Catjects [post]

Dirk Baecker
2021 unpublished
A general theory of digitization would not only look at electronic media and their impact on society but focus on distinctions trying to order, count, and show analogue realities. Calculus with Newton and Leibniz seems to have been invented to do just that. Distinctions become codes when their results are played back to reality to produce a reality of their own. The paper draws on George Spencer-Brown's calculus of indications to come up with the idea of catjects understood as eigen-values of
more » ... cursive and reflexive functions producing phenomena of all kinds, including social ones. Catjects allow to model, formalize, or symbolize the synchronization of observations contextualizing each other or of different systems, such as neuronal, mental, social, and artificial which draw their distinctions to reproduce as forms of digitization. Spencer-Brown's idea of the "form" of a distinction is a way to understand distinctions as connections modeling complex phenomena which combine systems references standing orthogonal to each other.
doi:10.31235/osf.io/73mht fatcat:g6ytdpqyivdg7dj4vgbubxtb5u