Politics of Teleonomies of Blockchain…Thought of the Day 155.0

All of this starts with the dictum, “There are no men at work”.

The notion of blockchain is a decentralized polity. Blockchain is immutable, for once written on to the block, it is practically un-erasable. And most importantly, it is collateralized, in that, even if there is a lack thereof of physical assets, the digital ownership could be traded as a collateral. So, once you have a blockchain, you create a stack that could be database controlled using a Virtual Machine, think of it as some sort of digital twin. So, what exactly are the benefits of this decentralized digital polity? One crucial is getting rid of intermediaries (unless, one considers escrow accounts as an invisible intermediary!, which seldom fulfills the definitional criteria). So, in short, digital twinning helps further social scalability by getting intermediaries o to an invisible mode. Now, when blockchains are juxtaposed with algorithmically run machines (AI is just one branch of it), one gets the benefits of social scalability with analytics, the ever-increasing ocean of raw data hermeneutically sealed into information for utilitarian purposes. The advantages of decentralized polity and social scalability compiles for a true democratic experience in an open-sourced modeling, where netizens (since we still are mired in the controversy of net neutrality) experience participatory democracy.

How would these combine with exigencies of scarce nature or resources? It is here that such hackathons combine the ingenuity of blockchain with AI in a process generally referred to as “mining”. This launch from the nature as we know is Nature 2.0. To repeat, decentralized polity and social scalability creates a self-sustaining ecosystem in a sense of Anti-Fragility (yes, Taleb’s anti-fragile is a feedback into this) with autonomously created machine learning systems that are largely correctional in nature on one hand and improving learning capacities from the environment on the other. These two hands coordinate giving rise to resource manipulation in lending a synthetic definition of materialities taken straight from physics textbooks and scared-to-apprehend materialities as thermodynamic quotients. And this is where AI steams up in a grand globalized alliance of machines embodying agencies always looking for cognitive enhancements to fulfill teleonomic life derived from the above stated thermodynamic quotient of randomness and disorder into gratifying sensibilities of self-sustenance. Synthetic biologists (of the Craig Venter and CRISPR-like lines) call this genetic programming, whereas singularitarians term it as evolution, a break away from simulated evolution that defined initial days of AI. The synthetic life is capable of decision making, the more it is subjected to the whims and fancies of surrounding environment via the process of machine learning leading to autonomous materialities with cognitive capabilities. These are parthenogenetic machines with unencumbered networking capacities. Such is the advent of self-ownership, and taking it to mean to nature as we have hitherto known is a cathectic fallacy in ethics. Taking to mean it differently in a sense of establishing a symbiotic relationship between biology and machines to yield bio machines with characteristics of biomachinations, replication (reproduction, CC and CV to be thrown open for editing via genetic programming) and self-actualization is what blockchain in composite with AI and Synthetic Biology is Nature 2.0.

Yes, there are downsides to traditional mannerisms of thought, man playing god with nature and so on and so on…these are ethical constraints and thus political in undertones, but with conservative theoretics and thus unable to come to terms with the politics of resource abundance that the machinic promulgates…

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The entire archives of Radical Philosophy go online : Read Essays by Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler & More (1972-2018)

On a seemingly daily basis, we see attacks against the intellectual culture of the academic humanities, which, since the 1960s, have opened up spaces for leftists to develop critical theories of all kinds. Attacks from supposedly liberal professors and centrist op-ed columnists, from well-funded conservative think tanks and white supremacists on college campus tours. All rail against the evils of feminism, post-modernism, and something called “neo-Marxism” with outsized agitation.

For students and professors, the onslaughts are exhausting, and not only because they have very real, often dangerous, consequences, but because they all attack the same straw men (or “straw people”) and refuse to engage with academic thought on its own terms. Rarely, in the exasperating proliferation of cranky, cherry-picked anti-academia op-eds do we encounter people actually reading and grappling with the ideas of their supposed ideological nemeses….

