Yeah, it seems that what is digital is the computer as model, not as implementation. We are uninterested in intermediate voltages and so purposely ignore them in order to enact as much as possible a formal configuration that strictly has no physical counterpart.

Pure process ontologies, it seems to me, have been developed mainly as a retreat from what was perceived as troublesome essentialist implications of traditional substance ontologies. On my view, though, the idea of "nature" being made up of pure processes, or raw activity, independently of the operations the intellect, which subsumes appearances under discrete concepts, is as unintelligible as is the idea of pure essences that would be individuated as they are in themselves independently of the operations of the intellect, which sort them out from underlying material processes. The objectionable idea of the thing-in-itself is present in both of those ontologies, since both of them are reductionistic and enforce a conceptually impoverished metaphysics that can only countenance either discrete substances, or continuous processes, but not both.

Substance ontologies can and must make room for activity (Aristotle's concept of energeia) being predicated of substances both as actualization of their characteristic powers and as enabling the background conditions of their existence (as characterizing underlying processes and boundary conditions). I don't see how an ontology of pure (merely "analog") processes can account for the possibility of empirical knowledge about anything. Kant's arguments regarding criteria for distinguishing objective succession from objective simultaneity, developed in The Analogies of Experience (in the CPR), seem to preclude the possibility of so much as objectively predicating analog qualities of elements of nature (however continuous), without also postulating substances a priori.

Recently, David Wiggins has argued for a richer fundamental ontology that makes room for both substances and process at an equally basic level in his paper Activity, Process, Continuant, Substance, Organism, Philosophy, 91, 2, 2016.

If you can make a distinction between discrete elements in a system, then you're dealing with a digital system. If you can't, you're dealing with an analog system. This isn't to say that one can't talk about differences in analog systems, only that with analog systems, you're dealing with differences of ordinality (position, order, magnitude) rather than cardinality (number of). It maps to the difference between extensive, metric qualities and intensive, topological qualities. The following passage from Manuel DeLanda details things quite nicely:

"Extensive properties include not only such metric properties as length, area and volume, but also quantities such as amount of energy or entropy. They are defined as properties which are
intrinsically divisible: if we divide a volume of matter into two equal halves we end up with two volumes, each half the extent of the original one. Intensive properties, on the other hand, are properties such as temperature or pressure, which cannot be so divided. If we take a volume of water at 90 degrees of temperature, for instance, and break it up into two equal parts, we do not end up with two volumes at 45 degrees each, but with two volumes at the original temperature ... An intensive property is not so much one that is indivisible but one which cannot be divided without involving a change in kind. The temperature of a given volume of liquid water, for example, can indeed be “divided” by heating the container from underneath creating a temperature difference between the top and bottom portions of the water. Yet, while prior to the heating the system is at equilibrium, once the temperature difference is created the system will be away from equilibrium, that is, we can divide its temperature but in so doing we change the system qualitatively." (DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy)

Do you think that ordinal comparisons cannot be described by number?

Not sure what to make of the quote. Temperature and pressure are numerically measurable and so divisible: whether effecting a certain division, say by half, involves literally just cutting the thing itself in half or not seems beside the point. Of course cutting water in half is not going to halve its temperature. Why would it, and how does that show a difference in kind between volume and temperature...? This shows that temperature is not the same thing as volume, and so cutting volume in half doesn't cut temperature in half. It doesn't show that temperature isn't halve-able. What a bizarre train of reasoning. You can cut the temperature in half by putting it in the fridge.

I do think there are intensive and non-quantifiable properties, but temperature and pressure in the physicist's sense aren't examples of them. And this reasoning is getting very scattershot, so the goalposts aren't clear to me anymore. If the distinction that matters here is cardinal versus ordinal, one would wonder how you can't have heard of ordinal numbers.

