欧博百家乐(PDF) Yuk Hui, On the existence of digital ob
Philosophical Views about Digital Information and Relational Schemata
Markos N . Dendrinos
2006
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Logic of Digital Worlds
Jason LaRiviere
parrhesia
Reflections on Yuk Hui's ON THE EXISTENCE OF DIGITAL OBJECTS
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Experience and abstraction: the arts and the logic of machines
Simon G Penny
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2008
This paper is concerned with the nature of traditions of Arts practice with respect to computational practices and related value systems. At root, it concerns the relationship between the specificities of embodied materiality and aspirations to universality inherent in symbolic abstraction. This tension structures the contemporary academy, where embodied arts practices interface with traditions of logical, numerical and textual abstraction in the humanities and the sciences. The hardware/software binarism itself, and all that it entails, is nothing if not an implementation of the Cartesian dual. Inasmuch as these technologies reify that worldview, these values permeate their very fabric. Social and cultural practices, modes of production and consumption, inasmuch as they are situated and embodied, proclaim validities of specificity, situation and embodiment contrary to this order. Due to the economic and rhetorical force of the computer, the academic and popular discourses related to it, are persuasive. Where computational technologies are engaged by social and cultural practices, there exists an implicit but fundamental theoretical crisis. An artist, engaging such technologies in the realization of a work, invites the very real possibility that the technology, like the Trojan Horse, introduces values inimical to the basic qualities for which the artist strives. The very process of engaging the technology quite possibly undermines the qualities the work strives for. This situation demands the development of a 'critical technical practice' (Agre). This paper seeks to elaborate on this basic thesis. It is written from the perspective, not of the antagonistic luddite, but from that of a dedicated practitioner with twenty five years experience in the design and development of custom electronic and digital artworks. Note and Disclaimer: This paper, inevitably, focuses on issues which arise as a result of the peculiarities of western cultural and technical history, and reflects discourses conducted in the English language. As discussed, some of the forces influencing those historical flows relate to the traditions of western philosophy, itself strongly influenced by Christian doctrine. The question of what form automated computation might have taken if it had arisen in a culture with different religious and philosophical history is a fascinating one. Likewise, the way that such a culture might negotiate the relation between technology and culture might be very different from that which has occurred in the West, and might offer important and useful qualities.
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Envisioning a Technological Humanism: A Review of Yuk Hui's On the Existence of Digital Objects
Joel McKim
Review Essay of Yuk Hui's On the Existence of Digital Objects available in Issue 6 of Computational Culture: A Journal of Software studies
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On the Relation of Computing to the World
William Rapaport
Philosophical studies series, 2017
I survey a common theme that pervades the philosophy of computer science (and philosophy more generally): the relation of computing to the world. Are algorithms merely certain procedures entirely characterizable in an "indigenous", "internal', "intrinsic", "local", "narrow", "syntactic" (more generally: "intra-system") purely Turing-machine language? Or must they interact with the real world, with a purpose that is expressible only in a language with an "external", "extrinsic", "global", "wide", "inherited" (more generally: "extra-" or "inter-"sytem) semantics? If you begin with Computer Science, you will end with Philosophy. 1 I was simultaneously surprised and deeply honored to receive the 2015 Covey Award from the International Association for Computing and Philosophy. 2 The honor is due in part to linking me to the illustrious predecessors who have received this award, but also to its having been named for Preston Covey, 3 whom I knew and who inspired me as I began my twin journeys in philosophy and computing. 1.1 From Philosophy to Computer Science, and Back Again Contrary to the motto above, I began with philosophy, found my way to computer science, and have returned to a mixture of the two. Inspired by Douglas Hofstadter's review [Hofstatder, 1980] of Aaron Sloman's The Computer Revolution in Philosophy [Sloman, 1978], which quoted Sloman to the effect that a philosopher of mind who knew no AI was like a philosopher of physics who knew no quantum mechanics, 4 my philosophical interests in philosophy of mind led me to study AI at SUNY Buffalo with Stuart C. Shapiro. 5 This eventually led to a faculty appointment in computer science at Buffalo. (Along the way, my philosophy colleagues and I at SUNY Fredonia published one of the first introductory logic textbooks to use a computational approach [Schagrin et al., 1985].) At Buffalo, I was amazed to discover that my relatively arcane philosophy dissertation on Alexius Meinong was directly relevant to Shapiro's work in AI, providing an intensional semantics for his SNePS semantic-network processing system (see, e.g., [Shapiro and Rapaport, 1987], [Shapiro and Rapaport, 1991]). 6 And then I realized that the discovery of quasi-indexicals ('he himself', 'she herself', etc.; [Castañeda, 1966]) by my dissertation advisor, Hector-Neri Castañeda 1 "Clicking on the first link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually eventually gets you to the Philosophy article. As of May 26, 2011, 94.52% of all articles in Wikipedia lead eventually to the article Philosophy" (:Getting to Philosophy). If you begin with "Computer Science", you will end with "Philosophy" (in 12 links). 2 3 Award 4 "I am prepared to go so far as to say that within a few years, if there remain any philosophers who are not familiar with some of the main developments in artificial intelligence, it will be fair to accuse them of professional incompetence, and that to teach courses in philosophy of mind, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, ethics, metaphysics, and other main areas of philosophy, without discussing the relevant aspects of artificial intelligence will be as irresponsible as giving a degree course in physics which includes no quantum theory" [Sloman, 1978, p. 5].
