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Thursday, 8 December 2011

Concurrency & Ontological dysphoria

This is a lovely essay, by a quite lovely sounding Latin American super-brain, which seeks to make concurrency (Djikstra) a fundamental property of physical systems and revive a Bergsonian sort of notion of Time.

Vide- 'If concurrency is some deeply inherent property of the world, then it would not be a consequence of dynamics, but the fundamental cause of it.
If this hypothesis stands correct, then an insight should be gained on the nature of time, by making our
theories explicilty concurrent. Concurrency should be elevated as a new internal symmetry of the world,in which the probabilistic framework of quantum mechanics would be just an emergent and incomplete
facet of a more heterogeneous underlying substrate. And the reversible or irreversible behavior of a given
system must somehow be attributable to the underlying heterogeneous concurrent correlations.'

The author makes an equation between Time and inertia- Inertial mobility, hence Time, emerges because the Universe avoids deadlock conditions. I take it this is an Anthropic type argument and further suppose 'concurrency as .. internal symmetry' means her proposed model doesn't throw away information and conserves something more fundamental which might knit extant theories together. However, by appealing to a ditopology (so there is local partial order), the essential question of non-metric Bergsonian Time is not addressed. Perhaps, the only way that could be done is by operationalizing something like Ibn Arabi's concept of barzakh or opening the gate to reverse mereology or something equally mystic.

Chrisine Cordula Dantas ends her essay thus- 'In any case, this essay was written presuming that time exists
in some fundamental sense, fully acknowledging, however, the possibility that it may not. If this turns
out to be the case, what are we severely missing? Would we be just a surface of imposed irrelevancies ��
the irrelevancies of time ��, below which the realm of \nature against nature" �� the summit of relativism
�� would forever lie, devoid of its own existence?'


I wonder whether something along these lines might motivate a mathematical Rene Girard to find in Proust, and therefore in Bergsonian Duration, not the Christology of circular sacrifice, but Doestoevkian ontological dysphoria whereby man is a flower not native to this garden. A mathematical Iqbal, however, meeting Bergson in the salon of Concurrency, might find the reverse.

However my real point is that hot Latin American super-brains, like Graciella Chichilnisky, don't make their subject sexy- Krugman did that for Trade theory- but erotic.
What's the difference? Sex isn't necessarily life-giving. Pornography is actually prophylactic. What is life giving is erotic and what is erotic is diffused and divorced from pumping or screwing or some other such plumbing operation.

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