If you can make a distinction between discrete elements in a system, then you're dealing with a digital system. If you can't, you're dealing with an analog system. This isn't to say that one can't talk about differences in analog systems, only that with analog systems, you're dealing with differences or ordinality (position, order, magnitude) rather than cardinality (number of). — StreetlightX

Here is the rub. (My argument here is influenced by similar consideration advanced by Michel Bitbol in some papers on the philosophy of physics, which I may seek to locate if needed). Whenever you are predicating some lawful and re-identifiable continuous quality of a system, this presupposes an ability to identify it as a system of a specific sort, or as a well defined instrumental set-up. This set-up, as a whole, and what defines it as a setup of this sort, is basically a substance. You can't conceive of it outside of a substance ontology. Interestingly enough, Bitbol himself purports to be arguing against substance ontologies, but his real target is a crude essentialism (or objectionable "metaphysical realism" as Putnam would label it) that doesn't make room for the constitutive role of concepts.

On edit: Similar arguments, it seems to me, sustain the core thesis of Karen Barad's book Meeting the Universe Halfway, which I saw you were rereading currently.

Part of my argument here is that what you refer to as material identity is a kind of hypostatization or transcendental illusion in which 'numerical' (formal) identity is projected (mistakenly) onto nature. I write of course, from the perspective of a kind of philosophy of process where any attempt to think in terms of brute identities ought to be rendered suspect from the beginning. With respect to formal logic, one can see how something as simple as the subject-predicate relation [P(x)] is fraught with metaphysical issues. — StreetlightX

The real issue here, I think, is the question of whether the natural (analogue) continuum has any identity whatsoever. Aristotle identified it as the same as itself, and called it "matter". If there is nothing real which is being identified here, then our whole understanding of nature beaks down, because it is based in the assumption that the continuum is real, that something real has been identified as "the continuum".

So even if numerical (digital) identity is projected onto the (analogue) continuum of nature, in the act of measurement, during the attempt to understand nature, this should not be characterized as mistaken. There is an age-old philosophical principle which states that like cannot recognize like, and this manifests in the tinted glass analogy, when like is projected onto like, it causes deception. Mistakes occur when the projection, and the thing projected upon, are not properly separated, because this produces a failure in distinguishing between the characteristics of what is projected and what is projected upon. That is why each, the formal digital aspect, and the material continuum, must each be properly identified, and understood as separate.

Digital systems are what happens when a continuum distinguishes an element of itself from itself. — StreetlightX

This may be an example of such a mistake. The continuum can only be identified as One. To separate one part from another would produce a contiguity which consists of separate parts. So if the digital, numerical system is projected onto the continuum, to separate out parts, such boundaries which are created are not a natural part of the continuum, but an artificial separation. The continuum itself, must be understood to remain whole, indivisible, despite any such acts of recognition, because to distinguish an element of itself, from itself, and claim that such a distinction is based in something real, within the continuum, would contradict its identity as a continuum. Allowing that the continuum has an identity is the only means for avoiding a descent into confusion.

Incidentally, when StreetlightX cited arguments to the effect that analog quantities don't make room for the concept of negation, I immediately thought of Aristotle's square of opposition as source of a counterargument. There may not be any such thing as the contrary of a determinate quality (some shade of grey, say) as it exists along a continuous spectrum of shades of grey. But there always will be negation, viewed as an unitary logical connectives. Any determinate shade of grey, as predicated of something (some part of a pure process, say) that exhibits this shade, may not have a contrary (as black and white are each other's contraries) but it always has a contradictory: "...not of this shade".

The objectionable idea of the thing-in-itself is present in both of those ontologies ... I don't see how an ontology of pure (merely "analogue") processes can account for the possibility of empirical knowledge about anything — Pierre-Normand

As I said above, the analog is not at all anything like a 'thing-in-itself'. It is eminently knowable in the most trivial of ways; it's just that unlike 'digital knowledge' which is denotative and representational, analog knowledge deals with relationships. It's only by confusing knowledge as such with denotative, representational knowledge can one make the kind of objection you have. The most fun example, drawn from Gregory Bateson, comes from thinking about animal communication. No known animal communication is digital, with the exception of our own, human language. This doesn't mean that animals can't know things.

