jeremy hunsinger wrote: > On Feb 20, 2009, at 3:55 PM, Michael Wojcik wrote: > >> Flick Harrison wrote: >> >>> I can understand the temptation to reduce "digital" to "numbers." >> >> There may be such a temptation, but at the end of the day, "digital" >> and certain fields of "numbers" (namely discrete ones), as technical >> terms, are isomorphic. There's no reduction going on. > > actually, digital things are not necessarily numbers at all, just > discrete values or objects.
There is no positive difference between "discrete values or objects" and some subset (possibly the entire set) of any countable infinite set, including the set of natural numbers. Idealists may believe there is some essential difference, but that's a question of metaphysics, and inconsequential. So "actually", "digital things" are, in fact, "necessarily numbers". > while we think of digital computing as > binary numbers, one can also thing of it as just a system of discrete > signals, that may not need to map onto numbers. that you can represent > things in numbers does not mean that the discrete object is a number, > nor need it truly map to a number. there should be no necessary > isomorphism, though, there usually is. There's an obvious necessary isomorphism: counting. Assign a different number to each possible discrete signal. Since the signals are discrete, it's always possible to count them. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
