On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, phanero wrote:
When did code ever 'order the world'? Not even the Dewey Decimal System
does that.
I'll have to differ on this.. the words themselves are the stumbling blocks,
but
it seems to me like your overdetermining the concept of 'order', and yet
there can also
be a sense where the overdtermination is also valid..(ie, the clock)
I wasn't the one who used 'order' - it was in the quote. I also don't see
how I'm 'overdetermining' it nor do I see how a clock is overdetermining?
there is |order| which includes all notions of purposive 'arrangement' but
within that absolute value
we encode also all the non purposive orderings which would be something
called disorder..
Why? Non-purposive orderings aren't necessarily disorder at all.
these are pretty antique terms.. something hipper and more up-to date might
be 'state of affairs' or 'vector-state'
Both seem to reference QM; I don't see how the latter fits at all.
When did code ever order the world? The 'world' when apprehended through
a human body is always already encoded. Take seeing. There is a discrete
encoding process which turns visual information which is itself a form
of encoding by which electron spin states and other atomic phenomena
pass a discrete quality through the substrate of the environment, which
is in effect the channel, though this is quite reductive, but in effect
a 'coding'. Scientists have just within the last few weeks made some
major breakthroughs in this area if you were reading your Kurzweil. They
soon will be able to translate with a prosthesis visual information from
the world directly into the brain..
Whew. Obviously vision is represented. To say it's 'code' is something
else - in fact Edelman's talk at SLSA was precisely why it _wasn't_ code.
You can say that man's mind is encoded in
his body, although more and more man's 'mind' is outside his body.. at
any rate with man, you can generally say, that the human mind has
changed the world..
Any mind changes the world <-> is a change in the world. But 'encoded'?
Since you gave a source, read Lingis. And yes, mind's increasingly
externalized, Merlin Donald writes on that a lot, but that doesn't mean
coding or code.
that's the
simplest way to restate one way in which an instantiation of coding has
indeed |ordered| the world..
another way is to consider plants, Plants use a genetic code and they have
completely altered the physical envirnoment
of the world..
here again is another instantiation of a code operating in a global fashion..
i don't see what the problem with this is.. Every single idea you possess or
are able to express has to be encoded in
some fashion
for it to even be said to have an existence.. just because a theorist
explicitly addresses 'code' as 'code' or doesnt
doesnt mean
that their work has nothing to do with code or coding..
No. It doesn't mean code at all. I'm not sure an 'idea' even has a
recognizable instantiation. Since you're giving sources below, check
Hadamard.
Youve got Frege, Russell, Tarski, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Austin, Grice, Quine,
Davidson, Donnellan, Kripke, Putnam,
Evans,
Marcus, Chomsky, Dummett, Burge, Millikan, Pierce, and thousands more Uexkull
etc.. All of these people are thinking
through coding in one sense or another..
Oh please, analytical philosophy doesn't equate to coding or encoding or
anything like it. If you want we can take these one by one but it would be
a waste of both our times. I think you're radically misinterpreting this
kind of philosophy except for Carnap; Tarski for example points to the
problematic of truth within formal systems, which problematizes code in
the first place. This is also a lot of older thinking moving on to classic
AI, Minsky, etc. which is pretty much overthrown now.
Even Witt. - look at early TLP which seems to go towards coding but if you
unpack the formulas they're of the form of a radicalized sheffer stroke,
pointing to 'heaping' negations -
I have Jack Sarfatti''s email addr. I wonder what his take on 'code' is..
Maybe I could get his sense of 'code' from a
physicist's
point of view..
No, just his point of view. Check out Finkelstein or Edelman for others.
- Alan
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