Many years back, at UNM, I was teaching a graduate seminar in the philosophical roots of computer science. At one point the discussion was around aesthetics and art, and one particular thread on computer programming as performance art. I asked students who if they would pay to watch a performer write code the same way as they would to if playing a piano. The spontaneous and consensus answer was, David Ackley. I later had a small opportunity to pair program with him, and they were right.
Totally different item: I sure would like to take some of you (especially you glen) the places I have been where I intellectually, viscerally, emotionally, somatically, and kinesthetically experienced and understood really cool things like infinity. davew On Mon, Mar 15, 2021, at 5:08 PM, jon zingale wrote: > "Computing Up" is such a good podcast. I keep forgetting that it exists. I > love what Dave Ackley is saying here about generalization, it repeats to a > strong extent what Deleuze is mining for in *Difference and Repetition*, a > pathological (though at times wonderful) obsession with the general (as a > psychological modality) when even at the expense of the particular. > Recently, I have been attempting to make my way through both *Difference and > Repetition* as well as Deleuze's *Bergsonism* in an attempt to better > understand the ramifications of the > general-particular/substitution-repetition distinction. Bergson at one point > explicitly calls Einstein's relativity "metaphysics posing as science", > Einstein and Russell, misunderstanding Bergson's respect for metaphysics, > all but pushed Bergson's writings into extinction. What Ackley discusses > here as *independence* and *uniformity* is not unlike the > Einsteinian-Noetherian conception of the *homogeneity* of space and time. > There appears a lot to mine from understanding the relationship between > symmetry and substitution, substitution the mark of the general. There is > also quite a bit in Ackley's monologue that synergizes well with Heidegger's > "The Point of Reference": > > """ > All distances in time and space are shrinking. Places that a person > previously reached after weeks and months on the road are now reached by > airplane overnight. What a person previously received news of only after > years, if at all, is now experienced hourly over the radio in no time. The > germination and flourishing of plants that remained concealed through the > seasons, film now exhibits publicly in a single minute...Everything washes > together into the uniformly distanceless. How? Is not this moving together > into the distanceless even more uncanny than everything being out of place? > The human is transfixed by what could come about with the explosion of the > atomic bomb. The human does not see what for a long time now has already > arrived and even is occurring, and for which the atomic bomb and its > explosion are merely the latest emission...What is this clueless anxiety > waiting for, if the horrible has already occurred. > """ > > All of these questions of substitution, homogeneity, scale, coverings, and > compactness have very much been on my mind recently. I cannot help but > wonder if a science of the particular, built upon Deleuze's work, is not far > off. For context, here is the relevant section of the Ackley monologue: > > """ > One of the ways that we describe reality a lot is in terms of here is a > situation and we imagine that this situation has some extent, it is my > house, it is my city, it is my room and it has some properties and I > describe it and I tell a story in that situation and there is an implicit > sense in which this situation can be likened to other situations > elsewhere, it's generalizable. It may not apply to everything, but from > first-look, you could try to put someone else's room, and someone else's > city, and someone else's country, and see how it applies to them and > it's supposed to be useful in some way. But that very act of saying that > this is a limited situation, that's supposed to be moveable, that this > description is supposed to apply in multiple places, carries with it some > sort of assumption of independence, or some sort of assumption of > uniformity (homogeneity?) of the places it can go...There is a sort of > first principles assumption that a description here should be a > description there and my problem with it is that once the descriptions > get really big like people on Facebook or people using the internet, > there isn't really a place to move it. *It's everything*. The length of > the (finite?) description *covers all of the stuff* (compactness?) we can > imagine it covering. We can say, "Well we need Facebook on mars, we need > the internet on Pluto", but that's not happening anytime soon, and what > it means is that this assumption of independence, this assumption that > there is a sink, where consequences can go, the assumption that there is > something outside of the room where food can come in and waste can go > out or power can come in or heat can go out and I can view this room as > an isolated system that couples to this thing I don't have to care about > ...Once the system becomes really big, like the entire planet, it isn't > clear I can really do that, it's all of the internal properties that > really matter, but people keep talking about it as if there is an > infinite world outside. > """ > > > > -- > Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . 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