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Possible bodies

Phil: 
In terms of the body, there are well established (in western science)
topologies - the nervous system as a network for example - that contribute
to an understanding of the 'materiality' of the body and the way in which
it functions. But these interpretations and descriptions of 'body
topologies' are in actually not fixed. Earlier medical understanding of the
way the brain works did not account for the wider significance of, for
example, the spinal cord, and current discussions in the field surround
whether or not the brain really does represent the 'centre' of the network,
or if its capability is in fact distributed across the system. Body
topologies are very often organised around a network - blood circulation,
skeleton, muscles, digestion, nervous system, respiratory system,
reproductive system etc etc. You can say that the descriptions of the
function of these networks contains some 'facts' e.g. blood contains cells
that supply oxygen to the body. But it is not 'fact' that the blood cell is
part of the circulatory system - the place of a blood cell in any system is
subjective (topologically so)...

So, to quote Kathryn Hayles (talking about Latour), “...the objects of
scientific research are at once discursively constructed, socially produced
and materially real...”

A network is only one type of a topology (specifically describing
connectivity between nodes) - but there are others topologies too. From
mathematics, 'set theory' is the crucial approach to thinking about
topology. you could have a set (or group) that contains "all things that
are red" and you can have a set that contains "all things that are round" -
the sets are not mutually exclusive and any single item can be in one, both
or neither set. So set theory is about properties and classification, which
we might normally think of as bad things to use to organize our thoughts,
as it appears to be a return to essentialist approaches. However, in
topological thinking there is no problem because both the 'property' (or
attribute) and the classification (i.e the set) are not fixed. The real
difficulty I have with classification as an approach is not the urge to
classify per se, but the compulsion to be rigid about what those
classifications are and what properties contribute to their definition
(this is particularly evident when talking about, say, species or gender
definitions in biological sciences). Topological approaches allow for
multiplicities - in property and set - without 'fixity, and are by
definition 'unstable'. What I also like is that it provides a
non-hierarchical view and there is no need for a 'contest' between the
objective and the subjective.

SIDE NOTE....
As part of this< http://www.topologicalatlas.net/bordertopologies.html >conference
at Sheffield University, the keynote speaker, Celia Lury (one of the
foremost thinkers on topology) gave a great paper about the disappearance
of the Malaysia airlines flight last year (the video should be here< https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCy91qoZuSoWvawrGsi-HqtSf7hWVJW5M >i
think- i cant check as youtube is banned here!). Celia used a great phrase
to describe why the plane could not be found, despite the huge amount of
effort and technology that was used in the search -  it was something like
"the aircraft fell of the edge of a surface of visibility". I think this is
a great way to talk about topological subjectivities.

It must be possible to see/understand/treat the software as a body!
(and software is a body)

are a body vs having a body

Look for: Balsamo. Technologies of the gendered body

Software as a zone of affordances: Johanna Drucker

Genderblending => interface (ref research machines)

Object-oriented programming is part of this movement toward
the computer as an expressive medium" ( Thinking in C++, 35) . As comput­
ers are increasingly understood (and modeled after) "expressive mediums"
like writing, they begin to acquire the familiar and potent capability of writ­
ing not merely to express thought but actively to constitute it. As high-level
computer languages move closer to natural languages, the processes of in­
termediation by which each affects the other accelerate and intensify. Rita
Raley has written on the relation between the spread of Global English and
the interpenetration of programming languages with English syntax, gram­
mar, and lexicon. 31 In addition, the creative writing practices of "code work;'
practiced by such artists as MEZ, Talan Memmott, Alan Sondheim, and oth­
ers' mingle code and English in a pastiche that, by analogy with two natural
languages that similarly intermingle, might be called a creole.

The vectors associated with these processes do not all point in the same
direction. As explored in chapter 8, (mis)recognizing visualizations of com­
putational simulations as creatures like us both anthropomorphizes the sim­
ulations and "computationalizes" the humans. Knowing that binary code
underlies complex emergent processes reinforces the view that human con­
sciousness emerges from similar machinic processes, as explored in chapter
7. Anxieties can arise when the operations of the computer are mystified to
the extent that users lose sight of (or never know) how the software actu­
ally works, thus putting themselves at the mercy of predatory companies
like Microsoft, which makes it easy (or inevitable) for users to accept at face
value the metaphors the corporation spoon-feeds them, a concern explored
in chapter 6. These dynamics make unmistakably clear that computers are
no longer merely tools (if they ever were) but are complex systems that in­
creasingly produce the conditions, ideologies, assumptions, and practices
that help to constitute what we call reality.

