**Links to**: [[12 Negintelligibility]], [[Free energy principle]], [[Assembly theory]], [[Complexity]], [[Pattern]], [[Patternicity]], [[Pattern recognition]], [[Equivalence and difference]], [[Rhythm]], [[Deleuze]], [[Schema]], [[Schematism]], [[Homotopy]], [[Homotopy Type Theory]], [[Entropy]], [[Entropic Brain]] _What follows below is are notes for a presentation given at TUWien, as I use this website to present my work in person. It is very much work in progress and should probably not have been published here, but having it published urges me to attend to it **asap**._ #todo # The [Devil](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEj5iE2juQg) ![[ML Williams record.png]] %% look into Enrique Llama for thoughts on assemblage %% # Recap: Satan’s schematism round 1 in Rotterdam, _negintelligibility_ - Intelligence is the _organized_ capacity to perform simple to complex (and vice versa) operations in the perceiving and performing patterns. - Patterns are repetitions of difference that structure perception-action and changes in patterns dictate the adaptations of intelligence. - Intelligibility is patterned, and negintelligibility resists the patterning persistence of intelligence. - The transitions between complexity and simplicity are dictated by the meta-pattern of negintelligibility as that which drives the ever-catching up advances of intelligibility. - The analogy with negentropy explains this relationship: [[Negentropy]] refers to the measure (measurable!) of organized, enduring observable structure in a system. It is paired vis-a-vis entropy, which is a measure of non-measurability: where all parts appear to interact in ontological indistinguishability (or irrelevance). We use negentropy to refer to the measure of distinguishable pattern, to the amount of ‘order’ or structure that can be extracted from or created through a system. Negentropy maintains a spatiotemporal level of ‘organization’ by pooling resources, by corralling available energy towards self-preservation in the face of what seems to be a relentless move towards structurally self-similar entropy. Intelligibility is the degree to which negentropy can or cannot assess its environment for patterns in the search for potential energy transactions and beyond (pleasure, reproduction, etc.). By analogy: [[12 Negintelligibility]] is part and parcel to intelligibility (remember discussions yesterday about collective thought challenging itself relentlessly). That is: the agent is to its environment what the permanent redefinition of pattern or relevance is to the patterned or already-intelligible. _Negintelligibility_ is an attempt at giving a name to the basic idea that the unknown is the pulling attractor for the known. Or that surprise is what drives search. We can define the ‘outer edges’ of pattern-detection and formation as that which is negintelligible, as a meta-pattern within the patterned panorama of intelligibility, which permanently resists the advances of the patternal. Going into the complexity measures, beyond FEP, but FEP (see [[Free energy principle]]) is treated elsewhere too. AT was just the newest thing I came across. More Deleuze, and using Assembly theory (AT) but I could use other presentations of indices of complexity. However, AT is the first to propose (perhaps to its own demise) to be able to deal with complexity from molecules all the way up to human systems. Elsewhere we talk about Michael Levin’s work on [[Polycomputation]] and Carhart-Harris’ work on [[Entropic Brain]] theory, which are related. # Satan’s Schematism, round 2: Assembly and Assemblage ### [[Postulate]]: assembly theory (Sharma, Cronin, Walker, et al.) and assemblage theory (D&G) can be fruitfully compared. [[Pattern]]s are of (functional) interest. >“Always look for the molecular, or even submolecular, particle with which we are allied.” (ATP, p. 11). >“[A] concept is a complex relation between conceptions, an assemblage [agencement] of preconceptual intuitions.” (Viveiros de Castro, 2014 (2009), p. 192). ![[diagram in complexity book Zurek 1990, page xiv.png|300]] <small> Fig 1. Wheeler diagram in Complexity book, ed. W. H. Zurek 1990, page xiv.</small> %% See: [[Flatness]] note on eve and not, Perhaps use to explain assemblage you do not mean DeLanda’s assemblage %% ### Abstract Life reveals and sustains itself through patterns. Patterns (regularities which necessarily exist _before_ life, and which can be latched onto and/or created by it) are the very conditions of spatiotemporal experience. The search for metapatterns in these patterns, a common goal for philosophy and much of science, can be said to reveal a desire for a synthesis between biology (that which sustains cognition and philosophy) and engineering (that which sustains cognition and science). The metapattern of these research patterns, therefore, seems geared towards the construction of something capable of revealing-engendering novel life patterns. This much seems, to me, obvious, but as will be seen: the argument has its intricacies (the devil is, yet again, in the details). This is where it becomes interesting to compare two historically differing approaches to organisms and their levels of complexity: Deleuze and Guattari’s _assemblages_, and Marshall, Sharma, Cronin, Walker, et al.’s _assembly theory_. As will be seen, it is no surprise they share an almost identical name. An assemblage—_agencement_ in D&G’s original context—is a philosophical proposition for the systemic acknowledgement of unavoidable multiplicity: dynamic, interlocked and interlocuted complexity. Assemblages are saying-doings. Assembly theory is a recent proposal for a new understanding of complexity in the organization of things that make themselves (i.e., life). Assembly theory puts the concept of assemblage to work in order to figure out the rhythms and logic of complex systems such as organic life. In this proposal we expose a comparison between assembly-theoretic foundations and assemblages as a fact of life. Notions of difference and equivalence temper the entire sequence that will follow, and chase after the question: _which came first: difference or equivalence?