Visit

http://www.openculture.com/2018/03/the-entire-archives-of-radical-philosophy-go-online.html?fbclid=IwAR2h5jjbe48D1WkZF3LkMzpdOQiBJNZ9cfk27w2Jwydi7dMPajcYEDDPZDo

 

The Old Subject is Cut by the New, but the Wounds to Disappear as Fast they are Created, a Suturing Takes Place to Take us Back from this Impediment to the Un-cut Stage….Conjuncted: Of Void and Nothingness

Of Void and Nothingness…

i have been thinking over the last few weeks about the nature of hope and its role in my life or rather essential/existential life. the more i reflect on the nature of hope, the more so, the concept seems to be erasing itself from my existence. but, ultimately, what counts is the liquid nature of reflection based on passion. passion, per se, is the emotion par excellence and is indispensable to move towards either the positive or the negative axis of the concept of the question. it is like the arrest between the man born posthumously or the man who has lived without being born. in both cases, the strangeness is displaced or rather deliberately misplaced and placed marginally for the hope to take the center stage. hoping is clinging on to the position of hypothetical, placing oneself in an attempt, a never-say-die one at that, to keep the invasion of the strange-ness talked about a sentence before this. the real is the strange-ness that is brutally kept at a distant, for us to enjoin the virtual realm. but aren’t we all victims of the real at some point in time and space? we fail terminologically to ascribe real to it and at the same time masking the virtual with the virtually real/really virtual. this is the space we live in and could be called the schizosphere. we are an agent who act not on the world stage, but in our own schizoid lives. the radiation of the result herein is two-fold. one is the transcendental i.e. a passionate longing for the escape from the predicament and other is the immanental, a silent erasure of the acceptance of the fact. the latter is buried and made dormant as the repressive tendencies that we call hopelessness and that does strike all of us, however hard we call our transcendentalism a success. this just calls for the non-fixity of our hope in time, a process that is always happening, a process that knows no ends. in short, a procedural aporia. now, isn’t it clear, that procedural aporia would always entail a fight of hope on hopelessness, in order to gain this static role it has always been bent on acheiving. QED, isn’t this journey substitutability by hope, which would imply that hoping on hope is a ‘hope into hopelessness’ as slight fracturing of the subject. the old subject is cut by the new one, but the wounds to disappear as fast they are created, a suturing takes place to take us back from this impediment to the un-cut stage….

Conjectural Existence of the Categorial Complex Branes for Generalized Calabi-Yau.

Geometric Langlands Duality can be formulated as follows: Let C be a Riemann surface (compact, without boundary), G be a compact reductive Lie group, G_C be its complexification, and M_flat(G, C) be the moduli space of stable flat G_C-connections on C. The Langlands dual of G is another compact reductive Lie group ^LG defined by the condition that its weight and coweight lattices are exchanged relative to G. Let Bun(^LG, C) be the moduli stack of holomorphic ^LG-bundles on C. One of the statements of Geometric Langlands Duality is that the derived category of coherent sheaves on M_flat(G, C) is equivalent to the derived category of D-modules over Bun(^LG, C).

M_flat(G, C) is mirror to another moduli space which, roughly speaking, can be described as the cotangent bundle to Bun(^LG, C). The category of A-branes on T ^∗ Bun(^LG, C) (with the canonical symplectic form) is equivalent to the category of B-branes on a noncommutative deformation of T ^∗ Bun(^LG, C). The latter is the same as the category of (analytic) D-modules on Bun(^LG, C).

So, what exactly is, the relationship between A-branes and noncommutative B-branes. This relationship arises whenever the target space X is the total space of the cotangent bundle to a complex manifold Y. It is understood that the  symplectic form ω is proportional to the canonical symplectic form on T ^∗ Y. With the B-field vanishing, and Y as a complex, we regard ω as the real part of a holomorphic symplectic form Ω. If qⁱ are holomorphic coordinates on Y, and p_i are dual coordinates on the fibers of T ^∗ Y,  Ω can be written as

Ω = 1/ħdp_i ∧ dqⁱ = dΘ

Since ω (as well as Ω) is exact, the closed A-model of X is rather trivial: there are no nontrivial instantons, and the quantum cohomology ring is isomorphic to the classical one.

We would like to understand the category of A-branes on X = T ^∗ Y. The key observation is that ∃ a natural coisotropic A-brane on X well-defined up to tensoring with a flat line bundle on X. Its curvature 2-form is exact and given by

F = Im Ω

If we denote by I the natural almost complex structure on X coming from the complex structure on Y , we have F = ωI, and therefore the endomorphism ω⁻¹F = I squares to −1. Therefore any unitary connection on a trivial line bundle over X whose curvature is F defines a coisotropic A-brane. 

