New Book List

I added a new book list with the additions you all suggested that we can work from after we finish Gödel, Escher, Bach which will allow us to zoom in further on some of the main ideas we've been exploring.

I think it will work well if we pick one book from each section that we all read together (like one of the math or science books). The books from other disciplines we can choose whether or not to read individually and those who do read them can present on them. This is a good way of exploring the full constellation of these theories and ideas by each bringing our own areas of interest and expertise to the group.

You can get to it by clicking on the Book List link on the left. Let me know if you have others you want to add.

Great Article

You all may have already seen this, it was published in April, but just in case:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/newtonai/

I especially enjoyed the comment thread that follows.

I miss you guys!

Kelsey

Message Table

Ruth Typed up the table of messages after Tuesday's meeting. I thought composing this table was the most fun and the most educational part of the night. Here it is:

	Frame	Outer	Inner
Record	Disc	Sound	Music/Emotion
*DNA	Aperiodic crystal	Genotype (Genes)	Alleles (Traits)
Message in a bottle	Paper in glass container, floating in water but dry	Letters in message, signifier, "h" "e" "l" "p"	Signified HELP!
Painting	Frame	Colors and Lines	Feelings/Idea depending on the period
Bird Flying South	Meat, Feathers, Sky, Light	Science	Season, Air exists! Laws of Aerodynamics
π	numerals	"3." "1" “4” “1” “5” “9” etc.	A circle's circumference divided by its diameter
Virus	Protein stuff	RNA	Copy Me!
Billboard	Wood, paper, Position	Images, Logos, Alphabet	Buy Me!
White dove	Meat & feathers	(Western) Cultural reference	Love (Peace)
Page 176 of GEB	Paper with ink	“CCGTCAGG…”	DNA*

Thanks so very much Ruth for typing this up. Does anyone want to add anything more? (leave a comment!).

This Week's Newsletter

Hey Team,

Thanks again to everyone for challenging me this week. Big thanks to Hope for giving us a place to meet.

Some announcements:

• We're reading Chromatic Fantasy, And Feud (pg 177) and Crab Canon (pg 199).
• Chapter VII (pg 181) is Propositional Calculus. This is probably going to be one of the hardest things for most of us. Write down your questions.
• I'm really going to try to bring food this time. Seriously.
• Two weeks from now, Kera will be presenting (6/30).
  
• While you're here on Centophilia, leave some comments.

-Nick

publishing pdf files into a blog

Nick ran into issues with getting math symbols into his post, and used separate pictures for each. If anyone prefers to upload a pdf when using images, graphics, etc., here is a link which explains how to do it. 

http://www.bloggertipsandtricks.com/2007/09/embed-pdf-file-into-post.html

Largrangian Interpolation

Today I mentioned something about interpolation but breezed over some of the algebra intensive parts because I know that for the most part you're not all enthusiastic about Euclid (that alliteration is intentional, I also considered "giddy about Gauss" and "pleased with Pythagoras") I feel I've done the world a disservice, so here's a post pretty much no one will read.

This is called Lagrangian Interpolation, named after some guy Lagrange. Given any number of points, you can create (find?) a polynomial that describes it. For the sake of simplicity, I'll use just three points, but it'll be really obvious how you can expand to any n+1 number of points.

Consider three points, for the sake of avoiding subscript we'll call them (a,A),(b,B) and (c,C). This is just like your high school algebra class, the first number (the lowercase letter) tells you how far over in the x (horizontal) direction and the second (capital) tells you how far up in the y (vertical). It's like Battleship. So if (a,A) = (3,4) you'd go over three and up four (grab some graph paper and play along).

Now here's the formula you've all been waiting for:

(I’m going through formatting hell right now, so please bear with me).

With this equation, if x = a, both the second and third terms reduce to zero, and the first term reduces to A:

So the curve passes through the point (a,A) (and (b,B) and (c,C)). I feel like it might be a little confusing at this point, but it’s difficult to explain without a white board, so deal with it.

Stop! Example time. (like Hammer time, but without baggy pants). Consider the points (1,1), (2,3) and (5,8). Ultimately our goal is to find the equation for a curve that passes though all of these points. We can use Lagrange interpolation to find the equation:

And if we really wanted to (and we really do) we could reduce it even further:

Which actually isn’t too intimidating. Hooray for algebra.

This connects directly to the complexity stuff we were talking about quite nicely. You can see how lengthy the equation is for just three points, and it just gets obnoxiously bigger as you add more and more points.