_ ### Introduction Life reveals itself through patterns. And so does everything else (all the way up to intelligence, see also [[12 Negintelligibility]]). The most relentless pattern we know of, that of thermal equilibrium, is arguably the simplest or the most complex pattern historicomaterial study has been able to make sense of, so far. Within pockets of disequilibrium, including rocks and gases, we search for _life_. Life organizes itself according to patterns which engineering knows it’s got some sort of a hold on. Why do we want to know what life is when it is all around us? One of the most apparent reasons is because knowing what it could be, beyond what we perceive it to be now, could reveal another logic to path-finding in pattern-engineering. Another seemingly harmless pattern is that knowledge seems to advance by distancing (or folding onto) itself: knowing as knowing as knowing as knowing as, etc. Seeing something _as_, that is, in the disguise of its totality, engenders new possible worlds, because (something about) its pattern is revealed, and thus so is its (possible) edge, its limit. In the context of a possible resemblance between animal cognition and programmed, machine-embodied cognition, the appeal of common, medium-crossing patterns and their limits seems more than obvious. Equivalence in difference, or difference in equivalence. Please note _equivalence_ is preferred over _identity_, as an opposite, for reasons that will be be explained later (hint: it has to do with repetition, A = A). The ultimate synthesis between biology and engineering is capable of revealing-engendering vast new worlds. This is where it becomes interesting to compare two vastly scale-differing approaches to organisms and complexity: Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages, and Marshall, Sharma, Cronin, Walker, et al’s assembly theory. As will be seen, it is no surprise they share an almost identical name.^[Ironically, though, their names would make more sense switched around: the etymological roots of assemblage are closer to clumps of matter than those of assembly, which are related to social groupings. Additionally, _agencement_ also implies arrangement, in the sense of _deal_, agreement to something, i.e.: having something in common (a pattern). Additionally, as John Phillips shows in his brief 2006 opinion article “Agencement/Assemblage”: “_Agencement_ is a common French word with the senses of either ‘arrangement’, ‘fitting’ or ‘fixing’ and is used in French in as many contexts as those words are used in English: one would speak of the arrangement of parts of a body or machine; one might talk of fixing (fitting or affixing) two or more parts together; and one might use the term for both the act of fixing and the arrangement itself, as in the fixtures and fittings of a building or shop, or the parts of a machine. ... {_Assemblage_’s} use as a translation of _agencement_ ... is ... in danger of missing what is really forceful with regard to knowledge in Deleuze and Guattari’s usage. The most direct connection that _agencement_ has for Deleuze would be to his work from the late 1960s on the philosophy of Spinoza and the common notion{:} ... the situation when two or more bodies have something in common. All bodies have in common the states of extension, motion and rest; but when two or more bodies come into contact or otherwise enter into a relationship they form a composition. A common notion is the representation of this composition as an independent unity. ... Deleuze and Guattari, first in their 1975 book on Franz Kafka, and then in _A Thousand Plateaus_, mobilize this sense of _agencement_ and the term itself begins to shift, to break up and to participate in further connections. The ‘collective _agencement_ of enunciation’ designates the language system to which all speakers of a language belong; the ‘social _agencement_ of desire’ designates the individual’s relation to his objects; and the ‘machinic _agencement_’ exceeds both the planes of enunciation and desire, recombining them in further enunciative events. The translation of _agencement_ by _assemblage_ might have been justified as a further event of _agencement_ (assemblage) were it not for the tendency of discourses of knowledge to operate as statements about states of affairs. The statement, as Deleuze and Guattari tirelessly insist, tends to undo _assemblages_, to take things apart, to divide things from each other, to divide, fundamentally, the subject of the statement (the sense and reference of a statement) from its enunciation (the conditions on which one can make a statement at all).” (pp. 108-9).] An assemblage—_agencement_ in D&G’s original context, see footnote {1}—is a philosophical proposition for systemic, networked, inter-locuted semeiotic relationality: a metastable pattern. Systemic because it is observed across parts; networked because it is composed of interacting elements, inter-locuted because it is expressed, pronounced, semeiotically relational (Peirce) because it is of _signs_: things which coincide with pattern-perception. This is necessarily metastable because, it seems, we are able to witness things like evolution. “An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.” (ATP, p. 8). %% Such an idea is the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of “assemblage” (the often-discussed translation for the French “ agencement”). An assemblage, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the coming together of heterogeneous components, and such a coming together is the first and last word of existence. I do not first exist and then enter into assemblages. Rather, my existence is my very participation in assemblages, because I am not the same person when I write and as I am when I wonder about the efficacy of the text after it is written down. I am not gifted with agency or intention. Instead, agency—or what Deleuze and Guattari call “desire”—belongs to the assemblage as such, including those very particular assemblages, called “reflexive assemblages,” which produce an experience of detachment, the enjoyment of critically testing previous experience in order to determine what is “really” responsible for what. Another word for this kind of agency that doesn’t belong to us is animation. Relating animism to the efficacy of “assemblages” is a dangerous move, however, because it may well reassure us a bit too easily. It is part of our fabrication as readers, to feel free to ponder without experiencing the existential consequences of our questions. For instance, we may be tempted to understand assemblages as an interesting concept among others, pondering its connections with other concepts—that is, without feeling our intentional stance threatened by its demand. And also without fearing the suspicious gaze of the inquisitors, without feeling the smoke in our nostrils. We are protected by the references we quote. (Stengers 2012, p. 6) “...a finite number of components yields a practically unlimited diversity of combinations.” (Deleuze, 1988, p. 131, quoted in Rieder 2020, translation amended by Rieder: “While the common translation of ‘fini-illimité’ as ‘unlimited finity’ may be more elegant than ‘fini-unlimited’, this amounts to a rather drastic change in emphasis.” Bernhard Rieder, Engines of Order, 2020, p. 31. %% Assembly is theory is a new proposal (though its novelty claims are disputed, more on this below) for understanding the organization of things that make themselves (i.e., life). According to one of the thinkers behind assembly theory, Leroy Cronin, a remarkable feature about the emergence of novelty is that it is fundamentally unpredictable. This pronouncement resounds the words of foundational information-thinkers such as Wheeler (“it from bit”,^[“It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.” (Wheeler in Zurek 1990, p. 5). Figure below, for amusement purposes: “Symbolic representation of the “telephone number” of the particular one of the 2^n conceivable, but by now indistinguishable, configurations out of which this particular blackhole, of Bekenstein number N and horizon area 4N ĥ $\text{log}_e$ 2, was put together. Symbol, also, in a broader sense, of the theme that _every_ physical entity, every it, derives from bits. Reproduced from JGST, p. 220; reprinted by permission of Freeman Pub. Co.” (ibid., p. 7). ![[Wheeler, Symbolic representation of a blackhole.png|500]]] “no continuum”, “more is different”: the informatic dialectic): “The world cannot be a giant machine, ruled by any pre-established continuum physical law.” (Wheeler in Zurek 1990, p. 3). Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari insist in ATP that the constants—i.e., “lines and measurable speeds” (ATP p. 4)—and variables—noise, novelty and other metamorphoses—that _be(come)_ assemblages, are interesting to the extent that they can be observed as things that are _plugged into_ each other: synthesis, not analysis, is of interest. At least: levels of interacting analysis need to be acknowledged as assemblages, over representations of systems. Joining this chant are also Longo and Montévil: “The increasing complexity of biological structures has been often denied in order to oppose finalistic and anthropocentric perspectives, which viewed life as aiming at Homo sapiens as the “highest” result of the (possibly intelligent) evolutionary path.” (Longo & Montévil 2012, p. 5). The fact that biology effectuates conceptuality[^9] is a fantastic feat of our meager existence, and this is why the mega-generalistic and abstract concept[^9] that is the assemblage is interesting to compare to speculations about the assembly fundamentals of biology itself: how does matter think itself? This question is worth pursuing, without further explanation as to why. Additionally, because comparing different levels of analysis leads to new scale-free insights (metametametapatterns), it seems fruitful to compare and contrast assembly theory and assemblages. Lastly: “When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate.” (ATP, p. 8). This is the type novelty that is interesting to both assembly and assemblage, and that is as far as our argument will go. First hint at initial equivalence/difference question: we seem to preserve patterns, which are made up of differences. Why prioritize one over the other one, or how to see this duality differently (ouch)? The prioritization impulse gives me the hint that equivalence is preferred over difference. Memory is generalistic, equalizing, but, crucially: tempered by difference, that which stands _out_ is that which remains. In assembly theory we look for the unique, most compressed differential pattern that leads to the sort of equivalence that is the preservation of an organism through its temporal iterations. In the case of assemblages, the components can be material or constraint-like, which is not to say immaterial but spatiotemporally similarly supervening over materiality in various spatiotemporal ways (this is clear in the case of e.g., abstractions, family-traits, ideologies, etc.). Assemblages are, however, temporary and can change over time, adapting to new circumstances involving the coexistence of diverse elements without clear subordination. The type of organizing subordination we are called upon to observe in AT is that of organic _matter_ as something which does not explore possibilities at random but has indeed succeeded to preserve a type of memory that has **preferred** states, maintains coherence in light of randomness (entropy) and, additionally, appears to evolves _functionality_.^[Links to Juarrero, Longo, teleodynamics in Deacon, etc.] First we will treat assembly theory, second: we will look at assemblages (interassemblages, transindividuation), third: the making of demons (Heraclitus, Satan, genies and bottles, etc), fourth: synthesis. Conclusion: is cognizing/building **beyond** difference and equivalence something possible/worth talking about? ### Assembly Assembly theory (AT) is a new proposal for the identification of biosignatures beyond earth, proposed in order to “comprehend how diverse, open-ended forms can emerge from physics without an inherent design blueprint” (Sharma et al. 2023). The intention behind its typology is to score the complexity of molecules (and beyond) on an assembly index (AI) scale. This index is that which is able to elucidate how living chemistry arrives at what it is by exploring-exploiting the physical constraints available to it, and differing from them on a scale of complexity. Determining the AI means arriving at the most compressed pattern in a molecular pattern, enabling an observer to determine the build-up of a (complex) molecular system. The idea behind the AI—also termed _molecular assembly_ (MA)—is thus to insist on the difference between life and non-life, by demonstrating that high-index molecules “are very unlikely to form abiotically, and the probability of abiotic formation goes down as MA increases” (Marshall et al. 2021, p. 3). A crucial parallel with traditional difference/repetition impressions by Deleuze is that: 1) repetition is impossible and 2) difference tempers all operations, leading to permanent change. A highly historicomaterialist enterprise, AT “conceptualizes objects not as point particles, but as entities defined by their possible formation histories” (Sharma et al. 2013, p. 322), thus opening up an analysis of their structure in light of their formative processes (in D&G terminology: as both _molar_: restricted, resolute, and _molecular_: combinatorial and unstable). This process-oriented definition of “an assembly space as all recursively assembled pathways {and number of steps: classical algorithmic formalization} that produce it” is not unlike the differential recognition of complexity in the idea of assemblages: “The problem of the organism—how to “make” the body an organism—is once again a problem of articulation, of the articulatory relation ... by virtue of a machine or machinic assemblage that stratifies it.” (ATP, p. 41). In ATP “Deleuze and Guattari will describe the process by which sedimentary rock is formed out of a field through a process they call, following the linguists, “double articulation” {in the sedimentation of rock, what makes rock rock} There must be a machine of sedimentation that selects and deposits. ... The first articulation is the selection of differences pertaining to all of these different bodies; their unique properties.” (Bryant, 2016, p. 301-2). The “basic building blocks” (Sharma et al. 2013, p. 321) as terminology, as articulation that breaks an otherwise continuous (or smooth) structure/logic/phenomenon, are what presents a challenge with regard to the level of analysis we are after: whether this be perspectival monads, relational folds or atoms and molecules. If the authors of AT claim to be able to go all the way up to complex systems such as memes, we need to believe the connection between assembly and assemblage to be possible. The not-yet-AT-textbook, but very much compression algorithm textbook example given to illustrate this indexing of complexity (in terms of redundancy) is that of **ABRACADABRA**. We look at the smallest (relevant) patterns this pattern is composed of: **A, B, C, D, R**, and then we look at the (longest) repeating chunks of uniqueness: **ABRA, CAD**, etc. and how they combine and result in our original object. This is clearly, in essence, no different than the definition of information as contained in a sequentially-readable object introduced by Solomonoff, Kolmogorov and Chaitin (Zurek 1990, p. ix), where the complexity of a structure is defined by the shortest program that can generate the structure anew (on a Turing machine). Some authors such as Hector Zenil have criticized AT for actually describing something that is indeed akin to Kolmogorov, Huffman compression or Shannon entropy, but applied to the “counting exact copies of molecular sequences, a method which has been used ([and abused](https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/22/6/612)) in every popular lossless compression algorithm since the 1960s (like GZIP) to approximate algorithmic complexity” (Zenil 2023). According to Zenil, what the AT authors implement is “none other than a compression algorithm (a very simple and weak resource-bounded version of Kolmogorov complexity, and a trivial version of [our own, the Block Decomposition Method](https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/20/8/605)), even openly adopting the language of compression — using terms like ‘shortest paths’, ‘smallest number of steps’ {yet they do} not compare their resource-bounded measure with any other under the false grounds that others are, presumably according to the authors, ‘uncomputable’.” (ibid.). Our interest in this text, however, is the exposition of a similar difference/equivalence trope found in both D&G and AT, not a defense of AT, or D&G for that matter. But what is of interest here is the argument that AT makes with regard to the importance of context^[Also to be found in Alicia Juarrero’s call for attention to constraints versus causes (2023).] and history is functionally similar to the argument in ATP that form (or code) cannot be dissociated from substance (or territory), in other words the reversible trope of _form = function_. The problems of “centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization, and finalization” (ATP, p. 41) that emerge from representationally **molar** (“basic building blocks” in AT) or binary-insisting articulations is similarly countered in assembly theory by their definition of _object_: >“An object is finite, is distinguishable, persists over time and is breakable such that the set of constraints to construct it from elementary building blocks is quantifiable. This definition is, in some sense, opposite to standard physics, which treats objects of interest as fundamental and unbreakable (for example, the concept of ‘atoms’ as indivisible, which now applies to elementary particles).” (Sharma et al. 2023, p. 322). This is not unlike D&G’s suggestion that multiplicities can be counted, measured, etc. but never exhausted: this is what makes them assemblages; relationships that are unbound (perhaps, in a Gödelian vein, because of our incapacity to be the system and its observation at the same time). Interestingly, it is also noteworthy to bring in the _image of language_ blindness^[“Image of language” is Gastaldi’s dictum after Deleuze’s _image of thought_. ] in attempts to formalize language (i.e., _be_ the system), that leads to proposals such as assemblages as generative ideas that _border_ on the formalizing or referential functions of language, precisely because they are unstable (or “distinct-obscure” as opposed to “clear and distinct”, Deleuze on Leibniz, 1967, p. 90). In Quine’s famous definition of being (seeking to avoid Russell’s paradox of self-reference): to be, is to be the value of a bound variable^[A bound variable, in predicate logic, is an x or a y (that is: a variable) that can be changed while the statement in a well-formed formula does not change in meaning, or _formulation_.] (Quine, **year**). What it is to be an object is thus defined by the _scope_ it has over a certain domain. This quantification/qualification of being seeks to abandon reference, and instead appeal to logical classes and their objects, rather than infinitely-regress in a language which supposedly refers to reality. The interesting phenomenon here, however, is how this language is referring to itself, and thus generating these curiosities or “folds” on itself: moving language forward by saying that it is something else. In both assemblage and assembly: we do not know what a body can do (“we do not know what signatures are unique to life”, Marshall et al 2021, p. 1),^[“Such an approach is vital for finding life elsewhere in the universe or creating de-novo life in the lab.” (ibid.).] and that’s exactly what where we want to be if combinatorial novelty is what we are after. Virtuality, for Deleuze, or unpredictability for the authors of AT, is a feature not a bug: the number “1” holds an infinity of functional options, as does the tail of a dog. Taking account of the observation of functionality is what is key: in physics functionality as a telos is ignored (see also [[Teleodynamics]]), in biology the tautology of “natural selection” conceptually impedes looking at _constraints_ rather than individual survivors/traits. It is histories, which repeat themselves by way of a highly differential operation, rather than individuals that we are interested in when we look for biosignatures. Initial conditions are not enough for the emergence of novel properties in complex systems. Emergence, however, is also noted by Chris Fields, is merely a term for the lack of scale-free analysis possibilities. Linking this back to the evolution of language, if, as Jameson proposes, “A schematism is the X-ray of a concept; its premise being that, like an atom, a concept (whether scientific, ideological, philosophical, or even narrative) contains within itself smaller units and their relationships, which remain invisible to the naked eye” (2023, p. 31), then understanding the relationship(s) between different levels of description/analysis, will lead to learning more about scale-free properties. Any model of a system is differential by nature, change (difference) _is_ perception, we know there cannot be a model which is “total” or static: it is always constructive, and AT aims to look more precisely at this relational, constructive complexity and its history. Again, AT has been subject to the criticisms that it does not go beyond comparable proposals of determining algorithmic complexity, failing to provide a computable methodology that exceeds “trivial statistical repetitions” (Uthamacumaran et al., 2022). Some authors claim that AT is a “suboptimal weaker version of Shannon-Fano and Huffman’s encoding algorithms” (ibid., Zenil 2023). AT authors such as Cronin maintain that in the case of evolving organisms there is a fundamental difference between earlier approaches because AT provides a historically nuanced alternative to traditional data compression, which tends to ignore context and history.