Molding an Emergent Newton from 3D Environments

With Pensées sur la interpretation de la nature, Denis Diderot marshalled a coupure parting him from the Newtonian tradition; later, he would produce Rêve de D'Alembert, a manifesto for proto-biology. In the Pensées, Diderot's axiomatic style mocked the conventions of mathematics, to break with them. The work is a statement of experimental method, using observation and sensory experience tied to an emotion or sensibilité. Too, it is the experimental method, or at least most often, Diderot's theory is homologous to his practice.

As early as the 18th century, as Diderot shows us, we have been breaking away from Newton and his school to consider the role of material organization via network principles, principles that disturb the strictly causal and mechanical nature of laws of force and attraction.

Now though, we have new technologies and new tools for simulation, which hegemonically reproduce Newton's laws. Computers though, at least in the information superstructure they produce, are not Newtonian, although Turing and Babbage, two computing pioneers, attempted to mechanize logic, even if they did not draw mechanical conclusions given the Wienerian prospect of an élan without a vital . It would be interesting then to transpose Newton onto the contemporary computing discourse and onto artificial life as organized by the 3D modeling and animation tool chest.

Since the Newtonianism of 3D sits in a layer above the emergent structure of computing, could not the simulation of Newton, the encapsulation of physical properties, critique those physical properties and the notion of "true" reality by exercising a control over them that indicates the new reality of virtual systems?

Whence came our new reality but with steam, though it actually takes longer for the concept of simulation to appear. It did not exist, then always existed, as Latour remarks of similar paradigmatic changes in the Western onto-episteme. Now that it exists, it is a valuable tool of critique for agents or subjects on the authorial side of the clipping plane.

What is emergence?

The property of emergence is nothing new, although computing brings home the possibilities for understanding the actual world through the virtual. Since Plato, philosophers have debated whether the aspects of human existence (those that make us "human") emerge from purely material and physical conditions, or whether they originate "top down", from the soul to the construction of the physical.

Socrates was one such philosopher who argued for a top down understanding of being, thereby countering the bottoms-up approach of atomists. The body/soul was not like a harp or clavichord (of which resonances stem from its tuning), because the soul did not simply emerge purely from the organization of atoms into molecules, molecules into cells, cells into tissues, tissues into organs, and organs into the human body.

Julian de Offray La Mettrie, however, a physician and independent scholar (influential in later centuries) argued (around 1750) that the soul emerged purely from the organization of matter, as did other mid-to-late 18th century philosophers. Like Diderot, La Mettrie looked to materialism to "free" ontology from first causes and to allow the subject to inhabit the space of emergence, in which teleology is shattered (although Diderot distinguished himself from La Mettrie as a considerably more moral actor).

Belief despite causal finality was, in the 18th century, a property of organization and sensibilité. Materialists had varying philosophies of the soul: some claimed its existence, arguing for supervention upon the physical body, or as a whole originating from the condition of being greater than its parts. Other pure materialists placed, without Monsieur Dieu, agency in each fundamental unit or atom of Nature. Matter itself had sensibilité or the propensity for fine organization.

Thus emergence is, despite whether the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, a theory of "bottoms-up" construction of complex systems: one builds components that in themselves may be reused and exchanged from machine to machine in modular fashion, from l'homme to l'homme machine.

Lord Newton, Be Layered!

There are several ways that Newton can be used in non-Newtonian ways. For instance, in the theory of Georg Lukacs, collision plays a role in the intersection of history with fiction. Collision is a trope of the historical "stage", and while, historical novels started out as simply changes of costume in the pre-Walter Scott era, with Waverly, they became a verisimilitude of the possible, if not probable, in conventions of realism.

With collisions of history proper into fictive works, we use physical laws in a way unintended by Newton, for cultural critique. The collision of fact and fiction invokes the bombardment of entities in a theoretical world space. Lukacsian collision exists in such a space, but it has morphed into -- not a world space of physical laws, but of cultural laws, supervening on the physical.

Realism, like Newtonianism, is thus able to critique itself through its own ontology, much in the manner of self-organizing matter. For it states a position that at first does not transcend representation. Then when we discover larger, highly-differentiated relations that structure realism -- in the way emergent layers are beyond the Newtonian layer/patch, it allows us to encapsulate realism in a layer supervening on computing relationships. Non-Newtonian and non-representational notions then follow from the use of purely physical laws (as supplied by the 3D modeling app) for cultural and critical purposes.

The "world space" of 3D applications encapsulate models of physical laws, which provide the basic components for cultural construction. Yet, underneath physical laws lies the institution of modern computing, in fact beyond the physics of multiple worlds. On bottom, we have computing and simulation concepts. Above that, we have an encapsulated set of physical laws. And supervening on top of this, we have ideas about the world.

Enter Popper's Three Worlds, yet with a difference: these worlds are simulated and virtual and miniaturized to be portable, both theoretically and actually. All Newtonian physical laws are on the CD or DVD-ROM media that install Maya; The world space is encapsulated within the 3D application running on a notebook computer. We move the world space when we pack up our bags and head for the café.

Retro-Computing and Retro-Science

A similar effect may be seen in the procedure of marketing computer technologies, in which older technological culture is recreated in new simulations. Or this is seen in Java applets that simulate, for instance, an Enigma machine, a World War II encrypted messaging system used by Germany.

A picture of retro-science is created, as well as retro-computing. Older historical times exist in ever present simulations. With Shockwave 3d games or iPhone apps, all the arcade games of the 1980s come back in newly three-dimensionalized look and feel. Computing's potential is that it can encapsulate and model (although sometimes wholly inadequately) anything that exists in the world.

If simulation is a way of encapsulating the world, from a subjective view, then this is, in retro-science and retro-computing, a control over time. The analogy of time traveling emerges as we encapsulate the world at our fingertips (in acts of symbolic domination). Retrospective-computing is a way of making sense of the past, and to the chagrin of Marxism, feeling (with great repercussions) a quasi-ownership of that past in a digital copy or property.

The accumulation of wealth then, has switched to the accumulation of information, fundamentally relying on the ability to encapsulate archaic science and "own it". With digital copies, everyone can own a piece of Newton's physical laws in the software Maya (not considering its steep price).

Science, and previously empirical investigations in the world proper now provide both a new empirical laboratory for discovery of "truths" and a laboratory in which to mix probabilities of these same empirical phenomena. Another way to think of Newton's physical laws as moldable into emergent ones is to say that the switch from Newton to emergence and back again is one of the templating of physics with a probabilistic physics.

When Science looks curiously like the history of science, and synchronic features of sciences are irretrievably present and multiple at the same time, we have the re-emergence of subject monadology: The world is the point-interface. In this networked episteme, the subject puts his view (a part) for the whole (what he or she can never know) and Newton revisits the 21st century. Yet Newton is simply like everything that can be simulated--the qualitative presence of Newtonian emergence has the propensity to epistemologically reconfigure any linear development of science away from a "neat package", through the neat, concise, and under 4GB software application, packaged within the technologized notebook interface.