wallpaper animals

 Loving this very dramatic and bold entryway...how about you?  Have a Fabulous day xx image via tumblr

Within cybernetics (or at least, what is called 2nd-order cybernetics - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_cybernetics) there has been a long discussion about the nature of objects, and the way that what we think are 'objects' (cats, cars, bricks, people) are in fact 'processes' existing between biological entities (us). Berkeley's question of whether there is a world 'out there' acquires a new (and much more technical) guise in this line of thought. Avoiding the temptation to go and kick stones in the manner of Dr Johnson (!) and say "I refute it thus!", I would say there may be something of value in this line of thought. However, I don't think anything of value can come from going around denying reality - that tends only to upset people, and often appeals only to those constructivists and post-modernists who have an almost religious devotion to being awkward.

But what is in the object-as-process work which might really give us something new? One of the key concepts in this thinking is Von Foerster's idea of Eigenvalues of perception which Louis Kaufmann has developed into a mathematical expression of an eigenform. It's the mathematical representation here which is valuable. The reason why I believe it's valuable is not to do with it providing any radical new representation of reality - like some sort of ontological argument for God (no doubt constructivists yearn for a defensible mathematical expression of their religion just as the scholastics did for theirs!). It is because it challenges us to reflect on some of the concepts for objects that have already suffused our academic disciplines and sciences.

The most fascinating one, I think, is the concept of a wave. For most physicists waves are physical processes whose objectivisation is beyond question. But if my little finger is not actually concretely my little finger, but the result of a process (just imagine for the sake of argument), what might a wave be? For a wave we already recognise as a process. And somehow our processes of objectifying it also rely on a process. How do we know which process is which? How do we know that the wave actually exists as a process? How can we be sure that we are not actually 'seeing' some manifestation of our own process of seeing? Rather like the strobe effect on a bicycle wheel, what we may see as moving backwards slowly, is the result of the interaction of two processes: one of perception, the other of motion.

But questioning waves like this gets us into trouble where even the cyberneticians can't afford to feel smug. Because if we've got waves wrong, we've also got a lot of physics wrong too. "But it can't be wrong! It works!" will, rightly, come the reply. Here we must be challenged to deeply ask what 'working' means. It probably has to do with anticipation and control of our physical environment. The question then is, is anticipation and control only produced as a result of objectifying waves, or can what we regard as anticipation and control ('working') also be produced through some other process. I don't know the answer to that. But I think it is worth reflecting on the conceptual understanding of the world which derives from our concept of the wave (and oscillation in general). It is so fundamental it is hard to appreciate.

First, let's start with clocks. And from clocks we have measurable time. And from measurable time, we have studied circular movements of planets, and from that we have derived infinitesimal calculus. And from this we have created complex machines - even complex machines with feedback!  (maybe you can see where I'm going here...). Those complex machines with feedback have underpinned our concepts of cybernetics whichin turn have undermined the certainty of the conceptualisations upon which they were based.

It appears to be a loop.

I'm in Brussels at the moment for the iTEC project, but I managed to take in a performance of "Passion", a fairly new opera by Pascal Dusapin. I very much like his music, and musically this was an interesting evening - although in the end I thought it was all over-long and took itself far too seriously. There was one moment where three pink telly-tubby looking creatures all rolled around on the floor: I  wasn't sure if this was supposed to be funny.

The opera is a curious mix of a re-framing of Monteverdi's operas (especially Orfeo), a philosophical nod to Descartes's Traité des Passions and a study of melancholia in women. Sung it Italian, it nevertheless felt very French with octatonic melodies reminiscent of Messaien. There were other borrowings I suspect - long-held organ chords which reminded me of Britten's Church canticles, and some baroquesque harsichord interludes to remind us of the Monteverdi connection.

But death and eroticism suffused the piece. It made me think of my dad's experience (if it could ever be called 'experience') in dying. It also made me think of Bataille, and I'd like to focus on Bataille's work and his take of 'passion' for the rest of this post.

I've blogged elsewhere on Bataille's emphasis on exhuberance and waste - particularly as it might apply to education (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.be/2012/01/luxury-of-education.html). I think Bataille's economic theory in privileging waste over rational equilibrium is extremely important, not least because there is no other theory out there like it. There are others (plenty of them) who have challenged homo economicus. But ultimately, they end up reinventing homo-economicus from a different standpoint (for example, Kahneman reinvents homo economicus from the standpoint of neuro-psychology). Only Bataille is there to point out that rationality itself is an epiphenomenon of passion, waste, exuberance and destruction. Given that world history provides him with some compelling evidence for this view, it is astonishing that nobody else (especially in economics) has really picked up on it.

The problem with talking about Bataille's theory is that it is difficult to get hold of anything concrete - and economists (on the whole) like concrete things. But of course the theory itself shies away from concreteness. It isn't that Bataille is being irrational: he had one of the most penetrating and analytical minds on difficult issues like sex, eroticism and religion. But his reliance on anthropological concepts like 'potlatch' immediately cause problems for those starting from the perspective of the contemporary economist.

This is where I wonder if Nigel Howard's "Paradoxes of Rationality" might help. When Bataille talks about waste, he is talking about a divestment of attachments: it is the moment when we say "to hell with it!".  For Howard, that might be seen as a particular meta-strategy in a game. Howard quotes Russell who said that the epitome of irrational action was "to become so agitated at the airport as to jump on the first plane that I see". Howard would then frame the question: "What's the game?"

This  is an important question, and Howard provides some very powerful tools for addressing it. Currently I am in the process of exploring how those mathematical tools might help understand the divestments of attachments that seem to lie at the heart of Bataille's 'waste'. In short, I believe there is a logic to it, but paradoxically, it is a logic which exists as a recursive process where meta-strategy is piled on meta-strategy (or meta-meta-strategy). It is Howard's genius to have unpicked the logic that sits behind classical game theory, and follow it to its logical conclusions, and show it to lead to irrationality. But nevertheless, this is an irrationality which can be situated through analysis, and in doing such an analysis, I believe new life can be breathed into "passion".

 Here's to Spring...


and the Beautiful things it has to offer...Hope you all had a lovely first weekend of spring, mine was spent gloriously soaking up the beautiful rays of sunshine on a very overdue holiday break with my gorgeous family...Wishing you all a fabulous Spring Day! xx images via pinterest

I'm currently talking to some students from the University of Bolton's Ras Al Khaimah campus about how the web is changing, and in particular how real-time communications are giving much greater information about the way the world changes in response to the communications that individuals make. I think this promises that businesses and institutions can take much greater control of their activities. But really, people have to see it in action to see how it works! So in posting this, I am able to demonstrate exactly what I'm talking about...