{"id":29614,"date":"2014-11-21T00:38:55","date_gmt":"2014-11-20T23:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/monasandnomos.org\/?p=1985"},"modified":"2014-11-21T00:38:55","modified_gmt":"2014-11-20T23:38:55","slug":"seminar-within-the-domain-of-the-suns-inverse-or-where-are-we-when-thinking-computationally-speculative-reasoning-and-the-nature-of-the-cosmos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meta.copyriot.com\/2014\/11\/seminar-within-the-domain-of-the-suns-inverse-or-where-are-we-when-thinking-computationally-speculative-reasoning-and-the-nature-of-the-cosmos\/","title":{"rendered":"Seminar | Within the Domain of the Sun\u2019s Inverse. Or: Where are we when thinking computationally? Speculative Reasoning and the Nature of the Cosmos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The open seminar is co-curated by Vera B\u00fchlmann (ETH Zurich) and Erin K Stapleton (Kingston University, London). It is a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/appliedvirtualitylab.wordpress.com\/\" >laboratory for applied virtuality<\/a>\u00a0event, organized by the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.caad.arch.ethz.ch\/main\/\" >Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design<\/a>\u00a0at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, ETH. The event will take place at Wirtschaft Neumarkt and Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, on November 26th\u00a0\u2013 27th\u00a02014. There will be papers delivered by invited speakers, and each will be 30 minutes long, with a 30 minutes discussion to follow.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Wednesday November 26th<\/strong>\u00a0at\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/wirtschaft-neumarkt.ch\/\" >Wirtschaft Neumarkt<\/a><br \/>\n<strong>Thursday November 27th<\/strong>\u00a0at\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cabaretvoltaire.ch\/\" >Cabaret Voltaire<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The space for audience is limited, but the event is open for anyone who is interested. Please refer to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/computingthesunsinverse.wordpress.com\/\" >the event\u2019s website<\/a>\u00a0for registration.<\/p>\n<p>Download the poster here:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/quantitability.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/11\/sunsinversepostera2-2.pdf\">sunsinversePosterA2-2<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"entry-title\"><strong>Abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In this seminar, we focus on the role of speculation in theory and philosophy in a historical manner, yet with clear inclinations to our contemporary present and the currently exploding interest in speculative methods in academic practice and research contexts. In order to expand our positions beyond strictly pragmatist considerations, we locate the role of speculation between two schematically accentuated poles: the first approaches the role of speculation in the (arguably inevitable) dogmatisms of anthropological cosmopolitics, operating within domains of sufficient reason; while the second approaches the role of speculation within a rational cosmology, where it (arguably inevitably) is prone to engender what Kant terms \u201cthe antinomies\u201d of pure reason, and which he sees as inherent to all systematic approaches to the cosmos.<\/p>\n<p>We will align these positions in a matrixical manner with vectors of (contemporary) characterizations of the sun written by such thinkers such as Henri Poincar\u00e9, Georges Bataille, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Serres. Based on these characterizations we will attempt to profile different understandings of economy. Two fields will serve as \u201acase-situations\u2018 for thinking about the \u201aenergetic-material\u2018 role of the sun: (1) Artificial Photosynthesis and its consequences for how we can think about food and energy, and (2) \u201ametabolizing\u2018 algorithms such as Google\u2019s PageRank which introduce circuitous units for measuring the relevancy of data in a quasi-climatic sense, and the peculiar economy of data\u2019s value the emergence of which we are presently witnessing \u2013 as an economy that is being addressed within the registers of \u201abiopolitics\u2018 and\/or \u201acognitive capitalism\u2018.<\/p>\n<p class=\"entry-title\"><strong>Speakers<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><i>Terence Blake<\/i>\u00a0(Agent Swarm blog)<\/p>\n<p><i>Vera B\u00fchlmann<\/i>\u00a0(CAAD ETHZ)<\/p>\n<p><i>Felicity Colman<\/i>\u00a0(Manchester School of Art)<\/p>\n<p><i>Ludger Hovestadt<\/i>\u00a0(CAAD ETHZ)<\/p>\n<p><i>Jorge Orozco<\/i>\u00a0(CAAD ETHZ)<\/p>\n<p><i>Matteo Pasquellini<\/i>\u00a0(Philosopher, Berlin)<\/p>\n<p><i>Johannes Paul Raether<\/i>\u00a0(artist, Berlin)<\/p>\n<p><i>David Schildberger<\/i>\u00a0(CAAD ETHZ \/ ZHAW W\u00e4denswil (Beverage Design))<\/p>\n<p><i>Erin K Stapleton<\/i>\u00a0(Kingston University London)<\/p>\n<p><i>Elias Zafiris<\/i>\u00a0(University Athens and University Budapest)<\/p>\n<p class=\"entry-title\"><strong>Pr\u00e9cis<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The decades of our immediate past throughout the 20th century are characterized by the perhaps unprecedented air of an apparently post-cosmological era, where secular politics builds on scientific knowledge rather than on theological authority, and where questions of moral value are framed \u2018critically\u2019 within the various cosmopolitical (rather than cosmological) orders (humanist, neo-humanist as well as post-humanist) that seek to render the very touchstone of enlightenment philosophy fit for our contemporary time: namely to find an alternative to cosmology as the domain from which the nature of thought might be deduced. Because, as Kant realized, cosmology \u2013 if pursued undogmatically, and that meant for him purely rationally \u2013 is prone to produce paralogisms, and hence poses irresolvable antinomies for a\u00a0<em>modern, secular\u00a0<\/em>and<em>\u00a0non-tradition-based<\/em>\u00a0philosophy at large. Like this, enlightenment philosophy distances itself from theological narratives of time, involving ideas of apocalypse, the fall, and accounts of salvation.