instrumentality

in , ,

At the beginning of its history, philosophy separates tekhné from épistémé, a distinction that had not yet been made in Homeric times. The separation is determined by a political context, one in which the philosopher accuses the Sophist of instrumentalizing the logos as rhetoric and logography, that is, as both instrument of power and renunciation of knowledge. (ref to Francois Châtelet, Platon, in Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, p.1) (is this a reference to Plato's Phaedrus?) 

Read More

intelligent building

in ,

The first thing an intelligent building will learn is your credit card number.
In the opening pages of Ubik, written in 1969 Phillip Dick brilliantly describes a battle between a down and out protagonist and his apartment building, called a conapt. Early one hungover morning, Joe Chip hears the knock of unexpected guests at the door. After verifying that they are not rent robots or creditors, he tries to clean up before letting them in.

Read More

intentionality

in

Franz Brentano called intentionality the property of awareness that is an awareness of something. For Brentano consciousness always has an object. For Heidegger, time is intentional insofar as it is always directed; it is time for___.

Read More

kiesler

in

The latter part of the twentieth century is marked, above all, by the confrontation between the human and the machine, by the repeated redefinitions of each in terms of the other. In the age of biopower and biotechnologies, cyborgentities proliferate, spawning hybrid terms like artificial life, machinic phylum, virtual realities, computer agents, and desiring machines.
For the architectural avant-gardes of the earlier part of the century, this confrontation was developed and formalized through, on the one hand, the abstraction and materialilty of De Stijl and Constructivism respectively, and on the other hand, the biomorphic forms and psychic associations of Surrealism.

Read More

language

in

In a very generic sense, language is a mode of communication based on symbolic reference (the way words refer to things) and involving combinatorial rules that comprise a system for representing synthetic logical relationships among these symbols. (from Terence Deacon The Symbolic Species)

For Ferdinand de Saussure, "language is a form and not a substance." (Cours, p.169) (see form / matter )

For Terrence Deacon, all symbolic activities place an extraordinary cognitive computational demand on the brain. Correlational, or indexical associations, which can be based on immediate context and learned by rote, need to be unlearned in a particular way. (Charles Sanders Pierce had insisted that indexical signs act on the nervous system. "Anything which focusses the attention is an index. Anything that startles us in an index, in so far as it marks the junction between two portions of experience." -- Philosophical Writings, pp 108 - 109.) The highly developed prefontal cortex of the human brain allows humans to maintain something in short-term memory while simultaneously recoding it into a symbolic system of association. Deacon believes that symbol use itself has been the prime mover for the prefrontalization of the brain in hominid evolution.

Language has been used to distinguish mankind from all other species, as the basis for the distinction between nature and culture.

Read More

limbs

in

On the one hand, the "phantom limb" -- a kind of mourning for a pre-Oedipal (i.e. pre-castrated) body -- whose painful reality is well documented. On the other hand, the "counterfeit" limb, paralyzed and "cut off" from perception and recognition -- "internal amputation." "How could a thing like that belong to me? I don't know where a thing like that belongs." -- the syndrome of anosognosia. To the nurse clearing away the breakfast: "Oh, and that arm there, take it away with the tray!" (Sachs, A Leg to Stand On, p. 57) For Sachs, this was a "neuro-existential" pathology where some features which could easily have been "hysterical" -- the characteristic dissociation and bland or joking indifference -- were, in those instances extremely organic. 

Read More

local/global

in ,

The "local" is a politically contested concept. Is it a site of resistance to globalization and the hegemonic ideological systems that go under the names of the West, McWorld, and EMPIRE? Is the local the only viable link to tradition, or is it a source of fascisms, of ethnic atavisms, of all the raging cultural fundamentalisms and defensively defined communities that Benjamin Barber calls jihad ? 

Read More

logical type

in

"This statement is a lie." true or false? 
Bertrand Russell' s theory of logical types arose in the early part of the twentieth century as a result of contradictions and paradoxes in the mathematical theory of infinite sets. For example, "the class of all those classes that are not members of themselves" was self-contradictory. One such contradictory entity within mathematics endangered the self-consistency of all mathematics, so that Russell came to the conclusion that all such paradoxical statements had to be ruled out. He devised a hierarchical "theory of types" in which the legitimate members of a set at one level all belong to the level just below. 

Read More

love

in

For Plato, love is an intermediate state between possession and deprivation. For Alain Badiou, love is "the procedure that makes truth out of the disjunction of sexuated positions." (Infinite Thought, p. 163) 

Freud stressed the risks of love as a means to happiness. "We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love." (Civilization and its Discontents, p.29) For Freud, "There is good reasons why a child sucking at his mother's breast has become the prototype for every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a re-finding of it." ("Three Essays on Sexuality) Jean Laplanche points out that a displacement has taken place nonetheless. "The lost object is the object of self-preservation, and the object one seeks to refind in sexuality is an object displaced." (Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, p. 20) 

Read More

machinic phylum

in , , , ,

"In order to adequately understand their apparently idiosyncratic contributions... riddled with jargon and with a mysteriously ineffable systematicity..." (E. Grosz)

Describing the development of weapons such as the saber or the sword, Deleuze and Guattari relate how metallurgy follows variations in materials and their qualities (spatio-temporal haecceities) and transforms them into features (traits of expression) such as hardness, sharpness and finish.

"We may speak of a machinic phylum or technological lineage, wherever we find a constellation of singularities , prolongable by certain operations, which converge, and make the operations converge, upon one or several assignable traits of expresssion" ..."Each phylum has its own singularities and operations...which determine the relation of desire to the technical element."...

