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Category Archives: Computer Science

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) »

One of my favourite Turing quips

24-Oct-11

From ‘Can Digital Computers Think?’ “One does not need to be able to understand how these orders lead to the machine’s subsequent behaviour, any more than one needs to understand the mechanism of germination when one puts a seed in the ground. The plant comes up whether one understands or not. If we give the [...]

Also filed in academia | | Comments (0) »

Hey Badiou, why no computation?

09-Oct-11

I’ve been reading a bit more Badiou of late. Not sure why – I guess I’m trying to discover more philosophical clout with regards to integrating the formalist equivalence of computation-mathematical theorems (Turing, Church) with ontology and computational aesthetics more generally. I’m not going in deep, just lightly skimming the surface of what’s been written, [...]

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

Paul Caplan on David Berry’s The Philosophy of Software

05-Sep-11

His brief thoughts HERE. Well worth a look. Here are his final thoughts concerning the lack of object oriented-ness in Berry’s new book. “Berry’s philosophy is certainly object-centred but it is not object-oriented in the sense in which I am seeking to use Harman’s quadruple object. For Berry objects do not exceed their relations. They [...]

Also filed in academia, Art, Graham Harman, Object Oriented Ontology | | Comments (4) »