Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 365.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2024-01-02 12:33:20+00:00
From: Bill Pascoe <bill.pascoe@unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.360: flip/flop into 2024
Hi Willard,
Here's just a few idle background thoughts when thinking about when and where
binary matters.
I notice that a great many arguments in the world could be resolved if the
protagonists recognised that the issue was a matter of degree, rather an a
binary is/isn't. So many adult arguments boil down to the simple formula of
children shouting 'IS SO!' and 'IS NOT!' at each other. One of the common
reasons for such confrontations is that they are using different definitions of
terms. But another common way to resolve such arguments is to change the
question from being "Is it or isn't it?" to "How much is it? More or less?" and
given that, the question follows, "At what amount should we do something about
it? What action should we take?" As well as every day kitchen sink arguments,
many political arguments are like this.
Then there is a big difference between the world around us being fuzzy, and a
matter of degree, and the way we interpret it in order to make decisions on our
course of action. Often an action is necessarily binary. Do I jump or not? (As
well as how high.) To make a decision much of our thought process is devoted
into taking in a lot of information, deciding if one thing or another (risky, or
not), based on information that tells us either way, so we interpret into binary
or exclusive categories, and binary and quantised mutually exclusive categorical
decisions. This fish looks like that fish a bit, but I think it's the poisonous
one someone told me about, because they said it had a blue tail, and this one is
kind of purple, but I'm going to put this in the 'poison fish' category, and
choose action 'not eat'.
This point about a matter of degree is one of the most fundamental to the
modernity (or whatever you want to call it), in particular, science. The point
of science is to go - hang on, it's not just is or isn't, it's a matter of
degree, and that means we can measure it, and with that measure we can
demonstrate whether this is more than that, and at what level of degree it
matters - and not only that, but what degree of change in this correlates with
what degree of change in that, which means we can predict this given that, and
what degree of action we should take on this to change that.
In the practical working life of a DH practitioner, I almost always find myself
having to cajole fuzzy information into mutually exclusive categories or
binaries, with a special column in the database for commentary notes so that all
these forced choices can be qualified with some remarks, like 'This is only a
best estimate of the date, the narrative actually says 'Winter, 1846' etc etc -
I explain to non DH Humanists, "If you want the computer to put it on a time
line, you have to tell it where. If you were to draw a timeline, you'd have to
put it somewhere - where would you put it? We'll put 'circa' in this other
field." (You were asking specifically about binary, but perhaps we are really
talking about mutually exclusive categories - which might be two - or
quantisation, or precision, more generally etc) Needless to say, there are a lot
of problems this forcing could cause, especially if there is an error. Failing
to recognise realities that get erased; failing to recognise things that can
only be put in commentary, and don't fit the data structure; valorising
countable and repeatable phenomena at the expensive of the great many important
and unique phenomena and truths in the world; not recognising things go in more
than one category; etc. But there are workarounds and information designs to try
to handle most of these things.
I seem to remember Hegel had some thoughts that might be relevant. It was
something about how, typically, in the world, phenomena increase in quantity to
a threshold to a point where they change in quantity. Perhaps he was arguing
this to the point of saying that what a change in quality actually is, is change
in quantity. Some examples might be - increasing quantity of temperature in
water reaches a threshold where it changes quality to a gas. Or perhaps
increasing frequency of red light waves, they eventually become yellow - and so
on until their quality as 'colour' itself changes to 'invisible'. This probably
applies to social and subjective phenomena too. At the moment in looking at the
history of violence, I'm grappling with questions like "How many murders does it
take for a set of isolated policing and justice incidents, to be called a
insurrection/revolution/war?" (there are of course other factors to consider,
but this is one of them). Then at the bottom of this is the age old 'heap'
problem from the Greeks - we can call a grain of sand a grain of sand, and a
heap of sand a heap, but as you keep adding grains, at what point does it become
a heap? Important of course to distinguish real 'things' from subjective or
social convention things - the sand doesn't care if it's a heap or a grain.
So too, to answer the question, 'When in human experience does binary matter?' -
in perception, for decision making. Perhaps that is stating the obvious, and
just raises the original question again - which perceptions, which decisions?
When and where does it matter? Maybe we should ask at what degree does binary
start to matter? What degree of noise and confusion causes us to apply binary?
What degree of complexity collapses our perception of binary into gradients? At
what point do we start to need it? At what degree does it become a problem? How
much binary is too much?
Bill
________________________________
From: Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org>
Sent: Saturday, 30 December 2023 7:25 PM
To: Bill Pascoe <bill.pascoe@unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: [Humanist] 37.360: flip/flop into 2024
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 360.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
http://www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2023-12-30 08:14:04+00:00
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
Subject: where the all-or-none matters, and will in 2024
Back in mid December, specifically in Humanist 37.340-343, we tossed
around the question of whether, and if so when, the all-or-none nature
of the binary signal matters, or when we make it matter. Perhaps this
bundle of questions has faded from our minds, but I'm still teased by
it, and so would like to ask for specific instances in which it does. An
enormous amount of effort and ingenuity goes into making clean bunary
signals; see (as I've mentioned) Lex Fridman's interview with the
microelectronic chip designer Jim Keller on Youtube.
Consider the following, if you would.
We say that we turn a tap (faucet) on or off, and so make in language
and thought binary that which is not in the kinaesthetics of the
operation. An electrical switch has two states, though again the
kinaesthetics is non-binary, like the momentary mechanics inside the
switch. So we conceptualise a non-binary experience and so render it
binary. Such plays out through many life-experiences. What about
listening to digitally reproduced music? Some persist in hearing the
difference between that and music experienced through analog equipment.
The concert hall raises other questions. And so on and so forth.
In research, however, when do we make something out of the binary/analog
difference? Text encoding is, I'd think, an obvious example, or can be.
Like the light switch we in some instances studiously overlook some or
many of the qualities of a word, phrase or page-design when adding
metatext, once again rendering binary that which is not, and in doing so
operate like the digital machine. Indeed, do we not when considering an
object of research in some computational aspect or other, move towards
becoming machine-like?
Comments and arguments welcome, as always. And a Happy New Year to everyone!
Cheers,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Humanist
http://www.mccarty.org.uk
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