PRELUDE: PHILOSOPHY AND THE MATRIX
So, philosophy and the matrix, huh? It's interesting: I'm
sure I wouldn't have read much philosophy if it wasn't for
"The Matrix". My friend Caroline explained to me how it
was based on "Simulacra and Simulation", so I decided to
read that before seeing the movie. Well, I had already
seen the Trinity fight scene when I was waiting to go to
Star Wars I, and at the time I regretted not seeing The
Matrix instead. Shall we say, I was easily tempted and
more than intrigued.
NOTE: Incidentally, Wikimedia Foundation's executive
director looks rather like Trinity, and she apparently
kicks ass in a similar fashion:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Sue_Gardner
1. OUT OF THE SHADOW OF WIKIPEDIA: PLANETMATH AT TEN
Initial history of my involvement -- walking the
hexagon-tiled path of bubble math.
And after that, I went to math grad school, and realized
that it was hard, and in many ways controlling -- that is
to say, the process of learning mathematics was controlled
by some gatekeepers called 'professors' who seemed to be
doing everything they could to make my life conform to
their ideals; but I wasn't having it. I didn't go to
class much and instead figured I'd learn the material on
the exams on my own, and create a repository of
information that would help other people teach themselves
to pass the exams too. That way we could avoid all this
external control stuff and just get on to business with
doing research.
Joining up: it seemed like a straight shot:
PlanetMath was the only thing I found on the web that
seemed to be doing something reasonably close to my
ideals.
* Do mathematics the way we do free software
* Make free software that helps us do math.
* Have some discourse to help decide what to code.
And to some extent that's what we did.
But... As we look at the actual state of
PlanetMath... mathematics... or much more broadly at the
actual state of 'human knowledge' --
We see:
* Things are a bit broken.
* Yes, PlanetMath is still there, but it is currently
running without much support for further development.
* And as far as I can tell, the vision I described is not
really implemented anywhere, yet.
What I had hoped was that the PlanetMathers would be a
sort of revolutionary group like Morpheus's. I was, shall
we say, very idealistic, but also not necessarily so
skilled. Somehow that didn't seem to matter as much as
'waking up' to the fact that academia was based on these
palpable structures of control. Even professional
mathematicians who hadn't realized this were, in my mind,
no better than machines for producing mathematics. Well,
although this was my emotional reaction, even then I
started to think about things a bit differently: Actually,
Mathematics itself *was* the Matrix! -- which is to say, a
tool for "simulating" reality in ways that went beyond
reality itself. Mathematics *was* the 'hyperreal'. It
was thinking like this that made me give the title "The
Hyperreal Dictionary of Mathematics" to the conceptual --
but not just conceptual -- project that I had in mind.
This is why I'm asking:
2. "HOW CAN WE BUILD A FUNCTIONING PLATFORM FOR
CROWDSOURCING EDUCATION?"
That was sort of like what I was asking then, too, but my
understanding of how such a thing could be 'bootstrapped'
was fairly different; I hadn't heard of 'crowdsourcing'
and I still thought that the 'band of brothers' at
PlanetMath could do it. Hell, I even imagined that *I*
could do quite a bit of it on my own if needed. By "it" I
meant: creating the kernel -- the core bits of
mathematical knowledge and computational linguistics that
would be needed for an automated system to start
extracting more mathematical knowledge from regular old
humanly-written mathematical texts. At other moments, I
figured that most of what I would have to do would be to
build the appropriate platform for coding this 'kernel'
and that I would find other people who would want to
participate in actually doing the mathematical stuff;
'crowdsourcing' (by some other name, of course). The idea
here was that people would learn by teaching the computer
for a while, until eventually they would learn from a more
fully-automated computer system.
I think we look around at free software projects that work
well (e.g. Firefox, Emacs, Linux kernel), there are some
features seem to apply quite generally.
* Patches
* Plugin architecture
* Fork, branch, and merge
Well...! Probably I should also add to the list that such
projects need to be appropriately social. It's not just a
matter of a hacker like Neo ("my own personal Jesus
Christ") cranking everything out; or not typically. This
isn't meant to say anything against the style used by the
early Stallman or Torvalds or anyone else of that ilk.
(Cf. XKCD "3117".) Even the most groundbreaking people
often realize in hind-sight that they have to be
'appropriately social' -- I'm thinking of the
mathematician William P. Thurston's paper "On Proof and
Progress in Mathematics".
These ideas can be applied quite generally, but a few
words about how they can be applied in the case of
mathematics?
3. "PEOPLE SHOULD BE FREE"
You know, before getting on with that, it strikes me that
my friend Stephan Kreitmayer's comments about my recording
"People should be free" -- that the music was played in an
unscholarly fashion or something to that effect -- could
also be applied to the way I've historically done
scholarship. In Texas, academia was just a desire or a
disaster waiting to happen. I was wrapped up in my own
passions, with 'the sound and the fury of a tale told by
an idiot, signifying nothing' -- well, you deserve the
actual quote:
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
All of my 'excessive' attributes are wrapped up in my
collection of avatars -- the 'names I call myself': Fear,
Deneb/Arided, Constante, Joseph K, holtzermann17...
