Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Discuss 2
'Discontinuity is a manifestation of independent individuality and autonomy, Discontinuity intervenes in questions of final causes and ethical and aesthetic problems.' Nicolai Bugaev.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Yeah you're making this much too easy, Bryan. Got anything challenging for us?
ReplyDeleteIf I'm interpreting the terms correctly:
ReplyDeleteIndividuality - as reality or fiction, to taste - is surely the negation of discontinuity. On the other hand, the perceived continuation of individuality over time - that we label personality - is capable of being disrupted by discontinuities that can manifest themselves physically or psychologically (e.g. epilepsy, schizophrenia, reading Straw Dogs).
So I think it's either/or rather than one arising from another and existing alongside it. This means we either are or are not responsible for our ethics, for instance. We don't exist in a grey area where we can't be sure whether we are or are not responsible depending on whether we're continuously or discontinuously ourselves.
ReplyDeleteIsn't this more to do with maths, Gaw? In continuous functions you change a little thing and, predictably, the output changes a little bit. Is Bryan/Bugaev trying to suggest that we can squeeze some free will into a deterministic universe via discontinuous mathematical functions?
ReplyDeleteI don't know, where's McCabe when you need him? Still going on about Formula 1 I expect...
Reminds me of one of the oldest problems faced by computer programmers: how to introduce true (rather than perceived) randomness into any system. Not sure if it’s ever been solved. This has huge implications for the development of artificial intelligent systems.
ReplyDeleteContinuity interrupted by discontinuity is a state that could be described as continuous, it is continuously being interrupted.
ReplyDeleteSoon, Mr Barlow will be here soon.
From what I understand, it's a kind of confusing way to tie in pure mathematical analysis into pointing out something that is fairly simple, that being that any object or outcome that we percieve is percieved differently by each of us due to our individual circumstances and upbringings.
ReplyDeleteBarely got me maths 'O' level so read it in more ordinary language. If I tripped over a continuous function I wouldn't know it.
ReplyDeleteIf that is the case Brit, I agree with Worm. It seems a rather banal statement, which admits the most questionable terms (independent individuality and autonomy) as a priori assumptions.
ReplyDeleteBut this stick may have a great many ends, any one of which I may wrongly grab.
An example of Nonsenus Profundis.
ReplyDeleteHmmn, maybe this quote relates to a specific question in mathematics or philsosphy, in which case I'm stumped. But isn't Discontinuity that which skewered the banksters, or rather the complacent assumption that Discontinuity in the form of a big Black Swan simply wasn't going to happen. Sounds like the kind of thing Nassim Nicholas Taleb or Art De Vany might know a lot about. Oh well, the truth is I am more interested in the biscuit I see winking before me. Crunch. There was a biscuit, I think. And now, discontinously, there is no biscuit at all. It's all magic to me.
ReplyDelete'Discontinuity intervenes in questions of final causes and ethical and aesthetic problems.'
ReplyDeleteso, to break it down further, specifically referring to aesthetic problems, a painting exists as a 'continuous' whole until people look at it, at which point it becomes an object that exists within each person's mind. To some its a thing of beauty, to others a series of demented squiggles. It no longer 'belongs to itself' but to the conception of itself.
The discontinuity comes from the trajectory of each entirely seperate perception up to the moment of visualizing the object, and then the divergent perceptional trajectories leading from the object
...In short, what I said earlier.
This is romanticism redux, and bunk, IMHO.
ReplyDeleteBugaev would have us believe that we are autonomous units disconnected from the rest of reality, or that there is some essential us, a thing in itself that is.
I say no such thing has been observed.
Ugg and Prada regret to advise that the discussion on discontinuity has been discontinued.
ReplyDeleteAt first I was thinking that this had a lot to do with whether the objective world we study with all our "ologies" and "isms", that predict outcomes based on laws and theories of nature combined with measurement, could be changed--a sort of simplified free will question of whether God or any autonomous individual could interfere with the physical realm, the mind over matter problem. Of course, it does not have to be this, because we have gone through quantum mechanics with discontinuous leaps. So such discontinuity has become part of our "system", which does not necessarily as a result leave room for "independent individuality and autonomy".
ReplyDeleteThis became more about interruption. This concept expressed by Bugaev has seemingly been simplified in the past century in that we each can either go with the flow, or be an agent for change, take a stand while most others are drifting.
This idea of discontinuity, not going with the flow, is indeed "a manifestation of independent individuality and autonomy." I think of Martin Luther King in this sense, that through his not going with the flow, by his taking a stand, he intervened in questions of final causes and especially ethical problems, but also in the value end of aesthetics. We can get quantum leaps in the social sphere.
The flow is powerful, though, and put him in prison for stepping out of line. It's not easy being autonomous and, putting this into action, intervening into what is everyone else's affairs. But that's where great thoughts and great works of art have their impact. It is also why so many have been martyred throughout history. Choose your own martyred saint, or consider those journalists and poets who are in prisons today for going against the flow.