[syndicate] Re: Note towards a foundational phenomenology of analogic/discrete

[Alan Sondheim]

On Wed, 11 May 2005, BjørnMagnhildøen wrote:

>> Until we understand the deep ontological and epistemological issues invol-
>> ving the analogic and discrete (digital), we will get nowhere.
>
> Notes - there's another quite obvious approach that goes via our neuro-
> physiology, the foundational brain split into hemispheres and constitute a
> physical double-being - analogic-digital. I'm not sure if you would regard
> it as a metaphor - in a way the metaphor is the working of the analogic and
> to disregard it is to disregard the analogic - but again, it's wild and on
> the chaotic side, on the wave side.

I honestly don't agree here, nor do I see it as 'obvious.' Nowhere have I 
seen that half the brain is analogic, half digital; in fact on a neuro- 
physiological level, what is actually happening is completely unknown.

And I don't think to disregard this metaphor is to 'disregard the 
analogic' - it's simply to say that the model seems unworkable to me, on 
too high a level, making too much of processes that are in fact mixed, 
etc. Nor do I see the 'wildness' at work here -

> Kind of parallells the workings of our hemispheres. The left tends to the
> digital, the right to the analogic, detailed and concrete.
>
Detailed and concrete implies neither analog nor discrete as far as I 
know. The 'workings' again are unknown. To be honest, I find what the 
brain does is irrelevant if one is looking for foundations; even in qm 
consciousness, the brain is to be 'described' or explained by deeper 
processes.

> I agree, metaphor is on the the wave part, which is a metaphorical
> statement. See the dangers of one-sided research on only the left
> hemisphere = the history of neurology. The right hemispheres represent the
> excesses, the left the lack. In our physical constitution these are
> interweaved - foreground:background, text:context, digital:analogic. To
> call it a superstructure is a view from the left, as would to call it
> excesses, sicknesses. On their own terms they're substructures, closer to
> reality - meaning in concreteness and detail, richness - would we have a
> world without it? The digital left hemisphere, the human computer, is built
> on the 'lesser' right hemisphere, the animal brain.
>
I don't think the brain is a computer in the first place; I don't think 
any hemisphere is lesser; and I'm wary of using 'animal brain' - as well 
as such an absolutely division as you present; neurophysiology in fact 
points to the remarkable malleability and resiliancy of the brain as a 
whole.

> Efflorescence of roots seems a good expression of its working and
> production, the right. Confusion, nothing is achieved - you're talking from
> the left, the human computer - but with only the human computer also
> nothing is achieved, it's powerless without its roots, a simulation and
> model, no 'reality'.
>
I wish I could buy into what you're saying but 'human computer' means very 
little to me. I do follow Penrose in this, or Pribram earlier or for that 
matter Maturana etc.

>> The collapse of the wave equation, Penrose's U -> R, Bell's theorem,
>> _bother_ us. Communication leaks; the mechanics transform (in Irigarayan
>> terms) from fluid to mechanical to the uneasy gnawing of a _mix._ Think of
>> Kristeva's abject for example, or Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel's work. Think
>> of a kind of transitional object carrying the all-too-evident seeds of
>> decay within it, the teddy-bear leaking stuffing.
>
> Re-introducing the metaphor, the metaphor disturbs us?
>
No, it's not a metaphor here; it's a model, unless you find transitional 
objects metaphors (which I don't, although they're within the symbolic and 
the asymbolic simultaneously).

>> The bothering is political; we would do anything to erase it! Purity, the
>> sensual absence of corruption, is primary to governance, where, for
>> example, justice is forced into equivalence with law.
>
> But the metaphor is also the world, at the analogic root, and the digital
> is built upon it, the physical workd collapsed from it.

What metaphor? I didn't say the world is analog at all, nor that the 
digital is built upon it; within the lifeworld the digital is construct, 
but this has nothing to do with the foundations; the collapse of the wave 
equation does.

> The metaphor is always an astray, an excess of the right hemisphere. Code
> reintroduces the right, the metaphor of the digital.
>
Now I've lost you, since I don't think I'm creating a metaphor here -

> Appendix - notes on neurology issues, from Oliver Sacks -
>
> the fact is that the history of neurology is the history of research on
> the left hemisphere.
>
> right, the lesser hemisphere. symptoms less clear.
> left, more refined, specialized.
> on the other hand - the right hemisphere controls the ability to
> recognize reality, while the left is developed for programs and
> schemata, like a computer hacked on the animal brain.
> and neurology was more interested in the programs than reality (or
> consciousness). right hemisphere has been a stranger also to science.
> Luria then suggests another neurology, of "personalistic" or "romantic"
> science - anyway, subjective, phenomenological, while the left etc.
>
> neurological disturbances in the right subverts the classical notion
> that a brain damage _whatsoever_ lessens the abstracting and
> categorizing ability and leaves the individual to the emotional and
> concrete - a notion that comes from only researching the left.
>
> lacks and excess : left and right
> in view of the left there are lacks, functions are missing
> a productive sickness? the hyper-
> a computer model of monster and mania?
> luria: the man with a shattered world vs. the mind of a mnemonist
> l-dopa
> the excesses forces a move from a neurology of functions to one of
> activity and life.
> the risk of hyper is embedded in growth and nature of life, of
> monstrousness, weird, deviating para-states - hyperkinesi tends to
> parakinesi, hypergnosi paragnosi.
>
> the paradoxal in a sickness that can appear as fresh - a wonderful
> feeling of health and well-being, and only later reveal its bad effects
> or workings - is one of nature's chimera and ironies. eg. art and
> sickness, dionysian, veneric, faustian - thomas mann
> how are you doing? dangerously good!  -george eliot
> the tourette patient, -i have too much energy
> after treatment -i don't see stuff and things anymore, will everything
> be dead when i'm cured?
> l-dopa tree drawings dry, shrinked, winter trees without leaves into
> lively, arabesque, baroque.
> what paradox, cruelty and irony - that the inner life and fantasy lies
> passive, unless woken by drugs or sickness.
> vigor can be real even if caused by sickness. and this kind of paradoxal
> sickness can be of lasting gain. here we are in strange terrain where
> the conventional reasoning are inverted - sick is healthy, and the
> normal sick.
>
> reminiscense, nostalgic incontinens, memorytracks memorytraces
>
> retards, -if we are to use only one word, it's 'concretion', their world is
> lively, intensive, detailed, and still simple, because it's concrete.
>
> if a man loses 'the abstracting-categorizing functioning' (goldstein) or the
> 'propositional reasoning' (hughlings jackson), what's left is subhuman,
> meaningless and uninteresting. that statement is backwards, awkward, since
> the concrete is elementary, it's what makes reality 'real', lifelike,
> personal and meaningful - all is lost if the concrete is lost.
>
> exploration of the concrete, luria's 'romantic science'.
> the concrete is treated as trivial.
>
> term : symbol - paradigmatic : narrative
>
> could we have a weaved mat without a pattern? a pattern without the weave?
> like the chesire cat's grin.
>
> the human calculators function iconic. -how could you count the matches so
> fast? -we didn't count, we saw 111 - 37, 37, 37.
>
> kurt gödel discussed in general how numbers, especially primes, can act as
> 'marks' - for thoughts, people, places, whatever.
>
> (Oliver Sacks - The man who mistook his wife for a hat - ISBN 9176087603)
>
I don't see where this is in Godel 'in general' but I may have read the 
wrong Godel. Nor do I see how Sacks divides things neatly into analog 
digital etc. and even if he did, it's not foundational.

> More on neurology, code, phenomenology - http://noemata.net/ideareal/


- Alan