^[See Cronin defending himself on Lex Fridman interview 404. ] This criticism is beyond the scope of this text, and is dealt with elsewhere (see: [[Shannon entropy]], [[Kolmogorov complexity]], [[Algorithmic complexity]], [[LUCA]]). What is here considered interesting, especially when compared to assemblage, is, again: the level of analysis^[“We do not have units (_unites_) of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement.” (ATP, p. 8).] (see [[Agent]] for an explanation of what this comment entails), and the implications this has for the concepts of _difference_ and _equivalence_ that we are after in the larger scope of this project. Assembly theory focuses on the characteristics of molecular _life_. Life makes _repetitions_ of objects, against a background of what appear to be randomly shifting permutations of non-living matter. This means that life functions on the basis of some principle(s) of repeatability. The ability life has to proceed in what we observe as causality in time, through iterations, must mean it performs a pattern which differs from these random permutations observed in say, a gas cloud or a river stream.^[Although, again (and this is also dealt with in [[Free energy principle]]), this gets complicated in terms of life/non-life differentiations when we think about eddies in a stream or other types of patterns. Both Friston and Cronin maintain that life contains within it the capacity to reproduce itself beyond what, e.g., a hurricane can do, which is “appear” and “disappear”, effectuated by the laws of matter. But the laws that govern matter govern self-repeating patterns: we enter an apparent paradox and have to resort to thinking about levels of analysis rather than ultimate principles.] With regard to this, Sharma et al. maintain that “assembly differs from entropy because of its explicit dependence on the contingency in construction paths intrinsic to complex objects.” (2023, p. 322). As Longo, Montevil and Kauffman (2011), and Sha (2023), also maintain: because we cannot predict the emergence of functionality in biological life (e.g., to reiterate we need only a simple example like degeneracy), we cannot integrate the dynamics of life into generalized function-models like algorithms. This would hint, in our proposal, at the idea that _difference_ entails equivalence/preservation, not the other way around. Preservation is only the preservation of differential immanence, and its analysis depends on the regulation of processing speed (leading to dimensions all the way up to the ethicopolitical, more on this in [[Computational irreducibility]] and [[Entropic Brain]]). ![[cellular automata SEP screenshot.png|700]] <small>Some cellular automata, from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.</small> AT also asks to reconceptualize (the computability of) molecular functionality, by looking at its history in light of what appears to repeat itself (life). In the same vein, D&G ask to reconceptualize the image of thought where we deal with all models of representation as _imitations_ of the world (of something “real”, out there): “How could the law of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides over the very division between world and book, nature and art? ... contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome {that is: _assemblage_} with the world...” (ATP, pp. 5, 11). In a way that could be functionally compared: concepts^[A note on concept versus idea: Deleuze treats the “idea” as something virtual, multiplicitous (_Difference and Repetition_, p. 209), and more general than the concept, which is the subject and method of philosophy. We treat the concept, however, like Deleuze treats the idea. The concept is the ceiling.] (or ideas, as _assemblages_: ever-changing multiplicitous abstractions) exist as enduring phenomena which permutate against a random (i.e., lacking in information) background. Their persistence is due to them not being able to compose themselves out of compressed operations, but they appear in linguistic-cognitive structures (speech, text, etc.) where their possible assembly indices are more elusive than something we could “trace back” to a building-block pattern. We tend to look at histories: etymologies, phonology, _palate_ tectonics, etc., but their complexity is of a higher order than that of molecules, because molecules _precede_ concepts. As AT suggests, biology gives rise to e.g., universal Turing machines, not the other way around. To demand that the computability of complexity in molecular biology be amenable to a UTM seems to add “unrealistic dynamics” to their analysis (Sharma et al. 2023, p. 322). This proposal falls in line with our suggestion that the concept of assemblage can providing a relevant level of analysis for phenomena of another order of complexity. If we are to accept that the human brain is the most complex/complicated object we know of (a dictum much pronounced in today’s sciences across the board, attributed to Michio Kaku^[Kaku: “The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10,000 other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.” _University of Connecticut_, “The Most Complicated Object in the Universe”, accessed 7 Jan 2024.]), and concepts are the functional _currency_^[Currency is employed in its non-monetary sense here, as that which runs (_currere_) through a medium/network/etc.] of thought, then we need an abstract, conceptual language that deals with this. But whenever something “talks about itself,” we are often confronted with the necessity to put a formal stop to infinities (emerging from [[Self-reference]]), and the banal intuition proposed here is that this bottoms out at whether we treat the—or *certain*—functional attributes of concepts fundamentally *equalizing* or *differential*. So, whether, for example, we agree that when we employ the term/concept “dog” we accept that it always means the same thing (a schematic rule), or it includes within it all the vastness of dognesses out there (dog evolution-representation). It is, ultimately, the argument between being or becoming, stasis or process, representation or generativity. But how to temper these difference/equivalence paradoxes inherent to concepts? Perhaps this statement bottoms out at mathematics, as the language of languages and the most abstract level of analysis we know of today, but this is something treated elsewhere (see: [[Equivalence and difference]]). ![[yagmur denizhan, modelled and unmodelled.png]] <small>Yagmur Denizhan’s proposed representation for cognitive processes, as opposed to the traditional image below. The Model stands for one of the many context-specific models in the Edifice of Knowing, and the Modelled for its hypothetical ontic pre-image.