On Sat, 6 Dec 2003, B. Bogart wrote:
On Sat, 6 Dec 2003, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
I don't think it has anything to do with fuzziness. It has to do with the stereotyped material/conceptual dialectic that assumes that the concept never can be about the material used, from the axiom that the art is an idea first, and it's just a sad thing that it has to be incarnated into puny petty materials [that make it impure]. ;-)
Agreed, In fact dialectics are not just blank and white anyhow. I'm happy you say dialectic here and not dichotomy! Oh the impurity of reality!
Actually I meant dichotomy :-}. But then I was not expressing how I think about things, just an impression about how some may be thinking about art; I mean in the same way that some "pure" mathematicians seem to frown upon practical applications, because the concept is everything.
BTW I finished my semester last monday. Yay! (and that's my excuse for replying late)
On this topic I have some (related) writing: http://www.ekran.org/ben/oracle/process/art_in_the_face_of_the_sublime.html
cool. i really like it!
Absolutely, I would say for myself (dispute the eductation perhaps) that both sides have to be taken in a dialectic relationship. Not one being the master of another.
Agreed.
Neil Postman said that "For a programmer, everything in the world becomes an algorithm."
It is also that the world also lends itself to be seen as such.
I find it hard to seperate our world from our conceptions of it.
If you don't have any conceptions about the world, then when things happen, you cannot have predicted them nor say that in retrospect they were likely to happen. Therefore you don't have anything to say about the world. That's why the conceptions are essential. Separating yourself from the conceptions, you cannot say much more than that there exists a world that you can have conceptions about, and that there exist different conceptions, and that one's conceptions change over time. (And I guess even that could be disputed.)
It depends which compsci you are talking about. Topics of computing have grown like mad in the 50 last years and have invaded all surrounding domains. It reaches around for logic, mathematics, statistics, operations research, linguistics, psychology, engineering, and so on.
definatly true, even more reason for a better term! But what?
Informatics, from French "informatique". Where I live, a compsci bachelor's degree is called a "baccalauréat en informatique".
don't reductionists think thought processes can be reduced to compuation?
Yes, but it depends: if it is the case that the reduction is valid, it doesn't mean it is useful, and still the higher levels of thought may remain better ways of thinking.
This is also a great point. A reduction may be technically/empirically valid, but that does not mean something has not been lost. (Postman talks a lot about this)
Which is why, in practice, several models of different levels are superimposed and used simultaneously, and then one chooses the model that best fit a problem or discourse; like, chemistry and classical physics are now considered to be consequences of quantum physics, but still we use the former.
A small bit about noise: every noise has its distribution, and a distribution is a pattern. Noise/randomness has _some_ structure, albeit less than anything else.
Very true, I was talking about uniformly distributed noise. But does this really exist?
The domain over which uniform noise is uniformly distributed is a pattern of the noise.
Now if you are looking for a domain the least "patterny" possible, maybe you'd try the biggest possible domain in a given context, but usually it does not make sense; for example, uniformly distributing noise over all natural numbers (or all real numbers) is a mathematical contradiction.
Or is all noise also chaos? (structure and indeterminacy)
What is considered noise is relative to the observer, and in particular to its ability to see patterns in it, and its willingness to do so.
I don't think you can prove that there exists an absolutely unpredictable source of data, and I don't think you can prove that there doesn't exist any. Those are largely metaphysical questions.
What is the lyapunov (measure of chaos) exponent of white/brown/pink noise?
The concept of "chaos" as found in mathematics is not founded on randomness at all. It merely refers to how, often, knowing the rules of a system doesn't mean that you can make much accurate predictions about it.
Now, if you have a source of white noise, then by definition, the only knowledge you have of white noise values is their probability distribution; for if you happen to know anything else about how those values go about, it's not white noise to you anymore, as its values are not independent from each other.
Therefore you can compute a Lyapunov exponent on white noise iff you can do it only considering its probability distribution; and briefly looking at what the definition is, I don't think it makes sense at all to try to find a Lyapunov exponent on white noise.
Mathieu Bouchard http://artengine.ca/matju