Re: [OPE] Dialectics for the New Century

johnholloway@prodigy.net.mx

Can I intervene with a little advertisement?

NEGATIVITY AND REVOLUTION
Adorno and Political Activism
John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros, Sergio Tischler (eds)
Pluto Press, London, autumn 2008

    With articles by Werner Bonefeld, Marcel Stoetzler, Adrian Wilding,
Alberto Bonnet, Darij Zadnikar, Jose Manuel Martinez, Michael Lowy and Elena
Varikas, and the editors.

    The book has to do with the whole question of the theoretical and
political importance of dialectics, and of understanding it as negative
dialectics. 

    The book has already been published in Spanish: Herramienta, Buenos
Aires, 2007.

John

El 3/4/08 06:54, "GERALD LEVY" <gerald_a_levy@msn.com> escribió:

> Hi Paul C:
>  
> All aspects of social relations of production can not be
> be expressed as 'calculi'.  That is, in part, because there
> are essential aspects of  those relations  which can not
> be expressed  as *magnitude*  and are
> comprehensable merely through formal/mathematical calculi.
>  
> How, for instance, is the changing 'balance of power'
> among (and within) contending classes under capitalism calculated?
> If class struggle is  calculi, can't it (at least in principle) be
> expressed as a quantitative *formula*?
>  
> I see the exclusive emphasis on 'calculi' as ... well ...
> undialectical.
>  
> In solidarity, Jerry
>  
> 
>  
>> ³Calculi are rules for the manipulation of strings of symbols and these rules
>> will not do any
>> 
>> calculations unless there is some material apparatus to interpret them. Leave
>> a book on the
>> 
>> low-calculus on a shelf along with a sheet of paper containing a formula in
>> the l-calculus and
>> 
>> nothing will happen. Bring along a mathematician, give them the book and the
>> formula
>> 
>> and, given enough paper and pencil the ensemble can compute. Alternatively,
>> feed the
>> 
>> l-calculus formula into a computer with a lisp interpreter and it will
>> evaluate.² (Are There New Models of Computation? Reply to Wegner and
>> Eberbach, Paul Cockshott and Greg Michaelson,, The Computer Journal 2007
>> 50(2):232-247; doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxl062)
>> 
>>  
>> 
>> ³And conversely, when we interpret
>> 
>> Turing¹s theorem as a statement about what can and cannot be computed in
>> 
>> physical fact, we are adopting some of his tacit assumptions about physical
>> 
>> reality or equivalently about the laws of physics.
>> 
>> So where does mathematical effectiveness come from? It is not simply a
>> 
>> miracle, ³a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve² [17]
>> 
>> ‹ at least, no more so than our ability to discover empirical knowledge,
>> 
>> for our knowledge of mathematics and logic is inextricably entangled with
>> 
>> our knowledge of physical reality: every mathematical proof depends for
>> 
>> its acceptance upon our agreement about the rules that govern the behavior
>> 
>> of physical objects such as computers or our brains. Hence when we im-
>> 
>> prove our knowledge about physical reality, we may also gain new means of
>> 
>> improving our knowledge of logic, mathematics and formal constructs. It
>> 
>> seems that we have no choice but to recognize the dependence of our math-
>> 
>> ematical knowledge (though not, we stress, of mathematical truth itself) on
>> 
>> physics, and that being so, it is time to abandon the classical view of com-
>> 
>> putation as a purely logical notion independent of that of computation as a
>> 
>> physical process. In the following we discuss how the discovery of quantum
>> 
>> mechanics in particular has changed our understanding of the nature of
>> 
>> computation.²( MACHINES, LOGIC AND QUANTUM PHYSICS
>> 
>> DAVID DEUTSCH, ARTUR EKERT, AND ROSSELLA LUPACCHINI)
>> 
>>  
>> 
>>  
>> 
>>  
>> 
>>  
>> 
>>  
>>  
> 
> 
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