Arquivo para a ‘Matemática’ Categoria
Narrative, languages and orality
28
Mar
Taking up one of Byung-Chul Han’s words: “Narrative is the capacity of
the spirit to overcome the contingency of the body”, this capacity to overcome the contingency of the body is linked not only to the memory of poetic and conative language, but also to the spiritual meanings and values that modernity has abandoned under the pretext of creating an “objective” vision (A crise da narração, Byung Chul Han, Vozes, 2023, brazilian edition).
The telling of the stories of peoples, their cultures and religions are thus key factors in overcoming such a dramatic moment in the history of communication.
The languages developed for machines are capable of producing narratives with a set of words that are part of their vocabulary, but without the imagery of the voices that perform the storytelling, especially in oral cultures, where writing is secondary.
The dramatic text is also a genre in which acts, scenes, rubrics and speeches are presented, which is why it is part of a theatrical form or a-presentation, in the sense that the presentation is both a telling of a story and its negation, since it involves fiction, storytelling always has a present aspect, this is the meaning.
The dispute between nominalists and realists in the lower middle ages (11th to 14th centuries) ended up neglecting the importance of language, but the linguistic turn of the late 19th century brought back its importance in studies such as grammar, semiotics, etymology and, more broadly, linguistics.
The beginning of modernity is marked by the break between the metaphysical function of language and the use of objectivity as a mode of expression, but this is only one of the functions of language, the Russian linguist Roman Jacobson recalls the functions: phatic, poetic, conative and metalinguistic, in which modern codes are inserted by example: Morse, digital and quantum, where “the code explains the code itself, that is, the language explains the language itself”, and this should be the only context where the concepts of sender/receiver apply.
The linguistic turn occurs in the midst of the crisis of idealist and positivist thinking in modernity: Husserl, Heidegger, Hanna Arendt are fundamental, although they are most remembered: Noam Chomsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault and Ferdinand de Saussure.
In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky wrote variations on these linguistic styles that are more technical, involve a restricted grammar and regular expressions. It is used in computer science and formal language theory.
When proclaiming texts in an oral culture, such as the Bible, it is necessary to have meaning, and in particular to make a hermeneutic of its presentation (repeat it when telling).
Communication, Shannon and data
13
Mar
Born in the small town of Gaylord, Claude
Shannon watched the creation of telegraphs using the barbed wire of the mountain farms in his region from an early age. He soon built his own telegraph, unlike the telephone companies of the time, in the countryside they continued to use barbed wire to send messages as telegraphs.
Shannon went to study at the University of Michigan, interested in mathematics and communication, where he discovered an advertisement asking for monitors for Vannevar Bush’s famous MIT Laboratory, where students finishing their theses were looking for a machine to tabulate data, unlike Charles Babbage’s historic English computer, this was just a machine to tabulate data, we could say a nascent data science.
The MIT laboratory was where “professors and students turned to the Differential Analyzer in moments of desperation, and when it was possible to solve equations with a margin of error of 2%, the operator of the Claude Shannon Machine was happy” (Gleick, 2013, p. 181).
The circuits of this machine were made up of ordinary switches and special switches called relays, direct descendants of the telegraph and predecessors of the logic of 0 and 1, whose logic was known to Bush, called Boole’s Algebra, which Shannon learned there.
This was where the data processed by Bush’s differential analyzer and the new logic of 0 and 1 came together, the other point we made in the previous post, the concern with an intelligible language for the machine and the problem of coding and decoding messages modified into electrical signals in the logic of 0 and 1.
Claude Shannon’s important point and great collaboration, expressed in his Mathematical Theory of Communication, determined how many coded signals would be needed to maintain the integrity of the message before the coding process.
The so-called Shannon Theorem determines that a number of signals twice the highest frequency communicated through the channel are required between the sender, who precedes the message sent, and the receiver, who decodes the signal and reconstructs the message. In order for this message to remain unchanged, the number of signals in Shannon’s Theorem must be observed.
The noise problem depends exclusively on the distance and the way the signal is captured and sampled (segmented into a quantity that complies with the theorem) while the sender and receiver problem depend on the transformation of the message into a signal (i.e. the transformation of an analog signal into a digital signal and vice versa).