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Digital worlds in limbo
Polyxeni Mantzou
στο "ΜΕΤΑΛΛΑΓΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΑΣΥΝΕΧΕΙΕΣ. Πρακτικές, πολιτικές και λόγος για τον αστικό χώρο". Εκδόσεις ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΕΙΑ, Αθήνα , (ΣΕΛ.38-43) 2009 "DIGITAL WORLDS IN LIMBO" Abstract: Digital technologies bring about fundamental changes in the way we relate to the environment. Architecture has worked with models for centuries; models that are not neutral and predetermine the outcome. Media used for the conception and presentation of architectural works, configure a production frame similar to that of the on the spot construction. The special characteristics of digital media are a result of the nature of the code. The computer has the ability to perform complicated transformations in a high velocity. These can be classified in four categories: translation, discretization, rationalization and metaphor. The computer’s method is projection and its aim is transformation. Computer performs complicated design tasks thanks to the existence of suitable software. Therefore another type of projection emerges, the one related to the distinction between the production of media used for the design process and the proper design process. The design process does no longer involve the gesture, the implication of the hand and, furthermore, the implication of the corporeity. The heavy, analogue body cannot communicate with the immaterial digital code immediately but only through interfaces. The immaterial nature of the code is the one that allows the elaboration of every point separately. All points become equivalent, and we can now refer to relations field-field, which brings along an algebraic logic, very different to the geometric one that distinguishes among, points, lines, surfaces and volumes. Processing the parts independently and continuously places the scale issue in a new condition. Digital code makes scale irrelevant as parts are no longer dependant of the totality. The code doesn’t recognize any other system of reference apart from itself, not even the human body. Our definite insertion or withdrawal from the reality of the digital era never occurs; our permanence in the digital worlds remains open, latent, pendant: in limbo.
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Irremediability: On the Very Concept of Digital Ontology
Adam Nash, Justin Clemens
Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture. Amanda Lagerkvist, ed., Routledge, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-138-09243-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10747-9 (ebk), 2019
The Implications of the Digital for Ontology This essay discusses what we and many others have termed 'digital ontology' (here-after DO). We begin by posing the following linked questions: What is DO? Does DO 'exist' at all? If so, how does DO differ from 'traditional ontology,' or, at least, from 'non-digital' or 'pre-digital' ontology? What does the adjective 'digital' signify here? How does it differ from adjectives that may seem quasi-synonymous with it, such as 'data' or 'information'? Why should we speak about ontology or perhaps even ontolo-gies (plural) at all, let alone digital ontologies? Should we not rather speak-as many have and do-of something like 'digital physics'? And how would we go about answering these questions if we did not avail ourselves of what seems to be a fundamental feature of ontological questioning, that is, a search for a method? Yet what if it is precisely the search for a method that the 'digital' undermines or over-turns? Indeed, does the digital also overturn the concept of 'ontology' itself? Could it be that DO is a paradoxical, nonsensical, or contradictory phenomenon that resists its own consistent formalization? We reuptake these difficult questions here in order to offer some background, arguments and provisional answers, and do so in a sequence of regulated steps. First, we stage some of the new issues raised by digital technologies, precisely by bringing out the problems that digital technology itself poses for research into digital technology. This staging is done by way of what has only very recently become-in the last two decades-one of the most commonplace of everyday acts: a browser search on the internet for a phrase. Although the very many complexities of such searching are by now well-studied and well-known, we briefly rehearse some of these here in order to draw out a few of their consequences for research. Second, in doing so, we identify, situate and explicate several major strands of thinking regarding DO today, with respect to three modalities in particular: the an-thropological, the analytic, and the physical, represented here respectively by the recent work of Tom Boellstoerff, Luciano Floridi, and Edward Fredkin/Stephen Wolfram and others. We will show that each of these modalities comes to be caught in something like a contradiction, which derives from their uncertain self-positioning between epistemological and ontological concerns. Precisely because they begin with the new propositions concerning knowledge that seem to be generated by digital tech- nologies, they end attempting to know by constructing doctrines of being out of their own contingent epistemological closures. Here, the conceptual restrictions derive from a commitment to a covert dialectic of the limited/unlimited/delimited, whereby what we know becomes either a limit to our knowledge of the being of the other (e.g., being as the other of knowledge), thereby alternatively refusing or projecting an emp- ty vision of being onto the other side of this knowledge or they project this knowledge in an unlimited fashion directly onto ‘being itself’ (e.g., the universe is itself a digital computer). This apparent divergence derives from their systematic solidarity with each other regarding the priority of epistemic questions. Third, following this summary, analysis and critique of these key contempo- rary positions regarding DO, we return to some of the most influential 20th century thinkers of the relation between technology and ontology, including Martin Heideg- ger, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler and Alain Badiou. This return enables us to establish certain requisites for any ontology that avoid the difficulties