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  Alternate

Entailment, Data as Agency and Autocatalyzed Alternates

Joel Slayton

Philosophies of the physical, biological, computer, social sciences and the arts have collectively lacerated traditional conceptions of content, deconstructing its nature into the stored, sorted, distributed, and acted upon. Reasoning for this approach is obvious; content, information and data can be understood synergistically, but considered segregated functionally. Distinguishing the signifier and signified in this manner requires a semantic strategy that ensures data to be scrutinized separately through methods of computation and measurement. This structuralist perspective does not suffice to describe a model in which "meaning" can be explicated as a self-deterministic function, which is not directly the result of inferencing and sign interpretation, but rather, the result of a self-organizing dynamic of data itself.

Datum, the fundamental agency of data enabling language-like behavior, can be observed in fluid depiction structures, such as a network, which involve complex entailment patterns. An entailment pattern is a set of rules pertaining to the emergence of self-organization within an information processing system, a notion useful in characterizing the autocatalytic and evolutionary nature of the datum. Entailment guides processes, resulting in filtering, association, referencing and substitution, particularly in non-linear systems in which uncertainty plays a significant role. These rules of entailment are necessarily constrained algorithmically (ex; if, then, and, or, else, list) and therefore infer only a computational disposition. The twist, of course, being that the datum is also self-referential, its purpose to function linguistically as an interface to other datum.

This linguistic of the datum is stratified in complex layers of entailment and therefore operates outside of a purely semantic model of meaning. It would seem that datum are not the output of procedures always poised between referents, but rather, are fundamental dispositions of language -like capacity. This suggests that denotation of the datum is possible only by virtue of self-stimulation. Conceived in this way, the autocatalytic datum as agency implies that datum act as their own interface. Perhaps it is this characteristic that enables datum to pattern with other datum, to combine (or un-combine) into more (or less) complex propositional relationships. If true, this conveyance of the datum would seem to preserve datum identity (action) across transpositions, that is, from one system to the next. This ontogenic behavior clearly demonstrated in 16 Sessions.

A reasoned supposition is that datum are necessarily predisposed to particular autocatalytic configurations and are therefore necessarily delimited to specific behaviors. This perspective, even if true, does not account for all potential linguistic like actions spawned by datum. It is more likely that datum continuously emerge new capacities by forming aggregate attributes that are idiosyncratic and serve to further purpose the linguistic nature of the specific agency. This complexity permits datum to be transposed across systems with the appearance of coherency, while defying specific signification.

Datum interact in seemingly endless manners, one of which is the autocatalyzed identity of the alternate, a mimicked substitution of the datum which ripples throughout the linguistic domain of the network space. Alternates, like datum, are capable of self-determination and denotation of meaning through patterned action. Unlike datum, the alternates contort patterning into mirrored equilibrium of data structures, which in turn, self-organize into replicant-like linguistic performances. Alternates enable algorithmic treatment of datum across borders, a clear distinction to a theory of signification. Alternates enable the datum to simulate their own functionality. It is this characteristic of dissimulation that creates the illusion of coherency across information structures, processes, meanings and applications. This dissimulation encourages algorithmic transposition.

The hyperlogical destiny of the Datum and its mirror, the Alternate, is an appearance of differentiation where none actually exist, a differentiation reduced to the continuities of coherence. It is the mirror of the alternate that results in the deception that the network cannot enact its own theme. What is interesting is that it may be quite the opposite.
 

 

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