For 7 points: (1,1),(2,8),(3,2),(4,7),(5,0),(6,6),(7,0) we get this crazy graph.

This can be described by the offensive equation:

-0.2681x⁶ + 6.4208x⁵ - 60.743x⁴ + 287.9x³ - 712.49x² + 858.18x – 378

The more and more “random” points we add, the worse and worse our descriptive formula gets. At this point, it’s obvious (I hope) that the descriptive equation for random points is just as complex as the bunch of points themselves.

If you’ve gotten this far, leave a comment or something so I can get a feel for whether or not there’s a call for something like this.

-Nick

Complexity, criticality and meta-modernity

-What brings novelty and persistence together in the same condition? Modernity is characterized by the new, and postmodernity by recyclage of the old. Meta-modernity will have to synthesize both. One of the conceptual themes we've been studying all along achieves such a synthesis: complexity. Complex systems are on the edge of chaos. Their intricate internal structure allows them to maintain their organization in the face of changing conditions, while also allowing them to adapt and change. The complex brings together novelty and persistence because it is that state which allows enough chaos for change and enough order for recurrence at the same time.

-Push order to its limit and it becomes chaotic. Push chaos to its limit and order emerges. In between order and chaos is a critical region of complexity. Criticality, too, will be a central motif of meta-modernity. What is criticality like? Critical states are scale-invariant: they possess structures of all sizes on all scales. In the critical phase-transition of a magnet, there are clusters of north-pointing atoms and clusters of south-pointing atoms of all sizes, from one atom to system-spanning percolating clusters. The geometry of these mixed clusters is fractal. Critical states are also coherent: what happens in one part of the system quickly affects the rest of the system. And critical states are optimally free. A critical system has all its possible states equally present; it can transform into any of its states in a minimum number of steps.

-At this critical moment in history, the synthesis of modern and postmodern can be seen as between them rather than as beyond them. Meta-modernity is a critical phase transition in culture, a fractal boundary between different cultural states. Categorical distinctions are neither erased nor ossified in this critical state. Instead, every entity can become anything at any time, in one step. Entities turn into information-bearing monads that can flip states spontaneously. A monad can choose to be living or non-living, art or non-art, conscious or unconscious, human or inhuman.

This week's Newletter

Hey Team,

Everyone already got this as an email, this is mostly for me to make sure I get what I'm doing.

Just some reminders:

• Next Tuesday we'll be back in the Learning Center's Conference Room.
• We'll be reading Little Harmonic Labyrinth (p 103) and Canon by Intervallic Augmentation (pg 153).
• I'm planning on resuming my duties as food bringer (not really a reminder... but what the hell).
• Three weeks from now, Kera will be presenting (6/30)
  

Also, we briefly discussed our mutual love for Arrested Development. For those of you out of the loop, WATCH IT HERE. Seriously, one of the best shows ever.

Used copies of Godel, Escher, Bach are really cheap on Amazon. (under $10 including shipping!)

Thanks everyone for this phenomenal opportunity to push my mind to the limit, and a cosmic sized thanks to Joe for dinner.

Modernism vs. Postmodernism

Some of the characteristics of modernism and postmodernism that we talked about at the last meeting. (From Ihab Hassan's The Dismemberment of Orpheus, full list here)

Modernism.....................................Postmodernism

Form (conjunctive, closed)...............Antiform (disjunctive, open)

Design.............................................Chance

Art Object/Finished Work................Process/Performance/Happening

Creation/Totalization......................Decreation/Deconstruction [Derrida]

Centering........................................Dispersal

Genre/Boundary..............................Text/Intertext [Julia Kristeva]

Selection.........................................Combination

Narrative/Grande Histoire...............Anti-narrative/Petit Histoire [Lyotard]

Determinacy...................................Indeterminacy

We also talked quite a bit about:

Universality.....................................Relativity

others to explore further

Modernism...................................Postmodernism

Romanticism/Symbolism...............Pataphysics/Dadaism

Hierarchy.......................................Anarchy

Mastery/Logos..............................Exhaustion/Silence

Synthesis......................................Antithesis

Presence.......................................Absence

Paradigm......................................Syntagm

Root/Depth...................................Rhizome/Surface [Deleuze & Guattari]

Interpretation/Reading..................Against Interpretation/Misreading

Signified........................................Signifier

Lisible (Readerly)...........................Scriptable (Writerly) [Roland Barthes]

Type..............................................Mutant

Paranoia........................................Schizophrenia [Deleuze & Guattari]