Now, what about the endomorphisms of the canonical coisotropic A-brane, i.e., the algebra of BRST-closed open string vertex operators? This is easy if Y is an affine space. If one covers Y with charts each of which is an open subset of Cⁿ, and then argues that the computation can be performed locally on each chart and the results “glued together”, one gets closer to the fact that the algebra in question is the cohomology of a certain sheaf of algebras, whose local structure is the same as for Y = Cⁿ. In general, the path integral defining the correlators of vertex operators does not have any locality properties in the target space. Each term in perturbation theory depends only on the infinitesimal neighbourhood of a point. This shows that the algebra of open-string vertex operators, regarded as a formal power series in ħ, is the cohomology of a sheaf of algebras, which is locally isomorphic to a similar sheaf for X = Cⁿ × Cⁿ.

Let us apply these observations to the canonical coisotropic A-brane on X = T ^∗ Y. Locally, we can identify Y with a region in Cⁿ by means of holomorphic coordinate functions q₁, . . . , q_n. Up to BRST-exact terms, the action of the A-model on a disc Σ 􏰠takes the form

S = 1/ħ ∫_∂Σ φ ^∗ (p_idqⁱ)

where φ is a map from Σ to X. This action is identical to the action of a particle on Y with zero Hamiltonian, except that qⁱ are holomorphic coordinates on Y rather than ordinary coordinates. The BRST-invariant open-string vertex operators can be taken to be holomorphic functions of p, q. Therefore quantization is locally straightforward and gives a noncommutative deformation of the algebra of holomorphic functions on T ^∗ Y corresponding to a holomorphic Poisson bivector

P = ħ∂/∂p_i ∧ ∂/∂qⁱ

One can write an explicit formula for the deformed product:

􏰋(f ⋆ g)(p, q) = exp(􏰋ħ/2(∂²/∂p_i∂q̃ⁱ  −  ∂²/∂q^i∂p̃_i )) f(p, q) g (p̃, q̃)|_{p̃ = p, q̃ = q}

This product is known as the Moyal-Wigner product, which is a formal power series in ħ that may have zero radius of convergence. To rectify the situation, one can restrict to functions which are polynomial in the fiber coordinates p_i. Such locally-defined functions on T ^∗ Y can be thought of as symbols of differential operators; the Moyal-Wigner product in this case reduces to the product of symbols and is a polynomial in ħ. Thus locally the sheaf of open-string vertex operators is modelled on the sheaf of holomorphic differential operators on Y (provided we restrict to operators polynomial in p_i).

Locally, there is no difference between the sheaf of holomorphic differential operators D(Y ) and the sheaf of holomorphic differential operatorsD(Y, L) on a holomorphic line bundle L over Y. Thus the sheaf of open-string vertex operators could be any of the sheaves D(Y, L). Moreover, the classical problem is symmetric under p_i → −p_i combined with the orientation reversal of Σ; if we require that quantization preserve this symmetry, then the algebra of open-string vertex operators must be isomorphic to its opposite algebra. It is known that the opposite of the sheaf D(Y, L) is the sheaf D(Y, L⁻¹ ⊗ K_Y), so symmetry under p_i → −p_i requires L to be a square root of the canonical line bundle K_Y. It does not matter which square root one takes, since they all differ by flat line bundles on Y, and tensoring L by a flat line bundle does not affect the sheaf D(Y, L). The conclusion is that the sheaf of open-string vertex operators for the canonical coisotropic A-brane α on X = T ^∗ Y is isomorphic to the sheaf of noncommutative algebras D(Y, K^1/2). One can use this fact to associate Y to any A-brane β on X a twisted D-module, i.e., a sheaf of modules over D(Y, K^1/2). Consider the A-model with target X on a strip Σ = I × R, where I is a unit interval, and impose boundary conditions corresponding to branes α and β on the two boundaries of Σ. Upon quantization of this model, one gets a sheaf on vector spaces on Y which is a module over the sheaf of open-string vertex operators inserted at the α boundary. A simple example is to take β to be the zero section of T ^∗ Y with a trivial line bundle. Then the corresponding sheaf is simply the sheaf of sections of K_Y^1/2, with a tautological action of D(Y, K_Y^1/2).