Thus speaking of cats trying to get our attention, Bateson writes, "When your cat is trying to tell you to give her food, how does she do it? She has no word for food or for milk. What she does is to make movements and sounds that are characteristically those that a kitten makes to a mother cat. If we were to translate the cat's message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying "Milk! Rather ... we should say that she is asserting "Dependency! Dependency!" [or, following Wilden, who borrows from Bateson here: "will you put yourself in a mother relationship to me?" - SX] The cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship, and from this talk it is up to you to take a deductive step, guessing that it is milk that the cat wants." (Bateson, Steps To an Ecology of Mind).

Of communication among bees, Wilden writes: "No bee constructs a message out of or about another message (there is no metacommunication about messages as is possible in digital communication); in other words, no bee can "dance bout dancing". The 'gesture language' of bees involves per­ception (perceptual representations are analogs of what they represent). Moreover, no bee who has not flown the course to find the nectar can send the message 'about' where it is, no bee can tell where the nectar or the pollen will be, no bee can say where the nectar isn't ...The circular dance has the specific function of analog communication: it simply says something about the dancing bee's relationship to the food near the hive, but it cannot say there is no food there. The wagging dance uses a code of signals to point; it is a more complex analog message. In neither case does there seem to be a possibility of a methodological analysis of these forms into discrete elements with a duality of patterning similar to that of morphemes and phonemes, for the indications of distance in the wagging dance are frequencies and times, and relatively imprecise." (System and Strucutre).

So the idea that the analog is a kind of noumenal 'in itself' is wrong. To drive the point home: "The analog is pregnant with meaning whereas the digital domain of signification is, relatively speaking, somewhat barren. It is almost impossible to translate the rich semantics of the analog into any digital form for communication to another organism. This is true both of the most trivial sensations (biting your tongue, for example) and the most enviable situations (being in love). It is impossible to precisely describe such events except by recourse to unnameable common experience (a continuum). But this imprecision carries with it a fundamental and probably essential ambiguity: a clenched fist may communicate excitement, fear, anger, impending assault, frustration, 'Good morning', or revolutionary zeal. The digital, on the other hand, because it is concerned with boundaries and because it depends upon arbitrary combination, has all the syntax to be precise and may be entirely unambiguous. Thus what the analog gains in semantics it loses in syntactics, and what the digital gains in syntactics it loses in semantics."

If the distinction that matters here is cardinal versus ordinal, one would wonder how you can't have heard of ordinal numbers. — The Great Whatever

And what exactly do you think ordinal numbers indicate? Distinctions between discrete elements in a set? Not at all. What they mark are relationships, which are - guess what - analog, and not digital differences.

So in other words...numbers don't imply digital...? I don't understand what your position is. You seem just to have denied this.

So the idea that the analog is a kind of noumenal 'in itself' is wrong. — StreetlightX

Your example is good but we are miscommunicating. On my view, neither process nor substance are noumenal. Both are empirical and, qua pure concepts, they are co-eval. It just becomes impossible to know or think of anything empirical that instantiates one of them when we seek to make one of them *the* fundamental constituent of "nature". It is only when one attempts such a reduction that the possibility for knowledge becomes unintelligible and that the basis of reduction (either substance or pure process) retreats into the noumenal. Intelligible ontologies must be pluralistic.

As I said above, the analog is not at all anything like a 'thing-in-itself'. It is eminently knowable in the most trivial of ways; it's just that unlike 'digital knowledge' which is denotative and representational, analog knowledge deals with relationships. — StreetlightX

I agree with this, but the same can be said of substances as they are conceived within a pluralistic ontology. Empirically knowable substances also essentially involve relationships. We must meet the substances that populate the universe midway, in Karen Barad's words.

Oh come on, you were talking about numbers in the context of a metric, numerical scale which is what I was responding to. Talk about shifting goalposts...

Do you think that ordinal numbers aren't used in scales? Don't even the cardinal numbers by definition impose a total ordering?

So you think degrees on a temperature scale are ordinal then?

