**Links to**: [[Evolution]], [[Attention]], [[11 Post-Control Script-Societies]], [[Scaling]], [[Biology]], [[Power]], [[Agency]], [[Freedom]], [[System]], [[Society]], [[Foucault]], [[Deleuze]], [[Postscript to the Societies of Control]], [[Control]], [[Cybernetics]], [[Discipline]], and much more. %% [[Notes on Function]] %% **A provisional definition of function**: the characteristic operation *or* effect that an individuated entity, system, or process produces and (temporarily) allows to persist and evolve within its context of interaction. Functions reveal themselves as crucial/salient/relevant/etc. at the time of observation, in their role within a larger system, but functions are always telos-dependent. Interpreting function as such, towards an interested analysis, allows us to focus on what something does (process) rather than what something is (identity), which has theoretical, practical and therefore political implications. Thinking about the tape and the machine again, about what agency we are witnessing as salient—the written or the writing?—it could be said that we only have subject/object re(ve)lations, or functions, through a lot of our languages: paths from **x** to **y**. Function allows us to move beyond that: we observe the _path(s)_, rather than the subject/object. This entry will be expanded in the future: #todo. >Biological adaptations are generally understood as opening new functionalities for organisms, new ecological niches that adaptations evolve to exploit and fill. With this understanding, we can ask what kind of functionalities cultural adaptations make available, and what kinds of niches they open up. On this basis, I judge that computational media, and especially AI, is the most important cultural adaptation since the invention of language. Consider the new functionalities created by computational media. Here is a partial list, which only reveals the tip of the iceberg: (1) the ability to create, process, and auto- mate large data sets too expansive for human-enacted arithmetic procedures; (2) the ability to automate sensors and actuators too extensive, remote, or sensitive for human operators alone to access and manipulate; (3) simulation modeling of large-scale phenomena such as the weather and climate change too vast and rapid for human-alone calculation; (4) real-time monitoring and analysis of global financial changes. > >K. Hayles, 2025, p. 13.   >Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. > >A. N. Whitehead, _Introduction to Mathematics_, p. 61.   >The opposition between engineering and the humanities can be caricatured as an opposition between positivism and hermeneutics, or between efficiency and reflexivity, but such a distinction, as Lyotard already noted while commenting on the Frankfurt School, is not acceptable, for the solution proposed by the latter “is no longer relevant” in postmodern societies, since this opposition ceases to function as a critical apparatus. > >Hui 2019, p. 211.   Or: critical function ceases, in other words. >Classical philosophy makes a strict distinction between subject and predicate or substance and property, whereas mannerism puts both terms in variation, such that predication becomes a matter of folding. ‘The real definition of the individual is concentration, accumulation, coincidence of a certain number of converging preindividual singularities.’ > >van Tuinen 2019, p. 78. See: [[06 Principle of Sufficient Interest]] and [[11 Post-Control Script-Societies]] for some unravelings on _function_. %% [[Notes on Function]]