Author: lievenlb

the topos of unconsciousness

Published May 14, 2022 by lievenlb

Since wednesday, as mentioned last time, the book by Alain Connes and Patrick Gauthier-Lafaye: “A l’ombre de Grothendieck et de Lacan, un topos sur l’inconscient” is available in the better bookshops.

There’s no need to introduce Alain Connes on this blog. Patrick Gauthier-Lafaye is a French psychiatrist and psycho-analyst, working in Strassbourg.

The book is a lengthy dialogue in which the authors try to find a use for topos theory in Jaques Lacan’s psycho-analytical view of the unconscious.

If you are a complete Lacanian virgin, it may be helpful to browse through “Lacan, a beginners guide” (by Lionel Bailly) first.

If this left you bewildered, for example by Lacan’s strange (ab)use of mathematics, rest assured, you’re not alone.

It is no coincidence that Lacan’s works are the first case-study in the book “Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science” by Alan Sokal (the one of the hoax) and Jean Bricmont. You can download the book from this link.

If now you feel that Sokal and Bricmont are way too harsh on Lacan, I urge you to have a go at the book “Writing the structures of the subject, Lacan and topology” by Will Greenshields.

If you don’t have the time or energy for this, let me give you one illustrative example: the topological explanation of Lacan’s formula of fantasy:

\[
\$~\diamond~a \]

Loosely speaking this formula says “the barred subject stands within a circular relationship to the objet petit a (the object of desire), one part of which is determined by alienation, the other by separation”.

Lacan was obsessed with the immersion of the projective plane $\mathbb{P}^2(\mathbb{R})$ into $\mathbb{R}^3$ as the cross-cap. Here’s an image of it from his 1966-67 seminar on ‘Logique du fantasme’ (213 pages).

This image includes the position of the objet petit $a$ as the end point of the self-intersection curve, which itself is referred to as the ‘castration’, or the ‘phallus’, or whatever.

Brace yourself for the ‘explanation’ of $\$~\diamond~a$: if you walk twice around $a$ this divides the cross-cap into a disk and a Mobius-strip!

The mathematics is correct but I fail to see how this helps the psycho-analyst in her therapy. But hey, everyone will tell you I have absolutely no therapeutic talent.

Let’s return to the brand new book by Alain Connes and Patrick Gauthier-Lafaye: “A l’ombre de Grothendieck et de Lacan, un topos sur l’inconscient”.

It was to be expected that they would defend Lacan’s exploitation of (surface) topology by saying that he was just unfortunate not to have the more general notion of toposes available, as well as their much subtler logic. Perhaps someone should write a fictional parody on Greenshields book: “Lacan and the topos”…

Connes’ first attempt to construct the topos of unconsciousness was also not much of a surprise. According to Lacan the unconscious is ‘structured like a language’.

So, a natural approach might be to start with a ‘dictionary’-category (words and relations between them) or any other known use of a category in linguistics. A good starting point to read up on this is the blog post A new application of category theory in linguistics.

Eventually they settled for a much more ambitious project. To Connes and Gauthier-Lafaye every individual has her own topos and corresponding logic.

They don’t specify how to construct these individual toposes, but postulate that they are all connected to a classifying topos, which is their incarnation of the world of ‘myths’ and ‘fantasies’.

Surely an idea Lacan would have liked. Underlying the unconscious must be, according to Connes and Gauthier-Lafaye, a geometric theory! That is, it can be fully described by first order sentences.

Lacan himself used already some first order sequences in his teachings, such as in his logic of sexuation:

\[
\forall x~(\Phi~x)~\quad \text{but also} \quad \exists x~\neg~(\Phi~x) \]

where $\Phi~x$ is the phallic function. Quoting from Greenshield’s book:

“While all (the sons) are subject to ($\forall x$) the law of castration ($\Phi~x$), we also learn that this law nevertheless resides upon an exception: there exists a subject ($\exists x$) that is not subject to this law ($\neg \Phi~x$). This exception is embodied by the despotic father who, not being subject to the phallic function, experiences an impossible mode of totalised jouissance (he enjoys all the women). He is, quite simply, the exception that proves the law a necessary beyond that enables the law’s geometric bounds to be defined.”

It will be quite hard (but probably great fun for psycho-analysts) to turn the whole of Lacanian theory on the unconscious into a coherent geometric theory, construct its classifying topos, and apply the Joyal-Reyes theorem to get at the individual cases/toposes.