<\/p>\n<p>But critical distance doesn\u2019t mean having done with. The questions of justice, decision and judgment, in short the problem of good and evil have not, of course, disappeared. They remain entangled with the relation between the concrete power of cognition and thought\u2019s abstract character.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the general appreciation of Kant\u2019s insight and his call for moderateness and critical distance vis-\u00e0-vis a cosmic \u201atruth,\u2019 scientists from the mid-19th century on were bound once again by the idea of an apocalypse purported by insights into the cosmos itself, now arising from within the Laws of Thermodynamics. Considered as a\u00a0<em>scientific<\/em>\u00a0Universal Law (not cosmological in the pre-critical sense!), the second law seemed to inevitably announce a \u201eheat death\u201c of the universe (Helmholz), which would be the \u201eend of all physical phenomena\u201c (Rankine). Thus, once again, there was a big interest in waving Kant\u2019s cautions against a scientific cosmology from the table, and in setting out instead to formulate one \u2013 in a sense that could now claim to be based on an approximative, empirical and experimental basis, rather than on abstract rationalist speculation alone. Henri Poincar\u00e9\u2019s \u201eLe\u00e7ons sur les Hypoth\u00e8se Cosmogonique\u201c cover, and put into a more Kantian-like, moderately-minded perspective, many of the then prevalent ideas about \u2018entropic creation\u2019 and \u2018cosmic evolution\u2019 that began to rise with the development of thermodynamics. Helge S Kragh\u2019s book\u00a0<em>Entropic Creation. Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology<\/em>\u00a0(Ashgate 2008) gives an informative overview.<\/p>\n<p>In the post Second World War era, there is another line of intellectuals who, in apparently untimely manner, stick to cosmical categories in one way or another: (1) Among the most prominent of these is Georges Bataille, who, writing directly before, during and after the war used political, anthropological and\u00a0religious examples to illustrate how the operations of what he\u00a0understood as the\u00a0equilibrium of a\u00a0\u201egeneral economy of energy\u201c is destabilized by capitalist\u00a0focus on\u00a0accumulation, and what he designated as a dangerous deferral of the expenditure of excess energy. Bataille draws attention to solar abundance\u00a0as\u00a0a systemic model\u00a0that\u00a0focuses on the expenditure of the excess energy beyond utilitarian need and survival. (2) Then we have Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard, for whom the question of the condition of postmodern knowledge is tied up with the foreseeable cosmic extinction of all embodied forms of life \u2013 \u201cthe sole serious question to face humanity today\u201c (Lyotard,\u00a0<em>The Inhuman<\/em>, 9). By asking \u201eCan Thought Go On Without A Body\u201c, he relates the interest in liberating thought, through its aspired mechanization, from actual embodied life forms and their diversities (as it motivates, at least as a not-so-insignificant factor, programs of Artificial Intelligence) to the apocalyptic future as foreseen by the astroscientific theories that confront humanity with the finitude of the solar \u2018reservoir\u2019. For him, the sun\u2019s approximating death is the sole important question because he sees it as organizing the vectors that are followed by capitalist techno-science, and that revolve around the question: how can science defy the upcoming cosmic catastrophe? Lyotard sees as the apparent goal of cosmopolitical capitalism the emancipation of intelligence from life. Today, as Lockheed announces their break-through in controlling processes of nuclear fusion (which would factually bring the production of an artificial sun on earth into proximate reach), and apparently plan to build fusion reactors (www.spiegel.de, October 17th\u00a02014), Lyotard\u2019s perceptive observation can be extended from Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Life and Robotic Forms of Embodiment. (3)\u00a0Michel Serres is a third contemporary intellectual for whom a characterization of the sun is central to philosophy. The sun, for him, is \u201cthe real, ultimate capital\u201d (Serres,\u00a0<em>The Parasite<\/em>, 173). And it is\u00a0<em>as<\/em>\u00a0capital, he dares to think, that the sun can count as the origin of all things insofar as they can be reasoned in the terms of a systematical account. The sun is the realm of general equivalence, and as such it is outside the true and outside the false, \u201cit indicates contents that are jokers\u201d (<em>The Parasite<\/em>, 163). This introduces a turn in how to think about rationality and the nature of thought. Our challenge today is not to think the Universe\u2019s dynamics as revolving around an axis of cosmic time, he maintains. Rather, it is to reason about a universe that expands. The nuclear particle perspective is only one aspect of the universe\u2019s physics. Of equal importance is the wave dimension of the photons radiated from the fusion of nuclei. Photons are parceled quanta of light \u2013 light characterized by different frequencies \u2013 from which electrons can bind with atomic nuclei and accrete into the chemical elements that make up, materially, all