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The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe

July 19, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the UniverseThe Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this amazing book, Roger Penrose looks for a very fundamental issue.

He is looking for a single metric to describe everything.

This is not a unit of reality, however, although this is how he poses the issue.

The problem with selecting a metric, as he shows us over and over, lies in how different metrics arise from localizations on various manifolds. As these metrics are extended beyond the localization, the very structure of these metrics will threaten to buckle. In many instances, the metrics (and their attendant relationships) will no longer be applicable. What this means, in the Kantian (and Badiouian sense) is that these relationships’s applicability will become “undecidable”. In some extreme cases, the relationships may even break down. For instance, black holes are a problem because the expressed relationships that emerge from physics experiments prove to be untenable in black holes (and the big bang) as these relationships decohere and infinities and zeros pop out everywhere.

This search for a metric leads Penrose to reject string theory as a viable relationship form. Each dimension is an extension of the 3 + 1 dimensions of space and time. For instance, gravity is a dimension, weak force is a dimension. Each dimension is an independent mathematical vector of a different “inertial” influence. Additionally, the mathematics of string theory, as well as other theories, proves to be too illusionary. As with post-structural critiques of modernism, Penrose points out that the consistency of string theory relies on theoretical supplements/signs that are attached onto the positions of various types in order to maintain coherency. For instance, superpartners, which have no physical correlative. In other words, the mathematical proliferation of dimensions as well as its immanent affects proves to be unweldly to Penrose because the coherence of the relationships are maintained by theoretical enforcement rather than any direct correlation of math and physical experimentation.

If Penrose was familiar with Badiou, Kant and Derrida, he would be able to recognize that the undecideability of supersymmetry and string theory result from these theoretical supplements. The supplements provide the missing pieces to cohere the theory, so physical experiments prove to be incomplete in their testing. As Penrose points out, string theorists in failing to find superpartners can always push the calibration of their theory to include these partners, just at higher energy levels, which can always lie beyond the ability of technology to generate.

In this sense, it seems to me that string theory and supersymmetry are antinomies of the Kantian variety. Penrose falls fault to this when he theorizes that Quantum Field Theory can be modified (rather than the Einstein’s general relativity) by changing the cut off metric. This is in line with all his discussions to “renormalize” the math so as to remove the variance accumulated by extending localized relations from beyond the area of origin on the manifold. We can always enforce a consistency of a given domain in two ways.

1. To provide a “superpartner” to supplement the terms, to keep phenomenon visible to one another within the domain, as a motion of immanence, as Derrida suggests.

Or.

2. To encapsulate a domain by limiting its identity to its other. From there, we can radically reduce the other to zero, thereby hiding the limitations of a domain, as with Moffe & Laulau with their Hegemony or as with Badiou with a basic atomic “cut” to center the domain as with Being and Event II.

Both of these strategies amount to the same kind of forced coherency by mapping a domain rigidly.

Penrose does offer his own favorite solution; his Twistor theory, which removes the need for extra dimensions beyond 3 + 1. Additionally, he considers this theory by collapsing all the different vector differences held cosmically in string theory into immanent relations that are founded on the very “knots” of space, so that the pre-space twistors contain the information that wider “vibrations” are meant to express. Both theories are incompatible in this regard because of their huge difference in scale.

And while Penrose admits that twistor theory adds nothing physically; that it’s just another way of viewing a situation mathematically, he also realizes the need for us to see things differently than we have.

It is this adherence to a particular view that causes all the problems in the first place. If you look at how these different views are constructed, you’ll see the mathematicians switch from one domain to another through various class equivalences whenever it suits them. When they need to express vectors they will jump to a manifold model, or a more generic (abstract) deformation of an algebra. In other words, we lack enough views. So we supplement the one we have in an attempt to normalize them.

Curiousier still is Penrose’s tiny discussion of consciousness in which he attempts to “renormalize” consciousness in terms of objective reduction. He theorizes that the waveform reduction that collapses due to quantum gravity may be at the seat of consciousness’s ability to complexly surject different sensory views into coherency. This suggestion is of the same kind as his forced synthesis of twistor theory. The satisfaction of trying to find a single metric, a single complex knot of relations that cannot be unraveled but contains all the “moves” is like a physicist trapped on a chess board recognizing the orthogonal formation of board, or as in Futurama the Professor discovering the smallest unit that constitutes the universe is the pixel.

In a real way, Penrose seeks to calibrate physics to the mathematical domain. He doesn’t want beautiful math that doesn’t apply, that is in excess of physics. This is why he creates that chart twice, in which the mathematical is the Truth of which the entirety of the physical is mapped; although mentality is generated from the physical and mathematical/Truth is generated from that.

