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There are limits to the kinds of problems computation is good at solving, as there are limits as to how to use computation ethically. And then there are limits to what kinds of problems can be computed at all.
There are uncountable ways a question can be unanswerable. In studies of computation, these often break down into problems where we can’t say for sure whether a program will ever stop (the halting problem), and problems where we can’t decide whether a statement is true or false (the entscheidungsproblem, or decision pr...
Particular unanswerable (or unknowable, or uncomputable) questions exemplify situations that we may be able to feel our way through as experiences (from up close or far away) but—encountering the limitations just mentioned—cannot know exactly. We can’t model it or interpret it. It’s beyond us.
I’m thinking, for example, about an example of uncomputability known as the domino problem, illustrated using patterned or shaped tiles. The question is: given any random set of tiles, can they be made to fit together, matching edge to edge with no gaps, to fill any random space? The answer to this can be ‘yes’ or ‘no’...
In this problem, things become uncomputable when we get that there are in fact some kinds of tiles that can fill an infinite space without ever making a pattern that repeats: aperiodic tiles. Since the answer to the domino question for these specific tiles is neither yes nor no, the domino question is shown to be uncom...
I think there is something mystical embedded in these shapes, a power to break questions. I trace them, feeling how their edges force decisions about how to fit or place or rotate into patterns.
Two versions of a type of shape that only makes non-repeating (aperiodic) patterns when tiled, not requiring reflective translations (flipping). Because its tilings have no reflections, researchers have named it spectre. This is the only type of shape known to have this aperiodic quality. Image description: Two similar...
The two versions of the spectre shape, superimposed to show their shared underlying form. Both shapes have the same arrangement of nodes, while each has its own variation of an S-curve forming the edges. I look at the previous figure, and then back, going back and forth between considering the shapes as unique, and of ...
Two ‘supertiles’ in which spectre shapes are placed into a tiled pattern. The only actions needed to make a non-repeating pattern are to rotate and slide the shapes up and down, or side to side, then place them edge to edge with one-another. Arranging these tiles by hand helps me to understand that there are still prin...
This is not the only way to distinguish between computable and uncomputable versions of this particular question. New conditions change the outcome: Are we permitted to know in advance where and how the first tile will be placed? Are we permitted to not only rotate and shift, but reflect, warp, or scale the tiles as we...
With these modifications, a wider variety of shapes can produce non-repeating patterns. When there are less available actions, the possibility of a set of shapes that can produce non-repeating patterns vanishes, and the question becomes computable again.
Another, urgent way of approaching the question of computability: can all patterns be predicted?
Computational approaches to prediction embed a conditional logic in the questions at hand: act, if a condition is met, with the requirement to be specific, legible, and exact. Uncertainty and immeasurability belong to another domain.
This is political. Diagram of a two-dimensional classifier that has learned a boundary between classes. Image description: an array of gray dots on a black background are crossed by a thin white line running diagonally from bottom left to bottom right. Some dots fall above the line, others under. Still others are touch...
Patient-reported outcomes (PROs), as subjective reports of interior experience, produce categories with fuzzy boundaries which require ongoing maintenance work, if interpretation is to be meaningful.
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The work of manipulating evidence through categories and interpretations to become meaning faces a number of challenges and critiques. Traditionally, research has approached this work with the aid of models, whether rational systems placed between observer and the object of study, as with traditional statistics, or eme...
To address the lived experiences, interactions, and affective dimensions that may not be easily captured by traditional forms of representation, disparate contemporary research disciplines, spanning philosophy, art, performance, and social science have taken issue with model-based, representation-driven approaches to m...
Bundled together as non-representational, post-qualitative, or more-than-representational these research methodologies share the position that the work of research is not just to hold a mirror to an external reality, but to engage with the complexities and multiplicities of human-environment interactions, embodied expe...
In this focus on assemblage and movement, non-representational research challenges stable identities, hierarchies, and boundaries, even patterns, emphasizing instead the fluidity, contingency, and relationality of social and material phenomena: everything animated and in motion, plural, changing. Departing from notions...
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“The language of action is [...] the language of nonsymbolic signs in the present tense; but in the present it makes no sense, or if it does, it does so only subjectively, in an incomplete, uncertain, mysterious way,” Pier Paolo Passolini wrote in “Notes on the Long Take.” Passolini continues, in one of the most deeply...
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If continuity and coherence are not intrinsic features of the original data, they are fantasized into the fabric of the model. The shape that this imperative towards coherence makes, out of thin air, is the vibe of the original. I’m drawing from Peli Grietzer’s mathematically-informed literary “Theory of Vibe,” here, a...
Grietzer’s theory understands variational autoencoders, a technique central to many generative AI systems, to be effective in modeling the vibe, or essence, of experiences and objects. From this, he proposes that the features learned by an autoencoder in producing this representation may, in turn, serve as a generative...