One can argue that the map from A-branes to (complexes of) D-modules can be extended to an equivalence of categories of A-branes on X and the derived category of D-modules on Y. The argument relies on the conjectural existence of the category of generalized complex branes for any generalized Calabi-Yau. One can regard the Geometric Langlands Duality as a nonabelian generalization. 

Grothendieckian Construction of K-Theory with a Bundle that is Topologically Trivial and Class that is Torsion.

All relativistic quantum theories contain “antiparticles,” and allow the process of particle-antiparticle annihilation. This inspires a physical version of the Grothendieck construction of K-theory. Physics uses topological K-theory of manifolds, whose motivation is to organize vector bundles over a space into an algebraic invariant, that turns out to be useful. Algebraic K-theory started from K_i defined for i, with relations to classical constructions in algebra and number theory, followed by Quillen’s homotopy-theoretic definition ∀ i. The connections to algebra and number theory often persist for larger values of i, but in ways that are subtle and conjectural, such as special values of zeta- and L-functions.

One could also use the conserved charges of a configuration which can be measured at asymptotic infinity. By definition, these are left invariant by any physical process. Furthermore, they satisfy quantization conditions, of which the prototype is the Dirac condition on allowed electric and magnetic charges in Maxwell theory.

There is an elementary construction which, given a physical theory T, produces an abelian group of conserved charges K(T). Rather than considering the microscopic dynamics of the theory, all that is needed to be known is a set S of “particles” described by T, and a set of “bound state formation/decay processes” by which the particles combine or split to form other particles. These are called “binding processes.” Two sets of particles are “physically equivalent” if some sequence of binding processes convert the one to the other. We then define the group K(T) as the abelian group Z^S of formal linear combinations of particles, quotiented by this equivalence relation.

Suppose T contains the particles S = {A,B,C}.

If these are completely stable, we could clearly define three integral conserved charges, their individual numbers, so K(T) ≅ Z³.

Introducing a binding process

A + B ↔ C —– (1)

with the bidirectional arrow to remind us that the process can go in either direction. Clearly K(T) ≅ Z² in this case.

One might criticize this proposal on the grounds that we have assumed that configurations with a negative number of particles can exist. However, in all physical theories which satisfy the constraints of special relativity, charged particles in physical theories come with “antiparticles,” with the same mass but opposite charge. A particle and antiparticle can annihilate (combine) into a set of zero charge particles. While first discovered as a prediction of the Dirac equation, this follows from general axioms of quantum field theory, which also hold in string theory.

Thus, there are binding processes

B + B̄ ↔ Z₁ + Z₂ + · · · .

where B̄ is the antiparticle to a particle B, and Z_i are zero charge particles, which must appear by energy conservation. To define the K-theory, we identify any such set of zero charge particles with the identity, so that

B + B̄ ↔ 0

Thus the antiparticles provide the negative elements of K(T).

Granting the existence of antiparticles, this construction of K-theory can be more simply rephrased as the Grothendieck construction. We can define K(T) as the group of pairs (E, F) ∈ (Z^S, Z^S), subject to the relations (E, F) ≅ (E+B, F +B) ≅ (E+L, F +R) ≅ (E+R, F +L), where (L, R) are the left and right hand side of a binding process (1).

Thinking of these as particles, each brane B must have an antibrane, which we denote by B̄. If B wraps a submanifold L, one expects that B̄ is a brane which wraps a submanifold L of opposite orientation. A potential problem is that it is not a priori obvious that the orientation of L actually matters physically, especially in degenerate cases such as L a point.

Now, let us take X as a Calabi-Yau threefold for definiteness. A physical A-brane, which are branes of the A-model topological string and thereby a TQFT shadow of the D-branes of the superstring, is specified by a pair (L, E) of a special Lagrangian submanifold L with a flat bundle E. The obvious question could be: When are (L₁, E₁) and (L₂, E₂) related by a binding process? A simple heuristic answer to this question is given by the Feynman path integral. Two configurations are connected, if they are connected by a continuous path through the configuration space; any such path (or a small deformation of it) will appear in the functional integral with some non-zero weight. Thus, the question is essentially topological. Ignoring the flat bundles for a moment, this tells us that the K-theory group for A-branes is H₃(Y, Z), and the class of a brane is simply (rank E)·[L] ∈ H₃(Y, Z). This is also clear if the moduli space of flat connections on L is connected.

