You may not have heard of it before, mainly as it’s a criticism levelled from ‘software studies’ and it’s implications from a cultural perspective. Matt Fuller and David Berry are the usual critics.

I definitely agree with you about the straight forward writing style being easy to read. Wolfram should definitely be commended in approaching a more democratic non-obscure method of communication. However, it’s one thing reading it, but absorbing it’s implications are another and that takes time. I’d even argue that the diagrams warrant more of a consideration than the text! (only because I study aesthetics and computer art!) And furthermore, getting your hands and executing his findings on an actual mathematica program and messing about with the codes, also illuminates his arguments in a more pragmatic style than simply reading.

The only reason as to why I put a time of four months, is simply because of the notes. I disagree about the notes being illuminating, only because they provide invaluable context to the main text (which is odd as Wolfram’s main discovery is anti-context). As you say, it totally depends if you want to understand Wolfram’s work contextually in metamathematics, quantum theory, etc and find out about it’s place in relation to those disciplines. For me, I couldn’t entirely grasp the nature of Wolfram’s discoveries until I read more about Turing, Godel, and chaos theory.

It’s generous of you to post this. I look forward to hearing any reactions you may have. I think you will probably actually be more interested in what I am working on now (although it is again not directly on aesthetics in a real sense). But I will only probably have even a first rough draft of this manuscript in 2-3 weeks at most. In any event, what I am working on now builds on the book you have in your hands so any reactions you have would probably aid me as I try to hammer things out.

Warm regards,

Noah

I’ll just make these brief and quick interventions.
You say OOO can admit the notion of the bit. But the bit is not an object. It’s a pure relation. 0/1 It’s a relation that involves the void itself 0 –> 1. That’s not an object. An object is some sort of unity. We use to just call them phenomena. But the bit is prior to unity as such. For example, phonemes in language are not yet signifiers. A OOO object is not even a signifier. It’s at best the signified. That is they are stuck in the Imaginary. So was phenomenology. This is what structuralists were saying about Husserlianism all along (notice how today they can already take our image of an apple in the brain, have a computer read it, and produce such an image every time one thinks of it on a screen if one is hooked up with electrodes). To think computation one has to think the Letter. Lacan says letters are of the Real and not the symbolic. Signifiers are of the symbolic. With modern science, the letter is what literally replaces reality and marks the real itself. AIT is a way of understanding how the real works insofar as it is about how bits computate (that is, how the letters conjugate themselves). To speak of being is then to speak of the letter and how it never ceases being written.

One of the reasons OOO does not talk about the void is because it takes the world to be a plenum. There is no room for the void in it other than as some sort of empty space (and given its Aristotelianism probably not even that). Saying the objects as such are withdrawn does not help since this is purely something we are aware of mentally.

Part of the issue here is that OOO relies on Husserl and Heidegger and never passed through the Derridean critique of Husserl as articulated in Voice and Phenomenon and the book on Husserlian geometry. There Derrida shows that the Husserlian intentional objects do not escape the defiles of the signifier. That is, the allegedly intended unity itself presupposes the mark and the trace—the signifier. So I think consciously I am intending an apple as a unity despite all the profiles, but actual it is always already the signifier ‘apple’ that makes the apple as intended unity possible. It is the signified of all the profiles It is then Badiou who is a realist who makes it possible to transpose post-Derridean thinking onto the real and to engage in realism. A post-Derridean Husserl should be transposed onto the real, but not simply Heideggerian Husserlism.

Bits are not mental units. They are phonemes and letters. There is no need for mind to determine bits. In fact, I argue that mind itself is not reducible to bits where as thoughts are obviously articulated as computation.

Recursive procedures are themselves a series of relations and dependent on bits. This is why at bottom it is on/off in computers.

You write “Because seeing how a given program plays out or executes is the OOO unknowable – epistemological act par excellence” I have to disagree here. OOO is saying that the apple withdraws in its unity in its being. I only have apple profiles. But if the apple is a set and computation of that set, then there is no withdrawal. The apple is incomplete (we do not yet know how it will develop), but it is not withdraw in any sense. Being open is not the same as being withdrawn. .It is just the name of a unity. But that unity itself is marked by the set containing he relations rather than being withdrawn. An acorn will become an oak. But we already have the code for the development inscribed in the acorn. Speaking about withdrawal is a model based on empirical perception at bottom. Think about it this way. Take a flame, an amoeba, and superduper computer that can computate much more than a human. Does a flame have any sense of objecthood? It does not experience a piece of paper as a thing independent and as a unity. It burns a ‘whatever’ is in its path. But there is no reason to say this whatever is differentiated. An amoeba probably does distinguish inside from outside and a signal to enter and exit for example. But that is far from what OOO needs. Now take a superduper computer. I would contend such a computer only sees numbers, letters, sets, bits, etc. This is why it was so incredibly difficult to get optical sensors to distinguish distinct things at the beginning. They were just seeing bits and numbers. They had to be forced to sectionalize them into particular sets. And here even we see it is a matter of sets/letters rather than signified