Hayles, my mother was a computer

-------------------------------

Emergence vs causality

The origin of the modern concept of emergence can be traced to the
middle of the nineteenth century when realist philosophers first
began pondering the deep dissimilarities between causality in the
fields of physics and chemistry. The classical example of causality in
physics is a collision between two molecules or other rigid objects.
Even in the case of several colliding molecules the overall effect is
a simple addition. If, for example, one molecule is hit by a second one
in one direction and by a third one in a different direction the com­
posite effect will be the same as the sum of the two separate effects:
the first molecule will end up in the same final position if the other
two hit it simultaneously or if one collision happens before the other.
In short, in these causal interactions there are no surprises, nothing
is produced over and above what is already there. But when two
molecules interact chemically an entirely new entity may emerge, as
when hydrogen and oxygen interact to form water. Water has proper­
ties that are not possessed by its component parts: oxygen and hydro­
gen are gases at room temperature while water is liquid. And water
has capacities distinct from those of its parts: adding oxygen or hydro­
gen to a fire fuels it while adding water extinguishes it.

DeLanda


Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools
recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations
for women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be
partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid
social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as
instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between
tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations
and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge.
Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.

Donna Haraway: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature


Topology

Topology (from the Greek ?????, "place", and ?????, "study") is the mathematical study of shapes and topological spaces. It is an area of mathematics concerned with the properties of space that are preserved under continuous deformations including stretching and bending, but not tearing or gluing. This includes such properties as connectedness, continuity and boundary.

Topology developed as a field of study out of geometry and set theory, through analysis of such concepts as space, dimension, and transformation. Such ideas go back to Leibniz, who in the 17th century envisioned the geometria situs (Greek-Latin for "geometry of place") and analysis situs (Greek-Latin for "picking apart of place"). The term topology was introduced by Johann Benedict Listing in the 19th century, although it was not until the first decades of the 20th century that the idea of a topological space was developed. By the middle of the 20th century, topology had become a major branch of mathematics.


Parameter

A parameter (from the Ancient Greek ????, "para", meaning "beside, subsidiary" and ??????,  "metron", meaning "measure"), in its common meaning, is a  characteristic, feature, or measurable factor that can help in defining a  particular system. A parameter is an important element to consider in  evaluation or comprehension of an event, project, or situation.


An adequate account of the simulation, then, requires expanding the
boundaries of the system beyond the programs and the computer to include
the virtual world, the creator, and the viewer. The evolutionary dynamics of
this larger world function as a distributed cognitive system composed ofhu­
man and nonhuman actors, each of which acts as an independent cognizer.
As Michael Dyer has noted in another context, with distributed cognitive
systems there is no free lunch: because all the parts interrelate, if one part of
the system can function only as a relatively low-level cognizer, the slack has
to be taken up somewhere else by making another part smarter. 8 Compared
to artificial intelligence, artificial-life simulations typically front-load less
intelligence in the creatures and build more intelligence into the dynamic
process of co adapting to well-defined environmental constraints. When the
environment fails to provide the appropriate constraints to stimulate de­
velopment, the creator steps in, using his human intelligence to supply ad­
ditional adaptive constraints, for instance when Sims put a limit on how
tall the creatures can get.

Hayles

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariosaviosproulhallsitin.htm "You've got to put your bodies"


The reason for this is that the knife's capacity to affect is
contingent on the existence of other things, cuttable things, that have
the capacity to be affected by it

http://pyroevil.com/2014/03/10/neural-network-biped-walking/


 Both Henri Bergson, who strongly influenced Deleuze, and Deleuze  himself build their conception of the virtual in reference to a  quotation in which Marcel Proust defines a virtuality, memory as "real but not actual, ideal but not abstract"
 
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_%28philosophy%29
 
 
 The reason is that even if the details of a given process account for the
resemblance among its products, the similarities which make us classify
them as members of the same kind, there may be similarities of process
which still demand an explanation. And when accounting for these
common features we may be tempted to reintroduce essences through
the back door.

De landa intensive science