrete & actual.
 
But since our brief, I take it (my “lengthy” might be a better description ;-)) is to upend and replace the idea that digital things aren’t actual ... and in fact to give voice to a compelling way to understand them *as* actual, concrete, material, etc., then I feel as if we should be extremely suspicious not only of the language of “abstraction” creeping in, but also the language of symbols / representation / interpretation.
 
Anyway, just a thought.  (P.S. I *do* think that computational things are, at least in general, representational and/or intentional -- but to argue that, which I am prepared to do, requires getting the digital things *themselves* to be concrete/actual/material, and then to talk about those concrete/actual/material entities function in similarly concrete/actual/material signifying practices...)
 
4) Re ANALOG AND DIGITAL: This has been a favourite topic for many years.  A simple version of my views on it is available here (someone suggested we put in links to our work):
 
http://www.c-span.org/video/?184429-1/digital-future-meaning-digital
 
What I think is interesting is that an A-to-D converter takes in an analog signal X and puts out *another analog signal Y*.  As it happens (not incidentally, of course) that output signal Y *can be registered* (as I would say it) as a digital signal Z -- where Z’s registration as digital corresponds in some way to X’s registration as analog.  For purposes of the present discussion, however, it is critical not to forget about Y’s properties as an analog signal.  For one thing, what it is for an analog signal (Y) to be registerable as a digital signal (Z) is a “nice” topic (as Quinn pointed out, Goodman is good in this regard, though so is Haugeland, and no one, in my view, gets it complete).
 
Note also, in the complementary case of the D-to-A converter, the input is of course again not just “a digital signal”, as if that were a fine-grained enough way to dispense with the ontological complexity. Rather, the input is a signal that is *also* registerable as analog (i.e., as well as being registerable digitally).  Call the input-registered-as-digital A (what most people would uncritically think of as just “the input”), and the input-registered-as-analog B (what most people don’t talk about).  What is interesting is that, from the point of view of the electronics, it is the *analog* properties of the input -- i.e., its properties *as B* -- that are relevant to what output it produces.  That is: because the D-to-A circuitry is itself registered at an analog level (e.g., in Kirkhoff’s laws), it is *only* the input-as-analog (B) that can impact the output.  Kirkhoff’s law level electronics cannot respond to its *digital idealization* (A) at all!  (Hence my argument that two different pressings of the “same” CD -- i.e., two different pressings that have the same-identical-bit-stream -- *must* sound different [at least: must produce different analogue outputs].  To claim that they *must sound the same” *because they have “identical inputs”* is simply a conceptual mistake.)
 
5) Re ABSTRACTION/REGISTRATION/LEVEL-OF-DESCRIPTION: As the last example suggests, in order to talk coherently about digital objects, it is my sense that we have to have very good and very clear (but not reductionist or otherwise unwarrantedly essentialist!) methods of talking about things at -- as they say -- *different levels of abstraction*.  ‘Analog’ and ‘digital’, after all, are not, in the first instance, predicates on *things*; they are predicates on *ways things are*, or *things at a chosen level of abstraction*.  Moreover, they aren’t *whole* predicates, either, in the sense of applying to objects as a whole.  As is evident as soon as you press on the question, any given object (such as a so-called “analog” watch, or the bit-stream emanating from a CD player, etc.) are analog in some respects, and digital in others.  So identifying what facet one is talking about, at what level of abstraction (those two issues -- facet and level of abstraction -- aren’t independent, of course) is prerequisite to insight as to the nature not only of digitality and abstraction, but also, I think (hence my ramblings) to the issue of *the matter of the digital* (to quote a famous forthcoming dissertation).
 
OK; lengthy is one thing; interminable is another.  So I’ll leave it there.  But thanks for the opportunity to throw this lumpy hat into the ring.  A fabulous topic, fabulously discussed by you all ...
 
Brian