[FRIAM] What is Wealth for?

[Prof David West]

Many years back, at UNM, I was teaching a graduate seminar in the philosophical roots of computer science. At one point the discussion was around aesthetics and art, and one particular thread on computer programming as performance art. I asked students who if they would pay to watch a performer write code the same way as they would to if playing a piano.  The spontaneous and consensus answer was, David Ackley. I later had a small opportunity to pair program with him, and they were right.

Totally different item: I sure would like to take some of you (especially you glen)  the places I have been where I intellectually, viscerally, emotionally, somatically, and kinesthetically experienced and understood really cool things like infinity.

davew


On Mon, Mar 15, 2021, at 5:08 PM, jon zingale wrote:
> "Computing Up" is such a good podcast. I keep forgetting that it exists. I
> love what Dave Ackley is saying here about generalization, it repeats to a
> strong extent what Deleuze is mining for in *Difference and Repetition*, a
> pathological (though at times wonderful) obsession with the general (as a
> psychological modality) when even at the expense of the particular.
> Recently, I have been attempting to make my way through both *Difference and
> Repetition* as well as Deleuze's *Bergsonism* in an attempt to better
> understand the ramifications of the
> general-particular/substitution-repetition distinction. Bergson at one point
> explicitly calls Einstein's relativity "metaphysics posing as science",
> Einstein and Russell, misunderstanding Bergson's respect for metaphysics,
> all but pushed Bergson's writings into extinction. What Ackley discusses
> here as *independence* and *uniformity* is not unlike the
> Einsteinian-Noetherian conception of the *homogeneity* of space and time.
> There appears a lot to mine from understanding the relationship between
> symmetry and substitution, substitution the mark of the general. There is
> also quite a bit in Ackley's monologue that synergizes well with Heidegger's
> "The Point of Reference":
> 
> """
> All distances in time and space are shrinking. Places that a person
> previously reached after weeks and months on the road are now reached by
> airplane overnight. What a person previously received news of only after
> years, if at all, is now experienced hourly over the radio in no time. The
> germination and flourishing of plants that remained concealed through the
> seasons, film now exhibits publicly in a single minute...Everything washes
> together into the uniformly distanceless. How? Is not this moving together
> into the distanceless even more uncanny than everything being out of place?
> The human is transfixed by what could come about with the explosion of the
> atomic bomb. The human does not see what for a long time now has already
> arrived and even is occurring, and for which the atomic bomb and its
> explosion are merely the latest emission...What is this clueless anxiety
> waiting for, if the horrible has already occurred.
> """
> 
> All of these questions of substitution, homogeneity, scale, coverings, and
> compactness have very much been on my mind recently. I cannot help but
> wonder if a science of the particular, built upon Deleuze's work, is not far
> off. For context, here is the relevant section of the Ackley monologue:
> 
> """
> One of the ways that we describe reality a lot is in terms of here is a
> situation and we imagine that this situation has some extent, it is my
> house, it is my city, it is my room and it has some properties and I
> describe it and I tell a story in that situation and there is an implicit
> sense in which this situation can be likened to other situations
> elsewhere, it's generalizable. It may not apply to everything, but from
> first-look, you could try to put someone else's room, and someone else's
> city, and someone else's country, and see how it applies to them and
> it's supposed to be useful in some way. But that very act of saying that
> this is a limited situation, that's supposed to be moveable, that this
> description is supposed to apply in multiple places, carries with it some
> sort of assumption of independence, or some sort of assumption of
> uniformity (homogeneity?) of the places it can go...There is a sort of
> first principles assumption that a description here should be a
> description there and my problem with it is that once the descriptions
> get really big like people on Facebook or people using the internet,
> there isn't really a place to move it. *It's everything*. The length of
> the (finite?) description *covers all of the stuff* (compactness?) we can
> imagine it covering. We can say, "Well we need Facebook on mars, we need
> the internet on Pluto", but that's not happening anytime soon, and what
> it means is that this assumption of independence, this assumption that
> there is a sink, where consequences can go, the assumption that there is
> something outside of the room where food can come in and waste can go
> out or power can come in or heat can go out and I can view this room as
> an isolated system that couples to this thing I don't have to care about
> ...Once the system becomes really big, like the entire planet, it isn't
> clear I can really do that, it's all of the internal properties that
> really matter, but people keep talking about it as if there is an
> infinite world outside.
> """
> 
> 
> 
> --
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