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Category Archives: Computer Science

Some questions about Actor Recursion Theory (ART): An interview with me – (Part 1)

06-Apr-12

So what’s Actor Recursion Theory then? Actor Recursion Theory is a name I’ve given to a specific intervention outlined in my dissertation. It’s not fully developed yet, and as such links or presents my haphazard state of mind during a PhD thesis. It’s reflects an opinion, but I leave plenty of room for others. The [...]

Also filed in academia, Actor Recursion Theory, algorithm, Art | | Comments (0) »

Thinking the Absolute: The Ambiguities of Emergence, Novelty and Life in Formal Systems.

23-Mar-12

Some good news to report; our panel “The Ambiguities of Emergence, Novelty and Life in Formal Systems“, has been accepted at the “Thinking the Absolute Conference at Liverpool Hope University, June 29th – July 1st. The panel will involve myself, Charlie Gere and Francis Halsall – our abstracts are below. Looks like it will be [...]

Also filed in academia, Art, Object Oriented Ontology, Speculative Realism | | Comments (2) »

Machinic Intelligence: An Important Argument from Turing.

25-Feb-12

This time from Can Digital Computers Think?, a lecture in 1951. This passage is particularly important for my thesis too (my emphasis). Certainly the machine can only do what we do order it to perform, anything else would be a mechanical fault. But there is no need to suppose that, when we give it its [...]

Also filed in Actor Recursion Theory, Turing | | Comments (0) »

The Coming war on General Computation

09-Jan-12

Here’s the Keynote speech by Cory Doctorow at the 28c3 conference in Berlin which posits a future war between platform appliances and general purpose computers. Quite an extensive keynote – which all good keynotes should be – which raises questions about what to do with the information at hand, rather than severely dominate the conference [...]

Also filed in Politics | | Comments (0) »

Noah Horwitz, Badiou, OOO and Constructive Computation

30-Dec-11

Replying to my last post on Chaitin, Noah Horwitz (who is working very closely with Badiou and Wolfram as am I) comments on the potential similarities and differences of our position. It’s an important conversation, so its worth elevating to its own post as it were. His original comment is here, but I’ve directly copied [...]

Also filed in academia, algorithm, Badiou, chaitin, Object Oriented Ontology | | Comments (1) »

Who is Gregory Chaitin?

28-Dec-11

Tim’s post just reminded me to write something on Gregory Chaitin. I’ve been writing about this area a fair bit in my thesis, in light of his relationship to Wolfram’s research. Often enough, if you highlight differences between two thinkers in one specific field, you can transport or unpack those differences in a completely different field. [...]

Also filed in academia, algorithm, chaitin | | Comments (5) »

A response to Jussi Parikka: or why materialism ‘encounter’ has lost its efficacy

23-Dec-11

Most of you have probably read Jussi Parikka’s latest piece on some Object Oriented Questions about OOO HERE; the comments are well worth a read if not for the usual can of worms OOO usually opens in the blogosphere. Paul Caplan replied HERE and Levi HERE, Graham’s also just replied with THESE TWO posts. But rather than repeat other responses, I thought [...]

Also filed in academia, algorithm, Art, Blog stuff, Object Oriented Ontology, Parikka, Politics | | Comments (6) »

Rule 30: More Hacking / OOO and all that…

09-Dec-11

There were some great responses to my post on hacking and OOO last week. Tim Richardson responded HERE and Nathan Gale just posted his response two days ago HERE. I’m doing this in the middle of a thesis session write-up, so I’ll have to be brief and numbingly inarticulate. So lets go through it a bit. [...]

Also filed in algorithm | | Comments (0) »

Reality in the name of God

26-Oct-11

…is the title of Noah Horwitz’s 2012 publication by Punctum Books. He sent a comment in, and I thought I should post it considering it links Badiou with Wolfram. How Horwitz can argue that a computational reality is made up of the Holy Name of God is beyond my level of intuition. Reality in the [...]

Also filed in algorithm | | Comments (1) »

More Badiou Anti-Constructivist Bias

25-Oct-11

Here he is in Number and Numbers again, clearly having a laugh at Peano’s expense for not being Platonic enough. “He thus participates forcefully in that movement of thought, victorious today, that wrests mathematics from its antique philosophical pedestal and represents it to us as a grammar of signs where all that matters is the [...]

Also filed in algorithm, Quentin Meillassoux, Speculative Realism, Work-Blog | | Comments (6) »