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Media are tools for thinking with. Overlapping with language, media offer compressed representations of reality made to be shared over the low bandwidth of our capacity for shared experience. We use media to access what is outside of our own perceptual or cognitive boundaries—to think unthinkable thoughts.
By switching channels between media—tactile, visual, sensory, symbolic, lexical, interactive—we build multimodal associations, extended techniques, to learn more about the texture of reality. More on this in a moment.
To understand latent space it’s necessary to get the underlying principle of dimensionality reduction. Hold a folded piece of paper in your hand between a light source and a blank wall. Note how the dimensionality of the fold, and your hand, are legible as a two-dimensional shadow. Consider all that this allows: to tra...
A latent space is a manifold for holding the reduced dimensional representation of a more complicated reality.
Image description: A black and white image of a hand holding a folded piece of paper. Both the hand and the paper appear to cast a shadow against a wall, and somehow they are both already shadows on the wall. What is intended as an illustration of how three-dimensional forms—the hand, the folded piece of paper—are legi...
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Leaving evidence.
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Image description: A thermal shadow left by a handprint, captured with a black and white infrared camera. The shape of hand’s palm is visible across most of the frame, with soft gradients from light in the center to dark along the fingers. The rest of the frame appears to have a grainy texture, with a few ambiguous sha...
The Rhythmic Work of Interpretation
“Organisms-that-person agitate in the mix, but always in a withness of environment: a becoming ecology of practices.”
“Your body? It consists in a bundle of rhythms.”
Any continuous signal depends on oscillation—repetition and circularity—to give the appearance of stability, of persistence.
Barthes: “Without rhythm, no language is possible: the sign is based on an oscillation, that of the marked and the non-marked.”
The rhythmic event works as a basis not only for symbolic language, but for anything that patterns.
Analyze time like a drum.
Recognition needs repetition.
“Does taking comfort qualify as life? Only if it flickers.”
The rhythmic event brings life, duration and ecologies together as the object of a particular form of analysis, what Henri Lefebvre called rhythmanalysis: “Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm.”
Extending the metaphor of rhythmanalysis, everywhere where there is interaction between prior knowledge and anticipation, there is a frame that guides our senses. Suzanne Langer describes it like this:
“Familiarity is nothing but the quality of fitting very neatly into the form of a previous experience. I believe our ingrained habit [...] of seeing things and not sense-data, rests on the fact that we promptly and unconsciously abstract a form from each sensory experience, and use this form to conceive the experience ...
“The experience of rhythm” in Eleni Ikoniadou’s auditory-focused reading of Langer’s process philosophy, “cannot be rendered discursively; it is indescribable and, moreover, nonsubjective—since it belongs to the act itself.
Ikoniadou uses Langer’s concept of rhythm to show “that aesthetic forms are not static but are assemblages of tension, accumulating continually without reaching an end or resolution (like ‘the breaking of the waves in a steady surf’). Langer’s treatment of the notion brings it forth ‘as a relation between tensions rath...
Langer describes the opportunity afforded by non-discursive (e.g. resonant, or as the interchange of intensities between subjects and objects—affective) forms of analysis, in which sensing is the action of creating worlds: “The world that actually meets our senses is not a world of "things," about which we are invited ...
Language helps to make sense of the world, but affective attunement at the level of mechanistic pattern recognition is key: “Out of this bedlam our sense-organs must select certain predominant forms, if they are to make a report of things and not of mere dissolving sensa. The eye and ear must have their logic—their "ca...
Logically, this process is not one of translation, but of interpretation between incommensurable realities. The imaginary, as the force of listening, doesn’t engage in representation, it only holds shape like a river carrying flood waters after a storm: “The imaginary comments with a dirge, or it just giggles.”
Recognition needs repetition.
“Think of your day as a continuous series of scenes or episodes in a film.”
The Day Reconstruction Method, a survey instrument for self-reported quality of life, compares satisfaction with affect by soliciting not only momentary appraisal, but the reconstruction of remembered affective states, as anecdotes. Patterns, habits, and complex internal attitudes emerge from this simple test. Asking s...
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Importantly, we are not simulating the experience of illness, pain, or disability—we are recognizing these experiences as patterns. Repeatedly asking for, listening to, remembering and responding to subjective accounts of experience (testimonies) builds mutual trust, recognition, and shared imagination, or sense of wha...
Imagination, in an overly literal sense, is the work of making and reading images. In practice, this means mental images in any modality, not just visual (holding a word, sound, place, gesture, plan, system in mind).
Sociologist Ruha Benjamin situates imagination between individual and collective thinking, as “the capacity to link individuals’ personal problems with broader social processes.”