The Platonic ideologue he insists on lies on the equivalence of function, on the purity of the sameness of process from point to point of the same type. Never-mind that the subatomic particles we find today are largely generated from artificial means. Penrose would assume as sameness of process that forces a universalization, but that is the way metaphysics and science both work, to equate different phenomenon as being identical based on narrow definitions of rational equivalence. This may work in some areas, but as we see, all relations are born locally, within a limited scope. Their extension cosmically creates the basis for which we start to see a degradation of relation qua variance (pollution, or various forces of form-fitting). After all, we can have no irrationality without first being able to posit a rational sheet of complete consistency.

Nonetheless, although this is a lengthy book it is still beautifully written. I wonder who Penrose’s audience is, for he approaches much mathematical complexity in such a short time, talking about basic principles like polynomials and trigonometry before jumping into Lagrangian manifolds and so on. Still, if you hunger for complexity and abstraction, here it is. Much of his explanations of very complex concepts are very clear, although at times we could use more handholding. His pictures are also very interesting and complement his point nicely.

Well worth the effort to read.

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Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge

June 18, 2015 / posted in agential realism, images of being-human, manifesto, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge by Paul Karl Feyerabend
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Feyerabend writes a difficult book here, but one which is necessary. Taking a radically different perspective on the aesthetics of what theory is, Feyerabend attack one of the scared cows of science and mathematics — that of consistency.

In some ways, Feyerabend could have raised objections more metaphysically — that ideas have at their germination roots outside of a given domain — that culture plays a role in utilizing domains in one area to influence another — that science is a socially generated practice, on that mistakes methodology for reality — but in other ways, Feyerabend does well by sticking very close to his topic. His use of Galileo as an example is of interest, since he returns to it often but it is in his later chapters that his critique really stands out.

Basically Feyerabend shows us that knowledge is always procedural. Knowledge and theory are generated through processes of agency. By attempting to manipulate or influence a specific phenomenon, we generate procedures to gain access to that phenomenon. This requires that we calibrate our actions to an appropriate cut. Nonetheless, any cut we calibrate to is simultaneously a distortion of the very object of study, because it casts it in a certain relationship. Thus

Expressing it differently, we may say that the assumption of a single coherent world-view that underlies all of science is either a metaphysical hypothesis trying to anticipate a future unity, or a pedagogical fake; or it is an attempt to show, by a judicious up-and downgrading of disciplines, that a synthesis has already been achieved. This is how fans of uniformity proceeded in the past (cf. Plato’s lists of subjects in Chapter vii of his Republic), these are the ways that are still being used today. A more realistic account, however, would be that ‘[t]here is no simple “scientific” map of reality–or if there were, it would be much too complicated and unwieldy to be grasped or used by anyone. But there are many different maps of reality, from a variety of scientific viewpoints’

One should be quick to realize that Feyerabend is not against science at all; in fact he encourages it in his “irresponible” and “anarchist” ways. What Feyerabend is objecting to is the imagined consistency/consensus of science, a “sacred cow” of science all the more because science doesn’t need such a “petit object a” in order to function. One of the underlying criticisms that Feyerabend levels is that all social institutions (including science) are in fact first and foremost, social institutions. We understand this to be even more true when we realize that the academic/scientific community often operates as a ranking system more than as a theory generating procedure; that grants and individuals are awarded more for position than they are for work. That the entire procedure of science is one of self promotion (through the modality of whatever science they are using) more than anything else.

In some ways, Feyerabend does well to criticize past methods in order to highlight inconsistencies in how they are aestheticized and presented. But this of course, will stop no one, because past procedures are in the past. After all, aren’t we better now?

I cannot stop praising his book, because there is so much in here. I appreciate the clarity and freshness with which Feyeraband approaches this topic. On a more abstract level, one that I think Feyerabend would appreciate, is that we should approach all polemics and theories understanding that they are generated through the auspices of their own consistency and meaning. We often reject theories and ideas just like we reject people — they either don’t make the cut due to some personal inclination, or they are competitors for the same social capital. Often, these are the same thing. I whole heartedly agree with Feyerabend. With the lack of any “true” authority, one that “naturally” supersedes whatever authority we could imagine here on Earth (as there is none like that), we ought to utilize any theory that allows us to increase our agency. Should we not desire any particular agency, we should embrace any idea for what it is worth, at the time that we need it. Of course, some ideas will become undecideable should the foundation for that idea be incommensurable with our own foundation. But that is not a fault of that idea. This is merely the fault of our own localization. Sometimes, a question simply isn’t available from a given point of view because its context is not available.

