It is not a secret from anyone that western political subject, across the spectrum, fetishizes the abstract notion of freedom: freedom from, freedom to, freedom for, freedom of, freedom in, freedom-freedom all the way. The idea is that one should be free and autonomous if one is to be a complete person with ability to make choices and decisions and pave the way to one's fate as per one's choosing without limitations of any external dictations.
The slogan of freedom and idea of revolution are synonymous to the post-French revolution liberal subject. The liberal subject sees freedom in terms of ability to trade, buy and sell across borders with minimum interference from public institutions. And of course, freedom to speak your mind (terms and conditions as per platform policy and IP authorities applied, of course).
This same freedom slogan is north star for other more radical political ideologies such as anarchism. Anarchist notion of freedom claims to be distinct from liberal notion as it is more grounded in daily struggles of common masses to be free from well defined notions of the domination they face daily under capitalism and state.
But, on a theoretical level, computational/cybernetic level, is freedom even possible? Is freedom really an intelligible notion which can ever be rendered politically efficacious or concretely applicable in a metaphysically consistent manner in so far as it does not spring up dodgy theoretical gerrymendering, goalpost moving and bodging to maintain an illusion of freedom while being bound to invisible cybernetic mechanisms?
In other words, is it possible to think about freedom coherently and completely or is it a cluster of contradictory and impossible demands founded in reaction to misunderstood conceptualization of what hierarchy and domination even is? This article argues that revolution is not a problem of mere political ideology but rather a problem of computational cybernetics. And any coherent cybernetic system shall exclude the loose arbitration of concepts with undefined and unstratified terms (terminology out of context from their domain or strata) and hence notion of freedom as such finds itself unmade as an incoherency.
Homo sapiens is strictly a functional transformation of homo politicus under some operation. This is man in his fallen state, thrown out of the Eden into a tensor field of power parametricized by his 'will to power'. Let us call this tensor field Politicum. Dimensionality of Politicum is a function of the order of psychicality of political entities or in other words, the order of operational abstractions of political cybernetics in the Politicum.
The fundamental cybernetic (auto-negation) principle of Politicum was discovered by Hegel as master-slave dialectic in Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) defined in terms of cybernetic struggle for 'existential acknowldegment from the other' against the order of 'consciousness of the other' as a particular subject. The premise can be charted as follows (following is my reformulation of the idea and I do not claim to be a Hegel scholar):
Only a being of same order of consciousness (degree of reflective autonomy) can 'acknowledge' an other being or 'being other of the other being'.
A subject cannot be commensurated to that which is other without reducing the being of one of them to that of lower order of consciousness with respect to the counterpart. This is asymmetric relation of master and slave.
In their encounter, the 'subject' and the 'other' clash and have no choice but to 'measure' the other, for "how do I know the other is conscious enough to acknowledge me?" and in this measurement process the other is constrained into a lower order of consciousness or altogether destroyed (gasp, dead!).
An inference has been drawn ("the 'subject' is no longer able to acknowledge me or perhaps anyone anymore"), but it is of no use anymore!
Wow, apparently master slave dialectic is just measurement problem reformulated afterall. There is a great paper in analytic theory of measurement by David Wolpert called Physical Limits to Inference (2007). This paper is a demonstration of cybernetic nature of inference itself where it looks at physical limits to inference, among other cases, in case of any two 'inference devices' which are essentially any reciprocally sensitive-sensible object pair which hold prehensive affordance for each other i.e. exist on same order or domain where they impart and process their respective affective datum towards one another in a way that one can be used to infer about the other.
This is what entanglement in general refers to, quantum entanglement is merely a special case of such a general notion of entanglement where two inference devices are demonstrably and deterministically entangled.
David Wolpert
Wolpert proposes that for any two inference devices, for each interaction or 'inference' they make, where A infers B or vice versa, there is always, by mathematical necessity, a cybernetic condition imposed such that, A OR B will have more 'autonomy' in so far possible states of being which can be measured or inferred by the counterpart device. A OR B having more autonomy simply means that one of them, by necessity of physical limits of inference, impose constraints of measurability or inference on the other, such that what state or behavior other corresponding device or object can suppose will be limited by the process of inference itself.
The scope of the paper is wider than presented so far, the paper more generally addresses any device making inference about any function, not just necessarily another device of same order."Setting up a device to observe a variable outside of that device restricts the set of possible universes; only those [world lines] are allowed that are consistent with the observation device being set up that way to make the desired observation." But coming to the two device scenario, it can go either way, either the inferring device will impose limits on the possible states inferred device can be inferred in or inferred device will constrain how inferring device can be probed for the inference. But both of them cannot have equal amount of autonomy, and hence, same order of consciousness. One of them has to be enslaved, momentarily at least!