The message sent and the message received depend only on human sources, as the sender and receiver are electrical, digital or photonic devices. Quantum devices are already being developed and could represent greater speed and signal integrity.
Gleick. (2013) Informação: uma história, uma teoria e uma enxurrada. (Information: a history, a theory and a flood). Trad. Augusto Cali. Brazil, São Paulo: ed. Companhia das Letras.
Clearing and being-in-the-world
22
Aug
A superficial reading of ontology is one that
imagines being as pure contemplation or what is worse as an insurmountable human condition. Hannah Arendt’s reading of the Human Condition says something else: it concerns the conditions that man imposes on himself to survive, that which can supply man’s existence and which is not only linked to his materiality.
His tutor and from whom he was greatly influenced, Martin Heidegger states that being-in-the-world is a being in a certain temporal situation (hence Being and Time), but that it must always be open to becoming something new, giving life is an existential characteristic, but as a second trait, not as an essence as in materialist or nihilist ontology.
By systematizing the human condition into three aspects: labor, work and action, Arendt separates each one in a particular way: labor is linked to the biological process of human life, work is the activity of transforming natural things into artificial ones, for example, we remove the wood of the tree to build beds, cabinets, tables, etc. and finally action synthesizes our social activities and they ultimately reflect how we conceive this life.
Thus Hannah Arendt will divide human life into Vita Contemplativa and Vida Activa, a theme also explored and synthesized from the point of view of philosophical ideas by Byung-Chul Han.
So much labor, work and action are fused in what becomes our Active Life, we dealt in the previous post with the criteria of efficiency and productivity that this life reached in Modernity and its questioning, however the contemplative life is complementary to this, only in the reasoning of antiquity classicism and that modernity has explored, is that we dismiss the contemplative life as something unnecessary or even fanciful.
In Socrates’ reasoning, if man is only for eating, sleeping, having sex, then he is not a man, but an animal, from which Aristotle’s shallow reasoning comes: man is a political or social animal, that is not what characterizes Aristotle’s Zoe, is the fact that he is just an animal.
Heidegger’s clearing, therefore, is not just the possibility of man finding his Being, what he is in the world from an existential point of view, it is also finding the clearing and in it the new being, which lives in the light and not in the darkness, it is the Plato’s cave now under the gaze of a dark cloud that shakes humanity in modernity.
Thus, glory, light and truth only shine within contemplation, not only that of great mystics and sages, but of those who humbly open themselves to the new, to the light.
Unitas multiplex, networks and the beatitudes
03
Nov
Among the main concepts developed by
Edgar Morin are cosmic Dasein (similar to Heidegger’s Dasein but expanded to the cosmic and similar to Teilhard Chardin’s Cosmic Christ), hominization and human identity, which is also linked to anthropolytic, but a fundamental and new is Unitas Multiplex.
According to Jean Ladriére Unitas Multiplex is “a system is a complex object, made up of distinct components joined together by a certain number of relationships”, and this both combines with the concept of social networks (not media) and Morin’s complexity, and Here we will establish a set of relationships with the biblical virtues of the beatitudes.
In a complex system, a certain number of relationships may be broken, what in social networks are called “structural holes” (Burt, 1992), weak ties (Granovetter, 1973) and small worlds of Duncan Watts (1998)
A system represented as a social network is a structure that connects nodes (forms a mathematical graph), generally each of these nodes are people, and links between nodes, representing relationships between these people (GRANOVETTER, 1973).
For Granovetter, bridges are links that enable weak ties, those that are on the periphery of the network or that are only reached by some nodes.
But neither the network theory nor the unitas multiplex theory establish the virtues that enable greater contact between these nodes, and as all these nodes can be reached, talking about empathy and bonds of solidarity is little, the biblical beatitudes can help.
Jesus climbs a mountain and speaks to a crowd of people, not just the disciples but everyone who wants to hear him (Mt 5:3-12):
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are the afflicted, for they will be comforted. [the weak ties]
Blessed are the meek, for they will possess the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. [the strong ties]
Blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. [empathy]
Blessed are those who promote peace, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven!
