Axiomatic Realism IV: Subjective Epistemologies

Forthcoming in Ars Scientia journal

Links to all five parts of this piece — not all of which are out yet, but will be available at these links if not already ::: Part 1 ::: Part 2 ::: Part 3 ::: Part 4 ::: Part 5

As a reminder, I said this in earlier posts, where I was signposting the few weeks’ worth of material that are surfacing on these pages. Feedback, comments are extremely welcome!

…I want to briefly introduce the next few posts. Last autumn, after many months of stewing ideas and/or wildly procrastinating, I finally sat down to write a dirty first draft of a lengthy new article taking a critical look at the epistemological arc of the sciences (my original home territory) through the memoiristic lens of autotheory. It’s going to be included in the second issue of the wonderful Ars Scientia, a new journal of scientific arts, which takes as its second theme “axiomatics”. Since the article is a weird mix of history and philosophy of science, historical recollections, and post-disciplinary meaning-making, and also because it still needs a little something extra according to some critical feedback I received and agree with, I thought it might be a good place for us to start. It’s pretty long — first draft was over 10k words, and the journal editors originally asked for 3-5k — so I’ll be splitting it into 3 or 4 digests and saving a final one for some additional rumination and riffing.

I also want to include an excerpt of the great motivational text that the editors of Ars Scientia posted on their website, to give a sense of where my piece is coming from.

Ars Scientia Issue 2 on Axioms
“It had been tactless of me to prove something on the topic of man – mathematically!”
Stanislaw Lem, His Master’s Voice, 1968

Axioms are “self-evidently true without proof.” In axiomatic systems, truth is preserved throughout the system as statements derive directly from the axioms. While the axiomatic approach can seem like a top-down monolith, in 1931 Gödel famously challenged the claims of metaphysical access through axiomaticity by demonstrating that within any such system there are true statements that cannot be proved. In addition to Gödel’s challenge, the history of axiomatic thinking also presents a multitude of traditions, concepts and crises.

For instance, automated theorem proving is a field of mathematics which attempts to automatize mathematical proof-writing with computing. Confirming the validity of this method and achieving automatization beyond first-order logic has been greatly challenging, where-as the methods of writing proofs by hand or with computerized (but not automated) proof assistants do not face the same scrutiny of “viability.” How does this history of mathematics relate to other interests more broadly?

In the first issue of Ars Scientia, we took the lead from Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants as a study in the systematization of the relation between observer and phenomena, a relation that makes up a blueprint of the simultaneity of aesthetic practice and scientific inquiry. In the upcoming second issue of Ars Scientia, we are interested in what happens when, as Thomas Moynihan writes, “this plenty [of the organic world] and progressivism becomes divorced, decoupled from, devoid of purpose? What happens when the artisan recedes from the picture—as the century following Goethe witnessed unfold?” (2021, Philosophical Life of Plants). We want to extend this conflict beyond the discipline of mathematics or the illustration of nature and towards synthetic practices between the artistic and the scientific.

Are our axioms so silent as they might appear? What is formalization, systematization when devoid of purpose? What does it mean to reintroduce such a purpose? What are the possible axiomatics that speak from below and beyond the mathematical impetus of abstract proof? Where is the hand? Can the silent speak for the quivering?

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Axiomatic Realism IV: Subjective Epistemologies

As the years passed, my attention gradually drifted away from the late-night activities that experimental music has always oriented itself by, and back towards discursive, reflective, and abstract practices. Amongst many other things, I organised a time-distortion workshop with Andrew McKenzie of The Hafler Trio infamy. In 2011, on a tour of the Western United States with some musicians from our now-defunct collective The Centrifuge I met someone mining Bitcoin on a DIY rig in their apartment. I didn’t realise at the time that it would become a passion, then an obsession - first as an aficionado, then an advocate, then an earnest researcher, and ultimately a critic driven more by disappointment than derision. Somewhere in the middle of that — rather well-documented and productive — arc, I re-entered the scholarly arena a decade after my prior exit, as an independent researcher searching for fresh perspectives to apply to an emerging field of research on applied cryptographic networks, that today is referred to as ‘blockchain technology’ or ‘web3’.

Fork Around and Find Out

My first crypto-research paper, Towards An Analytical Discipline of Forkonomy promised no less than a sui generis perspective with which to build a philosophical and analytical suite of characterization approaches, somewhere between qualitative data science and subjective epistemology. The subject of enquiry was the relatively recent phenomena involving network schisms — “forks” in disciplinary parlance — which for the first time ever provided similar enough decentralised networks to allow for like-for-like comparisons. In retrospect, this project would not be able to deliver on its lofty promises, partly for lack of resources, and partly because the ‘fork wars’ of 2016-8 were really just a moment in time rather than the beginning of a major trend, but mainly because it was not well-received by the computer science-dominated cryptocurrency research field of the late 2010s. Shortly after writing the first paper in a series of texts under the auspices of the Forkonomy project, I submitted it to a relevant computer science conference: in fast-moving fields such as CS, peer-reviewed conferences is typically the way results are disseminated quickly, with later collation into journal issues. Some weeks later I received the outcome: a rejection alongside the reviewers’ feedback. Unsurprisingly, Reviewer 2 was displeased:

“From my view, the paper just introduces new jargon that is difficult to understand and apply correctly and I remain skeptical that it will be helpful in any way to researchers. The writing is obtuse, jargon-laden, and difficult to follow.”
Reviewer 2, not getting it as usual

Perhaps they were right? Or, were they ‘normal scientists’ missing the point and attempting to invalidate new ideas coming out of leftfield? I will let you be the judge of that, dear reader. I should add that my first invitation to speak at a cryptocurrency conference (Ethereum Classic Summit, Seoul, Korea, Sep’18) contained within it a series of dim and dismal predictions for the future of the Ethereum Classic network. Fittingly enough for this text, Ethereum Classic is a formalistic subcommunity of Ethereum who valued the primacy of code-as-law over any moral quandaries resulting from what was back then the largest network exploit in blockchain history (targeting ‘The DAO’), which one-by-one came to pass.

A non-existent publication by the Byzantine Business School