Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)

Empirical and Strong Coordination via Soft Covering with Polar Codes

We design polar codes for empirical coordination and strong coordination in two-node networks. Our constructions hinge on the fact that polar codes enable explicit low-complexity schemes for soft covering. We leverage this property to propose explicit and low-complexity coding schemes that achieve the capacity regions of both empirical coordination and strong coordination for sequences of actions taking value in an alphabet of prime cardinality. Our results improve previously known polar coding schemes, which (i) were restricted to uniform distributions and to actions obtained via binary symmetric channels for strong coordination, (ii) required a non-negligible amount of common randomness for empirical coordination, and (iii) assumed that the simulation of discrete memoryless channels could be perfectly implemented. As a by-product of our results, we obtain a polar coding scheme that achieves channel resolvability for an arbitrary discrete memoryless channel whose input alphabet has prime cardinality.Comment: 14 pages, two-column, 5 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Wand/set theories

Here is a template for introducing mathematical objects: "Objects are found in stages. For every stage S: (1) for any things found before S, you find at S the bland set whose members are exactly those things; (2) for anything, $x$, which was found before S, you find at S the result of tapping $x$ with any magic wand (provided that the result is not itself a bland set); you find nothing else at S." This Template has rich applications, it realizes John Conway's (1976) Mathematicians' Liberation Movement, and it generalizes a lovely idea due to Alonzo Church (1974). Some parts of this Template are familiar: the bit about "bland sets" is just the ordinary story we tell about the cumulative iterative conception of set. But the talk of "magic wands" is new and different. Moreover, parts of the story are left unspecified. This under-specification is deliberate: we want to be able to flesh out the Template in umpteen different ways. The Main Theorem of the paper is that any loosely constructive way of fleshing out the Template is synonymous with a ZF-like theory

The \u27I\u27 in First-Person Thought and What is Meant by Self-Knowledge

There has been a great deal of disagreement over what exactly it is that is being referenced by the first-person pronoun, ‘I.’ Immanuel Kant believed the ‘I’ associated with a thinking subject is just a formal representation of the substantially existing subject. This raises the question about whether or not ‘I’ is actually a referring expression? In this paper I explore two accounts from both sides of the debate which opens up a dialectical space for determining a positive answer for this question. On the one hand, ‘I’ is said to be a referring term for the speaker or utterer of a given thought or expression. In every instance, ‘I’ uniquely picks out its object. On the other hand, this account of ‘I’ as a referring term merely tells us the way that it refers to the person associated with it, but it fails to tell us how the reference takes place. What drives this second account, which ultimately says it is not a referring expression, is that when we consider how we are able to refer to an object is determined by the perspective we have on the object. When we refer to our coffee mug or to the cat on the windowsill, the reference is made possible by perception. Moreover, this kind of relationship to the object being referred is one that involves a criterion for getting it right about the object. When it comes to self-reference, the perspective I have of ‘I’ is in virtue of my being identical with it, not by perception. This means that there is no need for a criterion of identity since getting it right is already achieved though my unmediated first-person knowledge of myself. The last part of this paper will consider what has been said about self-consciousness here, as well as in other views, and show that no account of self-knowledge is made possible through them. There has been a widely held misconception of self-knowledge which amounts to a conflation between this and self-consciousness. This is a problem because it obscures what is meant by the “self” and how we have knowledge of it

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