Morphing Castalia

The Glass Bead Game Revisited: Weaving Emergent Dynamics with the MES Methodology

In Hermann Hesse’s book, the Glass Bead Game constructs “a kind of universal language” based on interrelations between different disciplines, the aim being a synthesis of all the arts and sciences. The game is not entirely, nor even consistently, described, thus opening to several interpretations: is it reduced to an intricate combinatory game searching for interactions between beads of established knowledge, or could it be extended for leading to innovative interdisciplinary research? It is the question we are going to examine.

To this end, we will consider the 25 years development of the MES methodology (cf. Memory Evolutive Systems, A. Ehresmann and J.-P. Vanbremeersch, 2007) to try to play a revisited “glass bead game” aiming at synthesizing the main characteristics of living systems, be they biological, cognitive, social or cultural. Based on a ‘dynamic’ category theory, MES models autonomous multi-scale evolutionary systems which evolve through successive complexification processes — adding, suppressing or binding components. The global dynamic weaves local operative dynamics, whose interactions are mediated by a flexible and plastic central memory developing over time.

One main result (Emergence Theorem) shows that the existence of multifaceted components (“Multiplicity Principle”) is a necessary condition for the emergence of components of increasing complexity orders, whose interrelations (“complex links”) are not reducible to a simple combination of links between their components. Applied to MENS (a MES representing the neural-mental-cognitive system), it explains the emergence of higher cognitive processes up to anticipation and creativity through the development of a higher Archetypal Core. Recently this has been extended to collective action, in particular to innovative design.

Conclusion: As long as the Glass Bead Game is played with rigid glass beads representing invariant structures or pieces of knowledge, it cannot deal with “becoming”, thus at most allowing for “combinatory” and “exploratory” creativity in Boden’s sense. To model “transformational” creativity – e.g. understanding how properly new rules (complex links) could emerge – the beads should be multifaceted, presenting different facets depending on context. These beads should have some plasticity and eventually disappear over time (e.g. to account for evolving knowledge).

Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Sexual Reproduction: Some Sketches for Xenofeminsm

The notion of artificial general intelligence has taken on an almost mythic significance in accelerationist discourse, both left and right. I will try to analyse and plot this notion’s political coordinates, in a space that has, with somewhat different and sometimes conflicting ends, been mapped out by cyberfeminist research (by Alison Adam and Sarah Kember, for instance). The idea that artificial intelligence seems to crystallize, for many accelerationists, is something like an “emancipation of intelligence”, as Nick Land once put it. The forking of accelerationism into the left and right spectra can be seen as so many ways of articulating this idea and forging it into a programme: whether in the form of a neoreactionary demand for private exit (AGI as a line of flight), or the form of a cybersocialist push towards the rational social cognition (AGI as Geist).

The question for today, though, is: what should this idea – an emancipation of intelligence as crystallized in the notion of AGI – mean for feminism? How should feminism orient itself with respect to this idea? Cyberfeminism’s exploratory critiques of AI research and development (Alison Adam, Sarah Kember) are crucial in helping us get our bearings here, but the long game, the end we have in sight, is the one set in Shulamith Firestone’s searing manifesto of 1970, The Dialectic of Sex. There, she draws the skeleton of an uncompromisingly promethean feminism, which hinges on a strict normative antinaturalism: “Nature” shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever.

The emancipation of intelligence, for Xenofeminism, is continuous with the project of the enlightenment, understood as a thoroughgoing desacralization of nature, which itself is inseparable from a long-term project of gender abolitionism: the destruction of sexual difference’s political significance. This is the endgame xenofeminism has in sight, and the keystone joining cyberfeminist and transfeminist concerns with Firestone’s unrelenting radicalism. This presentation will try to lay some of the groundwork for these interconnected projects.

