Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 18:10:09 +0200
Subject: Re:  Math/Metaphysics
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)


Cologne, 28 May 1998

jmd schrieb u.a.:
> Perhaps, it's been a long time .... I don't want to seem like a pompous
> sod, but your comments here are running various distinct, but intimately
> related notions, into each other.

Yes, my mathematical knowledge is rusty, but your very interesting contributions 
on this subject may just well stimulate me to oil up. 

ME:
> >The interesting question (to me) seems to be what relationship the 
> >incompleteness of computability bears to the digitization of reality. If the 
> >real (beings as such) is all that can be given a digital representation,
>  then 
> >non-beings are everything that elude such digital reduction. 

JMD:
> My personal view, perhaps a minority view, is simple to state: not much.
> Historically speaking, we have always been susceptible to the same
> self-deception, namely, that our most 'sophisticated' or 'involved and
> intricate' artifacts are the 'best' models of the mental/intentional, such as
> steam engines, hydraulic mechanisms, hierarchical management
> practices, and now computers.
>
> We've created a wonderful machine for transmitting information,
> interpretations, representations of our everyday world, but the machine
> is not what renders such transmitting possible. 

That's right; it's the drafting of the truth of being (the techno-logical 
casting of an historical world) that enables. 

> We can even design
> wonderful digital representations of Pooh Bear, the Japanese character
> Tottoro, Charlie Brown, and the smile of the Cheshire Cat. It puzzles
> me why a digital representation of something should seem any more
> philosophically illuminating than a Polaroid picture; in other words, such
> digitalization will not provide any illumination at all.
>
> The interesting question is: Why might we even think that illumination
> was forthcoming from digitalization? It seems that underlying this
> 'thinking' there must be views/positions about what the Intentional is all
> about, namely, Cartesian caricatures of genuine Intentionality.

I was not aiming at anything to do with "illumination", but at the eery 
phenomenon that digital representation of beings becomes the hegemonic draft of 
the being of beings. Our being able to see pure difference (e.g. the difference 
between 0 and 1) _as such_ is then the only difference that matters. The digital 
representations of beings (strings of 0’s and 1’s) take the upper hand and 
smother 
any other access to phenomena. The world becomes images on a screen, 
telecommunicative audio and blinking LEDs.

This has consequences for how we think (about) human being itself. Listen today 
e.g. to psychologists talking about 'images' 'stored' in the unconscious, about 
'signals' being sent from the unconscious into consciousness, about 'energetic' 
flows between the two, etc. It has become eerily 'natural' to think of ourselves 
in terms of a PC.

Thanks,
Michael
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