I’m sure there are much deeper insights to be gained from Connes’ and Gauthier-Lafaye’s book, but this is what i got from a first, fast, cursory reading of it.

Grothendieck meets Lacan

Published April 21, 2022 by lievenlb

Next month, a weekend-meeting is organised in Paris on Lacan et Grothendieck, l’impossible rencontre?.

Photo from Remembering my father, Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called “the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud”.

What’s the connection between Lacan and Grothendieck? Here’s Stephane Dugowson‘s take (G-translated):

“As we know, Lacan was passionate about certain mathematics, notably temporal logic and the theory of knots, where he thought he found material for advancing the theory of psychoanalysis. For his part, Grothendieck testifies in his non-strictly mathematical writings to his passion for the psyche, as shown by many pages of his Récoltes et Semailles just published by Gallimard (in January 2022), or even, among the tens of thousands of pages discovered at his death and of which we know almost nothing, the 3700 pages of mathematics grouped under the title ‘Structure of the Psyche’.

One might therefore be surprised that the two geniuses never met. In fact, a lunch did take place in the early 1970s organized by the mathematician and psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony. But a lunch does not necessarily make a meeting, and it seems that this one unfortunately did not happen.”

As it is ‘bon ton’ these days in Parisian circles to utter the word ‘topos’, several titles of the talks given at the meeting contain that word.

There’s Stephane Dugowson‘s talk on “Logique du topos borroméen et autres logiques à trois points”.

Lacan used the Borromean link to illustrate his concepts of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary (RSI). For more on this, please read chapter 6 of Lionel Baily’s excellent introduction to Lacan’s work Lacan, A Beginner’s Guide.

The Borromean topos is an example of Dugowson’s toposes associated to his ‘connectivity spaces’. From his paper Définition du topos d’un espace connectif I gather that the objects in the Borromean topos consist of a triple of set-maps from a set $A$ (the global sections) to sets $A_x,A_y$ and $A_z$ (the restrictions to three disconnected ‘opens’).

\[
\xymatrix{& A \ar[rd] \ar[d] \ar[ld] & \\ A_x & A_y & A_z} \]

This seems to be a topos with a Boolean logic, but perhaps there are other 3-point connectivity spaces with a non-Boolean Heyting subobject classifier.

There’s Daniel Sibony‘s talk on “Mathématiques et inconscient”. Sibony is a French mathematician, turned philosopher and psychoanalyst, l’inconscient is an important concept in Lacan’s work.

Here’s a nice conversation between Daniel Sibony and Alain Connes on the notions of ‘time’ and ‘truth’.

In the second part (starting around 57.30) Connes brings up toposes whose underlying logic is much subtler than brute ‘true’ or ‘false’ statements. He discusses the presheaf topos on the additive monoid $\mathbb{N}_+$ which leads to statements which are ‘one step from the truth’, ‘two steps from the truth’ and so on. It is also the example Connes used in his talk Un topo sur les topos.

Alain Connes himself will also give a talk at the meeting, together with Patrick Gauthier-Lafaye, on “Un topos sur l’inconscient”.

It appears that Connes and Gauthier-Lafaye have written a book on the subject, A l’ombre de Grothendieck et de Lacan : un topos sur l’inconscient. Here’s the summary (G-translated):

“The authors present the relevance of the mathematical concept of topos, introduced by A. Grothendieck at the end of the 1950s, in the exploration of the structure of the unconscious.”

The book will be released on May 11th.

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The monster prime graph

Published March 16, 2022 by lievenlb

Here’s a nice, symmetric, labeled graph:

The prime numbers labelling the vertices are exactly the prime divisors of the order of the largest sporadic group: the monster group $\mathbb{M}$.
\[
\# \mathbb{M} = 2^{46}.3^{20}.5^9.7^6.11^2.13^3.17.19.23.29.31.41.47.59.71 \]

Looking (for example) at the character table of the monster you can check that there is an edge between two primes $p$ and $q$ exactly when the monster has an element of order $p.q$.

Now the fun part: this graph characterises the Monster!

There is no other group $G$ having only elements of these prime orders, and only these edges for its elements of order $p.q$.

This was proved by Melissa Lee and Tomasz Popiel in $\mathbb{M}, \mathbb{B}$, and $\mathbf{Co}_1$ are recognisable by their prime graphs, by using modular character theory.

The proof for the Monster takes less than one page, so it’s clear that it builds on lots of previous results.

