Thoughts on Platonic Discretisation and the Digital
David M. Berry Image generated with Nano Banana Plato's Timaeus presents a cosmos constructed from mathematical principles, where geometrical forms constitute the key architecture of reality. It has exercised considerable influence on subsequent thought, becoming arguably Plato's most influential dialogue for over a millennium and providing a key philosophical basis for pre-modern cosmology, medicine, and natural philosophy until the Scientific Revolution. In it, Plato claims that mathematical structures underlie physical reality. Yet its assumptions about the relationship between mathematical form and material existence are also relevant to contemporary debates about digital technology. In the dialogue, Plato argues that the world is reducible to proportional relationships, structures, and discrete combinatorial elements showing his reliance on Pythagorean mathematics concerned with "geometrical proportion only" (Cornford, 1937: 45). This mathematical foundationa...
