Quantum Game of Life

by Carlos Pedro Gonçalves

The following are pictures of a simulation of a quantum game of life, implemented in Netlogo:

Initial Configuration

After a Few Steps

Each cell (patch) can be in a vacuum state, or it can become punctured by a qubit state. In the pictures the black cells correspond to the vacuum states that may potentially become occupied by a qubit state, while the white cells have become occupied (in act) by a qubit state.

Quantum information is, thus, created and annihilated out of an information vacuum. A clustered patchworked dynamic geometry emerges, in the current simulation, from local connectivity rules that make it more probable for clustering to occur.

Defining Complexity

by Maria Odete Madeira

Diversity and complexity are contextually (co)implicated , depending, the nature of each, from the nature of the context, in which they are rooted and upon which they systemically depend. This means that to refer the term complexity to a single definition would be not only impoverishing but also difficult in terms of a desirable explicative rigor.

To speak of complexity one must comprehend complexity, itself. To comprehend comes from the Latin cum+prehender that means to apprehend conjointly, thus, the term “comprehend” folds, it its own definition, the diversity that allows one to design it also as complex, in the sense in which it folds in the same act of comprehension, successive resendings between different individuals, or subjects, which implies an explicare and, thus, an unfolding of the subjectivity in intersubjectivity.

Any attempt to define complexity will have to consider, in the act itself of defining complexity, the complexity implicated in the act of comprehension, necessary to that definition.

Comprehending complexity systemically depends upon individuals, groups, species, cultures, societies and civilizations, in their differences, multiplicities and diversities.

Being and Existence

by Maria Odete Madeira

In Plato, as in Parmenides, the Being is not addressed from the plane of the Existence, but from the plane of the Truth.

The Being is the very act of Being, immediately realized within the Being, itself.

To Be the Being is the realization of the Unity in its irreducible absolute act of Being.

When, within a Platonic position, one states that the Beautiful, the Good or the Truth ARE, one is stating that the Beautiful, the Good, or the Truth are in themselves as such: Beautiful, Good and Truth.

This in itself is a non-reflexive state of the Being, as condition of itself, without any constitutive relational element, that is, without reflexivity, but that, because of that, it can, itself, constitute itself as condition of possibility of the existence of the entities in the rotative relational positions of the different and diverse modes of the being-there (dasein), being there with the others (mitsein).

Image Source: "Being and Existence" by cpgoncalves

Being and Existence by cpgoncalves on DeviantArt

Nietzsche - Man... a chain of forces...

by Maria Odete Madeira

“Eu que sou filho da terra, sinto as doenças do sol como se fossem eclipses meus (…)” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power)

“I, that am son of the earth, feel the diseases of the sun as if they were my eclipses (…)”

For Nietzsche, the “I” is a sort of animal, an individuation constituted by chains of multiple forces articulated between each other and whose motion of rotation displaces itself incessantly in the direction of other forces upon which it exerts its pressure, growing or diminishing, rizhomating in accordance with the trajects and trajectivities.

Man… a chain of forces dependent upon all the cosmic forcers, man… a territory of fluxes of individuated forces, whose frontiers are critically situated between two limits: the infinitely large and the infinitely small, and…, yet, unpredictable, and…, as any small particle, man is a being in itself, simultaneously potential/virtual and actual, simultaneously wave and particle.

The Nothing

by Maria Odete Madeira

Nihilum or Nothing is a referential expression that signals the non-existence of all the things.

The Nothing is understood in its relation with the Being: the Being is and the Nothing is-not; the Being is the Being, because the Being is, and the Nothing is the Not-Being because the Nothing is-not.

However, the Nothing is also Being, because the Nothing is the Nothing, that is, the Nothing is the Being of the Not-Being.

Every referential expression resends towards a referent. The referential expression Nothing resends towards a referent: the Being of all the things.

In any language the referent can be defined as an object of perception. In the referential expression Nothing, the referent is the Being itself that, as such, has the power of generating its own negation: the Not-Being of the Being, understood as a non-presence and, in this way, as a non-existence.

Parmenides introduced, in the Western thinking, the concept of eternity as total presence of the Being. In accordance with Parmenides, the Being exists as total presence, the Being is not born nor dies, the Being is and exists as an eternal present.

However, the Not of the negation imposed itself on the human thinking and language as a power of the Being, as capability of displacing oneself, in a strange loop, from the Being to the Not-Being, in the same flow of Being, as total presence, and, thus, simultaneous, coincident and permanent rotativity of oneself, in oneself and for oneself.

Heidegger experienced, through a feeling of anguish, the interval of thinking between the Being and the Entity. It is dived in a profound anguish that the author conjectures that the entities are not the Being and that the truth of the entities is in that which they are not: the Being itself.

For Heidegger, in front of the Being, the man is helpless, lost in the Nothing. Because the Being, itself, is neither this nor that: the Being, itself, is Nothing.