Part 3: Nature & Infinity, ft. Sarah Pourciau

Welcome to episode 3 of The Being Invent Podcast. I'm Andrew, here with Alex, and today we feature an interview with Professor Sarah Porsio, where we talk about Cantor, Dedicand, the Continuum, the Ocean, and so many other things. But first, Alex and I offer our reading and interpretation of Elaine Badu's Being Invent Part 3, "Hooks on Nature" and "Infinity". Yeah, so we're kind of going step-by-step, part three, and actually, I think, by the end of today, Parts 1, 2, and 3, they really formed this sort of sequence, which I would call kind of like the Arithmetical or Natural Story for Bedu. And if we were to just stop after Part 3, we would have a very different explanation to the question of the mathematical story of ontology or something like that. And so, yeah, maybe we can kind of try to wrap a little bit at the end, like what these first three parts are all about. But before we get in, I just want to do sort of like a high-level kind of reminder about some of the larger themes that I think are important, at least for me, and you can chime in as well. And the first one I mentioned before, which is sort of a point about politics, where I think it's important to describe Bedu basically as a modernist, and specifically as a political modernist, acknowledging all of the critiques of political modernism, get into those as well. But I think that's a proper characteristic of Bedu. That's the first point. Second point is about math, which, what do you mean? You can't just say that he's a modernist, and then I'll explain what you mean by that, because it means so many different things, so many different things. Just the break, the theory of the break, that the political is understood as some sort of strong stark break. So that could be a break with the past, that could be a break with like everyday life or common sense, that could be a subjective break, which it is explicitly in bed you, right, where if you say like, well, what's the political, you know, the bed you in answer would have to include at some level, like you must change your life, you know, like the subject has to be qualitatively different at the end of it than at the beginning of it. So it's not necessarily development, colonialism, industrial revolution, new forms of gender and sexuality, science, literacy science, I'll say science again, even if I didn't say it the first time. Yeah, I mean, is it novelty? Yeah, it's all of the above. I mean, I think, and this is bad use. I think great is sort of liability and invulnerability, which is that he is vulnerable, you know, we talked about this in the first episode, right, that he's sort of trying to re-instantiate as the sort of like grand philosophical project. And you know, with all of the perhaps, I don't know, kind of nefarious, Eurocentric, teleological, you know, all of the things that go along with that, I mean, I don't know if this isn't an attempt to excuse him, but I think, you know, you mentioned sort of like new notions of sexuality, and I think, yeah, why don't we talk about those things too, right? Like Bolshevism as a new way of thinking about like the role of women, that's in fact really radical and really progressive. And so that may be a different way to think about political modernism, that isn't something we want to immediately discard. And I guess we'll get to this in Meditation 11 where he's saying that, you know, there is something that was new or interesting about the Greeks, but there's also this older legacy of philosophy from China, India, that did it even better than them, the poetic stuff. Also, he's not Christian, there's something like modern and new with with Canton. Okay, so I'm with you that. Yeah, and also we'll get to this in a second, as you said in Meditation 11, you know, it's not that he is endorsing the normal. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. He's endorsing the ab normal, right? And so it's a form of political modernism, I think, that if you will, like, is headed in an appealing direction or whatever, like it's not it's not this notion of political modernism where we have to like escape some form of deviation or and then adhere to the law or to the word or to yeah, I mean, look, if we want to look at time, one could say that, no, maybe linear time of these other things, beginning outside of cyclical time, which is let's say what some people will say is pre-modern time with a transition figure being some like Viko or something that, you know, now we get revolution. Yeah, and you know, honestly, we need to bring that back, right? Like we're in this, you know, we're in this sort of like, you know, what's the Mark Fisher line, like this, there's the sort of collapse of the future or whatever, like the slow cancellation of the future is at the line, you know, we're in this sort of there is no alternative, like sort of numbing fog phase of history where, and so, you know, I think the return of history, the return of some notion of a strong historical break is appealing to me. So that's one of the reasons why I really like that you. Yeah. So, okay, so that's kind of the first overarching point, which again, we'll I think we're going to just touch back on this like in probably every episode at some level. Second point is about math, and this one I'm not sure I can actually explain today because it's maybe an unusual notion, but I want to propose this. And so this might be a just a sort of like a tease or something, but the proposal is that bad. Do you gives us not just a description of math or a kind of interpretation of math or whatever, but he actually gives us a definition of mathematics. And what I think the definition ultimately is for for bed you is, and it's an unusual thing because it seems to be sort of like slightly self referential or recursive, but he says that mathematics is essentially defined as the difference between the real and the natural, the difference between the real and the natural. So, so some kind of like differential in the real and the natural, like the natural almost does like a subtraction from the real. This is what we could maybe nominate bed use principle. I think this is something that he basically introduces into the discourse. Okay, so file that away. I know that's just kind of a tease, and I don't want to actually say more about it today because we have a lot more to get to, but what maybe I can say something very briefly, which is we have real numbers, which is to say I don't pie square root or two, something like that. But then we have a lachanian real, which he's willing to sort of play between these, which for him is something that is maybe not maybe it's symbolizable, but it's not stable. Yes. Or it's it's still sort of there's a level of inaccessibility to it. Yeah, no, I think that's I think those are those are all of the discourses that need to be kind of included and implicated in in this definition that math is to find is the difference between the real and the natural exactly. So the hint as you're as you just are point out is to just simple number theory, right? Like the real numbers, the natural numbers, yet perhaps we can also do some sort of like analogy there to yeah, like you said, some of these concepts in lachan. And that's what I want to do. Yeah, and maybe it's messy. Maybe they don't entirely map over, but I think they there's some kind of connection. But I guess this means we're going to have to talk about nature about what nature, the natural nature, totally. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what yeah, and that's and that's one of the big topics for today. Okay. And then the third big macro thing and maybe this maybe this is kind of more my own hobby horse, but you have a lot of good ideas about this too is a kind of running commentary about technology, namely running commentary about computers and the digital analog distinction questions, you know, this kind of ongoing lingering question that may not have a very clear answer, which is, is bed you a digital philosopher? Yes or no, I think ultimately he is, but he's not a digital philosopher in a kind of mainline normal sense of like, you know, people who say that at the fundamental level, you know, things are discreet. And so this will be fun. I think for us because we can sort of fill in a little bit for bed use surprising kind of near total silence on the computation, the digital, which is sort of surprising, I think for someone who has such a technical mind and is drawn to things that are either adjacent or feed directly into modern digital computation. So maybe, you know, maybe we can kind of just supplement that story a little bit. Well, yeah, the biggest thing to happen to mathematicians in the last century is simple calculating machines turned into computers, which are now a way to not only verify work for proofs that used to only exist, let's say, you know, written an ink on a book and you had to sort of ask somebody and then might come with different results or something. But now we're at a stage where there's actually this casting forth and computers might actually have a navigational or exploratory role to find new numbers, theorems. I'm not a mathematician, so I don't know all the technical vocabulary here, but that the computers can actually drive mathematical inquiry, even in your math are really, really difficult stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And it does not show up in bad use work. There are no computers here. And so it seems to be like a huge absence. Yeah. No computers were harmed in the creation of this book, which is, which is weird for someone who has such an advanced like kind of technological brain. And you know, when I was, when I was looking at Reiner's archives a few years ago at MIT, you know, for years, it's just like him doing doodles of Cantor and talking about Russell and like all these people that that bad use, no, not engaging that leads to cyber dynamics and computations and know it. So like, he could have done this if he wanted, but maybe he doesn't want to get his hands dirty. Who knows? There's, there's got to be a reason. Yeah. It may even just be, I mean, this is maybe a goofy answer, but you know, it may just be a kind of like, um, theoretical, practical split, you know, like there's the applied math people and there's the pure math people, and bed you as 100% on the pure math people side. And, uh, and I would say computer science is ultimately at the end of the day, you know, it's a practical science, meaning things have to run using electricity on an actual machine within finite time and finite resources. And, you know, I probably said this before in a previous episode, but like if you ask a computer scientist about infinity, they'll kind of like give you the side eye, you know, like it's just infinity is not a thing within a computer. You don't even have real numbers in computers. You have, you have- You don't have an infinite hard drive, your processor can't hold an infinite number. Yeah. Right. No, no, no, you know, I mean, you have, you have, you have, you have pretty good approximations, like, you know, with floating point numbers, but to a pure, to pure mathematics, a floating point number is as far away from the real number it's supposed to represent as like an integer, you know? So technique does come up once in our reading today in meditation 11 in the original Greek. And the way that he describes it right before it is he says art, work of art, technique. So I mean, I think that reveals a lot. Right. That's where he's sort of sparring with high-digger that we'll get to in one second. Okay. So, okay, but you said, okay, so you pushed back a little bit on the political modernist thing, which I think is valid. And I just want to, before we get deep into the episode, just kind of reinforce that that there are a lot of people who want to reject badgy precisely on some of these macro-level themes that we've been talking about. And one of my favorite ones, examples of this is from Catherine Malibu in an often comment, but I think an important one, her critique of badgy. And I should look this up, but I can't really remember off the top of my head any point where badgy's done it. Sorry, where Malibu's done a extended read on badgy. I could be wrong. Maybe there's something there that I've missed, but she might have something like that forth coming in the future. I don't know. But there is an off-hand comment in this interview, I found, where she's sort of, her critique of badgy is that he basically rejects things that she likes, things like biology and maybe a more kind of physical or material realm in favor of math. And so this is the quote, the philosophical use of mathematics today is very strange and deserves to be deconstructed. Badgy, of course, is the great guru of this mathematician of the