Viral Load

Even if viruses have been quarantined on a user’s system, the user is often not allowed to access the quarantined files. The ostensible reason for this high level of secrecy is the claim that open access to computer virus code would result in people writing more computer viruses – a difficult claim for an antivirus company to make given that once they themselves have a copy of a virus then machines running their antivirus software should already be protected from that virus. A more believable explanation for antivirus companies’ unwillingness to release past virus programs is that a large part of their business model is predicated upon their ability to exclusively control stockpiles of past computer virus specimens as closely guarded intellectual property.

None of this absence of archival material is helped by the fact that the concept of a computer virus is itself an ontologically ambiguous category. The majority of so-called malicious software entities that have plagued Internet users in the past few years have technically not been viruses but worms. Additionally, despite attempts to define clear nosological and epidemiological categories for computer viruses and worms, there is still no consistent system for stabilizing the terms themselves, let alone assessing their relative populations. Elizabeth Grosz commented during an interview with the editors of Found Object journal that part of the reason for the ontological ambiguity of computer viruses is that they are an application of a biological metaphor that is largely indeterminate itself. According to Grosz, we are as mystified, if not more so, by biological viruses as we are by computer viruses. Perhaps we know even more about computer viruses than we do about biological viruses! The same obscurities are there at the biological level that exists at the computer level (…)

As Grosz suggests, it is no wonder that computer viruses are so ontologically uncertain, given that their biological namesakes threaten to undermine many of the binarisms that anchor modern Western technoscience, such as distinctions between organic and inorganic, dead and living, matter and form, and sexual and asexual reproduction.

Viral Load

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Hyperstructures

In many areas of mathematics there is a need to have methods taking local information and properties to global ones. This is mostly done by gluing techniques using open sets in a topology and associated presheaves. The presheaves form sheaves when local pieces fit together to global ones. This has been generalized to categorical settings based on Grothendieck topologies and sites.

The general problem of going from local to global situations is important also outside of mathematics. Consider collections of objects where we may have information or properties of objects or subcollections, and we want to extract global information.

This is where hyperstructures are very useful. If we are given a collection of objects that we want to investigate, we put a suitable hyperstructure on it. Then we may assign “local” properties at each level and by the generalized Grothendieck topology for hyperstructures we can now glue both within levels and across the levels in order to get global properties. Such an assignment of global properties or states we call a globalizer. 

To illustrate our intuition let us think of a society organized into a hyperstructure. Through levelwise democratic elections leaders are elected and the democratic process will eventually give a “global” leader. In this sense democracy may be thought of as a sociological (or political) globalizer. This applies to decision making as well.

In “frustrated” spin systems in physics one may possibly think of the “frustation” being resolved by creating new levels and a suitable globalizer assigning a global state to the system corresponding to various exotic physical conditions like, for example, a kind of hyperstructured spin glass or magnet. Acting on both classical and quantum fields in physics may be facilitated by putting a hyperstructure on them.

There are also situations where we are given an object or a collection of objects with assignments of properties or states. To achieve a certain goal we need to change, let us say, the state. This may be very difficult and require a lot of resources. The idea is then to put a hyperstructure on the object or collection. By this we create levels of locality that we can glue together by a generalized Grothendieck topology.

It may often be much easier and require less resources to change the state at the lowest level and then use a globalizer to achieve the desired global change. Often it may be important to find a minimal hyperstructure needed to change a global state with minimal resources.

Again, to support our intuition let us think of the democratic society example. To change the global leader directly may be hard, but starting a “political” process at the lower individual levels may not require heavy resources and may propagate through the democratic hyperstructure leading to a change of leader.

Hence, hyperstructures facilitates local to global processes, but also global to local processes. Often these are called bottom up and top down processes. In the global to local or top down process we put a hyperstructure on an object or system in such a way that it is represented by a top level bond in the hyperstructure. This means that to an object or system X we assign a hyperstructure

H = {B0,B1,…,Bn} in such a way that X = bn for some bn ∈ B binding a family {bi1n−1} of Bn−1 bonds, each bi1n−1 binding a family {bi2n−2} of Bn−2 bonds, etc. down to B0 bonds in H. Similarly for a local to global process. To a system, set or collection of objects X, we assign a hyperstructure H such that X = B0. A hyperstructure on a set (space) will create “global” objects, properties and states like what we see in organized societies, organizations, organisms, etc. The hyperstructure is the “glue” or the “law” of the objects. In a way, the globalizer creates a kind of higher order “condensate”. Hyperstructures represent a conceptual tool for translating organizational ideas like for example democracy, political parties, etc. into a mathematical framework where new types of arguments may be carried through.

Deleuze on Right versus Left. Thought of the Day 12.0

Deleuze says to be on the Right is to perceive the world starting with identity, with self and family, and to move outward in concentric circles, to friends, city, nation, continent, world with diminishing affective investment in each circle, and with an abiding sense that the centre needs defending against the periphery. On the contrary to be on the Left is to start one’s perception on the periphery and to move inwards. It requires not the bolstering of the centre, but an appreciation that the centre is interlaced with the periphery, a process that undoes the distance between the two. 

A Theosophist Reading of Spinoza and Bohm. For Whom the Bell Tolls.