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven” [keeping the net united to the mystical body or “cosmic dasein”].
It seems heroic, or utopian, but if we want a peaceful Homeland, it’s a good recipe.
BURT, R. S. The social structure of competition. In: NOHRIA, N.; ECCLES, R. G. Networks and organizations: structure, form and action. Boston: Harvard Business School, 1992.
GRANOVETTER, M. S. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, Chicago, vol. 78, no. 6, p. 1360-1380, May 1973.
WATTS, D. J.; Strogatz, S. H. (1998). “Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks” (PDF), NATURE, VOL 393, 4 June.
Mass over the world
06
Sep
Teilhard Chardin’s writing turned 100 years old 
on September 3, 2023, it ended in the Ordos desert in Mongolia, the writing started in 1919 when he worked as a porter in the First World War, it was remembered by the pope who was in Mongolia on this date.
For years the writings of Teilhard Chardin were banned, but little by little they were removed and were published revealing a spirituality and an updated and real worldview, it was Chardin who popularized the word Noosphere by Volodymyr Vernasky.
This mass reads: “Lord, since once again, no longer in the forests of France, but on the steppes of Asia, I have no bread, no wine, no altar, I will rise above symbols to the pure majesty of the Real , and I, your priest, will offer you, on the altar of the whole earth, the work and suffering of the world “.
Chardin had completed his thesis on paleontology and was in Mongolia to collect fossils when he finished the work, as he was unable to hold a conventional mass there (pictured with Émile Licent, in the Ordos desert, Mongolia).
His best-known work is “The Human Phenomenon”, controversial because he develops his theology within an evolutionary conception, which infuriated the theologians of the time and which is still fought today in more fundamentalist Christian sectors, it is good to remember that Jesus used parables to explain things complex and that the evidence for the existence of man in primitive periods is already a fact and many biblical allegories are clear, such as those used in the Apocalypse.
In the mass written by Chardin there is the desire for a single humanity, attached to the love of incarnation and revisited in the holy Host of each mass: “Receive, Lord, this total Host that Creation, moved by Your call, presents to You in the new dawn. This bread of our effort is, in itself, I know, nothing more than an immense disintegration. Unfortunately, this wine of our pain is still nothing more than a dissolving drink. But at the bottom of this formless mass, you have placed — I am sure, because I feel it — an irresistible and sanctifying desire that makes us all cry out, from the impious to the faithful: “Lord, make us one!” “.
The desire to see all creation as one and linked to life and Love is the Creator’s deepest desire.
CHARDIN, P.T. La Messe sur le Monde. (in portuguese), 1923.
Small worlds and closed circles
05
Aug
Small groups can potentiate their effects on a network, not only due to the ability to influence or cohesion, but also due to the degree of connectivity between nodes, which in technical language is called clustering, has nothing to do with closed circles, but the few connections are called Small Worlds.
This model of Social Networks (seen as a mathematical model of graphs and not just as media) observes a curious phenomenon called Small Worlds that was first proposed by Duncan J. Watts and Steven STrogatz in an article published in the journal Nature in 1998, the The model establishes that in a network there is a degree of separation between the points (network nodes) called six degrees of separation.
Albert L. Barabasi’s book “The New Science of Networks”, which expanded and corrected this model for larger scales, called scale-free, is thus described on pg. 47 of the book:
““The surprising discovery of Watts and Strogatz is that a few extra links are enough to drastically reduce the average separation between nodes…thanks to extensive bridges…connect nodes on the opposite side of the circle…”.(Barabasi, 2009).
So this is not the same as closed circles, since despite few connections, there must be bridges with nodes on the opposite side of the circle, so this “opening” is necessary, as mentioned for us on the opposite side of the circle.
This explains how many cultures and information expand or close according to the types of connectivity they have (the issue of clustering, in the graph p=0 to p=1) and due to the wider possibility of information today due to technology, the factors become more psychopolitical than geopolitical.
But it is also possible to explain the expansions of previous periods that depended on mobility and the “opening” of circles to other different cultures, Christianity for example, the book by Barabasi quotes, depended on the strategy of Paul of Tarsus which was to speak to the “Gentiles ” and to peoples who did not have Jewish culture, and from there it expanded into a network.
