Fascism!

[josef k.]

And then returns eight months later... I wonder if he's now on the wagon?

 

[swears]

Yes, should have really checked the dates, there...

I imagined that whole thread taking place in the space of half an hour.

 

[vimothy]

That was funny. I remember a couple of years ago, getting up for work, 8 in the morning, going into the front room of my shared house, which was filled with smoke, and finding Adam preparing for work with a fucking huge steak and a pint of cider!

 

[nomadthethird]

Math is only descriptive, though, like the rest of them. If we didn't live in this particular material universe it wouldn't apply to anything.

And also kind of deaf and mute when it comes explaining certain things.


(So all this talk about greedy reductionism is just noise, then, and it's really all about math?

Why am I not surprised...?)

 

[vimothy]

another TNR writer puts the boot into Naomi Klein

well i enjoyed it

Dani Rodrik doing the same.

 

[nomadthethird]

I remember (for whatever reason) watching a youtube clip of the Spectrum ZX+ Bruce Lee game and the comments below it devolved into a private discussion between two alcoholics discussing their affliction, with such real time moments as "argh! I just cracked! went down the shops and got a 6-pack of cider! the wife won't be happy!" It was really weird and sad and disturbing, but also absolutely brilliant.

What would the internet be without this kind of détournement?

I think it's more disturbing when people try to use the internet for things that are supposed to really matter.

Just put your damn picture on Facebook and stop pretending you're too important to ever have your precious likeness hanging in cyberspace, already, or get off the internet!

I hate it when people have myspace pages and then put tons of pictures of like random album covers and shit instead of pictures of themselves and you waste time clicking on their albums full of nonsense shit they googled. I've asked myself, could you get more narcissitic than an average myspace user? Then I realized that yes, this was possible--by pretending you're so special and above looking at people's pictures (and other such shallow trifles) that you can't deign to hold your cell phone up to your face and take a damn snapshot and email it to yourself...

 

[nomadthethird]

Ain't that the truth.

I love it when people in the sciences bicker over whose abstractions are the purest.

At Rockefeller there would be these three week long "reply all" petty bitch fests where scientists from different labs argued about whose work was more important...

I remember once Padraig warning me of the danger of symptom mapping (this one time I was armchair diagnosing Gek-Opel, tongue firmly in cheek), but it's funny, because in medical school no one respects the fourth years who are going to become psychiatric residents... the thinking goes that they're not "real doctors" because they don't look at inner ears or order x-rays or do pap smears... all they do is memorize symptomology and, given the absence of known etiology for most psychiatric illnesses, map symptoms onto DSM disorder criteria...

 

[nomadthethird]

Wow, that's even darker than I remember.

Amazing. (I wonder if jittering EvilDeadCellar knows that alcohol withdrawal can cause lethal seizures...? White knuckling it in front of youtube clips of weird video game music!)

But this may be less unusual than it seems at first read...

A lot of people on youtube have "friends" much like on myspace or facebook, and they post the videos and send them to their friend list, many of whom then come and leave comments. I know people whose friend lists on youtube are comprised entirely of real life friends.

I'm thinking SPiNNYFUCK and Evildeadcellar know one another for realsies.

Dare I ask why you were on this video in the first place, Craner?

 

[poetix]

Nothing really reduces to mathematics. That in a sense is the beauty of it. It is ontically mute. It doesn't need a universe to be about, not because it would exist even if the universe didn't but because it's the form of discourse that is most indifferent to "aboutness".

The real joke I think in that xkcd comic is that all the other sciences are claiming that "X is just applied Y". The mathematician is so "pure" she doesn't even care if her work has any application or not (some mathematicians are really like this, some are really not like this). So I don't think it's a statement that physics is "applied" mathematics, and so on all down the line...

 

[nomadthethird]

Nothing really reduces to mathematics. That in a sense is the beauty of it. It is ontically mute. It doesn't need a universe to be about, not because it would exist even if the universe didn't but because it's the form of discourse that is most indifferent to "aboutness".

The real joke I think in that xkcd comic is that all the other sciences are claiming that "X is just applied Y". The mathematician is so "pure" she doesn't even care if her work has any application or not (some mathematicians are really like this, some are really not like this). So I don't think it's a statement that physics is "applied" mathematics, and so on all down the line...

Hmmm. But I think math is really about a very specific universe in which things are divisible, they exist, they exist in time and space in just such a way...it's difficult to conceive of yet in specific terms but generally conceivable that there could be other universes, worlds, whatever.

It's "aboutness" that I'm interested in when it comes to science, or maybe "applications"... I'd rather have a psychiatrist treat my mania than a mathematician. And I'd rather have an engineer build a bridge I'm going to walk over than I would a PhD in math.

Math is obviously necessary, but things that are necessary seem more practical and tech school tastic. Of course I never made it past AP calculus, and that was over 11 years ago, so maybe if I got more into I'd care more.

Regardless of any aesthetic preferences, I don't think math describes things in a way that really gets us outside beings and nearer to Being...AB seems dead set on believing this...