To Spinoza mind and matter were parallel attributes of God or Substance, the great essence of the universe sometimes called in theosophical literature Svabhavat, primordial nature, mind-substance. Svabhavat (from the Sanskrit sva, “self” and bhu, “to become”) means self-becoming. Nothing can exist other than as an emanation from this primordial nature’s eternal action. Nothing, said Spinoza, can exist except this Substance and the unfolding of its attributes. This being so, “creation” had no beginning and will have no end; all things come forth from the Boundless and will therefore continue forever — theosophical ideas found also in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism.

With Spinoza we find emphasis on the essential unity and continuity of all existence, while Pythagoras, Plato, and Leibniz distinguish countless monads in it, centers of activity in every conceivable grade of self-expression. Combining the monad theory with Spinoza’s philosophy, a worldview emerges remarkably in accord with ideas from the Upanishads, Vedanta, Buddhism, and many a thinker from ancient Greece. We find corresponding ideas in the writings of theoretical physicist David Bohm, who also believed that the distinction between animate and inanimate nature is arbitrary, of use in some contexts but ultimately incorrect. He came to the conclusion that, far from being empty, space is an immense ocean of energy, and matter no more than a superficial ripple on that ocean. Everything lies concealed in an “implicate order” and comes forth from it. To illustrate this idea Bohm used the following experiment: the outer of two concentric cylinders is filled with a viscous fluid, such as glycerin, into which is placed a drop of insoluble ink. When the outer cylinder is rotated very slowly, the ink drop threads out, growing thinner and thinner, and eventually becomes invisible. The dye molecules become distributed among the molecules of the liquid as a grey shade. Rotating the cylinder in the opposite direction yields a surprising result: slender threads appear, growing thicker and thicker until, suddenly, the globule of ink is seen once more. This suggests that out of the “holomovement” of the ocean of energy comes forth the known universe with all that is in it.

From the “reality of the first order,” or implicate order, issues the explicate order, the world of forms and living things. In this “reality of the second order” these things have a relatively separate existence, as the Gulf Stream and other currents have a relatively separate existence within the Atlantic Ocean. From atoms to galaxies, all the phenomena of nature emerge from the ocean of the implicate order, make their appearance as “relatively autonomous subtotals,” and at the same time are linked with everything else.

Bohm regarded the universe as an undivided whole, a continuously ongoing process whose “ultimate ground of being is entirely unutterable, entirely implicit.” Space is not a nothingness but is in essence this ultimate ground of being. He employed the image of a crystal through which at absolute zero, according to quantum theory, electrons would pass as if it were empty space. The crystal would then be perfectly homogeneous and would seem nonexistent for the electrons, as space seems nonexistent for us. But when the temperature is raised, inhomogeneities appear, scattering the electrons. If one were to focus the electrons with an electron lens to make a picture of the crystal, it “would then appear that the inhomogeneities exist independently and that the main body of the crystal was sheer nothingness”. Like the school of Parmenides and Zeno in ancient Greece, Bohm regarded space as a plenum, utter fullness, the ground or substratum of all that exists. The matter that we sense is, like flaws in the crystal, inhomogeneities in space, which is the unity that includes both matter and consciousness.

Another physicist whose work endorsed the interconnectedness of things was John S. Bell. Two particles moving away from each other at the speed of light were thought to have lost contact forever, since no signal from one could overtake and influence the other. In 1964 Bell proposed his theory that particles like these do influence each other all the same and therefore, somehow, never lose contact. The theory was experimentally confirmed for the first time in 1972. Science seems to be overstepping its own boundaries, penetrating a realm where mystics have been long before. Not surprisingly modern thinkers are taking note of ancient ideas with amazement and admiration.

When H. P. Blavatsky published The Secret Doctrine in 1888, she stated that the ideas it contained were neither her own nor new. She sketched in bold strokes once again the existence of infinite Space, ground of countless universes, populated and ensouled by numberless monads: not as unconnected, separate things, but as differentiations within the whole. She spoke of “The fundamental identity of all Souls with the Universal Over-Soul,” and gave a vertiginous panorama of the evolutionary track, not of bodies, forms, but of centers of consciousness, monads, from their differentiation within the Oversoul to their grand consummatum est, the attainment of fully self-conscious realization of cosmic consciousness at the end of the world period. A work like The Secret Doctrine could not fail to cause a commotion in those days; recent developments have paved the way for us better to appreciate these thoughts and subscribe to the fundamental unity of man and universe.

The human mind is not extraneous to the mind of the universe. In fact, nothing is conceivable apart from the fundamental space-energy-mind to which the ancient Vedic poet would not give a name. Names indicate qualities, and so imply limitations because every quality excludes its opposite. So the Vedic sage spoke simply of tat, That. In the subtle logic of Buddhist thinking, the absolute fullness of space is called sunyata, emptiness: all that exists is as ripples in this boundless ocean which cannot be said to have this or that form, and which in that sense is “empty.” With their plenum or pleroma the Gnostics and other ancient Mediterranean thinkers emphasized its “fullness,” which comprises all worlds, our visible as well as numerous invisible ones. These worlds may be symbolized as rungs on the unending “ladder of being.” Whether the inhabitants of realms higher than ours are called aeons, angelic orders, or dhyani-buddhas makes no difference. The world is the interaction of a variety of monads, but not all monads necessarily express themselves on the physical level. Although in essence all monads are aspects of the ultimate ground of being, in their forms of manifestation they are infinitely varied. In their totality they constitute nature, the Jacob’s ladder of evolving beings, conjointly weaving the fabric of visible and invisible worlds, the multiplicity of “parallel universes” modern thinkers are beginning to surmise.