God the Father..............................The Holy Ghost

Metaphysics..................................Irony

John's notes on the cento

Eco writes about the cento in The Name of the Rose. All medieval texts were centos, since multiple books were bound together to save parchment: Boethius with Augustine, Isidore of Seville with Cicero, Bede with Pliny… Medieval thought then let this medial form influence thought itself, in the method of external authority, allusion and commentary. This shows that the postmodern notion of intertextuality (Kristeva and Bakhtin) has retrojective relevance. Other variants on the cento include the anthology, florilegium, chrestomathy and encyclopedia. Indeed, these forms are pointed to as evidence of decadence in medieval scholarship: scholars no longer read Augustine or Aristotle, just fragments in encyclopedic summaries. But here again postmodernism shows a different view: the hierarchial ordering of primary versus secondary source can be problematized, and sometimes re-orderings of primary works can be fruitful. Ours is an era in which the encyclopedic form is the only possible response to an informational eschaton. Negative collage and negative apokatastasis are the beginnings of new creative work.

New Working Book List

General & Formal Systems Theory

Math:

-The Universal Computer- Martin Davis

-The Turing Omnibus- A.K. Dewdney

-Infinity and the Mind- Rudy Rucker

Science:

-General Systems Theory- Ludwig von Bertalanffy

-Complexification- John L. Casti

Philosophy:

- Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside”- Cary Wolfe

- Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity- Cary Wolfe

- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Art Theory:

- selection of Systems Art essays (http://www.volweb.cz/horvitz/burnham/homepage.html)

- selections from Computer Music Tutorial- Curtis Roads (“Systems Theory: Linked Automata,” “Brief History of Formal Processes in Music”)

Instantiations:

Hans Haacke

Iannis Xenakis

Chaos Theory

Math:

Poincaré

-Mathematics and the Unexpected- Ivars Ekeland

-Chaos, Fractals and Power Laws- Manfred Schroeder

Science:

- Chaos: Making a New Science- James Gleick

- The Turbulent Mirror- John Briggs and F. David Peat

Philosophy:

- Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science- N. Katherine Hayles

Art Theory:

- selections from Computer Music Tutorial (“Stochastic Processes,” “Fractals,” “Chaos Generators”)

- "Aesthetics of Failure"- Kim Cascone

Instantiations:

- Snow Crash- Neal Stephenson

John Cage

Oval

Pollock

Rauschenberg

Julie Mehretu

Jared Tarbell

Complexity Theory

Math:

-A New Kind of Science- Stephen Wolfram

Science:

- Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos- Seth Lloyd

- Critical Mass- Philip Ball

Philosophy:

- A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity- Manuel DeLanda

Art Theory:

- “Abstraction and Complexity”- Lev Manovich

- selections from Computer Music Tutorial (“Cellular Automata” “Total Automation vs. Iterative Composition”)

Instantiations:

Information Theory (isomorphism, mapping, the location of meaning)

Math:

- Meta-math!: The Quest for Omega- Gregory Chaitin

- Mind Tools- Rudy Rucker

Science:

- Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Theory is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From our Brains to Black Holes- Charles Seife

Philosophy:

Art Theory:

- Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning and Aesthetic Theory- G.L. Hagberg

Instantiations:

- Pattern Recognition- Gibson

- Crying of Lot 49- Thomas Pynchon

- "Entropy"- Pynchon

- selections of Borges (Library of Babel, Garden of Forking Paths, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius)

- Valis- Philip K. Dick

Postmodernity (Axiom systems, undefined terms, incompleteness, relativity, recursion, self-reference, intertextuality)

Math:

- Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty- Morris Kline

Science:

- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions- Thomas Kuhn

- Against Method- Paul Feyerabend

Philosophy:

- The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge- Jean-François Lyotard

- "From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context” http://www.ihabhassan.com/postmodernism_to_postmodernity.htm

- Mythologies- Roland Barthes

- Limits of Interpretation- Umberto Eco

- Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature- Richard Rorty

Art Theory:

Instantiations:

- Gravity's Rainbow-Thomas Pynchon

- White Noise- Don DeLillo

- Infinite Jest- David Foster Wallace

Artificial Intelligence & Artificial Life

Math:

-The Computational Beauty of Nature- Gary William Flake

Science:

- How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics- N. Katherine Hayles

- Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology- Steven Levy

Philosophy:

Art Theory:

- Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life- Mitchell Whitelaw

Instantiations:

- Galatea 2.2- Richard Powers