the question posed by minecraft is: is a strong, structuralist notion of system required for the concept of isomorphism to work? in other words, how much are things themselves?
if you come from a technologically iffy country like brazil, your first reaction to opening google maps and seeing where you were automatically pop up might have been - “oh shiiiiet this is it, it’s true, this is where i am! it knows where i am”. isn’t there something odd with this reaction?
did you for any reason NOT know where you were? isn’t the fact that you are right there enough evidence of being where you are? and is the map not only a set of codes and symbols, some names on a picture? not only, in short, a representation?
when you see your location pinpointed there, though, it feels like you get a new sense of where you are. why does seeing a map gives form to some sort of special spatial awareness by means of which places seem to exist more? is it only the fact that you realize somehow that you belong to a system (of places), and that reinforces the spatiality of your space?
or is there a reversion somewhere in there, through which the map becomes more real - more concrete - than the very place you’re in and experiencing with your eyes?
say you’ve played minecraft and built yourself a cozy, zombie-free pyramid in the course of one of so many idle afternoons. issue number one: the pyramid you see in the screen resembles - barring socially crippling problems with your sense of space - pyramids in the real world.
hardcore mathematicians and freewilling bloggers might be tempted to call this an isomorphism: the presence of a structural relation between two separate entities.
within the strict mathematics of formal systems, argues douglas hofstadter, isomorphism is what allows some variation of meaning to arise from separate strings of symbols - meaning IS an isomorphism, it is the emergence of a relationship of similarity. apart from notoriously tuning in with strong a strong notion of relativity like simmel’s (are these concepts somehow isomorphic?), this angle forces us to contemplate the nature of consciousness, the issue posed by minecraft, and by any other form of isomorphic representation, then, is naturally that of the possibility of thought.
let’s leave the issue of meaning aside for a second though, and behave as if it is a stable, reliable reality, to consider a different side of the pyramid. it stands to modern reason that everything in the vast strange realms of information inside a computer is ultimately made up of a massive collections of numbers in particular modes of interaction with each other. the pyramid you see on your screen, then, must be represented more or less convolutedly somewhere in cyberland. is there an isomorphism, however, between the pyramid you see in the screen, the pyramid out there in the real world, and a particular string of binary digits that represent them? could it then be said, in a dash of boldness, that if a particular string of digits is isomorphic to a real pyramid, and the real pyramid to the digitstring, that one is as real as the other?
it gets worse - mostly, and as usual, because meaning won’t stay put in the corner of self-reliance we tried to stick it into. suppose you are looking at the pyramid in your screen - or at the real pyramid near that dirty final subway station in cairo, for that matter. how is the image you see processed by your brain? is there an isomorphism between, say, the real pyramid and some sort of brain-configuration that allows you to call that thing a pyramid? is isomorphism the center of meaning in this wider sense as well? damazio would seem to suggest something in this direction. it’s commonly claimed that the concept of Zero is the greatest single accomplishment of the human mind apart from Guimarães Rosa’s book Veredas. behind that claim lies the insight that the zero is only such a big deal because the only place it can be strictly said to exist is INSIDE the human mind, and not in reality at all.
if we consider ‘existing’ as mere relative replicative stability - and the case can be made if you’ve gone on without sleep for long enough - every consistently imagined scenario exists in a very material sense. let us not forget that many things we take for real - words, banks, technology, -
are already simulated reality! (albeit socially simulated, which might take up some different processing power)
some lovely odd things can come out of assuming that the answer is yes. a wyrd relationship between representation and ‘the concrete’ is what simmel, in all his loosely paraphrasic neo-kantian charm, argued for. objects are an abstraction from complexity, a set of imposed relations over the real. he goes as far as not quoting someone who said all reality may as well be numeric, making the mind a mechanism for transforming numbers into qualities (colours in the electromagnetic spectrum being the prime example). it might go without saying that computers are, by construction, a way of doing exactly that.
what basis have we got to argue that the represented has any precedence in relation to ‘reality’ when trying to establish whether something can be called real or not? let’s call this uncertainty the keynsham principle - that there are no coincidences, but that sometimes the pattern - or the isomorphism - is more obvious.
