{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","id":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","uuid":"24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title":"The Stack On Software and Sovereignty","normalized_title":"thestackonsoftwareandsovereignty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780262029575","isbns":["9780262029575"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":517,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/The%20Stack%20On%20Software%20and%20Sovereignty","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/24410bf1-91f1-4e6b-9613-e64f0132d341/search"},"page":{"printed_page":78,"pdf_page":94,"physical_index":94,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"65b45c9456b8b4e03c8b1ee04eeb9b11be0195b51bd5c5a028f6884b954feff6"},"chapter":"Fheck The Stack |On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin H. Bratton","content":"This conceptual shift is important to how we hope to consider reforming The Stack. One of Turing ’ s signal achievements is to show that an artificial “ machine ” could approach, and even approximate, the scope of natural computation, as defined in a particular way. His innovation was the specific pairing of formal logic with industrial technology that was, even after Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace ’ s Victorian-era calculating machines, by no means obvious in its implications. For measuring the significance of that pairing in relation to The Stack, it is important to distinguish the limits of formal computation, on the one hand, from what the limits of actual computational technologies can really do, on the other. These are two very different kinds of limits. While Turing ’ s hypothetical machine demonstrated the mathematical limits of formal computability, it also demonstrated that any problems that could be captured and expressed symbolically through a reduction to rational integers (which likely describes the vast plurality of things and events in the world as representable by intelligent creatures) could be simulated and solved by a machine engineered to do so, given enough time, materials, and energy. Anything expressed as computable information, regardless of the natural appearance, linguistic identity, or economic value, could be processed by a universal information machine programmed to do so and physically capable of running through enough operations. A strong computationalist philosophical position may also extrapolate from this that natural systems can be (and so must be) reducible to information and computational processes. <sup>9</sup> Problems arise when the notion that things are formally equivalent by their shared computability slides into the claim that they are therefore ontologically equivalent, or even culturally and economically equivalent. The questions raised by the idea of universally calculable matter are interesting on both practical and philosophical terms, but I raise them here to provide conceptual context for other questions.\n\n78\n\nEarth Layer","previous_page":77,"next_page":79}