Worldmaking Quotes

“Or think of Goodman's own example: the shift from the analogue to the digital should be regarded as a veritable worldmaking. In this process, continuities are deleted. We are now in the domain of pure mechanizability: discrete inputs, discrete states, and discrete outputs. This shift realized by deletion is a radical one. The very distinction between human and machine collapses. The human world will be revealed as nothing but a special qualitative kind of integration of computational algorithms. As an alternative to this digital world, we can imagine a computational world where continuity, and above all the realtime interaction between the system or the abstract machine and its environment, is restored (supplemented). This is a new computational world in which the system and the environment interact without any pre-given limitations. The interaction is computation itself in a truly concurrent sense, to use the idiom of today's theoretical computer science. The prospects of such a paradigm of computation for remodelling the very notion of spirit or geist as a multi-agent system (interacting computational processes) is beyond our acquired practical reason, if not truly theoretically and practically unbound.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“It is not by any volition that the name of a thing is determined. People do not invent some arbitrary sound-complex, in order to introduce it as the sign of a certain object, as one might do with a token. The spiritual excitement caused by some object which presents itself in the outer world furnishes both the occasion and the means of its denomination. Sense impressions are what the self receives from its encounter with the not-self, and the liveliest of these naturally strive for vocal expression; they are the bases of the separate appellations which the speaking populace attempts.”
― Hermann Usener, Götternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung