Dear Reader,
I have just received word that Exchange #3 a the recent series of 'Dialogues on F.E.D. Dialectics', is about to be posted to the www.dialectics.info website.
The set of questions, posted below, for this third exchange are, in my opinion, a very rich set indeed!
Links to the earlier two exchanges of this dialogue are as follows --
-- Exchange #1 --
http://www.dialectics.info/dialectics/Aoristoss_Blog/Entries/2015/5/21_Dialogue_on_F.E.D._Dialectics%2C_Exchange_1..html
-- Exchange #2 --
http://www.dialectics.info/dialectics/Aoristoss_Blog/Entries/2015/5/29_Entry_1.html.
Enjoy!
Regards,
Miguel
Exchange #3: Dialogue on F.E.D. Dialectics. 29JUN2015.
I1 Q #3:
Thank you for such a detailed response to my
questions. The links you included are helping me understand further what
you have surveyed in the main body of your text. You have convinced me
that pursuing a study of this material could indeed be worthwhile. Yet
for anyone else reading this that is not quite convinced that learning the
details of such a formal system is something worth doing, or just to help any
of us get more context on the value of this material and what it might mean in
the broader terms of contemporary intellectual discourse, I will pursue some
questions and offer some of my provisional evaluations on the context of your
discovery in the hopes of further clarification--primarily on just how this
line of thinking may do what you claim it can do or hope it may do in further
developments.
My most broad level impression of your system, having now
seen to what extent you believe and hope that it can approach some kind of
totalizing theory of everything, is not exactly disbelief anymore, since I see
that while you seem to hold out for some rather comprehensive synthetic
totality, it appears to be more of a formal architectonic than a claim or bid
for absolute knowledge. Yet some claims you make do seem to stretch the
bounds of what any formal system may do. I get the impression now that
you are describing a language that may be used to map and extend the knowledge
of systems past what would be possible in any single formal language by
extending the limits of formal systems through dialectical progression,
transcending normal Godelian limits by a mapping of (nested?) logical
types. But the impression is still just that, an impression. It
still just seems like a checklist of some future possible science, a checklist
of generic stages of progression, something we have seen before in various
theoretical guises, albeit in less formal detail.
Granted my lack of clarity may be due to the limits of my
knowledge of formal logic and mathematics or the further details of your
system. But how is this more than a specialized notation that aims to
guide a more coherent development of science and knowledge? If it is only
that, there is still much value, for it seems that our knowledge grows in an
incoherent fashion--our mathematics seems like a series of fudges created to
get around the limits it has no formal logic to deal with. A logical
framework for dealing with the formal constraints of different symbolic systems
and how they might be connected could certainly be a helpful guide in bringing
coherence to the scientific world and by extension the social world it has all
but conquered. But how are these symbols you have created more than just
placeholders for qualities that are always going to depend on information and
evaluation from outside the system? And what determines the structure of
this system? Where do all these numbers come from-- numbers of stages in
a progression, numbers of categories...? Where might I find justification
for these categories, rather than others, for these stages and progressions
that you have listed in formal detail but not shown me to be inherent in the
nature of development itself. Many people have advanced grand theories of
development. What makes your theory different? Amongst so much
emphasis on formal precision, one should have justification for these forms
rather than others. If it is merely abstract and general, then
qualitative accounts would suffice and perhaps be superior. Explicit formal
precision is a quantitative consideration. Why then these precise formal
constraints? Why does it take so many arithmetics to integrate the
qualitative, quantitative, and metrical demands of symbolic inscription?
I am intrigued that you seem convinced that these categorical divisions are not arbitrary but hold great content and look forward to understanding the nature of this content. But if your system is to have a more broad and abiding interest, it must have something to say about the genesis of form itself, not just its categorization. What principles have you discovered that your formal system has been designed to express? You have explained the importance of having a qualitative meaning for division by zero, the importance of solving for the functions of nonlinear equations, and I can see how this can improve the detail of determination in complex systems. But is this just a notation through which the indeterminate in any system can be deferred through to different measurements/standards of accounting? Perhaps an attempt to formalize the post-modern demand for a sensitivity to context, which pushed theory away from formal theories of everything in the first place. An attempt to formalize without reducing qualities to their form? This certainly is a step beyond the reductive lens through which much of science gets rendered. There are even supposedly "complexity sensitive" accounts that are still caught up in reductive logic, as you know. But a more "general complexity" approach which is what theorist David Byrne calls the non-reductive approaches are "non-restricted" because they acknowledge that contextual forces and emergent properties always escape law-like formality. Context is infinite. This doesn't bar modelling, it just places it in a middle range, beyond reductive representational theories but not quite absolute forms. This seems to be where you are reaching. A mapping of types, a crafting of metaphors that can generalize over a range of related systems. Yet in doing so, we must justify our choices in context which determine the nature of our models. I remain open to being convinced that your choices are valuable and effective.
I am intrigued that you seem convinced that these categorical divisions are not arbitrary but hold great content and look forward to understanding the nature of this content. But if your system is to have a more broad and abiding interest, it must have something to say about the genesis of form itself, not just its categorization. What principles have you discovered that your formal system has been designed to express? You have explained the importance of having a qualitative meaning for division by zero, the importance of solving for the functions of nonlinear equations, and I can see how this can improve the detail of determination in complex systems. But is this just a notation through which the indeterminate in any system can be deferred through to different measurements/standards of accounting? Perhaps an attempt to formalize the post-modern demand for a sensitivity to context, which pushed theory away from formal theories of everything in the first place. An attempt to formalize without reducing qualities to their form? This certainly is a step beyond the reductive lens through which much of science gets rendered. There are even supposedly "complexity sensitive" accounts that are still caught up in reductive logic, as you know. But a more "general complexity" approach which is what theorist David Byrne calls the non-reductive approaches are "non-restricted" because they acknowledge that contextual forces and emergent properties always escape law-like formality. Context is infinite. This doesn't bar modelling, it just places it in a middle range, beyond reductive representational theories but not quite absolute forms. This seems to be where you are reaching. A mapping of types, a crafting of metaphors that can generalize over a range of related systems. Yet in doing so, we must justify our choices in context which determine the nature of our models. I remain open to being convinced that your choices are valuable and effective.
I2 R #3: Once again,
you have posed an exceptionally excellent field of questions -- some of the most
thoughtful that we have ever had the privilege to respond to. I’m going, once again, to divide my
response(s) to this, your third set of questions, so as to keep track of the
separate clusters of inquiry into which they fall, with respect to my clusters of responses. Some clusters use E.D. spectral color-coding to highlight ‘interweaving
ordinalities’:
I1 Q #3.A. “My most
broad level impression of your system, having now seen to what extent you
believe and hope that it can approach some kind of totalizing theory of
everything, is not exactly disbelief anymore, since I see that while you seem
to hold out for some rather comprehensive synthetic totality, it appears to be
more of a formal architectonic than a claim or bid for absolute
knowledge. Yet some claims you make do seem to stretch the bounds of what
any formal system may do. I get the impression now that you are
describing a language that may be used to map and extend the knowledge of
systems past what would be possible in any single formal language by extending
the limits of formal systems through dialectical progression, transcending
normal Godelian limits by a mapping of (nested?) logical types. But the
impression is still just that, an impression. It still just seems like a
checklist of some future possible science, a checklist of generic stages of
progression, something we have seen before in various theoretical guises,
albeit in less formal detail.”
.
.
.