following the now well-established approach of judging text not on its literary merits but on whether or not it deals with concepts interesting to a certain moderately well-informed reader consensus* (call it the io9 school of criticism), we could say that there’s a large chunk of cool contemporary writing that seems to have made its nest right on top of these issue. neal stephenson’s Cryptonomicon makes a strong case towards seeing cryptography as merely a sequential shuffling-layering of abandoning and preserving of isomorphism. not only that, it explores at leyman length the connections between cryptography and computability in the realm of pure numbers - a dreamland on its own right.
scarlett thomas’ The End of Mr Y, however, is probably the one that wallows the deepest in this very issue. the thing it makes us ask ourselves, in fact, is this: if there’s any reality to representation, how can we still keep calling it representation and not reality?
the issue, or perhaps the confusion, is this: is information made of the same thing as the universe? scarlett thomas argues at lenght that it may as well be. hofstadter - together with an entire school of thought on artifical intelligence - goes even further, though, and hints at the fact that the materiality is not the central issue here as much as the arrangements that materiality provides. consciousness is not then in the substance, but in the patterns that complex substances allow to emerge. not in the neurons (or in a string of zeros and ones), but in the synaptic networks, or in the recurring movements of digits in orderly procession. it’s a funky notion. and weirdly temporal. and finally, if pattern is consciousness, all representation is pattern, and what we previously called reality is actually just mostly representation - in fact, all-ish reality was already fictional, turning our problem upside down.
or, from a slightly different angle: blood tests. imagine a disease that used to be detected, with moderate accuracy, by smell. now if at a certain point of cumulative medical advancement a certain blood test is developed to make a more accurate measurement, it's only reasonable to assume that the test is based on some sort of material reaction that we have learned to signify as 'that smelly disease'. that is, testing in this way is only making some things react with some other things in a consistent, fairly predictable way. won't we have to conclude, by reversion, that the sense of smell - perception as such - is in fact no more than a consistent, predictable material reaction? isn't an oscilloscope, in this sense, just an extension of our neural network - allowing us more strict perception than before it was invented? when does the spider's neural network end and the spiderweb begin?
either way, these general feelings are echoed in every single narrative that postulates an autonomous realm of experience divorced from the regular world. the earliest one i’ve stumble upon is lovecraft’s dreamlands in ‘the dream-quest of unknown kadath’, but the ghost in the shell, paprika, of course the matrix, serial experiments lain, all of the twilight realms in white wolf’s storyteller rpgs, charlie kauffman’s fluid-recursive synecdoche new york, Air’s Kelly Watch the Stars music video, and even Twin Peaks, at the least, hover around this problem.
as might be intuitive, this is made even more pressing by the evolution of computability. mankind has suddenly found another place besides the brain to create its realms in. suppose the universe collapses and all that’s left is your pyramid stored in the hard drive of some computer equipped with anti-scatological firewalls. how real is your pyramid now?
or suppose we were able to program a large, detailed and real enough simulation of kadath...
-- --- ----- ------- ----------- ------------- ----------------- -------------------
disregard the fact that the information is jumbled (the same could be said of reality’s information)
and avoid the answer that it wouldn’t exist unless it was represented by some sort of consciousness, because that is more or less the point i might be making.
(results may vary)
when deep blue anticipates every single possible outcome of a move in a game of chess, is he effectivelly looking into the future? into a tiny cross-section of the future isomorphic to a chess game, ok, but still a future? is he creating one? if time is even the tiniest bit material, it is!
on the other hand, maybe all of this - this endowing mental scenarios with a reality supposedly beyond themselves - is just some animistic leftover. maybe, lacking both a reliable perception of The real and a working, well-structured notion of reality, we still can’t accept lies for what they what, fiction without some invested reality. crap!