Broadly speaking, one can speak of two types of systems in nature: analog and digital — StreetlightX

I am snagged on the basics. 'Analogue' began as a mathematical term itself, about sameness of ratio or proportion. It's become a loose term, particularly handy as contrastive with 'digital'. It seems to me that one's beginning should be that there are a number of ways of speaking about systems in nature, one digital, one based on analogy, others descriptive in other ways.

It seems to me that the analog/digital distinction is not so much about the binary Yes/No nature of digital things, but rather about discrete vs continuous mathematics. Discrete mathematics is about cases where there is a finite or at least countable set of possible states, whereas continuous mathematics - of which calculus is the best-known example - is where there is an uncountable set of states, with a metric over that set to denote distance between states (eg the distance between 2.71 and 3.141 is 0.431). — andrewk

This is true in electronics. DC voltage is quantified discretely (obviously). We use a little calculus to quantify AC voltage. Interestingly, what we're doing when we quantify AC voltage is we're trying to weigh AC against DC... as if quantification is fundamentally a digital thing.

A digital phenomenon is either something or nothing... and when the something is there, it's static.

An analog phenomenon seems to always Be. There aren't any moments of absence.

If it's true that identity requires a moat around the castle.. a gulf between thing and world, then it's true that identity is the offspring of a digital world... a dualistic scene. It could be argued that the primal identity is the self. Where there is a self, there is a POV. POV requires space.. separation between me and the thing I observe.

Is the most important identity of all absent from the "nature" mentioned in the OP?

A way to summarise all of the above is this: to the degree that nature is a continuum, there are no brute identities in nature. Or less provocatively, to the degree that there are identities in nature, they are constructed and derivative of analogic differences. — StreetlightX

Streetlight. I feel that the title of your thread is misleading, as you yourself seem to acknowledge in the quote above. For given all that you have said, it simply does not follow that there are no identities in nature but merely that such natural identities as there are must be parasitic upon "analogic" differences. One can wonder (as others have) whether or not there is any definitive evidence to support the conclusion that nature is "fundamentally" analog in nature, but I'll leave that line of inquiry for now.

If we are to start traveling down the path that you have set by relegating identity to the realm of "transcendental illusion" we'll inevitably encounter the question of whether the contents of such illusions are themselves a part of nature, and I would expect that you'd be loathe to answer in the negative on that score. But even if you stick to your guns on that point, we can also leverage your own line of reasoning to query the reality of the binary distinction that you have made between digital/analog systems in nature - is that distinction not, by your own lights, merely a transcendental illusion (and what of the binary distinction between natural/transcendental)? I'm not sure we're going to make it very far down this path before it becomes clear that we've made a wrong turn.

Thougths?

Yeah, I was admittedly a little naughty in naming the thread. It was originally something like 'negation and the analog/digital distinction' but that was no fun. But yeah, you're right, it's more the case that what identity there is, is derivative of analogic differences. In a phrase: the digital is the result of an analogic genesis.

It gets complex however, because digital processes, once engendered, can feed-back into their analog 'ground' as it were. So you get something like a self-fulfilling prophecy: treat something as having an identity, and at some point it will have one. There's a dialectic, in other words, between the analog and the digital that takes hold once digital processes have come into being. Manuel DeLanda gives the example of a refugee who, having become aware of the fact of being so classified, changes her behaviour in order to fit better the criteria of refugee in order to gain asylum.

But as he also notes, "to explain the case of the female refugee one has to invoke, in addition to her awareness of the meaning of the term 'female refugee', the objective existence of a whole set of institutional organizations (courts, immigration agencies, airports and seaports, detention centres), institutional norms and objects (laws, binding court decisions, passports) and institutional practices (confining, monitoring, interrogating), forming the context in which the interactions between categories and their referents take place." In any case relational differences (i.e. analogic differences) are constitutive of identity, even if said identity has a real ontological standing, as it were. Identity, as real, is nonetheless context-bound, and constitutively, necessarily so.