</small> ![[yagmur agent disturbance traditional image.png]] <small>Yagmur Denizhan’s presentation of a classical model of agential information processing/control: “A generalised Closed-Loop scheme applicable to all information-related processes in technology. The Feedback Signal carries information about the System to the (artificial) Agent. The signal is processed to extract the pieces of information necessary to specify the indeterminacies (symbolised by the hatched pattern) in the Agent’s Model about how to interact with the given System in the given context.” </small> See: Denizhan’s [Intelligence as a Border Activity Between the Modelled and the Unmodelled](https://www-tandfonline-com.eur.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2216542), 2023. See also this footnote.^[ The “bias” in ML is that we aspire towards ‘spontaneously learned objectivity,’ an impossible task which forgets the gradual development of spatial interest.] ### Assemblage The idea of assemblage, interchangeably referred to as _multiplicity_ throughout ATP,^[Multiplicity being the vaster Deleuzian category for countering identity and other one/many dichotomies.] can be interpreted as the emergence of observable coherence which is nevertheless radically open to change. The fuzzy logic behind this concept can certainly be compared to e.g., degeneracy in biology: we do not observe the selection of a specific trait in light of a finite landscape of possibilities (better termed _virtualities_ in the case of Deleuze), but the evolution of _function_ itself. The virtuality of possible novelty clearly exists: else we would not observe the things we observe in organisms, as appearing to have the histories they do. This “carrying of their histories on their backs” (as Cronin often puts it) is precisely what assembly theory is after in analyzing biosignatures. Sharma et al. contend that “talking about true novelty is impossible in physical reductionism ... the open-ended generation of novelty does not fit cleanly in the paradigmatic frameworks of either biology or physics, and so must resort ultimately to randomness.” (2023, p. 321). What the authors imply, in light of the _repetition_/iteration that organic life depends upon, is that physics—as a view that _functionally_ lacks the idea of “functionality” in descriptions the universe—is not able to make a relevant assessment of teleology. Indeed, because however dependent on it (as is any pursuit), it is after a different level of analysis: one which puts teleology on hold while it examines aspects of its development: imagine, e.g., the activity of measuring the temperature of water without the multiplicitous context that envelops that boiling water. The image proposed by an _assemblage_ is perhaps comparable to that of considering the measuring, the water, the multiplicitous contexts, etc., as an ensemble of dynamics which incessantly co-determine and elude each other: novelty emerges from ever-changing combinations of differential (but not always _distinguishable_) parts interacting at different levels of analysis-observation. “We will never ask what {an assemblage} means ... we will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed... An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.” (ATP, pp. 4-8). The questions asked by assembly theory are materialist, pragmatic, but also have an unavoidably ontological character. If we are to ascertain that _functionality_ is a key aspect of the theory, this functionality should be laid out in as full an extent as possible. In order to do so, we inevitably enter the philosophical domain (if we are to define information, etc.). In a view which takes Deleuze’s oeuvre panoramically, there are more than a few things to say about functionality, but generally, owing to his Spinozist and Nietzschean foundations, existing means we need to accept _immanence_: the individuation of singularities—how a bee becomes a bee, how an atom has qualities we are able to probe—cannot be simply _assumed_ to require a cause, order or logic. This is not to say the latter are useless concepts, but they are to be interrogated as _functions_. Just like AT asks to reconceptualize (the computability of) molecular functionality, Deleuze insists—along with Gilbert Simondon—on the abandonment of (Aristotelian) causal identity/ies, and the idea of matter as formless “stuff” upon which qualities/structures can be imprinted. We are to observe _univocity_, inseparability, in the being/becoming of all substance. If we are to recur back to the identification of anything, then this identification is the acknowledgement of pure difference(s). There is thus no transcendental, no sub-ordinance, no ground from which to start, which (to me) intuitively makes sense if we are to accept that we have suddenly appeared with no possibility of prior memory. All we latch onto as a general pattern is just a learning (or _habit_-uation), a recursive encounter with the multiplicity of being through embodiment, perception, language, etc. and all their (dis)tortions. Deleuze describes _assemblage_ as the “general logic” at work in _A Thousand Plateaus_ (1980, interview with Catherine Clément, cited in Nail 2017), however, as DeLanda notes, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage “hardly amounts to a fully fledged theory” (DeLanda cited in ibid.). But what would a “fully fledged” theory entail? Would this not be a bounded variable? Would this not formalize and make “clear and distinct,”, i.e., rigid? The answer to this question depends, again, on scale (processing speed). A body (or for AT: an object), whatever we isolate as a unit of living capacity, where its _living_ so defined by its affective/effective qualities, how it comes to interact with, and exert change on other bodies, milieus. But a body has no clear borders, it is highly dissipative. A body is also abstract, like a set, it can be a person, an animal, but also an idea, a crowd and collection of bodies. In their interactive connections, bodies can be understood as assemblages, or can form assemblages, and in the simplest of proposals, assemblages are