But suppose it is not, say π₁(L) is torsion. In this case, we need deeper physical arguments to decide whether the K-theory of these D-branes is H₃(Y, Z), or some larger group. But a natural conjecture is that it will be K₁(Y), which classifies bundles on odd-dimensional submanifolds. Two branes which differ only in the choice of flat connection are in fact connected in string theory, consistent with the K-group being H₃(Y, Z). For Y a simply connected Calabi-Yau threefold, K₁(Y) ≅ H₃(Y, Z), so the general conjecture is borne out in this case

There is a natural bilinear form on H₃(Y, Z) given by the oriented intersection number

I(L₁, L₂) = #([L₁] ∩ [L₂]) —– (2)

It has symmetry (−1)ⁿ. In particular, it is symplectic for n = 3. Furthermore, by Poincaré duality, it is unimodular, at least in our topological definition of K-theory.

D-branes, which are extended objects defined by mixed Dirichlet-Neumann boundary conditions in string theory, break half of the supersymmetries of the type II superstring and carry a complete set of electric and magnetic Ramond-Ramond charges. The product of the electric and magnetic charges is a single Dirac unit, and that the quantum of charge takes the value required by string duality. Saying that a D-brane has RR-charge means that it is a source for an “RR potential,” a generalized (p + 1)-form gauge potential in ten-dimensional space-time, which can be verified from its world-volume action that contains a minimal coupling term,

∫C^{(p + 1)} —–(3)

where C^{(p + 1)} denotes the gauge potential, and the integral is taken over the (p+1)-dimensional world-volume of the brane. For p = 0, C⁽¹⁾ is a one-form or “vector” potential (as in Maxwell theory), and thus the D0-brane is an electrically charged particle with respect to this 10d Maxwell theory. Upon further compactification, by which, the ten dimensions are R⁴ × X, and a Dp-brane which wraps a p-dimensional cycle L; in other words its world-volume is R × L where R is a time-like world-line in R⁴. Using the Poincaré dual class ω_L ∈ H^2n−p(X, R) to L in X, to rewrite (3) as an integral

∫_{R × X} C^{(p + 1)} ∧ ω_L —– (4)

We can then do the integral over X to turn this into the integral of a one-form over a world-line in R⁴, which is the right form for the minimal electric coupling of a particle in four dimensions. Thus, such a wrapped brane carries a particular electric charge which can be detected at asymptotic infinity. Summarizing the RR-charge more formally,

∫_LC = ∫_XC ∧ ω_L —– (5)

where C ∈ H∗(X, R). In other words, it is a class in H_p(X, R).

In particular, an A-brane (for n = 3) carries a conserved charge in H₃(X, R). Of course, this is weaker than [L] ∈ H₃(X, Z). To see this physically, we would need to see that some of these “electric” charges are actually “magnetic” charges, and study the Dirac-Schwinger-Zwanziger quantization condition between these charges. This amounts to showing that the angular momentum J of the electromagnetic field satisfies the quantization condition J = ħn/2 for n ∈ Z. Using an expression from electromagnetism, J⃗ = E⃗ × B⃗ , this is precisely the condition that (2) must take an integer value. Thus the physical and mathematical consistency conditions agree. Similar considerations apply for coisotropic A-branes. If X is a genuine Calabi-Yau 3-fold (i.e., with strict SU(3) holonomy), then a coisotropic A-brane which is not a special Lagrangian must be five-dimensional, and the corresponding submanifold L is rationally homologically trivial, since H⁵(X, Q) = 0. Thus, if the bundle E is topologically trivial, the homology class of L and thus its K-theory class is torsion.

If X is a torus, or a K3 surface, the situation is more complicated. In that case, even rationally the charge of a coisotropic A-brane need not lie in the middle-dimensional cohomology of X. Instead, it takes its value in a certain subspace of ⊕_p H^p(X, Q), where the summation is over even or odd p depending on whether the complex dimension of X is even or odd. At the semiclassical level, the subspace is determined by the condition

(L − Λ)α = 0, α ∈ ⊕_p H^p(X, Q)

where L and Λ are generators of the Lefschetz SL(2, C) action, i.e., L is the cup product with the cohomology class of the Kähler form, and Λ is its dual.