Computation
Description
Benjamin Bratton:
"Computation is calculation as world ordering; it is a medium for the complexification of social intelligence.
Computation takes the form of planetary infrastructure that remakes philosophy, science, and society in its image.
How does Antikythera define computation? For Turing, it was a process defined by a mathematical limit of the incalculable, but as the decades since his foundational papers have shown, there is little in life that cannot be modeled and represented computationally. This process, like all models, is reductive. A map reduces territory to an image, but that is how it becomes useful as a navigational tool. Similarly, computational models and simulations synthesize data in ways that demonstrate forms and patterns that would be otherwise inconceivable.
As a rules-based, output-generating operation, computation has general and specific definitions, including biological analogical processing of very local information and Universal Turing machines, general recursive functions, and the defined calculations of almost anything at all.
Antikythera presumes that computation was discovered as much as it was invented. It is not so much that natural computation works like modern computing devices but rather that modern computing devices and formulations are quickly evolving approximations of natural computation—genetic, molecular, neuronal, etc.
Computation as a principle may be near universal, but computation as a societal medium is highly malleable. Its everyday affordances are seemingly endless. However, computational technologies evolve, and societies evolve in turn. For example, in the decades to come, what is called “AI” may no longer be simply a novel application for computation but its primary societal-scale form. Computation would be not just an instrumentally focused calculation but the basis of widespread non-biological intelligence.
Through computational models, we perceive existential truths about a great many things: human genomic drift through history, the visual profile of astronomic objects millions of light-years away, the extent of anthropogenic agency and its climatic effects, the neurological foundations of thought itself… The qualitative profundity of these begins with a quantitative representation. The math discloses reality, and reality demands new philosophical scrutiny."
(https://research.antikythera.org/)
Discussion
Planetary Computation
Benjamin Bratton:
"Imagine the famous blue marble image as a movie, one spanning all 4.5 billion years of Earth’s development. Watching this movie on super fast-forward, one would see the planet turn from red to blue and green, see continents form and break apart, see the emergence of life and an atmosphere, and, in the last few seconds, see something else that is remarkable. The planet would almost instantaneously grow an external layer of satellites, cities, and various physical networks, all of which constitute a kind of sensory epidermis or exoskeleton. In the last century, Earth has grown this artificial crust, through which it has realized incipient forms of animal–machinic cognition with terraforming-scale agency. This is planetary computation. It is not just a tool, it is a geological cognitive phenomenon.
It is this phenomenon—planetary computation defined in this way—that is Antikythera’s core interest. The term has at least two essential connotations: first, it refers to a global technological apparatus; second, it refers to all the ways that that apparatus reveals planetary conditions in a manner otherwise unthinkable. For the former, computation is an instrumental technology that enables new perceptions of and interactions with the world; for the latter, it is an epistemological technology that shifts fundamental presumptions about what is possible to know about the world at all."
(https://research.antikythera.org/)
Computation is Now the Primary Technology for the Artificialization of Functional Intelligence, Symbolic Thought, and Life Itself
Benjamin Bratton:
"Computation is, for us, not only a formal, substrate-agnostic, recursive calculative process; it is also a means of world ordering. From the earliest marks of symbolic notation, computation was a foundation of what would become complex culture. The signifiers on clay in Sumerian cuneiform are known as a first form of writing; in fact, they are indexes of transactions, an inscriptive technique that would become pictograms and over time alphanumeric writing, including base-10 mathematics and formal binary notation. There and then in Mesopotamia, the first writing was “accounting”: a kind of database representing and ordering real-world communication. This artifact of computation prefigures the expressive semiotics, even literary writing, that ensued in the centuries to come.
Over recent centuries, and accelerating during the mid-twentieth century, technologies for the artificialization of computation have become more powerful, more efficient, more microscopic, and more globally pervasive, changing the world in their image. “Artificialization” in this context doesn’t mean fake or unnatural; rather, it means that the intricate complexity of modern computing chips, hardware, and software did not evolve blindly but was the result of deliberate conceptual prefiguration and composition, even if by accident. The evolutionary importance of this general capacity for artificialization will become clearer below."
(https://research.antikythera.org/)
==Planetary Computation Reveals and Constructs the Planetary as a “Humanist Category”
Benjamin Bratton:
"Some of the most essential and timeless philosophical questions revolve around the qualities of perception, representation, and time. Together and separately, these have all been radicalized by planetary computational technologies, in no domain more dramatically than in astronomy.
The Webb deep space telescope scans the depths of the universe, producing data that we make into images showing us, among other wonders, light from a distant star bending all the way around the gravitational cluster of galaxies. From such perceptions we, the little creatures who built this machine, learn a bit more about where, when, and how we are. Computation is not only a topic for philosophy to pass judgment; computation is itself a philosophical technology. It reveals conditions that have made human thought possible.
Antikythera is a philosophy-of-technology program that diverges in vision and purpose from the mainstream of philosophy of technology, particularly from the intransigent tradition growing from the work of Martin Heidegger, whose near mystical suspicion of scientific disenchantment, denigration of technology as that which distances us from Being and reduces the world to numeric profanity, and—most of all—outrage at innovations of perception beyond the comfort of grounded phenomenology has confused generations of young minds. They have been misled. The question concerning technology is not how it alienates us from the misty mystery of Being but how every Copernican turn we have taken—from heliocentrism to Darwinism to neuroscience to machine intelligence—has been possible only by getting outside our own skin to see ourselves as we are and the world as it is. This is closeness to Being."