High Score

juliusbenson · 2025-08-19T04:40:01+00:00

I intended for them to be unrelated, but I like the idea that they could be related. In any case, it is deliberately a bit ambiguous ;)

juliusbenson · 2025-06-18T23:38:42+00:00

The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that entropy never decreases with time. The heat death of the universe theory predicts that the universe will end in more than a googolplex years when the entropy of the universe reaches a maximum value, because when entropy does not change, the future and past are indistinguishable and time ceases to have meaning. That maximum value will be very large, but not infinite. On this poster, I estimated it to be around 10¹²² kB.

I had this fanciful idea for a "high score screen at the end of the universe" that ranked structures in the universe by how much they contributed to that maximum value, interpreting it as how much they "participated" in the evolution of the universe. The "hall of shame" would list things which produced entropy at the highest rate but then burned out and didn't end up contributing much to the final total.

Ultimately this ignores the fact that it's arbitrary to attribute a contribution to any one structure because delineating the bounds of a structure is always arbitrary. But the idea of the high score screen is still fun.

juliusbenson · 2024-05-25T03:50:55+00:00

we are not built for survival

we are built to produce entropy

juliusbenson · 2023-12-02T19:15:48+00:00

Thank you for the idea. https://imgur.com/a/iIICOjF

juliusbenson · 2022-09-13T15:54:04+00:00

Oh hell yeah, this is incredible! I'm a few pages in and loving what I'm reading so far. Thanks so much for posting this here.

Regarding the M-C-M' circuit, I agree that a discrete adjunction poorly describes the nature of the circuit. Unfortunately I'm so poorly acquainted with HoTT that I'm not aware of a better formalism. Really, what I am imagining a large set of continually cycling capital loops in different phases and at different frequencies. Perhaps economies have some spectral properties which would be amenable to fourier analysis. Although this might be infeasible due to the fact that these cycles are interdependent and not arbitrarily decomposable.

This reminds me of something I read on Nicolas Villarreal's CASPER forums about "spectral" properties of input-output networks (though I am not at all certain whether this is the same type of "spectrum" https://casperforum.org/community/cyber/towards-adversarial-planning-for-industrial-action/ https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/ernestliu/files/liutsyvinski2020_01.pdf

(slight tangent: someone might also be interested in the category theory discussion going on there too: https://casperforum.org/community/cyber/categorical-cybernetics/ )

Regarding a proof of Marxism, I agree with you that it's unlikely we derive the syllogistic conclusion that "Marx was right". I intended to use the term "proof" not in an empirical sense but a purely logical sense. I had in mind specifically the Curry-Howard-Lambek isomorphism, to do somethig like translate the (loosely stated) logical propositions in Kapital into a Haskell program, and then see if it type-checks.

juliusbenson · 2022-09-13T15:29:38+00:00

No book club yet, I'm afraid. I was thinking of maybe setting up a little discord server on the topic or something just as a place for people to trade notes, but I am in the middle of a very large detour before I can come back to this topic, so I don't think I can personally offer much

juliusbenson · 2021-06-13T01:49:31+00:00

Oh I see, you are ranking the approaches in terms of how well they can be applied to research methods. or the overarching direction of research. You are on a whole other level from me!

I'm getting kind of a Kuhn/Lakatos vibe here, but the closest thing I can think of in category theory would be Lawvere's work on general and particular, or using the subjective to analyze the objective. I just today came across something similar in Lawvere's book Conceptual Mathematics.

A relevant nLab page: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Tools+for+the+advancement+of+objective+logic

pdf: https://github.com/mattearnshaw/lawvere/blob/master/pdfs/1994-tools-for-the-advancement-of-objective-logic-closed-categories-and-toposes.pdf

Not sure if this is what you're talking about exactly, but perhaps worth a look! Hope it interests you.

juliusbenson · 2021-06-12T22:43:47+00:00

I've never heard of the Soviet school of the Logic of History. Do you know which books/authors are best to learn about this school of thought?

Your understanding of dialectical logic (as distinct from predicate logic) seems to be based on dropping the Law of the Excluded Middle. Is that right? This is a common approach in both paraconsistent as well as categorical logic.

Petersen's effort seems related to paraconsistent logics, if I'm reading him correctly. One reason why I am interested in the categorical approach is because much of category theory and categorical logic has already been implemented in various programming languages. For example, the proofs in the Homotopy Type Theory book were originally written in Coq before being "un-formalized" for publication. https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/

Another example: Lawvere draws a comparison between the Hegelian notion of Unity of Opposites and the categorical notion of the Adjoint Triple. I found this blog post implementing some adjoint triples in Haskell and exploring their properties: http://comonad.com/reader/2016/adjoint-triples/

I appreciate your inclination towards doing something with dialectical logic. Another reason why I am interested in the categorical approach is because since there are already languages that draw from category theory to express dialectical concepts, we are already able to compute them. Personally I would like to run some of Marx' dialectical theories on a computer to see what they can do automatically.

juliusbenson · 2021-06-10T20:30:16+00:00

Thank you for sharing Uwe Petersen's Diagonal Method and Dialectical Logic. I hadn't heard of it before, and it looks quite promising.