As Kant knew, transcendental illusion gave rise to real effects: the entirety of dogmatic, uncritical metaphysics. The claim here is similar: if one uncritically employs categories of identity as metaphysically primitive, this too will this lead to uncritical ontologies. As far as the distinction itself, I'll refer you to the third post I made in this thread, but I'll add this: to the extent that communicative precision depends on digital, rather than analog communication, it is necessary that one employ digital forms of communication to get these - or any fine grained - ideas across. This is what makes the illusions transcendental: recall that for Kant, such illusions were unavoidable and were engendered due to the nature of reason itself. They are illusions intrinsic to reason. Our ability to communicate similarly - unavoidably - tempts us to project the digital into the world in toto.

It seems that you're real beef here is not with identity and categorization per se, but with the uncritical or dogmatic application of categories (especially those that imply socio-politoc-economic identities) upon individuals in nature. So a refugee is indeed a refugee, but make some far-reaching changes the socio-political context and perhaps the very category "refugee" disappears (or becomes irrelevant).

That said, I still feel hesitant to deny that there is a legitimate distinction to be made between those identities that essentially depend upon contextual relations to "ens rationis" (e.g. the human lebenswelt) and those that essentially depend solely upon contextual-relations to "ens reale". Again, this seems to come part-and-parcel with the notion that some binary distinctions are naturally sustained (e.g. consider the evolution of "switches" in biological nature, and their fundamental role in processes of homeostasis, reproduction, sensation, etc.). The upshot is that I'm not entirely convinced of the notion that identity is merely transcendental in the sense of being confined merely to "ens rationis", while perhaps acknowledging that it is transcendental in the sense of being essentially context-dependent (I believe that medieval scholars actually referred to the fundamental sensitivity of finite, substantial being to environmental context "transcendental relativity").

It seems that you're real beef here is not with identity and categorization per se, but with the uncritical or dogmatic application of categories (especially those that imply socio-politoc-economic identities) upon individuals in nature. — Aaron R

Yeah, exactly. I said elsewhere in the thread that got this train of thought going that what I'm kind of after is something like a "critique of pure formal logic" as it were.

That said, I still feel hesitant to deny that there is a legitimate distinction to be made between those identities that essentially depend upon contextual relations to "ens rationis" (e.g. the human lebenswelt) and those that essentially depend solely upon contextual-relations to "ens reale". Again, this seems to come part-and-parcel with the notion that some binary distinctions are naturally sustained (e.g. consider the evolution of "switches" in biological nature, and their fundamental role in processes of homeostasis, reproduction, sensation, etc.). The upshot is that I'm not entirely convinced of the notion that identity is merely transcendental in the sense of being confined merely to "ens rationis", while perhaps acknowledging that it is transcendental in the sense of being essentially context-dependent (I believe that medieval scholars actually referred to the fundamental sensitivity of finite, substantial being to environmental context "transcendental relativity").

I agree with this actually, although I would even refine it somewhat. I would in fact say that the emergence of the digital goes hand in hand with neither ens rationis nor ens reale but with ens vitae: that is, life. It is no accident or coincidence that all three examples of 'natural' digital systems mentioned so far in this thread are biologial - gene expression, biological switches and synthetic biocircuits, if I recall correctly. Insofar as digital process as self-relating circuits (that operate via negation), it doesn't take a giant leap to recognize that the self-relating 'ens' par excellence is life - that which is autopoietically defines itself by sustaining a boundary been organism and environment. So perhaps it might be fair to say the the transcendental illusions of identity are just those of life itself. It is only by virtue of our biological being that we can engage in digital communication.

"It is impossible to represent the truth functions of symbolic logic in an analog computer, because the analog computer cannot say 'not-A' — StreetlightX

Right - on my analog watch 3:30 (which is not really 3:30, because there are no identities) is not "not 3:31" - thus spoke the metaphysician.

If analog processes are susceptible to 'digital' understanding (and they are, even if this understanding is necessarily limited), there must be something in them that allows this kind of understanding. Otherwise the 'digital' understanding is merely replicating itself, as if in a vacuum, freely and without friction.So, sure, we can say that, via autopoesis, the analog can serve as the ground for the digital - but how does the purely analogical yield itself to an external digital observer in a way that makes possible understanding/control? This seems to hearken back to Kant's schematism - and it remains just as obscure.

