Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Presence Absence Theory

My prior bolg has caused me to think more about Presence Absence theory from the aspect that it is the conceptual foundation of the way we think, the way we have devised computers to operate at the lowest binary digital level.

The following I found at this website discussion Presence and Absence:

Recent scholars have begun to think beyond the binaried distinction of presence and absence to more technologically informed valuations of being.

I had to wade through a lot of philosophy at that site to get to it but it was worth it.  If you care to wade in those murky waters go to the website.  If not the qoute from the site is worth something.

This is my take from the quoted statement:

When binaried distinctions between presence and absence are reduced to the lowest level of representation on a binary computer (one and the absence of one) then all we have to be concerned with as users of that computer is the state of being of the higher level abstract conceptual things built upon the presence or absence of an electrical charge at a place of storage and its conceptual expression as on or off, a one or a zero.

Wikipedia describes Binary Opposition

In critical theory, a binary opposition (also binary system) is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system by which, in language and thought, two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another.[1] It is the contrast between two mutually exclusive terms, such
as on and off, up and down, left and right.[2] Binary opposition is an important concept of structuralism, which sees such distinctions as fundamental to all language and thought.[2] In structuralism, a binary opposition is seen as a fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture, and language.

It has been maintained that the human brain has a preference for binary oppositions, if this is so it will help explain the numerous pairs of related antonyms that are found such as hot and cold, right and wrong and good and bad[7]

Sounds like Debit and Credit to me!

Binary Opposition in broader terms is Being or Not being.  Looking down that road as a line of thought I quickly decided I did not want to go get lost on it.  Looking down a narrower road would be more productive.  Down the road that says an object is what it is, not what it is not.  In the computer world people work at that lowest level with binary objects that are logically there or not there by logically identifying an conceptual object presence based on its physical non-existence of emptiness in a bowl.  Good for them.  They deal with the meaning of things that have meaning because they do or do not exist.  Subjects science and religion deal with in different ways.

Debit and Credit are a binary opposition representations of debt owned and owed as assets or liabilities dependent of the state of being of the owner of the debt or the credit.  The holder of the debt being the creditor and the holder of the credit being the debtor.  The object in play between them being money. 

Remove the binary opposition relationship and what is left?

Just the asset and who has it in their possession.

Just the money and who has it.

The positive state of being of the Object:Money defines its existence.  No binary opposing thing about it.   Having a debt (owing a debt) is not having no money.  Holding a debt due is not having money.   They are each a state of being of a real thing called money.  Real because it has an identity, a unit serial number.

The following is a lost thought that I will leave unrefined.  There was, is something there.  Maybe it is there by the fact of its non-existence?  Maybe its existence that I just can't see right now.

Binary thinking at high levels can be deconstructed to lower levels by pure brain power of the common person.  That process tells the story of human history.  Beyond that level it was always deconstructed further by experts.  Those few experts have created machines as a product of their conceptual decomposition thinking that go far beyond the comprehension level of the common person.  They machines and systems that benefit us or can work to our detriment.   This was going somewhere...............Maybe that our human nature predisposes us to construct our big concepts using presence/absence approaches rather than approaches only dealing with the presence of things in greater and lesser degrees.  Presence/absence is a line that always must have as much of something above the line as it has absence of that thing below the line as it moves through time or our minds.  They must always equal out.  Abundance theory is counter to that thinking.

If you think I am confused then follow this link down through all the entries until you get to this:

Having distinguished the two forms of conjunction by their operational behavior, it is immediately clear that both forms are useful, and are by no means opposed to one another.  This is why, for example, the concept of a lazy language makes no sense, rather one should instead speak of lazy types, which are perfectly useful, but by no means the only types one should ever consider.  Similarly, the concept of an object-oriented language makes no sense, because it amounts to focusing attention solely on the pragmatist conception, to the exclusion of the verificationist, by insisting that only the elimination forms (the so-called “methods”) are relevant in defining an object, and not the introduction forms.
More broadly, it is useful to classify types into two polarities, the positive and the negative, corresponding to the verificationist and pragmatist perspectives.  Positive types are inductively defined by their introduction forms; they correspond to colimits, or direct limits, in category theory.  Negative types are coinductively defined by their elimination forms; they correspond to limits, or inverse limits, in category theory.  The concept of polarity is intimately related to the concept of focusing, which in logic sharpens the concept of a cut-free proof and elucidates the distinction between synchronous and asynchronous connectives, and which in programming languages provides an elegant account of pattern matching, continuations, and effects.

Then read beyond it.  These are the greatest minds among us called experts that are attempting to understand things like I am attempting to do.  I feel their pain as well as the challenge.

Our universe might exist because there is an equal and opposite dark mattter amount of stuff on the other side.  That is really taking presence and absence down to the matter vs no matter level.  Far beyond me.  Maybe there is a rule that everything has to balance with its negative thing absence on the other side.  At the lowest level that rule just gives me the real world that I live in and exist and while it might be a truth of the universe as long as it does not mess up my world and promotes my happiness in it then let it rule.  Just keep it down at the lowest building block level.

The current monetary system got stock long ago at a level of "plus must equal minus" that remains so far up the conceptual ladder scheme of things.  It remains there because it benefits the banking sector immensely.  The application of plus/minus, presence/absence thinking should have descended down to lowest level of logic application as technology progressed leaving behind at its proper high place in the conceptual scheme of things money as an asset only.   The balancing minus side of money no longer mattering.  The minus side exists as the absence of an electrical charge at the binary level of computing.

The nature of Money did not come down from that lofty perch as an Asset/Liability that it sat on long ago.  It has a long way to fall if it is not brought carefully up to date.  It can be brought up to date without the users of the system noticing any significant change.

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