On Sunday, January 12, 2014 5:02:07 PM UTC-5, Liz R wrote: > > On 13 January 2014 02:35, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com <javascript:> > > wrote: > >> How large does a digital circle have to be before the circumference seems >> like a straight line? >> > That depends on who is viewing it and where from, surely? >
Exactly, but if math doesn't have a term for that, then it is outside of mathematics. > Digital information has no scale or sense of relation. Code is code. Any >> rendering of that code into a visual experience of lines and curves is a >> question of graphic formatting and human optical interaction. With a >> universe that assumes information as fundamental, the proximity-dependent >> flatness or roundness of the Earth would have to be defined >> programmatically. Otherwise, it is simply “the case” that a person is >> standing on the round surface of the round Earth. Proximity is simply a >> value with no inherent geometric relevance. >> >> When we resize a circle in Photoshop, for instance, the program is not >> transforming a real shape, it is erasing the old digital circle and >> creating a new, unrelated digital circle. Like a cartoon, the relation >> between the before and after, between one frame and the “next” is within >> our own interpretation, not within the information. >> > I think what's it's doing is re-rendering the circle on a different scale. > I think that is our projection. I don't think that the computer re-members the old circle. You want pixels at certain coordinates, so it puts them there. You want the contents of a buffer dumped into screen RAM, then it does it. > The pixels that are set as a result are different, but the underlying > circle data is either unchanged, and a transformation matrix is changed, or > the circle data itself is transformed (the radius is changed, but the > centre remains unchanged). > I don't think that data has any concept of circularity or change. There are states and recordings of states which can be compared, but I think all of the transformation and formation that we project on computers disappears when we turn off the video screen or speakers, just as the conversation that a ventriloquist has with a dummy ends for the dummy, before it even begins. > > The real (underlying) circle is an abstraction stored as - I would guess - > a centre and radius, plus no doubt colour, style and so on. > I would say instead that reality is not the circle, the circle is always a figure which represents circularity. Reality is what is actually presented in addition to abstract patterns such as circles. Reality is concrete aesthetic phenomena. > > Didn't Plato say something about the world being an imperfect rendering? > :-) > Yes, but he may have had it upside down. Perfection is an imperfect rendering of the world. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
