Making Up Our Minds: Imaginative Deconstruction in MathArt, 1920 – Present

SPEAKER_00: Hello, it is October 14th, 2022, at least where I slash we are, and it's ActInf guest stream number 29.1. We are revisited by Shana Dobson, and today we'll be discussing the paper... with Dobson and Fields, Making Up Our Minds, Imaginative Deconstruction in Math Art, 1920 to the Present. We'll have a presentation with some interspersed discussion followed by more discussion. So thank you again for joining and please take it away. SPEAKER_02: Hi, Daniel. Thank you again for the invite. Thank you for noticing our paper and for welcoming us here. So we will be discussing and deconstructing the idea of personality and mind and self. through a very beautiful interlay of math art, as we call it. So we're going to lay down this sort of heavy argument about what we're actually lacing together. And then we're going to end with juxtaposing two mathematical giants, Groth and Deacon Erdos, and using them as a case point to evaluate this investigation of ours into why we're saying the mind is made up and what the self is. So it's a little text heavy, but we're going to pause every once in a while so that we can get, you know, understand what's actually happening here. I think no figure would do justice to what we're saying, possibly the perfectoid shape I have on the front, which I've talked about before, but I'll save the mathy part for the ending part. So the main idea, what we say, oh, and I want to say we also gave a snippet of this talk at the recent Models of Consciousness conference in Stanford, so people want to look at it there. But you can find the paper on the Phil Archive right now. So the main idea is that the cognitive sciences actually tell us that the self is a construct. So we're actually going to use mathematics to give it full expression and actually abstract the self to what we're calling a Grothendieck site. So the self is... is going to be what Deleuze and Guattari have called a hesaity. So it's an actual ephemeral this-ness and now-ness. And so we actually claim that we actually make up our minds. So when we're saying making up our minds, we actually were playing there. So that our acts are public and that they communicate effectively becomes what we're going to call a dialetheistic paradox. So it's a limit paradox. that happens when thought runs up against its own limits. And as you all know, like Chris and I are not afraid to sort of like, let's take this concept and push it, push it till it breaks, or in the words of like Bards, push it past the antiphrastical recrimination. So we love playing around in this heavy, heavy intersection of math philosophy, philosophy of mind, to figure out like What is this self? So we invoke a new mathematical formalism by Peter Schulze and Dustin Claussen called a condensed set to formalize the notion of a self as a site. So we're going to mathematize what the self is. And then we're going to create an event-dependent constructed time of retrospective and perspective memories. Event-dependent, not that it's independent. And so this is an alternative to the objective time of temporal logic and its descendants. So we discussed this in the paper, and I'm trying to give a snippet. So in essence, this new condensed formalism that's going to invoke some sheaves gives a representation to how a self as a site experiences memory. So if you remember, Chris and I are very puzzled by why do you experience memories? Not why do you have them? You can have some kind of like, you know, acceptation argument about why you actually have a memory, right? And going down the DNA line and stuff like that. But why do you experience memory? And can you imagine the first creature that actually did? So if we actually authenticate an object by observing it again, and that requires a lot of memory through the RAM, and we conclude that an inferential action or a creation has returned. So we play around with this notion of return in the sense of eternal return and sense of Nietzsche. Deleuze does a…