A lot of good questions in your post, Curt. While I hope others follow up on the curatorial ones, I'll just nibble off the first bit (qubit?):
Curt Cloninger wrote:
> it is surprising how quickly the discussion headed toward
> sub-atomic physics. There seems to be a kind of
> formalist/essentialist consensus that if we can sort out the
> differences between digital and analog at that "fundamental" scale,
> we will have definitevely sorted out all the differences. But things
> happening at that scale don't seem all that pragmatically relevant to
> the scale(s) and speed(s) of new media art.
This is an excellent point, one repeated from a scientific perspective in Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart's book "The Collapse of Chaos."
> Unless these principles
> from physics are interpreted in a kind of metaphorical or symbolic
> way, in which case we are back to Derrida.
I think this is precisely the problem: that the metaphysics many of us take for granted is inherited from outdated science textbooks.
Physicists have known since the beginning of the last century that nature's building blocks are assembled in messy states of superposition rather than lined up in neat compartments. ("Is the spin up or down? It's both!") Yet so many humanists I read, especially among the poststructuralists, yammer on about binaries and dichotomies as though the Law of the Excluded Middle were an incontestable truth. Or, almost as bad, as though they are the first to realize it isn't.
Nor are all scientists immune from this outmoded determinism. Most biologists I speak to have heard of quantum mechanics, but implicitly assume that atoms are minuscule billiard balls careening predictably around, instead of some perverse foam that oozes contradictory states of matter when you're not looking.
Even Newton didn't understand the metaphysical implications of his theory. Though a heretic by contemporaneous standards, Newton was still a devout Christian, and during his life wrote more about religion than science. He is remembered among metaphysics scholars for positing an absolute frame of reference for space and time, in contrast to Einstein's later relativistic one. Except that Newton's equations *are* relativistic for the scales he was considering--a fact he obscured by giving lip service to an absolute frame in order to reconcile his formulas with the dogma of his time.
The design of digital computers to date has only reinforced the lay perception that everything around us can be boiled down to 1s and 0s. The advent of quantum computers to which Simon alluded could challenge that perception--and maybe even give nonphysicists their first glimpse of nature with her hair down.
Cheers,
jon
______________________________
Still Water--what networks need to thrive.
http://still-water.net/
|