“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, February 20, 2011

Algorithmic Sampling & Causation




Algorithm and Contingency samples my sampling, promising a difference that makes a difference on causation...I am allured...

3 comments:

Leaf said...

With ref to 'that Bateson quote' that you requote in this post and love/(to)/hate, and with ref also to your posts and links on quantum coherence, had an epiphany.

Was wrestling (ap Manley Hopkins) with recognition that experimental empiricism inevitably employs (human) experience for evidence, with at least some implications for epistemology that might seem at least somewhat correlationist, as human experience as arbiter of difference produces what seems an inescapably closed human-centred-experience epistemological loop. However...

Reading quantum smelling/scenting, seeing/sighting, etc, realised that the difference that makes a difference is (in/to/as) our own quantum sensing (apparatus): the difference that makes a difference at a distance (entanglement).

That is, it is precisely that difference of sense in/as sensed difference in/as our own quantum sensed/sensory experience that constitutes the ontic-ontological object/entity that is both the difference we sense and the difference sensed. Entangled. (Alas, like this prose. Ho hum.)

It is as you said also apoleptic irony (fi in the photosynthesis article: "[I]n quantum mechanics, you can take all three of these routes simultaneously. You don’t specify where you are until you arrive" > http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/quantum-photosynthesis/).

In writing this am taking OOO's hyperbolic not critical stance seriously, so daring to share my ideas and entrusting the care of any logical or other flaws to OOO's refreshing integrity. Thank you all very much for advocating academic kindness and generosity, and for applying it as you all do.

Timothy Morton said...

That's cool Leaf! BTW I owe you a read of your work...sorry for the delay.

Leaf said...

Thanks, Tim. Apologies for delay in acknowledging; computer crashed just after posting comment, then couldn't remember on which post had commented to find out whether had sent it or not (so went through most of them, a useful review of recent ideas).

Am developing relations (perhaps identicality) between 'sampling' and 'experience especially empathy as quantum entanglement'. Part way through your 'Queer Ecology' which seems precisely pertinent.