<nettime> 'subjective' 'math' '.' digest [x2: carroll, goldhaber]

[nettime's_influencing_machine <nettime@kein.org>]

Re: <nettime> subjective math .

     brian carroll <nulltangent@gmail.com>
     Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh@well.com>

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From: brian carroll <nulltangent@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> subjective math .
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 13:20:59 -0500

  Hello St=E9phane

> The point is : "To increase freedom, I thought about a system that =20
> allow me to share my voice between the different possibilities in =20
> the proportion I want."

  I visited your project page and while I could not get the
  javascript example to function the basic idea is there
  and it is quite interesting to consider in terms of voting.

  At first my impression was of tiered access to concepts,
  how a young student may interact with a shared model
  of events in a simpler framework than others who may
  mediate more of its related and foundational structure,
  as an idea. Such that a child may reference 'house' and
  it may involve a certain framework, whereas an adult
  could reference house in terms of its management or
  an architect in terms of its construction, though these
  are not necessarily clear-cut views and could overlap.
  Thus an accurate modeling of 'house' could provide
  different layers of contextual access for perspective so
  if a child referenced its maintenance it could also be
  validated via the tiered model for use in reasoning,
  not denied as irrelevant in terms of its perspective.

  When I saw your javascript example it shifted this view
  of proportionality into the context of governance, voting,
  the state, and representational 'democracy'. The vote
  symbolic of its legitimacy, as if about error-correction
  and guiding the state via some kind of active foresight.
  If the world were ungrounded this mechanism could be
  turned-inside out, voting legitimating a fixed idea about
  how the deterministic state will function into the future,
  voting a ritual signing-off on its predetermined course.
  In the sense that what guides the actions of the state
  may not be informed by the vote, that it is an illusion.

  In terms of governing the state, the individual voter is
  to me similar to a person who stands behind one of
  those scenic or iconic paintings with a hole in it, for
  a person to poke through and smile for the camera,
  shooting them as if the person is a part of its scene,
  say American Gothic or a Wild West shootout, and
  then getting the photograph as a souvenir. It is a
  capturing of 'I was here - though not really' moment.

  Voting in Democracy, at least the U.S. today, is like
  this, though with the American Stars & Stripes as its
  scenery, perhaps iconic government buildings and
  then the temporary symbolic citizen, a smiling voter,
  if not holding a painted copy of the U.S. Constitution
  or flag along with a ballot stub in the photograph. In
  this way a citizen could function as a stand-in, cast
  in the role of 'active citizen' within political scenery.
  Yet in the reality - outside this painted image of the
  state - perhaps it is different than the given signage.
  What's represented versus what's actually going on.

  And representation can be controlled through both
  language and imagery, yet also through logic.* Your
  demonstration shows this situation quite specifically.

  It has been so long since I voted I forget how it works
  in terms of 'neutral' or abstaining from casting a vote,
  though it is assumed these remain "unaccounted" and
  are not tallied in relation to the outcome else perhaps
  other options would exist in the politics of today.

  If voting were modeled as you have it, into 3-values
  of  [ yes / neither / no ]  as the available options, then
  there would be a way of tallying 'dissent' from voting
  itself, versus a decision having to go into a yes or no
  category by default. This happens with voting systems
  yet it is a question of whether or not they are tallied,
  and so tallying the proportion of such dissents to that
  of a binary  [ yes | no ]  could at some point begin to
  challenge the legitimacy of the yes/no vote count, if
  the proportion of 'neutral' or neither was the greatest
  proportion. And so it is a question of what would the
  threshold be for determining legitimacy of the vote,
  especially if it is reliant upon a majority framework...

  If there are 100 people who vote, and 99 choose to
  vote 'neither' or 'neutral', and only 1 person votes on
  the issue [yes], does that legitimate the decision for
  the other 99 people, such that it represents 'yes' for
  all of them? This instead seems like an inversion of
  representation, proportionally, because 99% would
  be the majority, not the 'yes' viewpoint. Which by a
  binary determinism is the only valid response if it is
  not evaluated in the 3-value logic the situation exists
  within. Thus voting itself is 2-value if not accounting
  for the dissent of the vote itself. In this way it cannot
  be invalidated by voting, it becomes a faithful activity
  that accurate representation occurs within a binary
  viewpoint, ignoring the 99%. How few voters would
  it take to call into question the legitimacy of the vote.

  Any number of a population could be taken and used
  to represent 100% of the population, even if only say
  10 million were to vote for 300 million people, it likely
  would still be a 49% to 51% race, given mass media
  and the horserace, as it relates with winning odds.

  (Feasibly 1% could win the vote yet not 'represent' the
  goals of existing populations, only those tallied within
  the binary viewpoint, forcing such an approximation.
  Thus the biased, warped, distorted viewpoint could
  be normalized via mass media yet be quite unreal.)

  The mechanism self-reinforcing, not self-questioning,
  it cannot allow self-awareness or self reflection for it
  cannot mediate the truth, control the outcome of the
  reasoning process if allowing for such representation
  (in this case, meaning truth outside biased functioning)
  so the 'image' must be maintained as a limit, boundary
  or threshold and this is why 2-value logic is required,
  to invalidate everything outside its controlled domain.
  It occurs and can occur because there is no actual
  accounting for truth within society, beyond language.

  A citizen who references their Constitutional Rights
  in a real contest of power is more likely to end up in
  a psychiatric ward filled to the brim with mind-boggling
  chemicals, if not wrongly incarcerated if not murdered,
  than find 'representation' within the legal system at any
  level that would take on the state in its operating falsity.

  If you can prove via logic the state in its functioning is
  unconstitutional, it is simply ignored and disregarded.
  This is to say, the Constitution itself is being ignored.
  The status quo is government beyond its own laws
  while at the same time denying these for its citizens.
  Ungrounded language (and lawyers) allows this.

  In voting, those who _are represented by this system
  are encouraged by the status quo, signing-off on this.
  It's an inversion of principles, truth and falsity switched
  due to the logic, its biasing and lack of accountability.
  The image is everything, based on ungrounded beliefs
  or beliefs opposite what the words supposedly are saying.

  *(logic is also at the foundation of language/imagery.)


  Brian Carroll

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>From mgoldh@well.com  Fri Sep  7 10:22:45 2012
Cc: "nettime-l@kein.org" <nettime-l@kein.org>
From: Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh@well.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> subjective math.
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 01:22:27 -0700
To: brian carroll <nulltangent@gmail.com>
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Brian, 

How does your approach relate to or differ from Lotfi Zadeh's "fuzzy logic?"

Best,

Michael

On Sep 5, 2012, at 5:46 PM, brian carroll <nulltangent@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Brian:
>> 
>> The severe limitations of "logic" have been long recognized -- which is why
>> "real life" doesn't much rely on it.
 <...>

> Hello Mark,
> 
> The prevailing view of logic appears to consider it 'optional' and apart from
> the normal reasoning process. Perhaps this view is equivalent to equating it
> with the abstract level mathematic computations and equations for data that
> derive answers from computer processors, that thought would begin and
> function in terms of logical operators. A robot likely would be capable of
 <...>

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