Re: <nettime> subjective math .

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 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

From mgoldh@well.com Fri Sep 7 10:22:45 2012 Cc: "nettime-l@kein.org" From: Michael H Goldhaber Subject: Re: <nettime> subjective math. Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 01:22:27 -0700 To: brian carroll Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Status: RO X-Status: F Content-Length: 34148 Lines: 711

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 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 <...>

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org