"Digital" understanding seems to be merely a sharpening of analogical understanding; a making precise in terms of 'is' and 'is not' the imprecise principles of inclusion and exclusion that make any analogical understanding itself even possible.

I don't see what's to be gained from cordoning off what is a transcedental addition versus what is really in nature 'in itself,' and there seems to be no interest in the project if you're not a Kantian (the question of 'is identity in the mind/language/computer, or in the thing itself?' is only of interest to someone with Kantian assumptions)

This isn't strictly on point, but I think most people who have even the tiniest little smidgeon of philosophical curiosity are naturally drawn to the question of in-itself vs. in-the-mind. Plenty of people who have never heard of Kant spontaneously ask: 'what if what you see as orange, I see as purple??'

Point being, imo the distinction being drawn doesn't seem specialized and academic at all.

So you think degrees on a temperature scale are ordinal then? — StreetlightX

Insofar as they are considered merely as degrees on a scale they are ordinal, and insofar as they represent degrees (degrees here in the sense of quantities) of heat, as in the example, they are cardinal. It's all in the interpretation.

But there's no 'dark art' here: in order to digitize an analog continuum, you simply draw a boundary - and then you treat it as such. The cut is a semiotic one, a matter of significance. The Mississipi River may not physically be a 'real' boundary between Iowa and Illinois, but to the degree that it stands for a boundary - it is treated as a sign - it functions as a boundary. Of course, one need not follow a river, one can place a boundary entirely arbitrarily, and nothing in the continuum that will or will not stop one from doing so. What is needed is not something 'in' the analog or 'in' the digital, some something capable of treating something as digital.

Yeah, exactly. I said elsewhere in the thread that got this train of thought going that what I'm kind of after is something like a "critique of pure formal logic" as it were. — StreetlightX

That's a delicate project, insofar as any such critique must itself take some logical form. While certainly not an impossible task, one must be careful not to cut off the branch upon which one sits (sorry for the overworn cliche).

I agree with this actually, although I would even refine it somewhat. I would in fact say that the emergence of the digital goes hand in hand with neither ens rationis nor ens reale but with ens vitae: that is, life. — StreetlightX

I'm not sure I can agree. Granted, it is only with the emergence of life that "the digital" can in some sense be recognized as such, and leveraged toward the achievement of some "end" (e.g. some natural system comes to be leveraged as a switch by some other living system). Still, it seems hard to deny that the "raw materials" are there in nature prior to the emergence of life. A pressure gradient between two points in space is still a binary difference in magnitude even when its not being leveraged as such by some living system, isn't it (in the sense that the magnitude at point A is not the magnitude at point B)?

I never said it was, just clarifying whether the project is only of interest to someone with Kantian presuppositions. If you don't have them, whether that's against the layman or not, then the question is of no interest. It's important sometimes to qualify what's at stake before engaging in a problem that might have no relevance, or that you think you've solved in virtue of a prior commitment.

Though that said, the question of whether identity is in the objects really boggles the mind in a way that color doesn't, IMO. Though the ideality of identity is an old, old subject, and I subscribed to it myself for a time, and get the appeal.

How about this: for any analog measurement, a digital measurement that allows an open interval of an infinitesimal works just as well, down to an arbitrarily precise measure, and an operation like negation can operate on that analog by preserving the size of this infinitesimal open interval at the opposite end?

Cardinal numbers do introduce a total ordering by definition, but could only be assigned plain old ordinal numbers (accepting there is no such thing as e.g. 'the 1.5th...' which seems plausible) once we settle on some granularity, which the analog in principle doesn't require. But what the digital can do is go down to an arbitrarily small granularity as required, and then leave the rest to an open interval over this arbitrarily small amount. This is granting that things are analog in themselves, which as I said before is questionable for a mercury sample anyway. Then we preserve the ability to conduct well-defined operations such as negation, the gap being not one of metaphysical import, but of a necessary imprecision of arbitrarily small amount enforced on us by needing to decide on some granularity.