*let’s call this, for lack for anything better to do, the keynsham-otaku effect. the effect is convenient, at least, in that it probably saves the otaku from dangerous disinvesting self-awareness, a trick that The Literary seems to be constantly trying to pull.
if you come from a technologically iffy country like brazil, your first reaction to opening google maps and seeing where you were automatically pop up might have been - “oh shiiiiet this is it, it’s true, this is where i am! it knows where i am”. isn’t there something odd with this reaction?
did you for any reason NOT know where you were? isn’t the fact that you are right there enough evidence of being where you are? and is the map not only a set of codes and symbols, some names on a picture? not only, in short, a representation?
when you see your location pinpointed there, though, it feels like you get a new sense of where you are. why does seeing a map gives form to some sort of special spatial awareness by means of which places seem to exist more? is it only the fact that you realize somehow that you belong to a system (of places), and that reinforces the spatiality of your space?
or is there a reversion somewhere in there, through which the map becomes more real - more concrete - than the very place you’re in and experiencing with your eyes?
say you’ve played minecraft and built yourself a cozy, zombie-free pyramid in the course of one of so many idle afternoons. issue number one: the pyramid you see in the screen resembles - barring socially crippling problems with your sense of space - pyramids in the real world.
hardcore mathematicians and freewilling bloggers might be tempted to call this an isomorphism: the presence of a structural relation between two separate entities.
within the strict mathematics of formal systems, argues douglas hofstadter, isomorphism is what allows some variation of meaning to arise from separate strings of symbols - meaning IS an isomorphism, it is the emergence of a relationship of similarity. apart from notoriously tuning in with strong a strong notion of relativity like simmel’s (are these concepts somehow isomorphic?), this angle forces us to contemplate the nature of consciousness, the issue posed by minecraft, and by any other form of isomorphic representation, then, is naturally that of the possibility of thought.
let’s leave the issue of meaning aside for a second though, and behave as if it is a stable, reliable reality, to consider a different side of the pyramid. it stands to modern reason that everything in the vast strange realms of information inside a computer is ultimately made up of a massive collections of numbers in particular modes of interaction with each other. the pyramid you see on your screen, then, must be represented more or less convolutedly somewhere in cyberland. is there an isomorphism, however, between the pyramid you see in the screen, the pyramid out there in the real world, and a particular string of binary digits that represent them? could it then be said, in a dash of boldness, that if a particular string of digits is isomorphic to a real pyramid, and the real pyramid to the digitstring, that one is as real as the other?
it gets worse - mostly, and as usual, because meaning won’t stay put in the corner of self-reliance we tried to stick it into. suppose you are looking at the pyramid in your screen - or at the real pyramid near that dirty final subway station in cairo, for that matter. how is the image you see processed by your brain? is there an isomorphism between, say, the real pyramid and some sort of brain-configuration that allows you to call that thing a pyramid? is isomorphism the center of meaning in this wider sense as well? damazio would seem to suggest something in this direction. it’s commonly claimed that the concept of Zero is the greatest single accomplishment of the human mind apart from Guimarães Rosa’s book Veredas. behind that claim lies the insight that the zero is only such a big deal because the only place it can be strictly said to exist is INSIDE the human mind, and not in reality at all.
if we consider ‘existing’ as mere relative replicative stability - and the case can be made if you’ve gone on without sleep for long enough - every consistently imagined scenario exists in a very material sense. let us not forget that many things we take for real - words, banks, technology, -
are already simulated reality! (albeit socially simulated, which might take up some different processing power)
some lovely odd things can come out of assuming that the answer is yes. a wyrd relationship between representation and ‘the concrete’ is what simmel, in all his loosely paraphrasic neo-kantian charm, argued for. objects are an abstraction from complexity, a set of imposed relations over the real. he goes as far as not quoting someone who said all reality may as well be numeric, making the mind a mechanism for transforming numbers into qualities (colours in the electromagnetic spectrum being the prime example). it might go without saying that computers are, by construction, a way of doing exactly that.
what basis have we got to argue that the represented has any precedence in relation to ‘reality’ when trying to establish whether something can be called real or not? let’s call this uncertainty the keynsham principle - that there are no coincidences, but that sometimes the pattern - or the isomorphism - is more obvious.
