[-empyre-] Digital Objects // PROCESS : What is a digital process?

[John Hopkins]

On 22/Oct/14 17:13, Quinn DuPont wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- Such a rich and
> complex post, with many points of resonance to earlier posts!
>
> I think Alexander’s reference to Chaitin’s “Omega” number really needs some

Having suffered through (up to) matrix algebra and some nonlinear stuff in 
engineering school, argh, I couldn't stand math -- I did much better with 
'fuzzy' orders-of-magnitude/off-the-cuff touchy-feely applied 'potential fields' 
geophysics...

I think it boils down to the paradign: "The map is not the territory" except in 
the asymptotic case where the territory itself is a subset of the map (i.e., the 
map has *everything* the territory has & more) which has obvious limitations. 
And there is a sprinkling of something like 'God' in there as well -- the 
inexplicable, the Void, whatever it is we are dancing around pointing at and 
trying to explain what we see to our proximal (or distal!) neighbor...

Not to mention that mathematics is a symbolic 'language' and in this it has 
(imho) the same limitations as language generally. The noun is not the thing.

Having made that huge reduction on Chaitin's article and maths reasoning, it is 
possible that reductions (such as writing a text "The map is not the territory" 
about the issue of modeling reality) may be of greater or lesser quality -- more 
or less applicable to the local or general conditions that they are applied to. 
The 'elegant' model covers more ground (i.e., Newton&calculus did a damn good 
job describing a lot of stuff), but to cover it all you need an infinite variety 
of models (dammit, that asymptote again).

This is probably what drives most 'innovation' pesently -- from DV to HD & CRT 
to Retina screens, from 8-bit to 64-bit sound editing, etc, ad nauseum -- that 
we try to force the digital to accede to or even subsume the analog -- something 
it will never do because, once again, there is the asymptotic "The map is not 
*ever* the territory."

Oh, is this an infinite recursion? No, I'll stop here. End.

jh

-- 
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Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
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