the emergent, sustained qualities of grouped bodies. An organelle in an ant is a body, it assembles with the ant body, which itself assembles with the ant colony, which itself assembles with the environment, etc. An assemblage is, in a sense, the notion of an emergent dynamic open system, it is philosophically challenging of the idea of stable *identity*. In reflecting on the Spinoza’s focus of the body—and his overturning of the hierarchical Cartesian duality by stating that we do not know what it can do—Deleuze says: “One seeks to acquire a knowledge of the powers of the body in order to discover, _in a parallel fashion_, the powers of the mind that elude consciousness, and thus to be able to _compare_ the powers.” (Deleuze 1988, p. 18). This is “seeing as” at its best. Once we garnered the logic of A, we may compare that logic to the logic of B. In this focus on their double articulation,^[This statement is a simplification of a very complex phenomenon. See: [[Double articulation]].] by insisting on the lack of knowledge of the body, we acknowledge the un/sub/metaconscious of the mind, says Deleuze (ibid. p. 19). By comparing assemblages and the idea of assembly, we attempt to see beyond, and see the conjunction and divergence of their characteristics, in order to see _as_. D&G refer to revolutions in evolutionary thinking that seem to break with linear ordering: “evolutionary schemas may be forced to abandon the old model of the tree and descent.” (ATP, p. 10). Beyond their reference to nowadays outdated research by Benveniste and Todaro, we could think about something as “simple” as horizontal. As D&G continue musing on the sharing of _C_-type _viral_ genes by both domestic cats and baboons (Benveniste et al. 1975), they remark: “it is obvious that they are not models or copies of each other” (ATP, p. 10)—clearly: they have diverged, whence the difference? In AT we find the suggestion that evolutionary processes can be identified (or _defined)_, in contrast to other types of phenomena, “by the production of many identical, or near-identical, multistep objects.” (Sharma et al. 2023, p. 322). It is the assemblic complexity of these objects that grants them their index. ### Synthesis between _Assemblages_ and _Assembly_ “{W}e anticipate the theory to be **sufficiently general** to apply to a wide variety of other systems including polymers, cell morphology, **graphs, images, computer programs, human languages and memes**, as well as many others. The challenge in each case will be to construct an assembly space that has a clear physical meaning in terms of **what operations can be caused to occur to make the object**. (Sharma et al. 2023, p. 322, our emphasis). Let us connect this w/ Deleuze’s musings on the _Idea_ (which we refer to as ‘concept’ for our purposes, just like we refer to _intelligence_ over _reason_), and to human organization in general. Schematism as affordances (being perspectivally ingrained in a spectrum of action: life as pattern), affordances as (enabling) constraints: >What we call drama particularly resembles the Kantian schema. For the schema according to Kant is indeed an _a priori_ determination of space and time corresponding to a concept: _the shortest_ is the drama, the dream or rather the nightmare of the straight line. It is precisely the dynamism which divides the concept of line into straight and curved, and which, moreover, in the Archimedean conception of limits, allows the measurement of the curve as a function of the straight line. Only what remains quite mysterious is how the schema has this power in relation to the concept. In a certain way, the whole of post-Kantianism attempted to elucidate the mystery of this “hidden art," according to which the dynamic spatio-temporal dynamisms truly have the power to dramatise a concept, even though they are of a completely different nature. >The answer is perhaps in the direction indicated by certain post-Kantians: pure spatio-temporal dynamisms have the power to dramatise _concepts_, because in the first place they actualise or incarnate _Ideas_. We possess a point of departure in order to prove this hypothesis: if it is true that the dynamisms order the two inseparable aspects of differenciation—specification and division, qualification of a species and organisation of an extension—it would be necessary for the Idea to present in turn two aspects, from which these are derived in a certain way. We must thus question the nature of the Idea, on its difference in nature to the concept. > >Deleuze on dramatization, 1967, p. 96. Jameson on the rhizome, and lines: >In the latter {the rhizome} we find a primal indistinction that is not a first cause but rather an ur-indistinction {Z.f.: difference, noise, symmetry-breaking}, some first blooming, buzzing confusion of the world before concepts or differences. In the former, oppositions have not only appeared but they already exist in linear form, like so many parallel lines that fail to touch even when extended to infinity—stark difference in other words, which at once provocatively invites the ever alert practices of homologizing inasmuch as parallels solicit analogy and ultimately sameness. > >Jameson 2023, pp. 38-9. Speaking of the possibility of a “truly unifying,” universal science of organization, Alexander Bogdanov (1911) says: >From the most primitive cosmic combination of elements to artistic creativity—which is by all appearances the highest and, so far, the least understood form of organisational activity—everything will then be elucidated, clarified, and harmoniously interconnected by the conclusions of the formally organised experience of the whole of humanity. >But, the reader asks, is such a science possible? Is it possible to generalise and reduce to a unity what would seem to be heterogeneous—the methods by which nature operates in its spontaneous creation of forms of movement and life and the methods by which humanity operates in its diverse forms of labour and thought? >In principle the answer is very simple. History sets tasks, and so far humanity has resolved all the tasks that history has set for it. Humanity continually organises for itself the most alien and the most hostile forces of the universe; it will also be able to organise for itself, in the process of its cognition, the same methods of organisation. No one has ever proven that anything has existed—in the world, in experience, or in human activity—that is essentially inaccessible to organising efforts. The only question and doubt is _how much_ such effort and how much labour energy will be necessary for resolving a task and whether humanity has accumulated _sufficient_ energy to be able to bring the task to a successful conclusion. But we will discover this only in practice.” (pp. 22-23, Bogdanov, cited in Wark 2019, tr. David Rowley). This is truly telling, written more than 100 years ago, of