Anthropology, Metaphysics, Art: Ethnographic Aporia at the Limit

One can think of the particular turn of thinking we associate with anthropology as a calibration of two scales of alterity: one that plots difference on geo-cultural coordinates, from one society to another, and one that measures distances on the terrain of the imagination, from thought to thought. Anthropologists translate ethnographic alterities into intensities of argument, transfiguring the aporia of ethnographic ‘culture shock’ in the activity of thinking new thoughts. If metaphysics is par excellence devoted to thinking new thoughts, then anthropology conceived in this way is a royal road to it. One might even say that anthropology is hyper-metaphysical, inasmuch as its constitutive investment in alterity renders novelty of thinking as a kind of methodological necessity: the ‘meta’ of metaphysics must, by disciplinary exigency, also be ‘alter’, which is to say constitutively different, new.

This paper seeks to address the complaint that this vision of anthropology as ‘alterphysics’ does not quite live up to its promise in practice. Even when looking at the work of anthropologists who most deliberately ascribe to versions of the alterphysical project, at a certain level of analytical abstraction one tends to find a rather similar-looking set of ideas being (re-)generated with reference to ethnographic settings as different from each other as ceremonial gift exchange in Papua New Guinea, Mongolian shamanism, Japanese finance, Afro-Cuban divination, Amazonian hunting, European laboratory science, West African political violence, and so on: relationism, ontological transformation, mutual constitution, self-differentiation, multiplicity, process, becoming, non-humanism, cyborgs, the post-, the para-, the off-, the exo-, the minor. Indeed, these kindred ideas are typically not a million miles away from the conceptual currencies of certain strands of contemporary social theory, if not metaphysics – often the trendier ones. So how aporetic exactly, goes the complaint, are ethnographic exposures that tend so typically to issue in one version or other of, say, relationism? Taking this complaint as the single-most urgent challenge to the discipline of anthropology at present, this paper seeks to set out the coordinates within which different responses to it might be developed, and assess their chances of succeeding. In this connection, with reference to Lévi-Strauss’s idiosyncratic characterisation of art as a manner of allowing ‘the necessary’ to be revealed through ‘the contingent’, I end with the suggestion that anthropology’s distinctive claim to creativity may be cast as an inversion of art – a matter of allowing the contingent (i.e. ethnography) to be revealed through the necessary (i.e. analytical conceptualizations).

Ontological Fields: A Categorification of Space

We live in a world of fields – mathematical fields, scalar or tensor fields, electric fields or the Earth’s magnetic field – that keeps us bolted to the ground in complete indifference. In this lecture, I would like to show that the very existence of things is also a question of fields that I would like to qualify as ontological. These fields which induce appearances are responsible for the mutability of things and for the topology of multiple and heterogeneous sites that we develop today, such as the multiverse and pluriverse. I will illustrate my points with several examples, and show that to grasp these fields and the real in both its actual and virtual components, diagrammatic thought offers a suitable solution – as the diagram has a machinic and rhizomatic generosity that structure does not have. Finally, I will look at how the concept of field is a “categorification” of space – a concept I borrow from category theory in mathematics – and clarify what “to categorify” means in terms of methodology.

Diagrammatical Reasoning and Natural Propositions

The talk will present Peirce’s notion of diagrammatical reasoning. The core idea is that all deductive reasoning takes place by means of diagrams, explicitly or implicitly. Everyday examples include the use of maps, schemata, charts, pictures, gestures, language; scientific examples include reasoning with specially constructed diagrams, algebras, formalisms, etc. An important implication is that reasoning also involves a perceptual-observational aspect. Reasoning takes you from one proposition to another – so another implication is that diagrams and pictures may be used in the expression of propositions. Peirce’s functional definition of propositions thus extend their scope beyond human language, to non-linguistic semiotics as well as animal communication.

The constitution of Meaning: From Mathematical Structures to Organisms (E Ritorno)

Mathematics delineates the contours of the objects of the world, cuts them from their background, structures them with strong and stable physico-mathematical meanings. This historical constitution of the meaning of the inert has limits with regard to the description of living processes; the informational alternative diverts the understanding of biology into a meaningless dissipation of the organism, a partially programmed bag of molecules. The search for the organicity of knowledge and of the object of knowledge is the challenge that confronts us, especially with regards to the new interactions we have with the ecosystem. What interface between disciplines can contribute to this research program for a meaningful unity yet to be constructed, with the world?