TOTALITY | SINGULARITY:

The self-moving Subject in modern Chinese history 1740-1949 (the decline and fall of value-resistant forms of praxis)

A system’s observed behaviour is not necessarily reflective of the nature (the complexity) of the underlying dynamics behind that behaviour. Things look different from the outside. Endophysics is the body of facts, models, theories that the observer within the system can gain about the system itself; it is asking how the system appears to the internal observer. Endophysics, in contrast, models the entire universe of discourse from the outside. Consequently, the interface of the observer and the system-under-study – an interface which constitutes the measuring instrument – must be taken into account as a necessary dimension of the process-as-observed: “Computational complexity cannot be an intrinsic property of a physical system but “…emerges from the interaction of system state dynamics and measurement as established by an observer” (Crutchfield, 1993).

What is there in §§26-28 of the Preface and also at the closing of (AA) is Hegel’s continuing attempt to negotiate the intricacies of this interface over the course of its own fluid dialectic. This will be seen reflected by Marx as he deals with bourgeois political economy. Below provides a rough schematic.

How the ‘observer’ is defined by Crutchfield is a useful shorthand for our own approach to understanding process in the Phenomenology, too, so we will quote at length: “…the interaction of an observer and the system-under-study can lead to significant limitations on what the observer can infer from experimentation. The interaction is called a measurement; the effective dynamics of the interaction is an instrument. [the significance of the instrument as a mediating element between the observer and the system under-study – all three of which are of the same substance, the universe of discourse – to observation and action as construed by Hegel in the Phenomenology and to the generalized conception of triadic strucutres should be noticed here - AG] I see no way in principle to distinguish in a physical theory the notions in each of these pairwise identifications. The usual distinction is based on measurement (say) having something to do with the intentionality of an observer; namely, the observer intends to model the system-under-study. And this is tantamount to invoking some sort of “intelligence” to describe to describe the capabilities of one part of the universe of discourse. But the point is, as far as we know at this time, there is no physical basis for identifying intelligent subsystems. Thus, if system S1 “interacts” with system S2, then S1 “measures” some aspect of S2’s state. Information is transferred, possibly both ways…Until we can define and detect intelligent subsystems in physical terms, we are left with these identifications” (1993: 6).

It should be seen, on the one hand, that even were this objective to be realized, measurement could and should be reducible to these terms (here is also a foreshadowing of how we will return to this in the following major section on Marx, where the Subject will be defined, contra Hegel, as one without intrinsic intelligence); on the other, this final sentence is (a) a corollary of Hegel’s own research goal, expressed (also quoted above) as “culture’s laborious emergence, and (b) expressive of the underlying framework within which Hegel’s metaphysics and conception of godhood can be compared to that of Spinoza.

It will be further useful to explore how the notion of ‘hierarchical machine reconstruction’ – the modeling of dynamical process to provide a measure of their intrinsic computational complexity – corresponds to the process described by Hegel in terms of the encounter between self-consciousness and Spirit, particularly with reference to the potential for bidirectional information flow as indicated by Crutchfield above.