On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 9:26 AM, jeremy hunsinger <[email protected]> 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. 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. Isomorphic is not the same thing as identical (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism); Michael is being very careful with his choice of words. The fact is that the parameters (ariness etc.) of the digital split is more or less irrelevant to the possible manipulations of digital symbols (though it might not be irrelevant to the human-imposed semantics thereof). A digital system of any ariness is isomorphic to a finite set of numbers, and therefore we could replace the concept of "digital" with the concept "finite numerical" and lose nothing in terms of calculability and possibility. However, as that parenthesis hinted, this isomorphism is not able to reach identity because of *our* semantics. Whether or not we consider digital bits to be the same as numbers is important because it changes how we look at digitality, how we consider our relationships to it and the possibilities we envision for it. Digital bits may be isomorphic to numbers, but the implication of turning that into an equality, that the useful digital operations are those which have a foundation on numerical manipulation, is not at all necessarily true. This is a question of *foundations* in a system that only "really" sanctions *harmonizations*. Are numbers before distinction, or is distinction before numbers? According to Althusser's concept of science, this question has no object and is not therefore scientific. So it is a game, yes---but a game with stakes. Evan Buswell # 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]