real. We know what is hidden behind this totalitarian thinking. And of course, badgy hates biology. Yeah, and I mean, she's cutting right to the heart, right? Because if you say badgy hates biology, I mean, you know, you know, it's in parentheses there. She's basically saying badgy. Badgy hates women. Yeah, so this is very difficult. And that totalitarian theme, too, also comes up in other people who are critical of badgy, including Francois Larrouel, right? His anti-badgy basically makes the claim that badgy is doing a kind of like, you know, a kind of like re-education plan, right? That you have to like train and discipline thinking along these sort of like gulag type. You know, making these kind of analogies to like a kind of, I don't know, cultural revolution or some sort of like totalitarian quasi-totalitarian, like sort of imposition on the subject. And so, yeah, there are other people who are kind of pushing back on badgy's sort of political posture. But maybe I'll push back on Malibu just a little bit here and say, okay, maybe totalitarian, we'll have to figure out what that means. But we're going to find out with nature, actually by the time we're done with it today, maybe there's not even nature. What's been called nature with the big end is not a totality or a whole. And maybe it's just an illusion anyway. And by the time we get to Hegel, oh man, he tears into Hegel from three or four different angles. And there is there's no totality by the time we're done with that. Right. Right. But it's wild because you probably would agree that the method that badgy uses in that meditation is ironically or maybe he planned to this is super hegelian, right? He's like, like the the successor imminent critique. Yeah, totally. Right. So the successor ordinal versus the limit ordinal. I mean, you can see the kind of workings of the dialectic where he's sort of oscillating perspective wise. Like if you consider an ordinal from its kind of role as a successor, it come you come to this conclusion. But if you consider the ordinal in its role as a limit, then you kind of come to this other conclusion. And so that's a kind of beautiful kind of meta methodological move that he's doing in those sections. And there's I'd imagine there's a lot of difference and indifference that shows up in that too. And there's sort of ambiguity to where bad you ends on this. And if people actually mistake bad you for agreeing with Hegel right in this chapter, I think they can right come to some very um, species conclusions. He doesn't do a terribly good job. Yeah. Which you could easily do. Yeah, I think the first time I read this, I probably was thinking that badgy was a lot more of an ally with with Hegel in that section. Um, and in fact, this is we talked in the past about how spinosa and delus are that's one constituency that badgy really wants to keep at bay. And we see also in this section which we'll get to next. Um, Heiderger is also and phenomenology, the version of phenomenology that is, you know, so intent on focusing on presence and authenticity. And he also needs to keep that at bay. Um, and maybe here we also see that there is a kind of like version of Hegel and dialectics that even if, if, if badgy is kind of sympathetic to some of those mechanisms, he also needs to kind of keep that at bay as well. Let's jump into it. Um, Meditation 11 poem or Matthew. I mean, as an operator or you get a choice. I mean, here's that, here's your binary, you know, if you need one. So, so maybe we can, um, yeah, rehearse it a little bit. Philosophy of the conjunction, you know, delus is an and guy, badgy is an or guy. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the biggest or as we get, you know, because remember at the beginning of the book, he says, Heiderger is the last big philosopher or at least, if we're to all agree on the last big philosopher, it's Heiderger. And now he's just like, but I am not that. So here comes your break. Okay. So what's his, what's his, what's his, like, what's the dagger, what's the like shift in the ribs of Heiderger here? Yeah. So okay. So first begins with rehearsal. He just wants us to understand what he takes to be Heiderger, who is poem. And so Heiderger says that the moderns have forgotten nature, big M, as in the Greek, um, physicist, because we've made physics or mistaken physics, uh, physics for physics in and through Galileo. So, you know, this fontifiable, measurable, verifiable, you know, today we might say that the figure of positivism sort of stands in for this as well, but he wants to take it, you know, badgy is putting it a little bit farther back in the history of ideas. Because we've forgotten that. That's the thing that Heiderger needs return to, but maybe I should, I should get to that at the end. So then, badgy by contrast, says that the Greeks gave us something, but it wasn't this poetic on top. We don't need this Heidergerian project of going back to the Greeks to see what they originally meant if being perverted by the Romans and the Christians and ontotheology between it. And badgy makes this claim that I like, but I think some others might dislike to say that there are people who've done the poetic philosophy better, and they are the Chinese, the Indian, and other philosophers. So what do the Greeks give us? The Greeks interrupted that poetic ontology, which is sort of philosophy from so many places, and it gives us mathematical reason through deduction. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So he says the Greeks did not invent the poem rather they interrupted the poem with the Matthew. And this is part, I think of his, you know, I think we're we we're there. There's so many examples of people who want to sort of like undo Plato, right? Like Plato's the problem. We need to undo him. And so for Heiderger, even that's true for Heiderger, right? He's like, Plato is the problem, right? Like it's the pre-secretics. That's what's interesting. And Belize does a similar kind of move in the view for different reasons. And so I think the kind of audaciousness of bad you is that he knows that everyone is going to freak out when he does this, but he wants to militantly kind of reassert the radicalness of the Platonic intervention. Yeah. And and that in that, he like fights the Greeks on both sides, both the pre-secretics, you know, who probably be way too mystical for him and poetic. And then Aristotle, who's probably too much yet in the realm of physics and engineering and the substance of the real world. Yeah. Yeah. He's he's like good technocrat. So then okay, we get this image then. And he says there's no loss that needs to be recovered. We don't need to like figure out alafea or the real the truth that the Greeks knew that we've forgotten, which he says such a fun line where he says like that's just a nostalgia that Heiderger and the Germans are so known for. So he's just like swiping out all the Germans for that one. And he says instead he's cool with maybe a version of physicists, but that's not physics at all. It's just pure math. And eventually we'll get a symbolization for it later. That's just like way out there. Very very axiomatic. Yeah. So so so yeah, he says nature is normal. And then he gives it there's a series of these of these totally wild ways of characterizing nature. He says nature is normal. Nature is consistency. He says nature is the remaining there of the stable, or that's like internal quotation I forget from him. Maybe that sounds very very Heiderger. I don't know. And then he says nature is a stability of stability's. So this is his indictment of nature. And he wants to eventually, I don't know if I wouldn't go so far maybe like anti nature, but we know that we know that this kind of state of like ordinal nature needs to be surpassed and it gets surpassed very quickly in the book. I mean, in the next two meditations, which maybe we should just, you know, move to nature is just totally demolished by the end. Like there might be this physicist thing, but he says nature is an illusion. Right. It's it's this human thing that we've come up with to have this assumed totality. And that that makes it finite. It doesn't want any of that fine finiteness. He doesn't want to be this like thing that we return to nature. You know, we're like, oh, what do we know? We're talking about these abstract things. Give me a concrete case because that's how I know where the rubber hits the ground. And he's like, no, no, the rubber doesn't hit the road there. It's, you know, nature is just this terrible illusion that we've come up with in order to, you know, stop inquiry, stop thought. Yeah. Right. And again, you know, he gives this, he gives us through a technical definition, right? Like he, we hinted at this last time about the things that are presented, things that are represented. And he defines the normal as both presented and representate represented. So there's a kind of almost like consistency or entrainment between both of those moments that presented and the represented. And so this is why for bed you nature is homogeneity, right? He says nature is self homogenous, self presentation. It's homogenous normality. And I think that's a huge, huge part of how he's setting up the argument that will come later. And I already read the, the Catherine Malibu, the Catherine Malibu line at the top, right? And so we can see now, I think maybe why this posture would be so irritating to her. We could compare to Malibu, we could also make a comparison with, with delus, who would, I think say, hopefully you would agree exactly the opposite, right? Nature is heterogeneity. Yeah. Nature is de-territorialization. Yeah. Univosity of difference. Yeah. Exactly. It's, it's not a stability of stability. It's an instability of instability or something, right? Far from equilibrium, chaos, the chasmosis. Right. Exactly. Right. Exactly. Right. The order that grumbles beneath or whatever. Yeah. And so, and so that's odd, you know, you could pick up this book and be like, why is, why is bed you doing this? But it's really a step in the argument that then will be consummated a little bit later because, you know, he has to have the thing that gets broken from, right? So, if nature is normal, then the brick with nature will be the abnormal. And that's the, that's the direction that bed you is on, right? Like that's, the vector is pointing in toward the abnormal. The event is the abnormal, the thing that is impossible within the situation. Yeah. Because it's not easy to telegraph this. He hasn't told us where he's going yet. So, when I'm reading this, I'm like, okay, here's the technical, you know, stuff that we're working through right now. I know that he's neither a poetic, pre-sacratic, swirling mist of the void, even though he likes the void. Nor is he the Aristotelian, like, practical reason guy here who's trying to, you know, talk about what works. So, maybe this is time for Meditation 12, where we get, I mean, I think the title of this one's very straightforward. We do get a version of nature now, no longer a totality or a whole. We get an intellectual schema of natural multiples. That's where natures have natures have. And the non-existence of nature. So, nature isn't just like a single, single overarching term for anything. Yeah. So, maybe I could just say, like, two sentences about this concept of the ordinal. So, you know, and I'm not a mathematician, but, you know, they're sort of like these two important concepts that are used to describe number. And one is the cardinal quality of number or cardinality. And the other is the ordinal quality of number or the ordinal or our ordinality. And so, we haven't really gotten to the cardinal yet, but the ordinal is really important in this section. And so, what is the ordinal? Well, it's the quality of number that refers to just the order of numbers, or the seriality of numbers. And so, we would think of it maybe just in terms of like the counting numbers. Like, it's sort of cognitively and conceptually, we think of three as a magnitude before, in sequence, in order, before the magnitude four. Right. So, that may seem like completely obvious and why would we ever not think that? Let's slow this down for a second. Yeah. It's if we think of baseball, everyone has a number on their back, and then they're also put in a batting order. Yeah. Yeah. And those are different exact batting order is the is the ordinality and the number on their back is the cardinal. Yeah. Yeah. Like exactly. Like you could look at a basketball player. Like is, you know, is Michael Jordan the 23rd third in line or something? No. Like that that number is the name. That's a proper name. And so, when we look at it, we're looking at the cardinality of that number. We're not looking at the ordinality of that number. Another example would be like, like, if we said like, what's