the impetus of both assemblage and assembly theory. Some parallels are: - Combinatorial speculation in/towards scale-free patterns; - the shortest path towards some-_thing_ (and in homotopy type theory); - the desiring machine of organization against itself ([[12 Negintelligibility]]); - how much _effort_ does something take, FEP, Occam’s razor: what is the way, what is the perspective, what is the path, what are the building blocks; - discovery only in immanence/practice; - Very, very, very important: remembering and forgetting (Deleuze in DR), and assembly theory suggesting that high assembly index things have, essentially, a lot of memory, which they also forget (though the entire universe remembers). Bogdanov goes on: >Finally, let us compare the realm of life with the realm of so-called inorganic or inert nature. Exactly the same model—the rhythm of waves—is endlessly repeated in both realms in the most heterogeneous processes. We find it in the movement of the sea, in the phenomenon of sound, in the radiant energy of light and electricity, and—in astronomy—in the change of relationships of planets to their central sun. But it is also found in the fluctuation of the pulse, the breathing of animals, even in psychical changes of attention. The same model also governs well-organised work and artistic creativity, such as rhythm in music and poetry, and so on without end. The most dissimilar elements known to us, elements that are incommensurable both quantitatively and qualitatively, group themselves according to one type. >It would be naïve and unscientific to consider all these and countless other similar facts to be chance analogies; the theory of probability would unquestionably not allow this. The only possible conclusion is this: >_There exist general methods and natural regularities according to which the most varied elements of the universe are organised into complexes._ >This proposition provides the basis for the great new science that will take over from philosophy in order to resolve the tasks that are beyond the power of philosophy. With the help of this new science, humanity will be able systematically and comprehensively to organise its creative powers, its life. > >(ibid. p. 25). %% Alluring, suggesting, specious, inducing, capturing, mesmerizing—all our words express the ambivalence of lure. Whatever lures us or animates us may also enslave, and all the more so if taken for granted. Scientific experimental crafts, which dramatically exemplify the metamorphic efficacy of assemblage conferring on things the power of “animating” the scientist into feeling, thinking, imagining, are also a dramatic example of this enslaving power. What I would call with Whitehead an “imperfect realization” of what they achieve has unleashed a furious conquest in the name of which scientists downgrade their achievements, presenting them as mere manifestation of objective rationality. But the question of how to honor the metamorphic efficacy of assemblages—neither taking it for granted nor endowing it with supernatural grandiosity—is a matter of concern for all “magic” crafts, and more especially so in our insalubrious, infectious milieu. And it is because that concern may be common, but can receive no general answer, that reclaiming magic can only be a rhizomatic operation. A rhizome rejects any generality. Connections do not manifest some truth about what is common beyond the rhizomatic heterogeneous multiplicity—beyond the multiplicity of distinct pragmatic significations associated with “magic” as related to what we call politics, healing, education, arts, philosophy, sciences, agriculture, or to any craft requiring or depending upon a capacity to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention. The only generality here is about our milieu and its compulsion to categorize and judge—and spiritualism is here a probable judgment—or to negate whatever would point to the metamorphic dimension of what is to be achieved. Rhizomatic connections may be a non-general answer to this generality. Each “magic” craft needs connections with others in order to resist infection by the milieu, the divisive power of social judgment, to smell the smoke that demands we decide whether we are heirs to the witches or the witch hunters. But connections may also be needed to heal and to learn. Where the dangerous art of animating in order to be animated is concerned, what connects may be practical learning about the needed immanent (critical) attention. Not about what is good or bad in itself, but about what Whitehead called realization. Again, no mode of realization may be taken as a model, only as calling for pragmatic reinvention. In order to honor the making of connections, to protect it against models and norms, a name may be required. Animism could be the name for this rhizomatic art. Reclaiming animism does not mean, then, that we have ever been animist. Nobody has ever been animist because one is never animist “in general,” only in terms of assemblages that generate metamorphic transformation in our capacity to affect and be affected—and also to feel, think, and imagine. Animism may, however, be a name for reclaiming these assemblages, since it lures us into feeling that their efficacy is not ours to claim. Against the insistent poisoned passion of dismembering and demystifying, it affirms that which they all require in order not to enslave us: that we are not alone in the world. Stengers 2012, pp. 7-8 %% The only hard **disagree** here is: what is wrong with “mere” chance? This is treated in [[09 C is for Communism, and Constraint|09 C is for Communism, and Constraint]] and [[B The being of “mere” machines and “mere” propositions]]. # Further discussion: [[Equivalence and difference]], the line, persistence versus symmetry-breaking, relative speed and scale-free dynamics analysis. _Close with:_ # Music and speech patterns ![[diana deutsch, sometimes behave so strangely.png]] <small>Diana Deutsch, The music in the speech phrase ‘sometimes behave so strangely’ as it appears to be sung after it has been repeated several times. Also termed the “speech to song illusion”.</small> [Speech to song](https://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=212) Could also show: Shepard, phantom words, but also optical illusions: #### Ryota Kanai, Healing Grid illusion, Utrecht University, 2005. ![[THE HEALING GRID, RYOTA KANAI, UTRECHT UNIVERSITY, 2005.png]] <small>The Healing Grid, Ryota Kanai, Utrecht University, 2005.</small> Continue notes with: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780748691555-008/html #todo ## Footnotes %% What is an Assemblage? Author(s): Thomas Nail Source: SubStance, Vol. 46, No. 1, ISSUE 142: Assemblages: (Pre)Political, Ethical and Ontological Perspectives (2017), pp. 21-37 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26451291 Accessed: 23-02-2025 06:35 UTC