Sartre conjuring actor network theory

"The collective object is an index of separation. This would emerge more clearly if we took as our example a more complex market (in connection with the conjuncture, with State intervention, with the existence of semi-monopolies, and taking into account advertising, the weather--and consequently, fluctuations of production and tooling-- etc.), but this would require a treatment beyond the scope of this study" (pp. 288-289).

As quoted in Jean Paul Sartre's "Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume One"

The miraculous occurrence and quantum computing

An argument in creationist circles is that the number of factors that lead to the complex human organism is a miracle that could have only occurred through the intervention of God. A evolutionist argument to counter this is that any given discrete decision in the life of a person and the surrounding context, environment, and history of actions leading up to this specific decision is just as complex to consider and these are happening every day. 

Stepping off from where the evolutionist counters the creationist's view of actions in the world let us look at something like art. What is music? A guitarist touches strings and the fret board in some combination at some time signature. The touching and the sequence of this touching that the musician does is something anyone could conceivably do if he/she is physically capable of moving his/her fingers along the fret board and the strings. That being said, what makes one a musician, making music, and the other just mucking around, making noise? Time. An investment of time and physical discipline by the musician makes his/her playing of a song look so effortless, whereas a person without any real understanding or physical discipline cannot put the symphony together, per se, but can conceivably make all the discrete sounds of that symphony, just without orchestration. 

This analogy aside, we can look at a number of phenomena in the world as simply the configuration of matter and energy in temporal sequence, like a lock tumbler, which given a desired outcome reveals the value or effectiveness of this configuration. A thought, be it Einstein's equation, or a workaround for not having a cake making ingredient are simply thoughts. So is someone's meaningless daydream. What makes one thought more valuable than another requires both a context and a time investment to get to that state, which makes one thought more valuable as an outcome than another. Even further back, the identity of one thought over another, as a matter of neurons in a three-dimensional configuration, firing in a persistent thought pattern just doesn't seem to bear out the content of what thought it contains, per se, but we're getting at a hard ground for just what memory is as a physical manifestation of experience plus some active reproduction of it is and what brain activity is. Just as a lock is simply a barrier to both opening a latch and a door, what that lock contains and the mechanism that keeps it locked are a simple and potentially random arrangement of things, which have an occult feature, which keeps them 'locked' or hidden from being discovered. 

Two things: this characterization seems to drag the whole metaphor into the payoff, making the description a retroactive evaluation of its function and occurrence in the world. An Einstein equation, thought for the first time, makes that mundane, happenstance neural network somehow more important than that of a fruit fly's, a gate operators, or a symphony conductors to a manner of degree. All could be powered by a hamburger. All are broken down into states of matter in some configuration, yet some have an identity that render them more useful to know completely over others. 

Blah, blah, blah. The tie in to quantum computing comes from its native ability to try out multiple configurations simultaneously in order to do what has been occurring at the atomic level since the universe began. To square with the metaphor, a quantum computer, beyond its code breaking capabilities, is picking locks to the nature of the universe, finding more effective molecules for specific applications, to optimize for the quantum states of atomic structures. This is its big and interesting pay off, and it reveals something that reality, as we know it, has achieved and built up from the given environment over the course of billions of years. That the molecular soup of a young earth could give rise to discrete, self-replicating cells both refers back to the miracle that creationists see behind what we are and the world we inhabit and to something larger, spread out across the universe, seemingly 'baked into' it. 

To find humanity uncovering truth, unlocking a meaning built into the universe casts a reflection upon us, as a part of that universe and but one form that universe takes in self organization, which is itself a form of 'understanding.' 

Identity

I am beholden to answers based upon empirical data. I hold to a view that the identity fluidity of a generation coming of age now was influenced by character creation screens and the gaming environments they inhabited for the measure of their formative years. 

Content whale

 Art is Melville's whale being turned into oil in the era of content. 

we're all billionaires

We're all this brand of billionaire. We're all spare time billionaires. 

Some observations

I see mathematics relying upon:

1/x

x²

√x

This observation also falls prey to my interpretation of numerous glazed-over math presentations. 

I am finding that much of what mathematics does is to calculate or analyze plots in a three dimensional volume.

Finally, as we've been beholden to 2 dimensional graphical means for representing thought/calculation/analysis so long, the big discoveries in the past century have been attempts to transcend those 2 dimensions while working within them representationally.

Computers allow us to serially compute vast points in three dimensional volumes in order to test hypotheses about the probabilities represented by those points in space as a matter of a behavior imputed to those points. 

Quantum computing represents the next step in modeling points in a three dimensional volume such that it need not go through step-by-step modeling, via math, of points in three dimensional space but can do multiple points simultaneously, thus adding 'volume' as a baked in feature of its compute cycle. 

Classical computing is flattening of calculation to logic gates on atoms-thick wafers to maximize serial calculations within two-dimensional space. Quantum computing pushes through that miniscule control arena of two dimensions into quantum space, thus opening up multi-matrix calculation by having qubits masquerade as the control conditions for information. 

This is a mess, and I will return to it. 

Sartre on the human investment absorbed by material objects

"In this way, society in its most concrete movement is shot through with passivity, and unceasingly totalises its inert multiplicities and inscribes its totalisation in inertia, while the material object, whose unity is thereby recreated, re-discovered and imposed, becomes a strange and living being with its own customs and its own movement" (p. 169).

Later Sartre writes, "This is not a metaphor. To preserve its reality as a dwelling a house must be inhabited, that is to say, looked after, heated, swept, repainted, etc.; otherwise it deteriorates. This vampire object constantly absorbs human action, lives on blood taken from man and finally lives in symbiosis with him. It derives all its physical properties, including temperature, from human action. For its inhabitants there is no difference between the passive activity which might be called 'residence' and the pure re-constituting praxis which protects the house against the Universe, that is, which mediates between the exterior and the interior." (p. 169)

from Sartre's "Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1"