There’s the work of Mina Hagie The prime graph of a sporadic simple group, who used the classification of all finite simple groups to put heavy restrictions on possible groups $G$ having the same prime graph as a sporadic simple group.

For the Monster, she proved that if the prime graph of $G$ is that of the monster, then the Fitting subgroup $F(G)$ must be a $3$-group, and $G/F(G) \simeq \mathbb{M}$.

Her result, in turn, builds on the Gruenberg-Kegel theorem, after Karl Gruenberg and Otto Kegel.

The Gruenberg-Kegel theorem, which they never published (a write-up is in the paper Prime graph components of finite groups by Williams), shows the wealth of information contained in the prime graph of a finite group. For this reason, the prime graph is often called the Gruenberg-Kegel graph.

The pictures above are taken from a talk by Peter Cameron, The Gruenberg-Kegel graph. Peter Cameron’s blog is an excellent source of information for all things relating groups and graphs.

The full proof of the Gruenberg-Kegel theorem is way too involved for a blogpost, but I should give you at least an idea of it, and of one of the recurrent tools involved, the structural results on Frobenius groups by John Thompson.

Here’s lemma 1.1 of the paper On connection between the structure of a finite group and the properties of its prime graph by A.V. Vasil’ev.

Lemma: If $1 \triangleleft K \triangleleft H \triangleleft G$ is a series of normal subgroups, and if we have primes $p$ dividing the order of $K$, $q$ dividing the order of $H/K$, and $r$ dividing the order of $G/H$, then there is at least one edge among these three vertices in the prime graph of $G$.

Okay, let’s suppose there’s a counterexample $G$, and take one of minimal order. Let $P$ be a Sylow $p$-subgroup of $K$, and $N$ its normaliser in $G$. By the Frattini argument $G=K.N$ and so $G/K \simeq N/(N \cap K)$.

Then there’s a normal series $1 \triangleleft P \triangleleft (N \cap H)=N_H(P) \triangleleft N$, and by Frattini $H=K.(N \cap H)$. But then, $N/(N \cap H)=H.N/H = G/H$ and $(N \cap H)/P$ maps onto $(N \cap H)/(N \cap H \cap K) = H/K$, so this series satisfies the conditions for the three primes $p,q$ and $r$.

But as there is no edge among $p,q$ and $r$ in the prime graph of $G$, there can be no such edge in the prime graph of $N$, and $N$ would be a counterexample of smaller order, unless $N=G$.

Oh, I should have said this before: if there is an edge between two primes in the prime graph of a subgroup (or a quotient) of $G$, then such as edge exists also in the prime group of $G$ (trivial for subgroups, use lifts of elements for quotients).

The only way out is that $N=G$, or that $P$ is a normal subgroup of $G$. Look at quotients $\overline{G}=G/P$ and $\overline{H}=H/P$, take a Sylow $q$-subgroup of $\overline{H}$ and $\overline{M}$ its normaliser in $\overline{G}$.

Frattini again gives $\overline{M}/(\overline{M} \cap \overline{H}) = \overline{G}/\overline{H}$, and $r$ is a prime divisor of the order of $\overline{M}/\overline{Q}$.

Lift the whole schmuck to the lift of $\overline{M}$ in $G$ and get a series of normal subgroups
\[
1 \triangleleft P \triangleleft Q \triangleleft M \]
satisfying the three primes condition, so would give a smaller counter-example unless $M=G$ and $Q$ (the lift of $\overline{Q}$ to $G$) is a normal subgroup of $G$.

Sooner or later, in almost all proofs around the Gruenberg-Kegel result, a Frobenius group enters the picture.

Here, we take an element $x$ in $G$ of order $r$, and consider the subgroup $F$ generated by $Q$ and $x$. The action of $x$ on $Q$ by conjugation is fixed-point free (if not, $G$ would have elements of order $p.r$ or $q.r$ and there is no edge between these prime vertices by assumption).

But then, $F$ is a semi-direct product $Q \rtimes \langle x \rangle$, and again because $G$ has no elements of order $p.r$ nor $q.r$ we have:

the centraliser-subgroup in $F$ of any non-identity element in $\langle x \rangle$ is contained in $\langle x \rangle$
the centraliser-subgroup in $F$ of any non-identity element in $Q$ is contained in $Q$

So, $F$ is a Frobenius group with ‘Frobenius kernel’ $Q$. Thompson proved that the Frobenius kernel is a nilpotent group, so a product of its Sylow-subgroups. But then, $Q$ (and therefore $G$) contains an element of order $p.q$, done.