This is of course, in a big way, where Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason steps in, and it is at this point that Feyerabend stops short. He doesn’t wish to get into the logistics of what is reasonable. He only wishes that we set ourselves free of the chains by which we adhere to an image of what good science ought to look like so that we can do better science. And for that, I find that there is a resonance with martial arts, or with music or any other technicality/agency. We must learn the basics to define what the modality is. From that point on, mastery begins when we start to release ourselves from technique in order to be more appropriate to whatever situation we find ourselves in, simply because technique is a pedagogical tool, and its rigid organization will make certain acts impossible because they are incommensurable with that technique.

Ultimately, consistency is how we make sense of a localization for the purposes of ordinance (organization). We must never mistake the map for the territory since the territory is always changing as our desires/designs and agential relations change — so we too change.

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Timaeus/Critias

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews, Theory / No Comments

Timaeus/CritiasTimaeus/Critias by Plato
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These two works together were meant to be a trilogy about Athens, Greeks and their place in the world. Unfortunately, the 3rd book was lost, or never written, and the 2nd book, Critias only survives as a fragment. Still, interesting. The three men, speak to Socartes about the nature of everything, highlighting the Other of the Greeks, the Egyptians, as being part of the primary source needed to complete the story.

The first book, Timaeus is interesting because he speaks of how the universe started before man was made… how man was made rationally with intention, and all that. With Timaeus you see how Plato tries to ground everything, the 4 elements for example, into Being, with ideas being the root… (as the 4 elements are basically tiny shapes, and what’s more pure as an idea than a shape?) From this, you get the idea that once everything is built up from Truth, we should then, with the history of Atlantis in Critias, and the lost 3rd book, come to a systematic understanding of the way in which Athens has developed and should develop… with an eye on purity and rightness.

The idea is simple. If there was a way we were made, a reason for us being the way we are, then there too is a way for us to be, an intented way for us to live, and a right way for us to not go against our nature.

Only in a democracy like Athens can someone like Plato have existed… Plato who feared the nihilism of the Sophists, in which their collectively disordered wisdom threatened to destroy the inherent meaning and values that made Athens what it is. He of course, wrote his entire life, to try and find coherence; find Being which could bind those disorderly ideas, and bring them up from negating each other, so that we can have values, so that we can have orderly society. So that we can be a people with a moral and ethical content we could be proud of and exhibit.

At least, that’s how I see this book within the larger scheme of what Plato was doing.

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on Art

September 17, 2011 / posted in art, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, rhizomatic architecture / No Comments

Sculpture is the most ideal art. Music is the most pragmatic. Dance is the most expressive.

The dream of the artist is to inscribe in the space inside the body outside the body. It’s very much as what Deleuze said regarding the inscription of great books being written in flesh.

I don’t mean that art should be tattooed, but that it should connect what is internal with what is external.

Yet art is not limited to the permeation of membranes or the echo of a model in the head of an artist to the exterior, nor does art have to do with the fidelity of transmission between an external source with an internal experience.

The worst artist is one who carefully conceives of his creations as a matter of controlling the experience of his audience — about transmitting a message, of needing to supplement their art with a libretto or scoffing at those who do not understand their art. Art as a capitalist endeavor is owned, but art as art is experiential germination not teleological. Art is not an essay, it is not about message or medium, although essays can be art. Mediums themselves may be art, and messages can certainly have that artistic impulse.

Rather, to make art is to germinate a form with its ambivalence and its multi-valence and its integral congruity such that the experience of that form extends itself naturally within the substrate of a manifold.

So while each of us are manifolds, select reflections of the world around us, our manifold itself is permeated by forces beyond us from the outside. Those forces can reverberate within our manifold to manifest a chamber of interlaced experience. That vibration, be it pleasurable or stinging — be it without judgement is the result of art. Great art can lead us to intenser vibrations.

Although of course, we judge such vibrations on the face of pleasurable experiences, or singular expressions in allowed social spaces. The accidental death of a parent, or the purposeful interruption of employment can both be traumatic instances, but not permissible within the social realm of ‘art’.

This is how sculpture can be the most ideal form. In the rigidity or fluidity of material, we can experience the visual (and tensile) sensuousness of a form that interrupts a space we are in and informs us of an otherworldly experience. Traditional otherworldly statues of Gods and Demons, plants and other creatures can invoke in us the presence of a static creature such as Venus de Milo. More contemporaneous forms vary in their simplicity or texture to suggest the raw indeterminacy of a gesture — perhaps highlighting the specificity of a bird in space as with Brâncu?i.

In much the same way, music allows for the literal and synecdochiac reverberation of rhythms and beats that bounce within the antechambers of our manifold. We literally vibrate with sounds that resonate with us. As the rhythms align the internal weave of our core, as it is already pre-made with alliterations from familiar genres and languages, so does speech and poetry jolt us with the strength of its diastole and systolic pistons such that we get the hip shaking, head pounding one-step, a halfway intrusion into the expressive realm of Dance.