the cardinality of a cardinav eggs? We could say it's a dozen, right? But if we said what's the ordinality of a cardinav eggs, there isn't really an answer to that. There's not one egg that's the first one before the other one. And so, I think that's a good example because it shows that number can have the quality of cardinal. And it can also have optionally the quality of the ordinal. And it doesn't necessarily have to have both. And we can think about numbers that or symbols maybe that do one and do the other. And there's this great moment in Lacan where he talks about how the alphabet has cardinality, but it doesn't have ordinality or it doesn't have a strong sense of ordinality. So, you know, we could intuitively say like, yeah, D is after C, right? Okay, we learned our ABCs like after quote unquote, but it's not after C in a strong ordinal sense, meaning like, when you compose words out of letters, it's not like the fourthness of D that makes sense in its like composition and phonemes and syllables and words and things like that. Whereas the very meaning of four, you would have to understand in an ordinal sense in order to use that integer if you wanted to compose like the number 14 or some other number. Yeah, to a computer, they have no ordinality except maybe that it corresponds to no, it won't have any ordinality at all other than maybe the size it takes up. Yeah. But then from the perspective of a human occasionally, it comes in, but usually not, you know, it does. It does. And it comes in in different languages like XYZ, ABC, you can make jokes or things where the sequence actually kind of matters of how we're sort of taught it. But yeah, yes, that is true. And then also, of course, there are languages where Alphabet is used as explicitly as counting numbers. So like Greek and Hebrew are both two examples of that. Like we say Alphabet, you know, to mean first, second, or omega to mean last. And so the notion of kind of ordinality, I think, is strong, more strongly typed in certain languages, but I think in English, it's not entirely vacant, but I think Lacan does have a good point, which is that, you know, our normal kind of Roman alphabet is has a strong sense of cardinality, but a very weak sense of of ordinality. And anyway, we don't want to get I think maybe too too lost here, but another way I think to think about the ordinal as it figures in meditation 12 is I think I think a mathematician would agree with this example. But I like the metaphor of sort of like Russian dolls, right? Like nested dolls as a way to understand this idea of the ordinal chain. Because one thing that bedgie stresses in this meditation and he's getting this from kind of pretty well adopted and well-known definitions of ordinal number in mathematics, which is that you define a successor number basically in terms of the number that came before it. It's kind of like what, you know, like we were talking to us before we started recording about this notion of like of, you know, bedgie begins with the void and then he does like an operation on the void and that basically sort of like engulfs the thing inside of it and then you can do an operation on that and it engulfs that and you do an operation on that. And so there's this sort of chain that gets formed where every successive ordinal number literally technically contains the previous number inside it. And that's how you get this like very strongly linked series or order. It's not like, you know, just the word of God that tells you that one number comes after the other number or something. It's no, it's like a kind of a technical, it's a part of how numbers are kind of technically constructed. And so I like this metaphor of the nested Russian dolls, right? Like each nested doll belongs, he, I'll just read the quote. He says an ordinal is the number of that which it is the name. An ordinal can therefore be visualized as a chain of belonging. And he wants to say that this is a place where you have this, he says a maximum correlation between belonging and inclusion. Everything which belongs is included. So the Russian dolls again, like everything that's supposed to be inside one doll is in it, right? Nothing else is in it. And the doll that's supposed to be inside isn't somewhere else, right? Like sitting on the shelf or something. So everything's supposed to be inside the nested doll is there and nothing else is there. And then if you open that, there's this sort of iterative process where the same thing happens inside that doll. The only thing that's supposed to be inside the smaller one is present in it. And nothing else is present is present there. Yeah. Okay. So you've gone up with the successor. We've sort of started with a number that that can get counted also to mention the void in here. He's interested in how this can happen. Maybe in the, you know, you can't have a, you can't, it's like a null set, right? So it doesn't matter what the number is. So it doesn't like, like to use my baseball metaphor. It's the batting order where it doesn't even matter who the player is right now. He's just talking about the fact that there needs to be this order and all the things about it. We can also go down in this meditation. He's interested in this atomistic description where he says that the proper, we can define some of the elements at least according to the properties, I guess, the data. He's interested in how you can have a minimal blogging. So the smallest possible element that still belongs and that leads to a halting point where you stop the counting, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. What do you make of that? Because I wrote, my wrote in the margin there basically like atomism exclamation point. And he's sort of talking about that. An atom for every natural property. And so in my first thought was like, oh, shit, this is, this is like the smoking gun, you know, bad you is an atomist. He's a, he's a digital thinker. There's, there is a terminal unit at the bottom. And I think it's not exactly the right characterization, though. I still think he's a digital philosopher, but kind of for other reasons. So what did you make of that, that sort of terminal atomic basis or, or, or, or at least a basis? I'm just holding it without judgment right now. I don't know how to cash it out. I'm just holding it without judgment right now that bad you thinks that atomism, some element of atomism is necessary for his account. Obviously he'd get rid of it if he didn't need to because he's like trying to work with certain level of elegance here. Yeah. Maybe it could also be related to the other piece which comes a little earlier in the chapter two, where he's trying to give us this image of, well, how, how are all these things related, right? So we might have a term that can be sort of added in succession. I'm not added a grown in succession. And he's saying, well, there is nature, but nature does not exist. And there's no hole. There's no totality. There are just parts, which sounds like a certain atomism as well. You know, there's an atomism that says that the relationship between two things is an independent third thing. So there are these, these questions like holes and parts. And it seems like he's working with all parts and no holes. But then it's not just this void of atoms in which they're just sort of floating independently of each other. He makes this claim that all natural multiples are related through integration or in, in trickation without forming a hole. They're all interrelated or not actually related. They're intricate. But it doesn't add up to a hole. There's no totality that comes from it. Nor is there like even a common term. He loves that. He loves the like, the denying the one, the denying the whole yet, yet, holding on to the mold. So this is giving us an interesting relationship to this universality that we're going to grow to later as well. Like we do have this image of all of the things, but the all doesn't equal one. So yet there is a potential synonym for the one which he does want to grapple with, which is infinity, the infinite. Yeah. Meditation 13. Boom. I like this argument. I think it's super clump. Yeah. This section, I mean, I even just on a personal note, I mean, so this is kind of a sidebar, but I've told you this story before. But when, you know, when I first read being an event, I basically hated this section, turned up my nose, glossed through it, skipped it, was offended by it, was like, I don't want to read this because for me, infinity meant idealism. It meant, you know, the haggle section meant idealism. And at that age, I was still, I probably still am under this kind of heavy sway of like the Altusserian epistemological break, right? Still committed to removing speculative idealism as much as possible, right? Like always side with marks and never side with a pagel, et cetera. And it was really only years later, ironically, after a kind of like delisian epiphany that I began to see the importance of the infinite. And it's not like as a proxy for the transcendental or the absolute or God or whatever, but as a, as really the experience of real continuity, you know, I mean, I think that's how delisian would put it. You know, this also connects to my interest in the analog, right? And so the, I mean, the the too long didn't read version is infinity doesn't really work within the digital, if you ask me, but it's 100% at home in the analog. And so if you want to take the analog seriously, you have to take infinity seriously. And that may not make much sense, particularly now in Badgeo because he's starting from arithmetic, he's starting from counting numbers like whole discrete numbers. And that may actually betray a, a erythmetical bias in Badgeo, which I think is true. But he is, he's, he's, he's cantor-pilled, you know, I mean, he has to get to the two sizes of infinity and he wants to get to them, both of them. He's avoiding the cosmological one, right? That's, that's how he calls it. But providing, you know, infinite natural multiplicity is what he calls it. And so, I mean, you hinted at this earlier, right? Like he wants infinity, but without God, without a kind of mystical version of it. I think that's, that's the clever part of this, this meditation for me. Yeah. Because like you, you know, I was raised on antietapists. So like God is how you hide power, right? This sort of transcendent otherworldly thing isn't just like an error of thoughts. It's a power operation in which people concealed their own operations of power. Right? And that's, that's in so many ways one of the big sort of Nichean targets in antietapists. Like the psyche as this unsought, this unthought or as, you know, appeals to transcendence as it, as it inspires politics, as it actually is this despotic impulse, which DNG find a little bit in Dariada and Han and the name of the father. Okay. Anyway, I don't need to rehearse the DNG side of this. But so like you, I'm always a little suspicious of the infinity stuff, especially kind of the delusions he used to cheat. So it's like, okay, what's he gonna do here? But he does something else. He says like the ancients didn't believe in the infinite. I, I lived in Missouri for a while. You know, the great Missouri State motto, you know, I believe it when I see it. You know, there's like a, for him, I think that he takes the ancients as saying like there's not, there's not a, never trust a number rather than you can throw it, you know, like just very like finiteness to things. And he said, the Christians weren't any better. They, they layered or stacked this transcendent god on top of it. But it was a transcendent otherworldliness, like in this sort of like conke and critique of it, where it's just like an excuse to say that there's this outside, but they failed to actually have an adequate concept for thinking it. So in fact, the, the Christians didn't even really have an infinite. It was like a fake infinite. So I thought that was kind of, I mean, that, that's like a great argument. Yeah. Because it takes Cantor to actually think the infinite, which is a bit ironic given that Cantor himself said he was inspired by God to think the infinite, right? Oh, well, yeah. And then he like went crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, right. And so this, I think this is Badge's point, which is that he, I think what he would say is that if you have a concept of the infinite that you only get by basically denying, let's call it like the rationalist posture or whatever. So like an appeal to some ineffable beyond or repeal an appeal to like pure belief at a theological level. Thing bad, you would say like you haven't done it. You haven't done it to the infinite. But if you get it strictly through this technical language that we inherit from Cantor, then you did it. You did it technically. You did it