If these things were withdrawn and vacuum-packed, no one would ever be able to write computer programs and exchange the code.
I just do not see how computational irreducibility can be talked about in terms of withdrawal. At all stages of the computation one knows that it is a computation of that particular program.
You seem to argue that OOO will just offer a constructivist rather than a realist view of numbers. But here is the problem. OOO is saying that the real itself is differentiated into real unities that are withdrawn. But those unties presuppose that numbers are not constructions but are real since one thing is one thing and two two. If any object is just an aggregate, the only way to unlock the logic of its unity and mereology is by doing set theory as set theory is the very ontolology of mereology as such. This is why one should side with Badiou over Aristotle.

Have a good new year!

Noah

Not that I like disagreeing, but you know its the ‘academic thing to do’.

First let me clarify a point. I said earlier that what I am calling the Name of God is a finite omega bit-string. What I meant (and this is why I don’t like to post to blogs because I prefer my missteps to be buried in drafts of manuscripts) is that the Name of God is both irreducibly complex in Chaitin’s sense and a finite bit-string. Technically, an omega is an non-computable real number so by definition it is as infinite as any real number (the one Chaitin likes best is that which expresses the probability of the Turing halting problem). What I am saying is that the ultimate bit string (Name of God for me –for Wolfram the automaton expressing the universe) would involve both irreducible complexity (non-compressible) but also involve infinity (like pi or e do as real numbers rather than omega). As I said before, I do not think the universe as such can be described by omega given the amount of regularity and order (that is, compression) found in it. I think omega still plays a role in theology and is related to the name of God and other issues but not in the sense of being how the universe is. If omega describes the universe, then Meillassoux is right. These things are still a little in flux with me. But at some point over the next month or so I hope pin it down in a first (and hopefully consistent) expression (without too many missteps).

As for God as programmer, there is an element of that. But I am not pushing a model where God is conceived as a positive entity in the world. God’s programming for me takes place through God’s withdrawal and self-contraction.

For Chaitin on Leibniz I really recommend the youtube lectures if you have not already watched them (the ones at Lisbon, Carnegie Mellon, etc.). All those lectures are great in any event. Chaitin makes some really good points about how with Leibniz he would just dash off 5 pages in a letter or small piece and come up with a good idea. This is why it’s difficult to say what Leibniz said. He would express an idea and drop it. I think this aspect of Leibniz means if one is going to write a book on Leibniz it is most fruitful not to write it in the traditional way (that is, just trying to note what he says in each place and what it means).

You are right. I am not looking at art in any real way. I am actually looking more so at evolution/biology. This is another way Chaitin is important (although we are at odds on how to interpret what his attempts at merging computation and biology show).

We are also different in that I think OOO is essentially a dead-end and misguided approach. Objects cannot be sets of irreducible complex bit strings in the OOO sense. I do not think OOO can even admit the notion of the bit. OOO is transposing Husserlian intentional objects onto being itself in act of reification (with the caveat that they ‘withdraw’–which just means their unity is not perceivable and only intended ultimately– and perceive each other–although there is no phenomenological analysis of the analogy from human perception that could flesh out such a claim in the way Husserl gives such an analysis in Cartesian Meditations relative to subjectivity). If an OOO object were a set of non-compressible bits, then the object itself would be the computation of those bits. That means one has a formula that captures the object itself as such. The conception of the thing and the thing would be the same. It’s then just a matter a la Woflram to see how that computation plays out. The bit I argue involves the existence of the void, numbers, pure differentiality, etc. Admitting that things are bit strings means admitting that at bottom there is an ‘atom’ and that atom is relationality in itself. It’s not surprising that OOO has nothing to my knowledge to say about numbers as objects or the nothing/void as non-object. These are things in the book already coming out.

But now I have truly said too much. Time to bury back down into my mole hole and dig.

Best,

Noah