the bodies in a solar system. If a cosmic order, rather than an anthropological one, is to inform philosophy, it must take both aspects into account. In consequence, where philosophy has hitherto been thinking in descriptive terms of relations of equivalence, we ought to think in contractual terms of relations of equipollence \u2013\u00a0being same in the mediate aspects of force, power or validity (the symbolic character of Being), rather than immediately in form or essence (Being). This relation of equipollence, he maintains, is different from the relation of equivalence in that it cannot, by principle, be stated in any firm and foundational manner \u2013 it needs to be articulated contractually, symbolically, in discrete terms that formalize the reciprocal bonds of all that factors in the relations that can be reasoned philosophically, and investigated scientifically, between the real (world) and the rational (cosmos). We can think about relations of equipollence, he suggests, as a contract with nature (<em>The Natural Contract<\/em>, 1980).<\/p>\n<p>With Serres\u2019 position, the vector of computability\u2019s inevitable alliance with the fulfillment of cosmopolitical capitalism, as exposed by Lyotard, can be seen, to a certain extent, as disempowered \u2013 simply because the notion of \u201asignature\u2018 interrupts the continuous transformability of functional conclusiveness. The notion of \u201asignature\u2018 appears in Serres book rather abruptly, and given that Serres introduces the idea of a Natural Contract as an answer to the concerns of the planet\u2019s climate and its health, speaking of \u201asignatures\u2018 is likely to raise associations to Paracelsus\u2019s 16th century pharmaceutics, developed out of his doctrine of a \u201aharmony between the macro- and the microcosmos\u2018. But more urgently, perhaps, we can relate it to the technologies of communication and information that constitute science today as techno-science. Here, \u201asignatures\u2018 occupy a central role in where and how we compute: the transmission of messages is organized by protocols, on the level of hardware as well as on that of software. Protocols establish encrypted keys that work with so-called \u201asignatures\u2018 used to specify abstract data types algebraically. In communications technology, the notion of \u2018signature\u2019 exposes that all inferences of a computation-based logics are actually based on symbolical contracts.<\/p>\n<p>In the seminar we want to discuss the problems that are implicated within the question \u2018Where are we when we think computationally?\u2019. We would like to invite you to speculate with us: what would it mean to ask about the Inverse of the Sun?*<\/p>\n<p>* In mathematics, an inverse problem is a problem considered as indetermined. Or, pertaining to the language of logics, with inverse problems it is the domain of an argument (its established reason or firm ground, as we might say metaphorically) that is treated as unsettled, while the range of an argument (its manifestation in cases, like the symptoms of an illness) can be registered, labeled and documented.<\/p>\n<p>  <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"http:\/\/feeds.wordpress.com\/1.0\/gocomments\/quantitability.wordpress.com\/1985\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.wordpress.com\/1.0\/comments\/quantitability.wordpress.com\/1985\/\" \/><\/a> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/pixel.wp.com\/b.gif?host=monasandnomos.org&#038;blog=42221392&#038;%23038;post=1985&#038;%23038;subd=quantitability&#038;%23038;ref=&#038;%23038;feed=1\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The open seminar is co-curated by Vera B&uuml;hlmann (ETH Zurich) and Erin K Stapleton (Kingston University, London). It is a&nbsp;laboratory for applied virtuality&nbsp;event, organized by the&nbsp;Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design&nbsp;at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, ETH. The event will take place at Wirtschaft Neumarkt and Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, on November 26th&nbsp;&ndash; 27th&nbsp;2014. &hellip; <span><a href=\"http:\/\/monasandnomos.org\/2014\/11\/20\/seminar-within-the-domain-of-the-suns-inverse-or-where-are-we-when-thinking-computationally-speculative-reasoning-and-the-nature-of-the-cosmos\/\">Continue reading <span>&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/span><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/pixel.wp.com\/b.gif?host=monasandnomos.org&amp;blog=42221392&amp;post=1985&amp;subd=quantitability&amp;ref=&amp;feed=1\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":883,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[695,1589,1126],"class_list":["post-29614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-syndicated","tag-korper","tag-open-seminars","tag-thinking-as-an-algebraic-mechanist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meta.copyriot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meta.copyriot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meta.copyriot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meta.copyriot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/883"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meta.copyriot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29614"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meta.copyriot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29754,"href":"https:\/\/meta.copyriot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29614\/revisions\/29754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meta.copyriot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meta.copyriot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meta.copyriot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}