This video is not available for public access. If you are a researcher who would like access to this video, please contact us at incrediblemachines2014 AT gmail DOT com, and we may be able to provide you with a private link.
At the Crossroads Between Descriptions
A system can be assigned two sets of descriptions, physical descriptions and computational descriptions. Models corresponding to these descriptions differ in various fundamental ways. Conflating these two asymmetrical sets of descriptions results in an inflated metaphysics of computation, ultimately leading to different forms of pancomputationalism, or a view according to which everything can be furnished with a computational description, or can be viewed as a system naturally entitled to an algorithmic decomposability and capable of implementing every computation. Tacit endorsement of pancomputationalism by disregarding conditions required for computational descriptions is an ideological foundation for reinventing the universe at the level of myth yet this time myths entirely populated by machines. By giving ‘universe as a warehouse of machinery’ a new meaning, pancomputationalist ideology vacillates between what Mark Wilson calls tropospheric complacency and semantic mimicry, over-extended local circumstances and imaginary ubiquitous behaviors associated with flat universes. Reinforced by our intuitive tendency to evenly distribute descriptions and properties across different incommensurable domains, the world of omnipresent machines is in fact a global semantic simulation of our local niche phenomena. When this new semantic picture of the world does not directly influence our concepts and perspectives, it serves as an alibi for our choices of method. But, on the other hand and at the other extreme, I would argue that eliminating the possibility of mediation between these two descriptive sets by privileging the physical description leads to unsound ontological and epistemic claims about the limits of constructibility and knowledge, eventually reinscribing ineffability in new guises.
Reza Negarestani is a writer and a philosopher. He has contributed extensively to journals and anthologies and lectured at numerous international universities and institutes. His current philosophical project is focused on rationalist universalism beginning with the evolution of the modern system of knowledge and advancing toward contemporary philosophies of rationalism, their procedures as well as their demands for special forms of human conduct. His book Cyclonopedia was published in 2008.