"We will call an assemblage every constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flow of matter-movement. The assemblages cut the phylum up into distinct, differentiated lineages, at the same time as the machinic phylum cuts accross them all." (Thousand Plateaus, p. 406) Examples of these assemblages include the nomads' invention of the man-horse-bow assemblage.

"The machinic phylum is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression...This matter flow can only be followed. The artisan is one who is determined to follow a flow of matter as pure productivity. The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. His work is a legwork. To follow the flow of matter...is intuition in action." (p.409) (this is neither nomadic nor sedentary, but in contact with both) -- minor science.

"Why is the machinic phylum, the flow of matter, essentially metallic, or metallurgical?" (p 410) "Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow...The machinic phylum is metallurgical, or at least has a metallic head, as its itinerant probe-head or guidance device." In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari follow the trope established by the Futurists and followed by the architectural avant-garde, that described engineers as noble savages at the vanguard of technological innovation, "men of the people without culture or education," endowed with "the gift of mechanical prophecy, the flair for metals." (Marinetti, Le Futurisme, Quoted in Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis, p.204)

According to Manuel de Landa, for Deleuze the machinic phylum is the overall set of self-organizing processes... in which a group of previously disconnected elements suddenly reaches a criticial point in which they begin to "cooperate" to form a higher entity. The notion of a machinic phylum blurs the distinction between organic and non-organic life. Phenomena of self-organization occur whenever a bifurcation takes place in phase space: when a new attractor appears or when the system's attractors mutate in kind.

According to de Landa, Deleuze realized the philosophical implications of trajectories, attractors, and bifurcations in phase space . He emphasized the ontological difference between "actual physical systems" (represented by trajectories in phases space), and "virtual physical systems" represented by attractors and repellors. Although he did not mention bifurcations by name, he explored the idea that special events could produce "an emission of singularities", that is, the sudden creation of a set of attractors and repellors. Thus in addition to "actual machines", there are two layers of "virtual machines" . The world of attractors (the first layer) defines the long-term tendencies of reality. The world of bifurcations modifies those tendencies and represents the source of creativity and variability in nature. (see de Landa p. 236 and Deleuze Logic of Sense)

machine

in , ,

"Machine is derived via the Latin machina and from the Greek mechane , meaning tool or machine -- especially an instrument to lift heavy objects, a crane, or a military engine. Perhaps the original word is mëxos, which means an artificial device, especially used against misfortune and troubles. 

Read More

Mandlebrot set

in ,
Mandlebrot set

The Mandlebrot set has been described as the "most complicated object in the world." The figure represents the boundary of the domain of attraction of the behaviour of a simple equation in the complex plane. It is not the domain of attraction of a single system but rather a map of a family of systems, based on a single criterion.

Read More

mechanism/vitalism

in , , ,

The prestige of mechanistic physics after Newton led to an extended confrontation between the norms of physics and other areas of science such as biology and psychology. Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophystood as a classical prototype, or canon, by which to judge all subsequent science. Newton's great achievement was to have produced a mathematical theory of nature that provided general solutions based on a rational system of deduction and mathematical inference, coupled with experiment and critical observation. Newtonian mechanics established "universal laws" that explained the movements of the planets, the tides, and whose predictive powers were given an overwhelming demonstration with the appearance of Halley's comet, just as predicted, in 1758, long after both Halley and Newton were dead. Even today, the exploration of space is a straightforward application of classical gravitational mechanics. 

Read More

memory

in ,

"If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory." -Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of MoralsIs 

Is memory primarily individual? Or is it social? 

Individual memory can be thought as communication with the self over time. " I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under ever-changing forms." (Stephen Dedalus) "Memory is the real name of the relation to oneself, or the affect of self on self." (Deleuze, Foucault, p.107) 

In Rewriting the Soul, Ian Hacking asks whether memory is the name of what once was called the soul. For Hacking, the Western moral tradition, encapsulated in the Delphic injunction to "know thyself," expresses a deeply rooted conviction that a self-knowledge is central to becoming a fully developed human being. In the modern area, this self-knowledge has increasingly focussed on issues of memory. 

Individual memory can be broken into three classes:

personal memory claims concerning events in the past, which figure significantly in our self-descriptions; This is also called episodic memory
cognitive memory claims, concerning things we learned in the past; (also called semantic, or categorical memory) 
habit-memory , our capacities to reproduce performances (like riding a bicycle)-- also called procedural memory. 

Read More

metaphor / model

in ,

According to Giambattista Vico, the ancient language, before the formation of society, must have been full of the boldest metaphor, since this is the natural character of "words taken wholly from rough Nature, and invented under some Passion, as Terror, Rage, or Want." A distant echo of Vico's theories can be heard in Steven Pinker's Darwinian accounts of language. For Pinker, metaphors of space and force are quite possibly part of our evolutionary inheritance and are so basic to language that they are hardly metaphors at all, at lease not in the literary sense.


Metaphors depend on drawing attention to the similar in the apparently dissimilar, and they trade on secondary comparisons between the two terms.

Read More

mind / brain

in , , ,

How does the physical brain give rise to the psychological mind? How do the laws of mental life emerge from the brain?

The hypothesis of all those who examine the brain as "organ of the mind" is that a close enough analysis of the workings of the brain would, if we also had the key to psychophysiology, lead to a knowledge of consciousness. The psychophysiological hypothesis, at least in its narrow version of it, seeks point-to-point mappings of brain, consciousness, and memory.

Read More