If you follow me so far, you will understand the how dance and other forms likewise fall under art.

Great art is not the germination of a thought, so much as it is the construction brand new memetics, not of the replication of cliches and icons — although there are room for these too, as art. Art can be any kind of verbal or non-verbal language, it is a modal set operating on other modal sets. And we human subjects are not the only manifolds, although that is our best experience of alien worlds that weave worldly produce in often inexpressible or even inexcusable forms.

Manifolds exist as reflections in the pond, registers in your motherboard — manifolds are topographical maps of the earth, presented as 2D fold-outs. Manifolds are imprints of a system, or a totality along a specific interface, such that the movements of a knight in chess is a particular manifold. A table is a manifold of a factory. A chair is the manifold of the man who made it, the woman who sat in it for fifty years and the weather outside her home.

When Charles Bukowski grew old, wrote poems and started to vomit his brains out, drink is heart and his relationships down the toilet, he is a manifold of a great deal things. His abusive father, his teenage acne, his misery and search for pussy, his subsequent selfishness and alcoholism, his many wives, his days traveling and giving talks. When Michel Hemmingson wrote about the human scum, like the step-father who fucks his step-daughter, or shall we imagine a novel Hemmingson might write… a Vietnam vet who ends up in Hawaii, drugged out, alcoholic, washed out, alienated from the his family, his life interrupted, working a worthless job, waking up drunk each morning, walking the beach dressed like a bum, watching the waves crash on virgin sands, dreaming of the pussy he had, of his children who hate him, barely riding his bike to work once in a while, and his friend who drives a crab truck. This too is a manifold, the manifold written out in words meant to be inscribed in flesh, a way of life. A way of living, a weave, a potential argument for humanity, for existence, for the interruption of alien consciousness on our planetary cosmos.

Philosophers desire to be artists, they desire to walk the thin line that intersects all manifolds, runs through them. But that too is a manifold, one which seeks to imprint its attending indexes onto other manifolds. Plato wrote his Republic as an exploration of what he thought is, justice and the best social roles to express that justice. Heidegger, Sartre, Nietzsche, Marx and even Hegel all wrote on what the best way to live was, the best life to be. The different indexicals that tie these manifolds together act as spaces within a statue, to help formulate the different modes of awareness along bands of consciousness. Shall we name the indexes in Freud? Father, Child, Mother. Lacan? Analyst and Patient, Symbolic and Real and Imaginary. Language works as Moebius Strips that both inform us of our specific meaning along an indeterminate range. Art that does not apply so directly to such vast and vague concepts such as Society and Justice still carry a language a rhythm like Frank Sinatra’s do-be-do-be-do or a do-wop that enfolds us and unfolds within us in a place and time of our being-here regulated by limbs, circadian rhythms of day and night, our social function (formal, wedding or in the bedroom with an intimate guest) and what we had for lunch earlier, our hopes and dreams, the deixis of our self image &c.

In this manner, art is more than just a medium or a message. It is the way in which we weave and are weaved by our surroundings, the ripples of our actions in other’s lives and their actions in ours. We are made and unmade by the minute, by the hour with the expressive forms that carry alien forces directly into our filters, such that the Simpsons expressed in South Park is more than just South Park or the Simpsons, but informs us of each. We watch Lost not as Lost is made or watched by its producers or written by its writers, but as we are made and it is made through us. So the truths and beauties that Moulin Rouge spoke so highly of in Art is less the periodic expression of “partial theories as though formalized through science” but the deployment of our own orientation to that stimulus, our own expression of our manifold as a slice of a context, through the deixical filters of self image and being and through the rubric of oneness, the way evolution isn’t about the development of a single species through time but the cohabitation of a series of forces as they co-evolve, the planet as one massive domino, biome on biome, niche on niche and weather system on planetary rotation.

Living life is art in the broadest sense and our awareness of it does not make it less rich but in fact is irrelevant to its continuation. If anything our awareness is an interruption of a process through the privatization of a deterritorialized space and the prizing of one deixical filter above all others. The projection of ego and selfhood is to mistake the manifold for everything else, when in fact manifolds are little more than dirty mirrors. Remove that dirty mirror from its manifestation and place it in a vacuum and it would be like putting a diamond in a room with no light. Or cutting a figure from a painting out. Taken out of context, the figure lacks all balance of perspective and is no longer adequate to its task. It functions as an empty vector. Unless one projects the original painting around the figure or introduces the figure as a piece in a new manifold, nothing will happen. A mirror in the dark like a soul without a body will falter and vanish completely without a trace like animals in iron cages.