 

[poetix]

What Badiou does in The Concept of Model is give an intra-mathematical example of how mathematics, as pure production of differential marks, is able to gain traction across different domains (the example is model theory, where a mapping is established between a domain of statements and a domain of sets such that the latter "models" the former), so that a physical science can become axiomatised or a philosophical "meta-ontological" discourse can "place itself under condition of" innovations in set theory (obviously the "innovations" discussed in Being and Event are all pretty old hat, but part of Badiou's argument is that philosophers still haven't really caught up with them).

So I would say that the statement "math is only descriptive" seems radically false to me. It's not even that. Or, it is only "descriptive" to the extent that other domains attempt to formalise their own knowledge by mathematical means. If they didn't - if they knew nothing, or were content to rest in "wild empiricism" - then mathematics would not in any sense describe their contents. Physicists may "apply" mathematics within their domain, but this neither makes physics "applied mathematics" nor mathematics "only descriptive" of the physical universe (not least because it is capable of being used in the description of inexistent universes, universes that have yet to come to be).

 

[nomadthethird]

(not least because it is capable of being used in the description of inexistent universes, universes that have yet to come to be).

Oh, it is?

I can't think of any.

I would think mathematics began as a sort of empiricism. 2 apples plus 2 apples makes 4 apples.

I think mathematics is a formal language that exists because we live in a world where objects exist, and not only that, where they exist in very particular way according to certain general principles.

I could see our mathematics breaking down in a world where there were infinite dimensions in space or something like that...make up your own example...no integers or numbers to use to model theoretical objects because there are no objects...

 

[poetix]

Another angle, possibly worth considering, is Badiou's peculiar affiliation to Lacan. "Le reel ne saurait s'inscrire que d'une impasse de la formalisation" is a key notion. Mathematics doesn't index the real, but arrives at impasses in which the real is inscribed (made evident).

What I find peculiar here is that Lacan's use of mathematics is really a bad joke - it's the kind of naggingly-suggestive but ultimately nonsensical symbolic mess one might find oneself trying to make sense of in a nightmare*, which I suspect is perfectly deliberate - yet Badiou clearly finds Lacan's statements about "the matheme" useful...

* like those dreams where you're trying to dial a number on a telephone, and you keep hitting the wrong buttons and having to redial, and the more you concentrate the more your hands shake and your fingers slip...

 

[poetix]

Infinite dimensions in space would not, mathematically speaking, be inconceivable. I see from a quick google that there are papers on, for example, "infinite-dimensional compact hausdorff spaces"...

 

[poetix]

And you don't need objects to have natural numbers. You need a couple of axioms.

{}, {{}}, {{}, {{}}}, {{}, {{}}, {{}, {{}}}}...

 

[nomadthethird]

Another angle, possibly worth considering, is Badiou's peculiar affiliation to Lacan. "Le reel ne saurait s'inscrire que d'une impasse de la formalisation" is a key notion. Mathematics doesn't index the real, but arrives at impasses in which the real is inscribed (made evident).

What I find peculiar here is that Lacan's use of mathematics is really a bad joke - it's the kind of naggingly-suggestive but ultimately nonsensical symbolic mess one might find oneself trying to make sense of in a nightmare*, which I suspect is perfectly deliberate - yet Badiou clearly finds Lacan's statements about "the matheme" useful...

* like those dreams where you're trying to dial a number on a telephone, and you keep hitting the wrong buttons and having to redial, and the more you concentrate the more your hands shake and your fingers slip...

I suppose I'd have to hear some examples of how set theory can help us get at these impasses. I've never really been able to think of any myself. It seems that we could just as easily use a totally fast and loose method like deconstruction to map out the little aporias along the ontological road. (Not that I'm a big fan of this method either...)

But re Lacan and Badiou, if the unconscious is indeed structured like a[n informal] language, I'd expect that the "grapheme" is just as important as the matheme, or perhaps moreso...

 

[nomadthethird]

And you don't need objects to have natural numbers. You need a couple of axioms.

{}, {{}}, {{}, {{}}}, {{}, {{}}, {{}, {{}}}}...

I just can't help but feel that it's partially math and its applications that make us believe that a world where math doesn't work or hold is inconceivable...

God could totally create one where there's Being but no beings heh heh

 

[nomadthethird]

See in my school the mind control powers of Derrida were utilized to turn us all into closet mystics, instead of Zizekian revolutionaries.

 

[poetix]

There is no royal road to the impasses of formalisation...

Also worth bearing in mind that Badiou from quite early on is talking about mathematical "inscription", about mathematics as a system(atisation) of "marks", a material practice and so on. In some respects he can be seen as developing an early suggestion of Derrida's about mathematics being the privileged site of inscription of a non-phonocentric general writing.

 

[nomadthethird]

There is no royal road to the impasses of formalisation...

Also worth bearing in mind that Badiou from quite early on is talking about mathematical "inscription", about mathematics as a system(atisation) of "marks", a material practice and so on. In some respects he can be seen as developing an early suggestion of Derrida's about mathematics being the privileged site of inscription of a non-phonocentric general writing.

Interesting. Obviously this is a worthwhile avenue of inquiry but I can't help but have a negative visceral reaction to at least 50% of what I read by Badiou.

Edit: I did enjoy The Clamor of Being more than I'd anticipated, though.