These names have quite plainly to do with me mapping my
understanding of things back to my own body, a body that I
think of as 'mortal' and in other ways, quite limited; or
else to my understanding of bodily matters in general.
To be a bit more clear: the 'hyperreal' projects have to
do with a sort of yoga, a sort of 'binding' or 'yoking' of
mind and body.
In fact, each of the above monikers contains within it a
fairly obvious sense of cancellation or paradox: the
collection of names I call myself is 'excessive' in the
first instance only insofar as it has expanded to contain
the excesses of my cancellations, to turn them into a
regime of self-limitation.
I am a dare that hasn't been taken up,
a star that faded to black,
the angel of ambivalence,
a sort of puppet that bites back,
or else a simple place of residence
that I moved away from long ago.
It should really come as no surprise that part of the
vision is becoming-machine, that what I was saying before
in a critical tone about mathematicians-as-machines was
somehow an ingredient in formulating a 'neutral' target
self-description; neutral in this case being better than
negative, both in terms of self-distaste and in the more
extreme sense of containing a seed of death.
In short we are looking at 'free software -- the free
software of patches, plugins, forks and so forth -- as a
way of life, or way to life, or simply as the matter of
life'. Mathematics was always seen as a primitive form of
such software, whereas life itself is perhaps the most
primative form.
Without further ado, we will turn to some more impersonal
themes.
4. STAKEHOLDERS, ROLES, AND ACTIVITIES
This 'anthropological' picture of Mathematics as a sort of
ecosystem provides at least temporary relief from the sort
of self-scrutiny I was discussing above. Culture and its
multiplicities give a very different sort of "map" or
"terrain" -- and the idea: 'what sort of activities do we
want to support' ultimately gives me something to think
about.
See, as you pass from the amorphous picture of
'stakeholders in mathematics' (academia, the state,
industry, and so forth) and on to a collection of roles
(researcher, learner, teacher, employer, colleague,
friend, etc.) and ultimately to a set of purposive
activities (writing a paper, attending a class, creating
an exam, defining a goal, chatting, smiling, etc.), we can
absolutely develop a sort of "matrix" that can be said to
define "mathematics" as a field or locus of human
endeavor. We could do this for other fields as well.
Revolution in this space might consist of moving the
cultural patterns off of one sort of hardware and on to
another, for example. A smaller revolution just might add
a new row or column to this matrix.
Here we are thinking as anthropology-machines; slowly,
methodically, comfortably. Of course it must be noted
that even a relatively minor change like adding a new row
or column to this matrix may correspond to ridiculous
upheavals in the underlying picture of social dynamics.
As it currently stands, I'm inclined to map the matrix I
have in mind the following phase diagram, in which the
first bit is somehow central, the second bit is somehow
ambient, and the four final bits plug in to the first bit
in order to interface with one another.
5. SEMANTIC CORE ; EYES AND HANDS
My current agenda for the project is assembling a new
semantic core, together with enough eyes and hands, as
well as support for writing and doing exercises,
connections to original research, integration of computer
algebra systems, improved communications on the site, and
functional social networking to connect it to outside
issues.
Such a diagram brings to mind again a cluster of bubbles,
or perhaps better still the gluing-together of various
more complicated geometric spaces with their own curvature
and physics (cf. Thurston again).
But it isn't so necessary to froth at the mouth about
*these* things: it is more effective to just build them --
* To work with Michael Kohlhase and his group in Bremen;
* To make PlanetMath work as a 'frontend' to Wikipedia;
* To set up a place to write and work on self-grading
exercises;
* To correlate encyclopedia terms with terms used in 'the
literature';
* To make it possible to move mathematical expressions from
a discursive setting to a computational setting;
* To make discourse about mathematics work better.
The "philosophy" described in this article is not just a
matter of moving from Baudrilliard to Deleuze, but also, I
hope obviously, a matter of 'maturing' in some ways.
I seems like I still haven't turned these sorts of musings
into a "research question".
At the same time, I think I am much less attached to or at
least less embedded in "mathematics" than I was 8 years
ago. This distance may possibly correspond to some
increase of intimacy with myself and my peers, a new
feeling of who those peers are, or better still -- since I
am no longer attached to the 'band of brothers' idea and
am instead engaged with new ideas about 'dynamics' or
'dynamism' -- of HOW such people operate.
I don't think it is entirely possible to abandon a
"Philosophy of the Matrix" but I do think we can remove
some of its most obnoxious dualisms.
In pragmatic terms, this corresponds to the pursuit of
6. HAPPY HACKING
(to be continued...)