But they were a small group (12 apostles and then 72) but who traveled through the western world at the time, this idea of small worlds is still present in Christianity until today, although numerous, the precepts of Love and Solidarity are not always observed, and this reduces it to closed circles.
The future is also expressed in Christian culture (Lk 12:31): “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom”, then the parable of the administrator is told. they do not know the time that will arrive and must always act waiting for you to arrive and find them attentive, in this case it refers to true treasures that we have already dealt with in previous posts.
Being, Pain and Easter
15
Apr
This is a time that did not abolish Pain, because as we developed
in previous posts it is inherent to existence, but we condemn it to oppose it to Being and Happiness, the philosopher Byung Chul Han wrote: “Just in the palliative society hostile to pain , silent pains multiply, crammed into the margins, which persist in their absence of meaning, speech and image”. (HAN, 2021, p. 57).
Nothing is more paradoxical in post-modernity than Pain, so the Cross is imagined as a symbol of liberation and of life, one could even say: absurd, but Paul the Apostle warns: “For both Jews ask for signs, and Greeks seek wisdom; but we proclaim Christ crucified, who is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” (Corinthians, 1:23).
It is in this perspective that racial violence, various forms of exploitation and what Byung Chul Han calls “self-exploitation” are explained, we no longer need others to exploit us, we do it voluntarily, incitement to a daily life with the mark of counting and not of Being.
The Pandemic could be an occasion for solidarity pain, but it was another impulse for exclusion, for isolation, for the strengthening of barriers and individual anxieties, which exploded in an anxiety crisis, in various ways of ignoring the pain of others, the point of denying it altogether.
It took a while, but in the final battle against the Pandemic we gave in to fatality, to the delirium of public parties out of time, the desire to overflow and try to ignore the pain for the ecstasy of public parties.
What appears on the horizon of this delusion are even more hellish wars, desires for domination and more power, lives are ignored with almost always absurd justifications: it was inevitable, there is no way to stop them without weapons, etc. more wars, more deaths, more suffering and market crashes.
Apparently, ignoring the divine Passion, we are making great strides towards a civilizing, humanitarian “passion” (of suffering) and a greater abyss than that which would be to live and manage the pains of a sick civilization and postmodernity with a horizon dingy.
There remains the hope of those who believe in the solidarity overcoming of a dormant humanity, of a balanced civilization center that recovers not only the process of hominization but also its solidarity with nature and the universe we live in.
This is a possible reading for the Divine Passion of the one who for love endured human pain, only a “passage” through Pain can make us understand a new possible humanity.
HAN, Byung-Chul. (2021) A sociedade paliativa: a dor hoje (The palliative society: pain today). trans. Lucas Machado. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes.
The complexity and its genesis
21
Sep
As we penetrate into the increasingly studied man-machine
relationship, it is necessary to understand what has been theorized about nature so far, which means forming a model for nature, and in turn, making human and non-human collectives and individuals, composed in a culture, or in a tradition, or in a more general scope, what is articulated and what is only configured.
That is, the model may be subject to error or failure according to the areas implemented and can be determined by them, but by re-articulated it within its own history of creation, not naturalization but the culturalization of concepts, we understand the model that we have a priri, and that it is not always nature itself.
The one who penetrated deeper into this idea was Edgar Morin and from there conceived his method and developed complexity, conceiving nature requires ultimately preserving the network from which he conceptually emerged and correcting where the concepts were separated, identifying a network.
So it’s about identifying the culture that developed around nature, Morin puts it in lowercase to differentiate it from Nature itself in capital letters which is all that was said here and so the complex develops, which means what was “fabric together”.
What we then say about nature is the culture that developed around the idea that we could dominate it, but one of Francis Bacon’s maxims is that “we can’t dominate it if we don’t understand”, modern quantum physics, Modern astrophysics have shown how naive the models of Newton, Galileo and Copernicus were, but they were woven together to arrive at the new models proposed today.
Edgar Morin explains the “disorder of order” starting with two quotes to say that the order: “simplified laws invented by the wise” (Brillouin, 1959, p. 190), abstractions taken by the concrete (Whitehead, 1926)” (MORIN, 1977 , p. 76).