following the now well-established approach of judging text not on its literary merits but on whether or not it deals with concepts interesting to a certain moderately well-informed reader consensus* (call it the io9 school of criticism), we could say that there’s a large chunk of cool contemporary writing that seems to have made its nest right on top of these issue. neal stephenson’s Cryptonomicon makes a strong case towards seeing cryptography as merely a sequential shuffling-layering of abandoning and preserving of isomorphism. not only that, it explores at leyman length the connections between cryptography and computability in the realm of pure numbers - a dreamland on its own right.
scarlett thomas’ The End of Mr Y, however, is probably the one that wallows the deepest in this very issue. the thing it makes us ask ourselves, in fact, is this: if there’s any reality to representation, how can we still keep calling it representation and not reality?
the issue, or perhaps the confusion, is this: is information made of the same thing as the universe? scarlett thomas argues at lenght that it may as well be. hofstadter - together with an entire school of thought on artifical intelligence - goes even further, though, and hints at the fact that the materiality is not the central issue here as much as the arrangements that materiality provides. consciousness is not then in the substance, but in the patterns that complex substances allow to emerge. not in the neurons (or in a string of zeros and ones), but in the synaptic networks, or in the recurring movements of digits in orderly procession. it’s a funky notion. and weirdly temporal. and finally, if pattern is consciousness, all representation is pattern, and what we previously called reality is actually just mostly representation - in fact, all-ish reality was already fictional, turning our problem upside down.
or, from a slightly different angle: blood tests. imagine a disease that used to be detected, with moderate accuracy, by smell. now if at a certain point of cumulative medical advancement a certain blood test is developed to make a more accurate measurement, it's only reasonable to assume that the test is based on some sort of material reaction that we have learned to signify as 'that smelly disease'. that is, testing in this way is only making some things react with some other things in a consistent, fairly predictable way. won't we have to conclude, by reversion, that the sense of smell - perception as such - is in fact no more than a consistent, predictable material reaction? isn't an oscilloscope, in this sense, just an extension of our neural network - allowing us more strict perception than before it was invented? when does the spider's neural network end and the spiderweb begin?
either way, these general feelings are echoed in every single narrative that postulates an autonomous realm of experience divorced from the regular world. the earliest one i’ve stumble upon is lovecraft’s dreamlands in ‘the dream-quest of unknown kadath’, but the ghost in the shell, paprika, of course the matrix, serial experiments lain, all of the twilight realms in white wolf’s storyteller rpgs, charlie kauffman’s fluid-recursive synecdoche new york, Air’s Kelly Watch the Stars music video, and even Twin Peaks, at the least, hover around this problem.
as might be intuitive, this is made even more pressing by the evolution of computability. mankind has suddenly found another place besides the brain to create its realms in. suppose the universe collapses and all that’s left is your pyramid stored in the hard drive of some computer equipped with anti-scatological firewalls. how real is your pyramid now?
or suppose we were able to program a large, detailed and real enough simulation of kadath...
-- --- ----- ------- ----------- ------------- ----------------- -------------------
disregard the fact that the information is jumbled (the same could be said of reality’s information)
and avoid the answer that it wouldn’t exist unless it was represented by some sort of consciousness, because that is more or less the point i might be making.
(results may vary)
when deep blue anticipates every single possible outcome of a move in a game of chess, is he effectivelly looking into the future? into a tiny cross-section of the future isomorphic to a chess game, ok, but still a future? is he creating one? if time is even the tiniest bit material, it is!
on the other hand, maybe all of this - this endowing mental scenarios with a reality supposedly beyond themselves - is just some animistic leftover. maybe, lacking both a reliable perception of The real and a working, well-structured notion of reality, we still can’t accept lies for what they what, fiction without some invested reality. crap!
*let’s call this, for lack for anything better to do, the keynsham-otaku effect. the effect is convenient, at least, in that it probably saves the otaku from dangerous disinvesting self-awareness, a trick that The Literary seems to be constantly trying to pull.
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