that beset Boell- stoerff et al., even if, in turn, we will disagree with these thinkers regarding the proper method and sense of a contemporary ontology. Our disagreement will hinge on cer- tain new pragmatic and conceptual phenomena exposed by digital technologies that have no real precedent in any metaphysical or logical tradition, whether mathematical or naturalist, materialist or idealist. Here, the evidence is provided by three essentially contemporary problems, simultaneously conceptual and technical. The first of these is the so-called ‘P v. NP problem,’ formalized in 1972, an as-yet unsolved dilemma which poses whether cer- tain computational problems whose solution can be rapidly checked in polynomial time can also be solved in polynomial time. The second concerns the claims made by non-classical (‘paraconsistent’) logics developed in the wake of operational difficul- ties that emerged first in post-WWII computing, which don’t uphold an absolute ex- clusion of contradiction, in contrast to classical logic which depends upon the Law of Non-Contradiction. Third is the operational necessity that all data be simultaneously modular and modulated, that is, at once created as elemental ‘bits,’ yet bits that are essentially mutable. We will treat these aporias as opening onto ontological questions. So, fourth, taking up the challenge of these aporias — that is, impasses of knowledge that do not thereby necessarily designate immutable limits to our thinking of being— we suggest that it is in this epistemological rift opened by digital technol- ogy that the new lineaments of a properly DO can be discerned. In conclusion, then, and on this basis, we briefly present a new theory of DO, which doesn’t treat contra- dictions as explosive or entailing only trivialities. Rather, we maintain that: ontology is always onto-technology, that is, digital; onto-technology is always a-temporal, im- personal, and in-consistent; its contemporary character is discerned through the new impasses that have been revealed to us by binary computation; these impasses deliver a new sense of being that also immediately and irremediably affects the grounds of knowing and action too. For reasons that will hopefully become apparent in the course of this presentation, we will name this paraconsistent DO ir-re-mediable.
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The Experience of Information in Computer
Patrick Crogan
2011
ABSTRACT: This paper responds to Espen Aarseth’s provocative proposition about the way First Person Shooter games reveal a fundamental modality of human experience by embodying a dialectic of “aporia and epiphany. ” It is argued that if the First Person Shooter Doom tells us something fundamental about living today, then this is because of the programmatic nature of the prevailing cybernetic world view of which Doom is an elegant illustration. The military origins of this world view are then examined. The logistical tendency to order and control contingent events is discussed as a central legacy of the military source of cybernetic thought influencing contemporary technoculture. The concept of information in the widespread notion of information processing is cited as a key element of this legacy. Information is examined in its initial mathematical conception as a means for calculating future eventuality in a cybernetic communication system. The experience provided in the First Perso...
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Toward an Interality-Oriented Philosophy (IOP) of the Digital
Peter Zhang
This article examines the digital through the lens of interality and Flusser's thought. It claims that the digital affords an interological sensibility. It sees the Hive as a mythical symbol of the digital, which constitutes a new khora or milieu that reconfigures everything in it. Some of the key notions elaborated in the article include: intermind, the virtual, the digital doppelgänger, control and becoming, the acceleration of reality, etc. The article calls for openness toward no knowledge when humanity is faced with the unknown so it can improvise a new existential gyroscope adequate to the new real. [Peter Zhang. Toward an Interality-Oriented Philosophy (IOP) of the Digital. China Media Research, 15(4):13-22] 4 A man coins not a new word without some peril; for if it happens to be received, the praise is but moderate; if refused, the scorn is assured.-Ben Jonson [T]hinking is not a continuous, discursive process-thinking "quantizes."-Vilém Flusser The digital is something we use and are used by on a daily basis but do not quite comprehend. This familiar stranger has become our constitutive other, our new dwelling. We have since been taken on a giddy journey of becoming with neither destination nor return. Myriad signs around us indicate that the digital has been and will continue to be a formidable agent of transformation. The world itself as we knew it once upon a time has been pulverized and become one with the digital sandstorm. At this post-historical, neo-nomadic moment, "know thyself" immediately entails knowing the digital. We are challenged to grasp something discursive prose made up of strings of letters is not adequate to precisely because it has rendered this means of knowing obsolescent. We have reached a point where we cannot but let go of our rational bearing because everything rational is mere content in this new medium. Literal (i.e., letter-based), linear, logical thinking has to give way to statistical, probabilistic, cybernetic, programmatic, game-theoretic, quantum-theoretic, neo-atomistic, pointillistic thinking. Ontological thinking will be overthrown, overcome, dissolved, and absorbed by interological thinking. The digital transforms our mode of existence, reconfigures our patterns of consciousness, and reshapes our collective unconscious. As members of a community of inquiry, our cause resides and proceeds in between questions and dialogues, experiments and lucky finds. We are faced with a project without precedent. To try to construct a neat system is to betray our cause. We have to own up to the fact that we simply don't know, and present our findings in a form that reveals our sense of no
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Chapter 2. Computer Principles vs. Human Thinking
Bin Li
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