rational. You did it within mathematics. So it still has all of the explosion. It still has all of the glory and all of the power, right, of the infinite. But you didn't get it through like, you know, Heidegger on his path and like meditating on like the forgetting of some pure presence or something like that, right, which is a kind of secular religion. So maybe this sort of false concept of infinity is transcendent version of infinity. He says that put thought onto an imaginary impasse that just it was incapable of doing this not so it takes Cantor to break through it. And so the version of infinity that he wants says is without breaks, it's without nature, it's without without meditation of the one. Okay, I think we're sort of coming through an understanding. And then maybe I'm skipping ahead here, but this is very much his like attack on the philosophies of finiteness of which Heidegger, but then all these sort of phenomenologists and other sort of stand in for. And I'm just going to read it page 149 right at the end. He says, human is that being which prefers to represent within finitude, who Stein is deaf rather than knowing itself to be entirely traversed and encircled by the omnipresence of infinity. At the very least one consolation remains, that of discovering that nothing actually obliges humanity to acquire this knowledge, because at this point, the sole remit for thought is the school of decision. Yeah, and that's definitely a dig at Heidegger, you know, being into death, the importance of finitude in being a time. And then yeah, I interpreted the second half of what you just read almost as a kind of would you agree, almost as a kind of existentialism, right? The school of decision, the decision academy or something. Yeah. Yeah, because it's not like it's almost like the human is sort of placed in accessible proximity to the infinite. Given all of the tools, yet necessarily must act in this kind of quasi existentialist way, must sort of enact the decision or the decision is enacted through the person. We'll probably have to wait until we really get into the decision because when I hear a decision, I always think Schmitts and like hyper conservative anti-revolutionary politics. But maybe I like the Sartrian decision here. Well, I mean, I agree, I think you're you're right that there is this important tradition of basically saying decision is fundamentally conservative or maybe if that's putting it too strongly, decision is synonymous with a traditional conception of philosophy. Right, so this is basically what I learned from basically what I learned from reading law or well, which is that in meditation 14, that you comes down very clearly and he basically says like, I'm not doing a deductive science. I'm not doing an inductive science. I'm doing a science of decision. So like in another book that he writes sort of in the wake of this book in a book called Number and Numbers, he puts this very clearly. He says it's not deduction, it's decision, and this is the quote, the infinite will not be deduced. We have to decide its existence axiomatically, which comes down to admitting that one takes this existence not for a construction of thought, but for a fact of being, which is totally wild. So he's, let's take that a little more slowly. So he's saying it's not something you deduce or construct. And those are both direct references to like methods that people use in logic and math. So he's saying like they're the certain version of doing that. Instead, it has to be about decision and axiom. And then the result is a fact of being, which is like very hidegarian or something, right? Capital B. And it's, it seems like it might connect with someone like Delizor Spinoza, right? Because for Deliz, of course, continuity is real. You know, the real is real. And so maybe a kind of fact of being, even though Deliz would never use language like that. But bed you is nevertheless always an ever that classical metaphysician, I think, on this point. And that's where the decision being is always split. It's never continuous. Anyway, so for me, this is kind of like the proof that, that, that you as a digital philosopher, it's not case he's an atomist or not even just that he has an affection for math that explains that. You mean, Deliz had his own, you know, affection for certain kinds of math. But it's because he's committed to this decisive decision-based logic, which I would connect with distinction, discretization, the cut, a kind of strong notion of, of discrete stark symbolic difference. And I think this is something that I never really metabolize, I think fully, until after reading Laruel. And he, I don't know if Laruel would say explicitly, like, that's a conservative posture. But, but that's the, I think that's the assumption, right? That, like, that is the traditional posture of Western metaphysics. And bed you is 100% doing it. Absolutely. So the decision also being related to all these mathematical operations that formalized through computation, like executing a command. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. It's an active event. You know, that, that something is, yeah, it's, it's active. Whereas, whereas like for Deliz, there's a passive synthesis of a lot of things that happen within a sort of metaphysical schema. Yeah. And here for the most important thing is an active decision. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think like the most generous read is that this is a kind of existentialism. You know, we could probably pick meaner, meaner things to call this, right? Like, I don't know. Volunteerism or totalitarianism is that that's what Malibu was saying, right? Yeah, totalitarianism. Yeah. Yeah. Or, or even, or even some, you know, like, what's the, what's the, what's the flip side of existentialism that's more, that's like less, you know, less kind of generous read on existentialism is like, oh, you know, like the great man theories, like an individual who can like, you know, head out into the world and make like active, you know, you know, it exert their will and then have it be actively, like, realized in the world or something. So like various forms of volunteerism that that are gross and mastered. I mean, it's funny. You say arithmetic too, because in the next meditation, there's this funny sort of, it ends, like, I guess I just read another ending. This one, he's kind of taking a swipe at arithmetic, but maybe I should read some of this too, because it was like one of these moments is like, wow, he's really going for it. The arithmetic, queen of Greek thought, for Udoxus's geometricizing revolution, is in truth, the science of the first limit ordinal alone, which he designates as a omachron, or a omega omachron. It is ignorant of the latter's function as other. So even with this mathematician and this formalization, he wants to maintain the otherness of a lot of these, these returns here, especially within the limit ordinal. I mean, mentions finiteness, but then he has this like pro-con. He says the strength of arithmetic lies in its calculatorid dominion. He's obtained by the foreclosure of the limit and the pure exercise of the interconnection, same others. So he's giving arithmetic some do. So a certain version of calculation, he's saying is necessary and useful. Then he says, it's weakness lies in its ignorance, of the presentative essence of the multiplicities with which it calculates. Essence revealed only in deciding that there's only the seers of others within the sight of the big other, and that every repetition supposes the point at which interrupting itself in an abyss. It summons beyond the name of the one multiple that it is, infinity is that name. So he's ultimately saying, even if we can arithmetize certain operations and try and get to the multiple that it calculates. Sure, it's calculable, but we're still left with an inability to understand the abyss, the one multiple, the other, all these things. He says, we can do all these operations on it. But you know, sounds very like Heidegger at a certain moment, right? Yeah. I see it still seems like the ineffable. I don't know. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I think this is a fundamental sort of, it's not a problem, but there's this fundamental kind of counterintuitive inconsistency and idea, which is that he's very militantly against pushing back against, let's just call it a kind of romantic, or in this section, the poetic ontology, right? Nevertheless, there's all this talk about abysses and impasses, and you know, radical breaks. And so it does seem that there is a kind of romantic posture that re-emerges. And yeah, I think what you, just to respond to what you just said, which I think is crucial, which is something to be acknowledged, bed you, starts with arithmetic, right? That's really important. I think set theory also starts with an erythematical mode, and I would say a lot of mathematicians and logicians and other people also are basically biased in favor of the arithmetic. But you're absolutely right that part of the narrative of this book is to get beyond it, right? Nature is normal. He wants to get beyond this kind of limited sense of number. And so I think like the overall trajectory is that until now, he's basically been kind of clearing the field. He's been sparring with opponents. He's been setting up some kind of tube technical prerequisites. But it's really only in meditation 13, 13 and 14, where we basically, for the first time we see bed you taking a large kind of active step towards his ultimate goal in the book, which is to basically use Cantor's sizes of infinity as a basis for this political modernism for this theory of radical break. And the event, the event, absolutely. Yeah, and I think maybe we're still here and being, right? So we're getting this thorough, thorough economy. Yeah, we're exactly, yeah, we're still here and being, exactly, exactly. And so, and so that's I think where this is ultimately headed. So in meditation 13 on infinity, we're still just within nature, quote, unquote. We're still just within the erythematical, the erythematical infinite where we could call that the natural infinite. This is like the smaller size of the infinite in in in cantor. But soon we'll get to the two sizes. And this is demonstrated in Cantor's famous diagonalization proof. And it's really in the two sizes where the abyss opens up, right? And that's that gets formalized in this kind of famous continuum hypothesis that articulates the gap between the two sizes. And that abyss, which is the gap between the two, is the mathematically real basis for what you just said, events. So maybe the transition to this, like right at the beginning of meditation 14, he wants just absolutely clear, like this is the thing for people to like highlight, write down, and cite. If they ever want to be like, bad you is not talking about some natural, that's concrete, that's whole, that's total, that second paragraph, he says, nature has no being. It falls foul of the prohibition of self-belonging. So he's saying that he's using the set theoretical argument for it, along with Kant, a cosmological conception of the whole or totality is inadmissible. Yeah. If infinity exists, which bad you want it to, it must be under the category of one or of several natural beings, not under that of the quote, grand totality. Yeah. And that I mean, he'll take on haggled really sort of point home in the next meditation. That's it. So he's looking at multiple natural beings as the basis for this. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And maybe before maybe even like more fundamentally than multiple, it's really two, right? Like he says on 150, there are two fundamentally different species of natural multiple being, which is just totally wild. And this is like a first hint, I think of what is to come in what I consider the two most important meditations, meditation 26 and 27, particularly page 278, which we'll get to in a few episodes, which is just like that's that's the, those are the pages where the book kind of breaks in half and explodes. And it's based on this, which I would call basically the rule of two, which is to say that like you can't, you can't answer a question by reverting to some sense of totality or whole or continuity. You have to answer the question by reverting to a decision or a cut or a distinction. And it's clear that you in a very strong sense wants to assert as he puts it to fundamentally different species. So maybe we should talk about success or just a little bit, because I think that's maybe one of the operations that helps us understand infinity here. So it's not just that you can count. Yeah. But then after Cantor and all these other people, there's this question like the dot dot dot. So you count one, two, three, four, and then you keep going until you've counted everything, which is say infinity. And so then Cantor is big question with the two sizes. Okay, you can count one two, but what if you count that twice? Is it bigger? Like, can you have a set of that count operation happening twice? Or what if you start rather not with one, but if you start with two or something? I'm not mathematician, so I don't know what the regular ones. Yeah, it's, yeah, I think, I think technically they've, there's, you can demonstrate that like the, the set of all the odd numbers is actually has the same cardinality as just the set of all the counting numbers. And I think you can also demonstrate that if you were to square every number, you know, like, or if you were to multiply by two or whatever. So like, like simple error with medical operations. And which is why we stressed, I think in the previous episode of one before the power set, because for, you know, for bed you following Cantor, the power set is not one of those simple kind of modifications of the natural set or the rational set. But it actually is qualitatively of a different magnitude of cardinality from the simple rational or natural numbers. And, and, and so yeah, that's the distinction that he's trying to get to. So he introduces this concept of the limit ordinal. I think the place where he outlines the clearest for me is when he's distinguishing two different forms of ordinality in 155. So there's the successor ordinal and the limit ordinal. And so the first, the successor, I think it's just that sort of counting and the inclusion of, of the inclusion of the name and it keeps sort of growing. And then there is something that exists beyond the, quote, finished sequence. So my sort of dumb, non-mathematical brain says like, okay, we can do the dot dot dot. But it's like the dot dot dot itself even has a different status than the one, two, three, four that we put beyond it. Yes. So exactly. I think that's actually a good way to describe it. Yeah. So the limit ordinal is like the dot dot dot, like the fact that there's still something that's going on, but that it's beyond the notation and it's sort of beyond our initial conception of it. Yeah, I think this distinction between the successor and the limit, you're exactly right, that this is sort of the the initial intuitive, almost baby step for him introducing what will become a strong distinction of magnitude or distinction of cardinality. In other words, like if you can just kind of provisionally, locally understand like, here's a successor and then there's a limit, right? And those are sort of like slightly different ways of understanding ordinality. If just in an initial sense, if you can get a sense of the difference between the ordinance, the ordinal as successor versus the ordinance as limit, then that initial intuition is the spark that will lead to the strong distinction. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Yeah. And so he says that the successor then has a local status. Maybe that's like the multiple or it's like we can think of it as generally what we think of like as a set, like a collection or gathering of things, your partner of eggs. And then he says the limit ordinal has a global status. It's none of the ordinal smaller than it or any closer than any other and it is the other of all of them. So the big oh other for him is this different magnitude, this different option, this or operation for him, it's also infinity. Yeah, and there's kind of an elegant moment where he defines the infinite sort of I think he even calls it the border. I don't remember the page now where he basically says like it's very beautiful. And you you mentioned this already omega zero, right? Like there's different ways of thinking about the infinite. And I think the convention is that you're if you're thinking about the infinite ordinal, you use the notation omega zero. And if you're thinking about it cardinal, you use the notation alif zero, I could be mixing that up, but and what he says is basically that if a number belongs to omega zero, it's finite. And if omega zero belongs to it or is equivalent to omega zero, then it's infinite. So it's a very simple but very elegant way of understanding the difference. That's about all I could pull from 14 for now because there's a lot of techy stuff that's going on, but it seems like it's set up for something else that's going to happen. So maybe we wrap up with Hagel. Yeah, I have I have one I have one footnote and then we'll do Hagel. Yeah, so one final note on 14, which again, I'm drawing from this book called number and numbers where he does this wild argument where he basically says and this will anticipate a little bit the interview that we're going to go to in a couple of minutes here, talking about the mathematician Richard Dedekin and bed you refers to Dedekin and he kind of inverts the conventional wisdom around the infinite. And he says Dedekin is a true modern. He knows that the infinite is simpler than the finite, which I love. So he just totally inverts it, right? We think of like, oh, finite experience, finite life. That's but we that's what we know is it must be kind of like lesser or more direct or simpler or whatever. And that you has this beautiful argument that really the essence of the modern is to essentially begin from the infinite. And then the finite becomes a kind of like iteration of the infinite or something like that. He puts it this way. The most striking aspect of Dedekin's definition is that it determines infinity positively and subordinates the finite negatively. This is it's especially modern accent. Well, like yeah, Cantor rejected infinity between all numbers. And so we're already getting it, let's say, from the bottom or the inside. And what I like about Dedekin is that he begins with, let's say, you know, a number line. Let's just say it starts at zero, but or could go from negative infinity to positive infinity. And that's where it begins. And then you cut on that line to find your number. And then you compare those two different portions. You know, you cut at square root of two and then you can measure. Right. Exactly. You get you get a finite number. You get you get like a particular number or an instance of number exactly by by splitting the number line into two partitions. Exactly. So you begin from infinity and then you get the the particular magnitude from that. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, cool. Okay, Hey, go. Hey, go. Okay. Look, when I was reading this, I knew that he was going to be critiquing Hegel. I could see how people could sort of misunderstand this. He's the, I don't know if it's in the translation or in just bad use, initial wording here, but all right, I read it slowly and carefully. I'm like, wow, is he going after Hegel, right? So first failure of Hegel that Hegel takes the law for the law of being. Ooh, I love that because you know, bad you doesn't like the law. And so he's like, look, the law and the way that we've created the law is certainly not what do you do? But then he has the great part on the good and bad infinity. You know, and there's a, there's even a handy chart, right? Maybe we can even look at the chart together for a second. It's on 166. And he's like, okay, you know, schematically, the bad infinity is object process transcendence or representation. And then the good infinity is the virtuality, eminence, the unrepresentable. Bet you doesn't even, you know, like this, but he's willing to sort of at least engage it initially. But then he says, look, even when you get to the good infinity, there's still a qualitative versus quantitative, which I guess is Marxist, this is probably what we know just as much. Is it so important to Marx when talking about the commodity form or other things? Totally. Yeah. Good point. And he says that, you know, Hegel is even backwards here because the quantitative is super interesting. And it's not this totally evacuated character where everything becomes infinitely substitutable and homogeneous and all these sort of like bad critiques of capitalism that we've, we've heard in the last 100 years, you know, so that's great. He's not like a homogenizing culture guy. Right. Because because bed you, I mean, I do think bed you, maybe maybe I did phrase it incorrectly earlier, right? It's not that bed you wants to leave arithmetic behind. He does begin from the earth medical. But I think the key for bed you is he wants to basically almost like redeem a simple whole numbers, right? Like those, and I think you're right because like, there's such a strong tradition, particularly in critical theory and in a lot of continental thinking that like, that like, you know, the real is better than the natural. You know, like the continuous ness, presence, I mean, there are many kind of like versions of this is better than rationality, discrete rationality, the symbolic, you know, beyond calculation. Oh, this is a insufficient system that only creates a shadow of who I really am as an authentic subject. Yeah, you know, whatever, like like with that notorious moment when Roland Bart was like language's violence, you know, and and I think, I think what bed you would say is like, well, you know, breaking with a simple arithmetical order is necessary and could have this sort of crypto romantic capacity of like the abyss and the the impasse or whatever. But the same time bed you wants to say like, no, you cannot think that you're better than mere number. Your number is absolutely crucial. And I love the line on 169, which is another one of his kind of like sick burns on Hagle, where he says, what Hagle cannot think is the difference. I love this between the same and the same. That is the pure position of two letters, which is so radical, right? Like because that actually isn't made like if you can think same, same as difference as dialectical difference, that's actually totally different than thinking same other, right? And and bed you wants to say two multiples, which is to say an eight and a 12 or something like that. That is all you need. It's not that you need like, it's not that you need like simple consistency and then a miracle or like simple consistency and then like the radical other or something like that. No, bed you says the opposite. He says you just start with the arithmetic. You follow, you know, what canter revealed and you get the two sizes of infinity and it's all strictly provable math. There's no like, have to believe in God, there's no like leap of faith, there's no nothing like that. It all directly almost technically or even mechanistically flows from it. You know, which is maybe why he says, well, then the human is just put there and you still have to decide or something. You still have to like want to participate. Yeah. Yeah. So he doesn't like this. Hydegarian or like the the authentic saying that like numbers were counting or something get rid of the authentic, which which for him is tied to an nostalgia that is deeply conservative. Yes, exactly. But he'll also be different than like the loser's someone who's like pro math, but the lizard's math is like this other math of infinity that is tied to it's the it's the analog math. Let's be honest, it's the analog math. It's the math of pure continuity, right? Calculus is the math of pure continuity. It now it does it through the frame of analysis, through the frame of making it susceptible to algebraic erythematical thought. But I think the reason why Delos loves all that stuff and and it's strangely the way Delos like kind of redeems livenants who would I think naturally be his natural enemy is because the target of calculus, what it's intent on is the continuous real. For him, it's then difference differentiation, the difference that makes a difference. It's more like evolutionary pattern of things like honestly going under transformation, but but often in very small ways. Yeah, okay. Well, maybe we could we could kind of get to the end of Hegel and sort of do some do some closing thoughts here. I do love what he do you want. I think you I think you should probably gloss this properly hagelian hallucination line, which I really love. I feel like you have good things to say about this. Yeah, this last section like the fifth critique because every section in this is a critique of Hegel and they're different ones. We finally get to the fifth critique of Hegel in these short few pages. And it's that Hegel cannot think disjunction, which is like Hegel's not a true revolutionary, he can't think of the break, he can't get us to, you know, something else. Already in the top of that final page, we get a in wishing to maintain the continuity of the dialectic right through the very chicanes of the pure multiple to make the entirely proceed from the point of being alone. Hegel cannot rejoin infinity. Okay, but then we get to this end and he's like, look, even if we were to like pick through Hegel for bad you define the things that he likes that Hegel is trying to actually get rid of like a good quantitative infinity. I mean, that's where that's where bad you would land that Hegel doesn't think even that is a properly Hegelian hallucination like he's rejecting the previous categories that Hegel outlined. He doesn't want to have a good or a bad infinity. It doesn't want a quantitative or a qualitative infinity like these are just not useful terms for him that he's willing to sort of find with. That's a good point. He says, yeah, that these are ultimately like he'd been saying throughout an artifice of Hegel and the Hegelian method and it's quote differentiable in difference. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm I think I think I'm guilty of the Hegelian indiscretion at least on one level, which is I because I think you're exactly right. What bed you doesn't like about the good infinity bad infinity distinction are the adjectives, the moral adjectives good and bad, right? Bed you want to say natural infinity good real infinity good. They're both part of the same system really forbid you. But yeah, I maybe you can forgive my my indiscretion because I actually think the bad infinity good infinity is is one of the best parts about reading reading the logic. So okay, so to sort of summarize, I think that and this is really a summarizing point, I think in the book, our moment where with parts one through three on being, I think we essentially have the full as we've been calling it kind of arithmetical or natural story of being qua being according to bed you. So what do we have? We have entities, multiples, we have sets, we have the void, we have the ordinal chain, and we now have natural slash arithmetical infinity, which again is just the the smaller size of infinity for cancer. The infinity of the counting numbers, the national natural and rational numbers. And so if bed you were to stop here, bed you would remain a kind of naive digital philosopher, he would remain a kind of arithmetical thinker. But as we will see with part four, he didn't stop here, right? And he and he breaks with this natural foundation. So to explore some of these questions further, we spoke with Sarah Porcio. And so we want to go to that interview now. And Sarah is a journalist who teaches German studies at Duke University. And she knows a lot about 19th century German thought about some of these figures that we've been talking about kind of obliquely, but not in any in depth away, cantor and dedicand. And Sarah is really good on both the philosophy side and the mathematics side. She's the author of the book, the writing of spirit, soul, system, and the roots of language science. But for this interview that we did with her, we actually focused on two essays of hers, which I really like. And Andrew really liked as well, called ah logos. So it's a slash logos, ah logos, an anomalous episode in the history of number. And another essay called on the digital ocean, which was just published a few months ago, and we will link to both of those essays. Sarah Porcio, I want to begin with this kind of meditation on the digital ocean, the ocean, the ocean, the oceanic. And try to bring that out a little bit, maybe direct us back to the 19th century. And in order to do that, I want to read this quote that I ran across from Felix Bernstein, on Richard Dedicand and Cure Cantor, both of whom are 19th century German mathematicians who are influential on Alan Bedieu. So this is the passage. And I think this will be a great way to bring out some of these themes around the oceanic, the abyss. So Felix Bernstein put it like this. Dedicand said, with respect to the concept of set, that he imagined a set as a closed sack that contains completely determinant things. But things which one does not see, and of which one knows nothing except that they exist and are determinant. Somewhat later, Cantor gave his own conception of a set. He drew his colossal figure upright, made a magnificent gesture with his raise arm and said, staring into the indeterminate, a set, I imagine, as an abyss. Okay, so what does this say to you? This is one approach Dedicand closed determinant, its other approach, Cantor, indeterminate, and abyss. And maybe this is a way to kind of open up this idea of the oceanic. I'm going to start by saying that I have always found this quote, which I've known for some time, totally okay. I find it actually incredibly difficult to reconcile with my understanding of how Cantor thinks about sets. I have some thoughts about how one could do that. The Dedicand situation makes perfect sense to me. This is exactly how he thinks about it. He calls it a system that's actually his word for set is actually system. And he thinks of it as a system. It's just a system of which one does not know, according to which unity principle it operates, right? So like, you know it's a unity because you have a sack, but you don't know what the principle of unity is that ties together all this stuff in the sack, nor do you particularly care because your whole thing is trying to figure out the rules according to which you can think about stuff without knowing the specific unity principle that determines that. So that's like, that is a very dedicated Indian notion of what it means to be a set. It's actually also quite similar to Cantor's. I mean, there were in very strong agreement about how to think about what a set is. And I have this quote in the oceans, I'd say, from Cantor's theory of manifolds, foundations of the theory of manifolds. Manifold is just his menu. It's just group cluster aggregate, which was his word for set. And in that passage, which is the one that I sort of play with in the oceans essay, it sounds very different, right? That's the one where he connects the set to the platonic idols, which is really, like, by definition, not an abyss, right? So like, here's that quote. "In general, by a manifold or set, I understand every many, which can be thought of as a one. I.e. every aggregate of definite elements, sounds like a sack, right? Which can be bound up into a hole by some law. I believe that in this, I am defining something akin to the platonic idols or idea, as well as to that, which played, which played or called micton in his dialogue, Philippus, or the highest good. And he contrasts this to the upper one, i.e. the unbounded undetermined, which I call the inauthentic infinite, but uneignity, uneindlichkeit, as well as to the pair as i.e. the boundary. So like, this, the notion of set is something that sits in between the notion of the total unlimited, the undilimited and undilimited bowl, and the limit. The notion of set is the thing that emerges when you have, as it turns out, a system of limits. So you can see why I find the notion of the of a set to be puzzling in this context. So like, if the upper one is definitely by definition not a set, then how is a set in a this? The way that I understand that is as an expression of Kantor's unbelievable ambition, which is to say, as I see the point that I make in the Ocean Sesseis that I think that he is actually attempting to imagine a set theory that would grab a hold of or form a rule about the collection of the totality of everything which is collective which is to say the abyss. So a set theory that could do that word, maybe from there you get to the notion that a set just isn't abyss. That's a that's a jump that I have trouble with. It makes sense to me that he was thinking of set theory as a way of dealing with the indeterminate, right? Like he's looking off into indeterminate space and he's like set theory is like, you know, I'm going to grasp this space. That's, I think, what he's trying to do. And so the the infinite and the abyss, they they have a relationship to, to is there a relationship between those two things? Yes, absolutely. Traditionally, like, we Kantor, they're virtually the same thing. The notion of something that doesn't have an end, it doesn't have boundaries, it doesn't have limits. You can't put it in a sack. So it's not it's not finite. It's infinite. And that is often like mostly I would say figured in this notion of the oceanic that doesn't have, you can't see the horizon, you can't see it, you can't see it's end, it's it's dense. It's a really fundamental characteristic of a continuum that it's like between every two points. So you're going to find another point, right? So there's like this notion of of flowy material viscousness that goes into this oceanic idea. So this like that you you can't determine where one thing stops and another thing starts. It's not composed of distinct parts. That's the continuum and the infinite and the abyss and the oceanic are traditionally sort of one figure of the undilimited in determinant. Yeah, I like I like how you put it. And I think I think to the to the layperson it may not be clear that continuousness does have that relationship to the infinite. And I like that a lot. And maybe we could bring in one other aspect of this and important one that you bring out in your essay on on the oceanic is that it's also gender, right? And you have this this passage that I like a lot where you refer to the the exclusively female denizens from Kittler's sirens to Bernard Stegler's Pandora from Deliz's Devaneer Fem to Bruno Latours Gaia. So and before we started yeah and we could add to that mean before we started recording you made reference to bed use interest in the not all which is also you know a way in which Lecon partially defines sort of like the the female side of the formulas of sexualation. So maybe maybe you can just say more about this this roster of female denizens that you think kind of might figure into. And you're you're drawing on some media studies people too which I like but also these philosophers. Yeah so this is like I would say this is this is really a work in progress for me. The the math stuff's been with me for a real long time. This the the relationship to the work that the feminine is doing in contemporary media studies contemporaries are a radical political thought is new ish for me and it is I would say the interest is born out of just like a sense of irritation really kind of like you've got to be kidding you we we're still doing this but I do think that we're still doing this for a reason and part of my not not that it's like not a justifiable reason not in the sense that like I think we should be still doing this but in the sense that it is deeply tied like the reasons why we are still doing this making this move is that the feminine is so deeply imbricated in this structure of continuity which is also the structure of a certain kind of feconed fertile infinity right like the kind of infinity that gives to be like just like straight up hightigarian about it um and like you know I don't I don't love that it's feminized in hightig or two even though he pretend that it's not like I mean is it is it irritating yes does it have legitimate philosophical reasons also yes um so my sort of the task that I've kind of set for myself here in this in this project which is uh in this sense just started sort of getting off the ground um is to figure out what the commonalities are among the kinds of work that this figure of the feminine is doing in these various spaces what's the common ground um and then how does that help us read this specific work that it's doing in each of these places and then how do we let it go what do we have to do in order to like think these things that we do want to be able to think about freedom creativity spontaneity uh like how do we think about these things uh without this figure um and maybe also by extension without the continuum like maybe we also kind of have to let go of the continuum we don't understand it anyway um nobody does uh and so like you know I don't know what's what's the purchase and holding on to it is it and I I'm not like committed to the idea that there is no reason to hold on to it but I'm that's what I want to explore yeah so this makes me think that it would be a wonderful time to explore how you set up your argument specifically in the the a logos article about why set theory comes around what it's sort of responding to you you set it up in relationship to uh critique and uh move beyond contiant intuition you also note it's related to live in its abit and issues with calculus, neat and fattessimal and you then draw on not only can't or but then dedicate in and his opponents and I think this sort of gives us to sense of what's at stake for set theory that we perhaps don't get when people are simply concerned with the mathematical questions of what's the number how do we count and these things that are taken for granted? I mean the the real discovery for me like the I've always done mathematics like I but for me my