It is now, according to Morin, squeezed “between microphysical chaos and the diaspora”, and it matters to know how it was born: “How did it develop from scratch? How to conceive of it despite, with and in disorder? How can she appear to us as the sole sovereign of the universe if it is now so difficult to justify her existence? (idem).
What is the genesis? “the concept of order, in classical physics, was Ptolemaic. As in Ptolemy’s system, where suns and planets revolved around the Earth, everything revolved around an order”. (MORIN, 1977, p. 82).The Copernican revolution, however, was not the final word: “Hubble took away the entire astral or galactic center. And here is the great Meta-Copernican and Meta-Newtonian revolution, which went underground from Carnot and Boltzmann to Planck, Bohr, Einstein and Hubble. There is no longer a center of the world, whether it is the Earth, the sun, the galaxy or a group of galaxies” (idem)
And he continues: ”There is no longer an unmistakable axis of time, but an antagonistic double process that emerged from the same and single process. The universe is, therefore, simultaneously polycentric, centered, decentered, disseminated, diasporizing…” (ibid.).
MORIN, E. (1977) The nature of NATURE. Lisbon PUBLICATIONS EUROPA-AMERICA, LDA.
Language beyond logic
21
Jul
In the entire history of philosophy and even science, there
are three concepts that surpass in many aspects the concepts of logic, among them, the truth, the good and the justice are the most common, already in
Plato go beyond being logical principles, they embody cosmological principles and as such must resort to metaphysics, analogy and metaphor.
Thus, in Book VI of the Republic, the great metaphysical analogy falls on the idea of good, homonymous to justice and truth: the sun is the son and progeny of good itself, and is still its visible analogue, there it is placed in the shadows of shapes in the cave, the contrast with the real and perfect world of shapes and the analogy of the sun to “lighten” objects.
In the absence of knowledge, they confuse mere shadows with reality, and philosophy is for Plato the pedagogical bridge that serves to pass from complete obscurity to the light of knowledge.
The use of language can also be only logical, in the 1930s, Wittgenstein said that as we know that in language there are only propositions, and surprises only occur in the world, so there are no surprises in mathematics: mathematics is totally “grammatical”, right -se-ia today is just syntactic.
In the context of semantics, and of meaning, language acquires other properties and in them that the metaphor makes sense, when saying José is brave as a lion, the analogy serves to increase what it means brave, giving new semantics to the syntax: José is very angry.
But the metaphor is also contextual, the beautiful poem by Fernando Pessoa “The poet is a pretender” is only understood if we know that “rope train” refers to a child’s play in the 20s and 30s of the last century and that “wheel rails” refer to the tracks, there:
And so on the wheel rails
It turns, to entertain the reason,
that rope train
Which is called the heart.
There is also the penetration of the metaphor into the mystery, the ineffable as we have already posted, and being able to affirm it.
The pandemic plateau remains
06
Jul
The data observed in the last week of deaths by the corona virus, which are reliable
data, since the curve of infected people depends on testing, which is done by companies and is still low, indicate that the plateau remains and the pandemic is internalized in the Brazil (see graph), we have already stressed the importance of making the logarithm to better visualize the slope of the curve, which is exponential.
What the policy would be for this moment is to continue maintaining social isolation, personal hygiene, and social distancing habits, in addition to precautions in relation to municipal policies.
Any prospect of a peak, at least the data indicates, seems meaningless, the number of infections remains around a thousand daily deaths, and a #lockdown is no longer viable, as the virus has already spread and regional isolation does not mean pandemic control.
We will navigate through uncertainties, already tired of a long period of isolation and with an open and close policy that does not have much effective results, except to contain a greater contagion, without meaning any effective result of controlling the pandemic at the federation level.
The economic costs that would be great in the case of a #lockdown period, will now be higher because both the commerce and the services that effectively need face-to-face contact would not be justified to keep them disabled, and few services are non-essential.
The plan is to continue the so-called “social isolation”, whose more certain name in the Brazilian case we have already said, is “social distance” which is compatible with some open services.
The essential is therefore to maintain personal care and hope that the curve falls “naturally”.
