<nettime> subjective math .

brian carroll nulltangent at gmail.com
Fri Sep 7 11:20:59 PDT 2012


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