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Abstract
Michel Serres said that history is the propagation of effects, saying in his conversations with Bruno Latour, “we experience time as much in our inner senses as externally in nature, as much as le temps of history as le temps of weather,” characterized more by turbulence than by Euclidean geometry. Setting out from Serres’ nautical meditation on noise, guided by Giuseppe Longo’s and interlocutors’ characterization of the random as a function of theory and measure, one can distinguish the random from the non-schematizable noisy. How do we think given the noisy dynamics of the world? Bernard Stiegler’s epiphylogenetic technologies and Gilbert Simondon’s transindividuating technics prepares considering thought as collective as well as individual activity. After sallies into algorithmic technology to establish its limits, we consider how epiphylogenetic thought develops in the presence of indeterminacy. We return to noise not as a simple veil between the discernible and indiscernible, but as a constitutive aspect of the complexification and enrichment of developmental ontologies, an enrichment co-articulated by epiphylogenetic imagination and technics.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 “Content introduced into human memory will superimpose itself on prior content and take form on it: the living is that in which the a posteriori becomes a priori; memory is the function by which a posteriori matters become a priori […]” (Simondon 138).
2 Simondon provided succinct characterizations of technical object and individual and ensemble in his Prospectus to On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (xvi).
3 Longo, “Uomini e Macchine” 12, 32.
4 Signal processing amounts to using mathematical methods to create numerical indices that can be used to coordinate the operation of other mechanical or electrical devices. Signals can be in any modality – sound, light, radar, gravity waves, etc. – and typically vary in time; the analysis of “time-series” is central to the field. The analytical methods typically are mathematically subtler than the relatively coarse techniques used in pattern recognition on tokens, but they refrain from claims about meaning or intent.
5 Under the present regime of data science, artificial intelligence, and pattern recognition, data tends to be treated as matter and unquestionable ground truth. Consider, however, what the five stars in the flag of the People’s Republic of China and the fifty stars in the flag of the United States are supposed to represent. Whereas each star in the US flag represents a state of the union, the four smaller stars of the PRC flag represent the four social classes: peasants, workers, urban bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie. Already on this first level description sharply different ontologies, histories, political theories come into play as contexts of meaning for the formal signifier of a star. And these ontological, historical, political theoretic differences proliferate limitlessly under inquiry, as a consequence of which no finite scheme such as a pattern recognition algorithm can adequately contain sense-making interpretation. An informatic technology that starts with data would treat the observable ★ as “ground truth,” covering and rendering indiscernible the magmatic fields of lived multiplicity that give it meaning; after all, as signifiers, every ★ is equal to every other ★.
6 For diverse contemporary treatments, see, for example: Grosz, Incorporeal; Beetz; Sha, Poiesis; Epperson and Zafiris.
7 Indeed, in loop quantum gravity theory as developed by Carlo Rovelli, Lee Smolin, and a substantial network of physicists, there are no “independent” parameters and “dependent” functions; even time and space are symmetrically treated as certain types of fields that bear determinate relations to other physical fields like mass-energy (Rovelli and Vidotto). Time is a product rather than an index of activity.
8 Bluemink. See Stiegler, For a New Critique; Technics and Time.
9 See, for example, Sheets-Johnstone, “Thinking in Movement”; Primacy of Movement; Cohen; Cohen et al.; Naccarato and MacCallum.
10 I borrow the title of Erin Manning’s book, Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance, but space precludes employing her creative work with Whitehead and Simondon.
11 For a more carefully elaborated notion of sense, see Voss and Sha, “Adjacent Possibles.”
12 For regional approaches, see Sha, Poiesis 143–44.
13 For extensive treatments, see James and Whitehead.
14 Pattern recognition is deeply embedded in any industrial process that needs to modulate its operation according to some machine-readable measures. In particular, a recent Berkshire Hathaway Business Wire study claimed that “global image recognition market size is expected to reach USD 107.84 Billion in 2030 and register a revenue CAGR of 15.0% during the forecast period, according to the latest report.” Companies mentioned in the study include IBM, Google, Qualcomm Technologies, Amazon Web Services, NEC, and Huawei.
15 To elaborate the sense in which such “analogical” modes of thought strictly and transfinitely exceed algorithm one could start with a description of Gödelian incompleteness and undecidability theorems of the early twentieth century.
16 I thank Harry Smoak for introducing Morse Peckham’s work in relation to the American pragmatists: Harry Smoak, Meaning as Response: Experience, Behavior, and Interactive Environment Design, Ph.D. thesis, Concordia University, 2015.
17 Regarding the reduction of powers to subjects consider the term “human rights,” which sediment an ethics and politics that start from the atomic human subject, foreclosing ecological thought. All these invert Erik Bordeleau’s characterization of “haptic or processual mode of perception, that is, a capacity for ‘perceiving a world peopled not with things but with forces, not with subjects but with powers, not with bodies but with bonds’” (4; quoting the Invisible Committee).
18 Adam Nocek, Stuart Kauffman, Cary Wolfe, Gaymon Bennett, Giuseppe Longo, Phillip Thurtle, Helga Wild, Erin Espelie, and Sha Xin Wei. See Synthesis ontogenetic process research stream: synthesiscenter.net/projects/ontogenesis; Wolfe and Nocek; Kauffman; and in a distinct vein, Morris.
19 For a distinct but consonant approach to this proliferation of sense in the world, see David Morris’s original and profound work on developmental ontology.
20 For a description of textural approaches to material dynamics, see Sha, Poiesis 108–09, 156–58.
21 In his book, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, Jonathan Sterne details the simultaneous formation of encoding standards, decisions by engineers and standards bodies on what aspects of a signal constitutes human-meaningful sound, and the industrialized hearing subject.
22 Farrell-Beck and Johnson. For an essay film meditating on the evolution of writing and reading and technologies of memory in the wake of the computer in the twenty-first century, see Khintirian.
23 James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” in Essays on Radical Empiricism.
24 This approach relies on notions anexactly – to borrow Deleuze’s notion – crafted from topological dynamics and fields on differentiable manifolds. For a more systematic development refer to chapter 6 on topology, manifolds, dynamical systems, measure, and bundles in Sha, Poiesis; and the section on differential heterogenesis in Sha, “Adjacent Possibles” 261–64.
25 Mindful of Bailly and Longo, these results are, strictly speaking, not adding analog material noise, but a model of noise to stabilize a stochastic dynamical process. However, the models themselves are not deterministic but probabilistic. In a sense, this pushes the consideration into still deeper waters, the question of what probability represents, or articulates. In any case, for adding stochastic “noise” to stabilize an unstable dynamical system, see Zhang et al.; Mao et al.; and Khasminskii et al.
26 Sha, “Square Root.”