For example, the way the measurement device for the electron is probed constrains which direction the spin can possibly be detected in. In the two device formulation, measurement of an electron spin constrains which states its paired electron can be found in. It can, thus, be said we have never detected a free electron, merely a constrained one.
Now, is this a disaster for the political project of freedom? Depends on how well defined the notion of freedom is. For an abstract notion of freedom which seeks freedom from an arbitrary master principle, then yes, this is a death blow. But more reflection makes it obvious that we need to properly predicate freedom from what (what kind of master principle to attain functional decoupling from) and to what end (when is such decoupling pragmatic)? We can demonstrate that this physical limit of inference does not indefinitely spell a non-compromising state of 'slavery'.
If I am speaking to you verbally, I am entangled with you as part of a communicative coupling where you can hear me as I speak or I can hear you as you speak but both cannot speak simultaneously. This seems politically disastrous at first: as it implies equally conscious subjects co-existing in same plane or domain is mathematically impossible, which is true, since this line of argumentation is domain / substrate / information channel independent. But consider how when a speaker and listener take turns speaking, both of them enter a game of exchanging the position of speaker-listener hierarchy in coordination with each other. This is resonance. Possibility of such resonant coordination and collaboration is precisely what makes it so that such limits do not doom us. Pretty far from that.
An important aspect of master salve dialectic which is overlooked is that it is not just the master who wields the power, but so does the slave. Without master, slave has no identity and without slave, master has no status. It is slave who masters the processes which constitute reproduction of the master as an actual occurrence. The power flows in both directions at different thresholds, but it adds up to equal amounts. Either cannot exist without the other as actual occurrences, modulated over the unequal correspondance of the dialectic. Or in other words, master and slave constitute a dipole which is in metastable tension maintained by the bidirectional flow of constitutive and legitimization power.
Law is not exercised upon inert beings, but only upon those whose cooperation can be claimed. Obedience is always at least minimally active. This is why the recipient of a commandment is characterized as an agent, and why lawfulness attests to an implicit sovereignty. Docility in respect of the law is quite different from a surrender, in exactly the way that moralists are different from mystics. Surrender is a deeper evil than any possible action. The very principle of action is an acceptance of justice and responsibility, and any act is—as such—an amelioration of crime, expressing defiance within the syntax of redemption. In stark comparison with action, surrender gnaws away the conditions for salvation. Giving itself up to a wave of erasure, the agent dies into the cosmic reservoir of crime. Beyond the (agentic) pact with Satan lies an irreparable dissolution into forces of darkness, apart from which there is no ecstasy. Surrender is not a submission to an alien agency (devotion to God), but a surrender of agency in general, it is not any kind of consigning of oneself over to another (return to the father), but utter abandonment of self; a dereliction of duty which aggresses against one’s birth.
Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation (1992)
This is a revelation at the fundamental structure of co-existence. We are always subordinate subjects to God (ur-inference-device), fundamentally less autonomous and sentient but in no way, any less of co-conspirators. God is the only entity which subordinates all and hence knows all. All subordinating entities are all coupled with each other only in so far as they are coupled with God. We are trying to tune ourselves as attuned inference devices of him. Conspiracy, collaboration and cooperation with the more sentient and autonomous entities whether human, textual or divine, is always a possibility that God, the ur-master, permits.
It shows that independent of concerns of free will, no two devices can unerringly emulate each other. (In other words, no reality can have more than one universal device.) Somewhat tongue in cheek, taken together, these results could be called a “monotheism theorem”.
David Wolpert, Physical Limits to Inference
Addendum 1: Defining Hierarchy
I have been thinking about how does one formally define the notion of hierarchy in a way theoretically continuous with the above thesis. Here is what I have in mind: hierarchy is a n-pole system of entities, symmetrically constrained yet asymmetric in terms of functional autonomy.
So, what does that mean? In simple language, it refers to situations like when I hold a glass of water, both my hand (and by extension the rest of biological system in coupling with the hand) and the glass of water are symmetrically constrained by image of the dipole as a unit. The glass of water is constrained to move in space along the motion of hand position and orientation in space and hand is constrained to take the posture conducive to holding the glass and orient itself in order to keep the glass upright. This system extends to constraining of tension in the muscles of the arm and so on. Such a system is symmetric in terms of mutual constraints however entities (hand/arm vs glass) are asymmetric in terms of functional autonomy which maybe centrally reflexive or outsourced to a higher order integrated intelligence (intelligent owner of the arm).
This formulation can be easily extended to the listener-speaker system, master-slave system, brain-body system and so on.
References:
David Wolpert (2007), Physical Limits to Inference. https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1362.
G. W. F. Hegel (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit. ISBN:978-0198245971.
Nick Land (1992), Thirst for Annihilation. ISBN:978-0415056083.
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