[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> internetontology

[brian carroll <human@electronetwork.org>]

  hi Josh, interesting URL and ideas you share.
  my language abilities are faltering, so i will
  be abstractly brief in my observations...

  ontology, in my experience, has been closely related
  to developing 'generalist' content online, such as
  a glossary, architectural portal, and now a portal
  for electromagnetic information and ideas. what i've
  run into in the coding of these projects are decisions
  upon how to structure relationships between words and
  their conceptual relationships. for example, archiving
  all primary disciplines which use electromagnetism is
  one huge assumption, as there are competing taxonomies
  and that science-humanities split still needs stitching.
  so too, architectural texts, and ideas. one resource
  that always stuck in my mental-atomspheric has been
  the archivist/librarian, which is why i enjoyed the
  foucoultian 'archaeoknowledge', as it is practical.
  Getty's library does a significant job at categorizing
  the fields in detail. yet there is always a sense that
  the structure is like matter, and the anti-matter is
  really where knowing occurs, where guesses and hypo-
  theses and experiments turn mystery into understanding.
  but there is always an uncertain certainty, given the
  language, so it seems. that constant subject viewing,
  thinking, acting, verbing along. but not so with science,
  with mathematics, with numbers, or not nearly as so in
  their absolute sense, in that they already are beyond
  the question of authority and do hold authority, even
  if it is not warranted. but do so by power alone, often-
  times, and despotically so.

  so, as a necessary badness, it may be necessary to find
  a common language for humans, however fuzzy, to be able
  to speak to the ideas that are universalized in numbers
  and statistics, which guide public and private policies,
  and determine the future course of things, as they have
  the past. economics, engineering, physics. whatnot. as
  issues like gene research come up, who can argue with
  the number 1, how can one begin to say it is not right,
  or wrong, or, forbid, untrue? impossible, because it is
  improbable to do so given totally subjective and private
  languaging amongst people of sign-i-ficant difference.
  until i=you and this equals we, then and only then will
  we be able to speak in terms of probability, where 1 is
  not true if it is really closer to zero, and not absolute
  at that, however fuzzy our shared language is, it is much
  more reasonable than any mathematician trying to speak
  humanity through a fortress of numerological ideology.

  greatest quote of 2001, Bush saying 'we need better science'
  on Global Warming. funny, that. else, say, the PBS public
  tv show yesterday on Air Force One, the plane, with a
  followup advert for Caeser of Rome and his empire.
  given the complexities of language, the complexities of
  communicating, and that of reasoning, false in privatized
  communalities which are pre-supposed to re-present the
  whole while pimping for the authoritarian bureaucracy,
  it is time to lay down the power that is holding back
  simple and basic truthes and move forward, together, on
  shared ideas. without language, there is no way to do this.
  and languages die out. and it seems so has public language,
  any ideas that can break out of the commodification of the
  individual's 'I'dentity, where it is subservient to the
  needs, or at least in balance, with those of the whole
  'i' of a distributed humanity. make a database, let it
  reverse engineer itself via fuzzy logic, and there need
  be no authority, just as a-life engines. the rules are
  links, and densities, and evolutions and mutations. a
  supercomputer may be the only way to find meaning in
  this muck of intellectual complexity that is thinking
  today, and collaborative inaction on the scales of events.

  onto logic, human.

brian
matter, energy, and in-formation
http://www.electronetwork.org/


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