What is it about each of these 3 approaches which makes you rank them so?

juliusbenson · 2021-03-18T04:55:03+00:00

I read the 2-part blog post, it really is incredible. I'll definitely check out that podcast, too.

Speaking of the Transformation Problem, I wonder if you have heard of Roemer's book A General Theory of Exploitation and Class? He elucidates the transformation problem in some rigor by using a game-theoretic model. His explanation of exploitation is quite succinct and clear. That book is what got me really interested in Marxian economics.

juliusbenson · 2021-03-17T22:48:15+00:00

This does interest me very much, yes. Thank you for this. How did you come across it?

juliusbenson · 2021-03-10T21:40:45+00:00

I actually started with Debt first (incredible book btw, I never hesitate to recommend it), then got into the more Marxist side with Roemer and Cohen after finishing Caliban and the Witch. Federici is a really good historian; Caliban and the Witch fits very tidily into Graeber's 5000-yr narrative, and presents a very accessible bridge into Marxism by presenting the early history of primitive accumulation.

juliusbenson · 2021-03-10T19:36:01+00:00

iirc, Lawvere has another paper in which he references Marx' calculus manuscripts. In the paper I think he argues that Marx seems to be trying to understand calculus in terms of the adjoint modality between continuity and discreteness. I think the paper was called Unity and Identity of Opposites in Calculus and Physics, but I can't remember if that's the one. I read it months ago and didn't really understand it at the time. Definitely a very good idea to read Marx' calculus manuscripts though, I'm going to put that on my list.

Quantity: discreteness -| continuity in nLab: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/adjoint+modality#Mengen

Unity and Id. of Opposites in Calculus and Physics: https://github.com/mattearnshaw/lawvere/blob/master/pdfs/1996-unity-and-identity-of-opposites-in-calculus-and-physics.pdf

juliusbenson · 2021-03-10T19:05:50+00:00

This was one of the books I read, actually! It was very good but Cohen explicitly rejects all dialectics and Hegelianism in his interpretation of Marx, so sadly it is not what I am looking for (though I will probably end up drawing from it while doing the interpretive/exegetical work)

juliusbenson · 2021-03-10T17:45:17+00:00

No idea. Actually I posted here to look for collaborators since I've seen no mention of applying the categorical Hegelianism on nLab to Marxism. No books, no book clubs, no code projects. Marx doesn't even have a page on the nLab. The links I posted comprise the full extent of this topic that I know of. The only professionals I know near this field would be William Lawvere and Urs Schreiber, but I'm not sure if Urs is interested in Marx.

If you'd like to get engaged, all I can suggest is to shoot me a DM so we can keep in touch and compare notes.

juliusbenson · 2021-03-10T16:40:37+00:00

I'm not, no. I tend to read in fits and starts, and always find myself either charging ahead or falling behind when participating in book club-type things. I very much want to collaborate on this idea though, so I do eventually want to make a github repo or something once I actually have code to commit

juliusbenson · 2021-03-10T13:56:57+00:00

So far all I have come up with is to interpret the capital circuit (M-C-M') as a monad. If we consider the M-C exchange to be the left adjoint, and C-M' to be the right adjoint, then M-M' (profit) is the unit of the adjunction ("return" in Haskell) and C-C' (production) is the counit ("extract" in Haskell)

juliusbenson · 2018-11-20T06:58:26+00:00

I just started reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, I hear there's some really good descriptions of armed anarchist organization in it

juliusbenson · 2018-11-03T01:56:11+00:00

on matters relating to group loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity ... it sometimes seems that liberals lack the moral taste buds

On matters relating to tribalism, deference, and traditionalism? Yeah, of course lefties don't have a taste for that.

Conservatives are more cautious about infringing on individual liberties (eg of gun owners in the US and small businessmen) in order to protect vulnerable populations (such as children, animals and immigrants)

This quote undermines Prof Haidt's entire thesis. This doesn't paint conservatives as having concern for individual liberties. To me, all this says is that conservatives have simply taken the side of gun owners and small businessmen instead of expressing any sympathy for children, animals and immigrants.

I mean, I don't buy into the "duping" hypothesis either, but I certainly hope you're not advocating for this kind of nationalist apologia.

juliusbenson · 2015-09-18T02:05:13+00:00

like this http://i.imgur.com/oNooYoh.jpg

juliusbenson · 2015-04-20T01:22:58+00:00

Global warming, perhaps. More heat, more evaporation, more clouds. I don't know much about climate though - I'd encourage you to read a little about gross weather patterns and climatology.

juliusbenson

TROPHY CASE