[Art, Digitality and Consciousness] - A New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum

A New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum

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Art, Digitality and Consciousness

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Posted by: Guy Birkin

Recently I submitted a proposal for artwork to the Creativity and Cognition conference. I thought that my accompanying short paper [attached] might be of interest. It's about my art and about the relation of NKS to process philosophy and to a model of consciousness evolution. I think perhaps it overlaps some of Mike Helland's work.
I'd appreciate any constructive criticism.

N.B. Please excuse the fact that it was written for an arty audience. I posted here rather than the Artistic NKS forum, because it's the bits relating to an NKS way of thinking that I'd like feedback on.


Posted by: MikeHelland

The sentiment that Leibniz may be replacing Newton as the founding father of physics is an important one, in my opinion.

Do you know of any definitive, comprehensize papers on this specific subject? It would be handy to pass around.


Posted by: Guy Birkin

It's something I've picked up through my research, and noted because the idea fit with Gebser's idea of the changing ways of thinking - Leibniz was literally ahead of his time.
I'm afraid I've not yet come across an authoritative text on the shift from Leibniz to Newton. But Greg Chaitin has written about this in his essay Leibniz, Information, Math and Physics:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS.../kirchberg.html

He says:

"None of us who made this paradigm shift happen were students of Leibniz, but he anticipated us all. As I hinted in a letter to La Recherche, in a sense all of Wolfram's thousand-page book is the development of one sentence in Leibniz:

"Dieu a choisi celuy qui est... le plus simple en hypotheses et le plus riche en phenomenes"
[God has chosen that which is the most simple in hypotheses and the most rich in phenomena]

This presages Wolfram's basic insight that simple programs can have very complicated-looking output. And all of my work may be regarded as the development of another sentence in Leibniz:

"Mais quand une regle est fort composée, ce qui luy est conforme, passe pour irrégulier"
[But when a rule is extremely complex, that which conforms to it passes for random]

Here I see the germ of my definition of algorithmic randomness and irreducibility.

Newtonian physics is now receding into the dark, distant intellectual past. It's not just that it has been superseded by quantum physics. No, it's much deeper than that. In our new interest in complex systems, the concepts of energy and matter take second place to the concepts of information and computation. And the continuum mathematics of Newtonian physics now takes second place to the combinatorial mathematics of complex systems."


Posted by: MikeHelland

Interesting excerpts. Chaitin does seem to be thinking in the right directions too.

While I hold that Leibniz's ideas are a better starting point than Newton's ideas, the model I've developed of nature isn't completely digital.

In fact, I don't think Leibniz's model is comletely digital either.

I could send you a work in progress that explains why if you're interested.

Or, I could post it here?

If anyone reading along is interested in this, post a message and I'll start a new thread on the topic of why we can only go so far with digitality.




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