two interests like my history philosophy interest in my philosophy mathematics interests are quite separate for a long time uh and when I opted for this field I the point at which they came back together was when I realized that in the 19th century the history of of attempts to define what it means to be a number uh were became associated with or in fact we're always from the gecko associated with the question of what it means to uh think at all like with what it means to be logos uh to be logical uh and by extension to be a system because in my first book I'm the whole question is like what does it mean to be a system and what's the history of that of that trajectory so that's that's how I got there and that is I think that's the general point at which the history of attempts to define what it means to be a number in the 19th century interface with the history of German philosophy uh and also the backdrop of political philosophy because the question of what it means to be a system in value is the question of what it means to be a state and how do you change the system right like you got to go outside the system to change the system so the question the the question of the unity principle of this system and how that can be transformed is a political question and in fact it already was that in the 19th century uh but my interest in the history of number as it's laid out in the article is really about how that dovetails with history with the history of the concept of concept formation period so like if you think about the the different kinds of number that we have on our table uh we have things that are called the natural numbers things that are called the rational numbers things that are called the irrational numbers things that are called the real numbers and all those names are like you know they're very overdetermined and loaded and a mathematician will tell you that you don't have to think about them in those terms and imaginary numbers are not imaginary and real numbers are no more or less real blah blah blah blah but like the fact remains that actually they have those names for very deep philosophical reasons uh and you can't actually entirely I mean Leiden it's called his particular brand of the irrationals which for him were the ones that could not be captured by algebraic formulations he called them straight up transcendental and he meant that in every possible way right like this was not a this is not just a terminal logical question um so the question of this distinction between what is like a legitimate number what is a natural number or a rational number or a non-transcendental number like a you know a straight up number and what are these other numbers uh and what is the relationship where do we draw that boundary uh which emerges again in touring with the boundary between a computable and uncomputable like where do we draw that boundary and what does it mean for cognition because typically where we draw the boundary has been the boundary of cognition like the boundary between the rational and the irrational is there because the rational numbers are the things that have a common measure and isn't it also tied up with um how can I put it almost like a way of thinking that is more comfortable for a certain kind of mathematician or for a certain kind of philosopher because I do think maybe this is overstating it but I do think that you know the whole numbers we could talk about the sort of like crisis you know that the discovery of the irrational number introduced in the Pythagorean system and it just seems that like these these continuous values these magnitudes the real the continuous the infinite they seem to kind of pose a or I should pose this as a question you know do you would you agree that these sort of pose a threat to a certain kind of thinking which is a way of thinking that's rooted in sort of um use the word system which I like a lot um a sort of a sort of some kind of unity or monad or whole that is then brought into relation either a simple two-part primitive relation like the ratio um you also bring out I think really nicely with something that I'd never really um kind of you know metallized fully but even richer dead against definition of um you know the real number is about bringing two elements together these two partitions of the number line and you connect that nicely but generalizing the notion of ratio exactly I love that it's a general notion of what logical operation means yeah yeah I like that a lot and and so yeah so the question is what do you think about this notion of of kind of comfortable ways of thinking and then sort of mystifying or or uncomfortable ways of thinking and and maybe that connects back to our what we said earlier about the oceanic the abyss ah yeah so I don't know I'm I'm going to out myself here by saying that I don't I don't actually think that I actually think that there's really only one way of thinking like the thing that you just described as like thinking comfortable thinking I like think that there's I don't really know what thinking would mean if it didn't look like that so I mean which is not to say that you can't have a relationship to obviously everything that I explore is all questions about like how that form of thinking has a relationship to its outside um but I don't understand what logos is supposed to mean if it's not a sort of in some way definable or characterizable relationship among relationship which is to say that it has to have the structure and animals of a proportion of some kind relations have to have a relationship to other relations if not you have no measure uh and if you have no measure as far as I'm concerned you have no thought like I just don't I don't understand how that would work so like I'm open to being dissuaded from that position but like I think I really I'm like I do appreciate the fear is I guess what I'm saying like and that's that by extension I that's what I love so much about dedicate an encounter is like they they overcome this problem in such unbelievably creative ways um so it isn't about like sort of diving into the abyss and exploring the the indeterminate it's about rendering determinant in an unbelievably creative set of ways uh something that never been thinkable as determinant before never been thinkable as a system before never been thinkable as a set of proportions before or as logically accessible and they do that by reimagining what it means to be an operation to be the operation of deciding on a unity um so you know by expanding or generalizing the mathematical notion of operating over a domain um and it's just wildly beautiful so like the the thing about about these sort of safer versions um is is that they're super they're super sympathetic it's like you totally get it they have in the mid in the in the 19th century they just like think they're breaking right and left and getting like super confusing and problematic and you can totally see the jester that's just like this is the safest space that we have let's shore it up you know and like like not fall off the deep end uh and i compare that in my in both of the essays i think to to a kind of conti and jester and that's you know that comes from the mathematicians themselves they make that that move um of like let's draw the boundary between what we're allowed to think and what we're not allowed to think and not coincidentally for con the things that fall on the other side of that boundary are the antennas of the continuum like the the domain of real number uh and the continuum and that form of infinity is what falls on the opposites falls on the new mental side for conscious like you're not that's you you you needed to think about grounding but you're not allowed to sort of put it in the determinant box it doesn't go in the sack um and i just i i think that the dedicated canter in their two different ways are doing this like post conti and idyllis move uh of expanding they take that limit as their starting point right as like the engine of their thought just like hegel um and they're like it it just has so much power it's totally phenomenal i mean dedicating's version i see as being more of a like hegelian epistemological move and canters is more of a return actually to a kind of like nitsian ontological idyllis on him he's just like straight up metaphysical about it um and that's a big difference between now but this gesture of of overcoming the limit by making the limit itself the starting point is this kind of idyllis move and i i just think it's it's mind-blowingly beautiful i mean it's amazing an eagle but the the way you can see it play out in the math itself it's just it's so lovely maybe i can follow up with that and just rehearse a few things that you do in your logus article because you pit for most of it these two thinkers dedicand and chroniker against each other and in chroniker you say that he's working through a stock of signs that goes back to the original mark that a human might make to to count and then what math or numbers are meant to do is refer back to those and the real world you call them a thing of things everything is very clearly countable and then with dedicand you say that there's a definition of the infinite and then you can have infinite collections which allow you then to have natural numbers work as an image or a map of all that then also makes it arithmetizable and so the the end is a system where you've an era it's hard to say this word era methodization of the all and maybe you want to explore that a little bit more with us here to you how does this connect to the german idyllis system what do you see as so a galean in it and you know for people who aren't reading both of these fields as deeply as you like what are some of the connections you'd like us to draw between them i mean well the first thing to say about this is that it doesn't work right so i'm like i mean dedicand's dream is shattered uh canter stream is shattered too but he doesn't really care canter is just like um okay so there are paradoxes i like i believe in god that's where the paradox let's go right and he's still he still really convinced that you can think that continue him in a non paradox way and that's what he thinks that he needs in order to found the freedom of human thought um so canter's a little bit less distressed about this whole thing but dedicand system is epistemological if if you can't found everything in logos then he's done he's out he's like i don't i don't know what we're even doing here so and and that is that does turn on to be the problem that you cannot get the infinity of the size of the continuum i'm part of part of the issue here is that there are two different infinities at work which is totally radically new idea uh in the end of the 19th century but like the continuum of the counting numbers one two three four five six seven you can get that's fine it turns out to be much more complicated than dedicand thought but his axiomatization that he you're the structure of of the natural numbers um that he outlines is still ours um and is is unproblematic mostly uh in you know in most ways according to most metrics uh the the reels um you can't you can't get them that way in the way that he wanted to get them so while his definition of the irrational stands that's the the notion of the cut what he wanted to do was generalize from the notion of comparing ones to ones to the notion of collecting into addition the notion of collecting into multiplication the notion of collecting collecting collecting collecting and ever greater kinds of generalization and then his idea was if you can collect you can analyze right so like you have to be able to do the backward operation every single time if you can add you can subtract if you can multiply you can divide and that's like that's that gives you the negative notes because if you can add you can subtract that means you have negative if you can multiply you can divide that means you have fractions that gets you to the the sum total of the rationales and his question is that okay how do we get the irrational like well if you can cut right like like you can approach your limit then you can cut and that's he's like I need the sum total of all cuts in order to be able to do the approaching to a limit thing and that's you can see how it's a kind of hegelian process of generalization he comes up against a place where there's not a fit right like he there's an operation he can do and then inside of that operation he can do there's a non-fit with the domain that he has at his disposal and his response is super hegelian it's just like I'm just going to make the domain fit the operation I can do this operation air go there are things that correspond to this operation right and that's that is what he's doing there um but you it turns out that you cannot get you can't get the