Where imagination invokes the communal, interpretation holds the subjective center. Interpretation is biased work, like reading, critiquing, curating, assembling, learning how patterns and relations come together to make a unity.
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Consider another passage by Ian White, a sharp-tongued deflection of interpretations that conflate the meaning of his work (staged performances, paintings, films) with the meaning of his person (his identity, his biological data, his testimony, explanation, or intention):
“…if I am speaking it is not to ask you to witness my feelings or what I am pretending to feel, which is nothing anyway. Here are no confessions. It is because the thing said is to be there, thrown from me, not of me. ‘I’m not here’ cannot be spoken, stupid. But it is one way of describing agency. And desire. (I’m trap...
I read it in circles, then ask an AI to explain it to me like i’m five (ELI5):
Imagine playing with a toy, and you decide to make it say something.
When the toy speaks, it's not really about the toy or its feelings because, well, toys don't have feelings. This is like saying, "The toy isn't really talking; it's me making it talk for my story."
It's more about the story you are telling with the toy.
In our pretend game, we can change how things normally are. We can make something that doesn't usually change, change.
When we play with the toy differently, we make a new game. This can be a special way to share ideas.
What kind of learning?
Philosopher of technology Beatrice Fazi outlines the shift in direction that everyday computational work has taken with regard to interpretation:
“While much of computer programming has historically consisted in making human abstraction significant and operative within the instrumental remit of algorithmic machines, with deep learning we face the opposite case: the abstractions and consequent instructions the machine gives itself now require interpretation for t...
Interpretation is a process that benefits from inquiry and interaction. To interpret an instrument, it helps to have access, to play, to act and react, to produce and observe effects, to assemble and test ad hoc models of how the instrument behaves.
Explanation, on the other hand, is entirely abstracted from the instrument. Explanation is summary, modeling intent and sentiment, framing and reframing to support what are deemed likely as meaningful patterns. Contemporary AI excels at explanation, but fails at interpretability.
Why this is concerning, particularly in terms of how AI may interact with patient-generated health data, is because it leads to loss of imagination, or to “imagination without insight,” as Audre Lorde has put it, detailing a crushing flaw in the promise of analysis.
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Automation of learning, but what kind of learning?
As I walk to campus today, cutting across the busy traffic of students moving out of campus housing, a self-driving car very politely stops to allow me to cross the street. Robots always work to do better. In cases where ‘better’ is poorly defined, or multiple versions of ‘better’ conflict with each other, whose lead s...
Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) is too often misinterpreted as a focus on individual skills, self-improvement and problem solving, instead of its intended push to reframe educational processes within “a more context-based, relational, and cultural-situational view of problems and their solutions.” Put another way, it’s...
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Sociotechnical imaginaries, as detailed by Sheila Jasanoff, Sang-Hyun Kim and others, describe “collective visions of good and attainable futures [...] both as the ends of policy and as instruments of legitimation.” Sociotechnical describes specific entanglements of social and technological factors contributing to a gi...
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Who imagines? Does filling out a PROM produce a kind of defamiliarization for the patient? A “vertical perspective,” view from outside? What other perspectives are happening, and can they be mapped or diagrammed? For this exercise, I propose an assemblage: Sociotechnical-Emotional Learning.
What did you imagine would happen if you filled out this form? What did you anticipate?
Forms of Submission
“The rhythmanalyst will not be obliged to jump from the inside to the outside of observed bodies; [they] should come to listen to them as a whole and unify them by taking [their] own rhythms as a reference.”
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Every six months I return to the oncologist, who, after glancing at my lab results, performs a curious (to me) ritual of methodically tapping on my chest with the flat side of two fingers close together: thump thump, thump thump. First one spot and then another. Thump thump. Diagnosing by touch, and by listening, the o...
In “The Birth of the Clinic,” Michel Foucault wrote that clinical data originate from “the meeting point of the gestures of research and the sick organism”—they are actively solicited, assembled. The scale and location of this meeting point is variable: Instrumental mediation provides a “solidified distance” between cl...
“The stethoscope,” in the example Foucault provides, “is the measure of a prohibition transformed into disgust, and a material obstacle.” In locating the function of disgust, he is drawing from René Laënnec, the 19th century physician and musician, who first developed the stethoscope. Laënnec promoted his invention as ...
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Crip theorist Robert McRuer, in “Composing Bodies; or, De-Composition” details the uses of composition (as a creative and pedagogical act) to trouble the idea that “identity [...] emerges from disparate features that are supposed to be organized into a seamless and univocal whole.”
Invoking Donna Haraway’s notion of “permanently partial identities [...] living within limits and contradictions” McRuer calls for a practice of critical de-composition: “re-orienting ourselves away from [...] compulsory ideals and onto the composing process and the composing bodies—the alternative, and multiple, corp...
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