continuum in that way you know I'm not a hegelian at all but one thing I love in hegel is this distinction between good infinity and bad infinity and it seems like you're sort of bringing that out and I don't maybe I don't understand dedicate can well enough but are you saying essentially that dedicate can begins with this sort of simply additive constructive notion of getting to the infinite aka a a a kind of natural infinity to use that word versus what I would characterize almost as a kind of like category shift or a sort of qualitative leap that would have to take place in order to get from this sort of bad infinity to the to the good infinity and is that maybe the question is does dedicate can accomplish that is that what the dedicate can cut accomplishes for him to be able to get to the good infinity right rather than just counting further that is a really interesting question um I think the answer is no but I cannot offhand answer it um I would have to think harder so here's here's the thing I mean good good infinity is feaccount right for for hegel also it's it's productive it's not just simply a infinite repetition that's sort of the the crux of the thing and both dedicate can and can are super interested in the fecundity of the continuum the fact that it gives you everything that you might possibly need for any form of cognitive operation that you might possibly want to make which is it's like the domain of freedom but it isn't just the space of the all it also has it has a structure it has a sort of richness and depth and a spontaneity and that's like that's the problem the problem turns out to be that dedicate dedicate is trying to ground or arithmetize spontaneity it actually says that like moving from one to the next one that inside of that originary movement of of counting is a spontaneity um and my suspicion about why his philosophically speaking why his system fails is that you can't actually mathematicianize that in the way that he was I don't think you can mathematicianize it at all is that because it's a it's a it's also a shift from as it were like a thing to an operation right like a cut is an action that you do a moan ad I don't know either literally or metaphorically is kind of like an object or a unity or some kind of whole I think about that a lot like and and and bed use bed use maybe we could talk about this as well you know being an event that those two notions those two things are not just different they're like categorically right and so maybe maybe you could say more about this idea of a cut like what does it mean to on the one hand form a moan ad or a whole versus a cut which really has a much more active if not also I don't know somewhat kind of violent connotation right well it's also it's also writing right I mean it's like it's an incision and inscription um and he's he's quite clear about that so the the rational numbers he compares to a body he's in German or get it's an organic hole it's a it's a body uh and he needs to move on from this organic body which since at least Plato has been sort of the paradigm of logical thought too it's like a logically coherent system right and so conceptual thought is supposed to also have this organic structure the structure of an organic hole he's trying to extend that notion to cover the domain of the irrational which is the domain that has traditionally been associated with femininity and materiality and non-commitiveness and all these like dangerous versions of of the infinity and investment so on and so forth that he's going to try to like expand logical operation to get there and when he does that it looks like writing which and one of the things that really fascinates me is the kind of the difference in yet similarity between pro-Nuker's notion of stroke writing where like his strokes are actual things and dedicants cuts where the cut is a relation it's a relation it's a difference right it's writing is difference it's it's there it uh but you know decades before yes like it's it's very it's a very careful in a way that in a way that Yari does not I mean I love very bad but like this this stuff really really really hangs together and that is part of his problem because it's so it's so perfectly done that you can see the problem like he himself then sees the problem and sees that it is not in fact trying to work but this the the relationship between thing and relation is absolutely what's at stake here but I think debt it for dedication in his kind of hegelianness the the ground is the difference the ground is the negativity the cut ultimately so like he's trying to get away from a notion of thing towards a notion of the grounding relation like the whole would would be grounded somehow in in relation to relation to relationality um so I mean you really have in the move from from chronicle to denicant you also have this kind of like being versus event thing going on you know like denicant is really very much a relational positional thinker the essence of the system is the tendency that the generalizing tendency that drives you uh in in a direction it's the event of of operation right like the the the act the operative act rather than the thing so chronicle is like a very static thinker and denicant is an incredibly dynamic thinker um and so I would I would say that the cut is in some said it isn't just like the generalization it is the essence of the way that he's trying to think um the the problem comes because he cannot hook the cut to counting in the way that he wants to um he he wants to make the cuts he wants to bury them somehow inside the idea of counting uh and that doesn't quite work because it requires him to start with a notion of of an all uh which is not self consistent but it doesn't make it any less beautiful so so the third act of this comes in your digital ocean essay in which this question of counting and the countable suddenly encounters our 20th century question of computers and the computable and uh you not only discuss turning but then you bring girdle in communication with it in a really interesting reading across both their works so I want to just give you an opportunity to sort of um help us walk through that argument again and find some of the interesting textual details and cash out the argument a bit um because you're you're drawing in less red texts or connections that that haven't been discussed nearly as much the gist of the touring girdle comparison that I make um is that both of them are concerned with this question of the boundary of operability the the boundary of uh like where's the end of what mathematics can do yes by virtue of its operations uh which was the 19th century question remains the set theoretical question um and girdle has drawn this boundary a new um the set theoretical paradoxes force us to to sort of reassess the boundary of operability uh and then comes the axiometization of set theory which is trying to put it on from from ground and girdle kind of undermines again this this new attempt to kind of grasp the whole by saying no there's this there's this really fixed boundary actually um and Turing's work is I understand it in parallel to dedicate in candor's work in the sense that what he is getting at what he is trying to do is formalize what it means to operate mathematically so uh dedicate and candor has thought about that in terms of mathematical concept formation what does it mean to operate over a domain um but not like in any specific sense in the in the meta sense what what is the operation of operation that's a way of thinking about set theory what's the concept of concept formation what is the concept of collecting uh yes absolutely so and you know they're like they're they're assessing concept formation mathematical concept formation from the perspective of sets um by the time Turing comes around it has become clear that we need um we need an actual definition of mathematical operation cancer and dedicate and we're like I don't care what kind of operation you want to do what we're talking about is going to hold no matter what operation you might possibly want to do um by the time one way of thinking about what girdle shows is that um actually we need a definition of what we might want to do like it's not enough to just say that like it's on the table because it is no longer on the table um Turing has a definition of what it means to operate mathematically uh and that automatically draws a boundary around the notion of what mathematically can be thought and it puts the continuum on the far side of that uh because you know like the computable numbers are the same size the set of computable numbers is the same size as the set of the countable numbers the set of the natural is not the same size as the set of all reels just to say most numbers are not computable um and I think that's that is a thing that like that the move to say most numbers are not computable but that's the limit of mathematical thought that I see as effectively Turing's move or at least one way of reading what Turing is doing in one possible consequence of what he showed and girdle does not want to go there that's that's the purchase of that comparison so girdle wants to say what Turing showed was the limits of mechanical formalist mathematical thought uh the limits of algorithmic thought but the limits of algorithmic thought are not the limits of human thought says girdle because human thought is free and potentially infinite uh he really goes back to the infinity of time he's like we're we're in time and time is a continuum we have access to temporal thought therefore we have access to spott-nady um and so this this whole question of like freedom of thought and spott-nady and surprise and creativity girdle it wants to hold on to all of that on the far side of the computable uncomputable boundary and I'm not sure that Turing does I'm not sure that he's I don't know Turing that he cares I'm not sure that he's committed to that you know he has this like fantastic fly where he's like well people people are like but then nothing can ever surprise us and he's like machine surprised me all the time what more could you possibly need right like the computable is really big is a is a really big domain and wish to operate and for him I think it's big enough and so that's like the the purchase of the end of the oceans as they was kind of to be like well what would it mean if he's right like what would it mean if we tried to think spott-nady and creativity within the domain of the computable without needing to jump outside of the continuum and by extension without needing to jump outside to like some notion of life-giving fecon femininity um but rather we just like thought thought inside of the space of what can be computed like maybe it works I don't like have we tried yeah I like that a lot the I always think that that sort of the Turing moment is a turn toward a kind of making practical of mathematical possibility or even just a pragmatism right and you know I encounter this sometimes talking with computer scientists who will often just if you ask them about things like the infinite or the continuum they'll just you know look at you and say like I don't know what you mean you know and it seems like there are these categories that have just been sort of like um cast off in in the wake of of the digital you know the the turn to digital computation I don't know I have some sort of like um kind of like romantic pathos about that that having happened um and I'm not sure I want to give it all over to like the kind of practical turn in in rationality but um I don't know that really that really struck struck me in what you just said yeah so like I think part of the purchase of my trying to think with Turing is is or will be attempting to to like thread that needle right like I too like I'm in case it's not totally obvious I really love German ideals I really really love like the thinking of spontaneity and freedom and like I also don't necessarily want to give all of that baggage up you know but like I also just sort of have come ever more clearly to recognize that it really comes with a lot of well baggage that we don't necessarily want to be still holding on to um and so part of the purchase is to kind of figure out like what elements of that continuum thinking um can we can we keep uh if we let go of some of the can we thread that needle do we have to think just in terms of like this kind of pragmatism and like like it's just a matter of binary code and like maybe the machine will surprise us and maybe it won't um can we get more so to speak uh without going all the way there I'm like taking trips with Hitler to go find the birthplace of the siren [Music] Thanks for listening and a special thank you to Dana Papa Priestu who provided the music for the podcast please join us next time for episode four on the event