machine in this context (following http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/HvF.htm von Foerster ) is a set of rules by which some state of affairs is transformed into another state of affairs basically there are two sorts of machines, "trivial", which have only one fixed rule that operates without change, and "non-trivial", which have rules that change the rules that operate on the state of affairs (a machine within a machine, a 2nd order machine or programme)
the trivial machine follows triadic logic - that from two premises there is an inescapable conclusion - and is structurally embedded in our language (because, for…), and is the pillar of traditional ontology, causality
the non-trivial machine - a programme (or 2nd order machine) - may be seen as operating on "internal state of affairs" (the operating rules that operate on the external states of affairs) and sometimes we know these operations (as with trivial machines, we have programmed them) and so their determination is trivial
when we haven't programmed them, we try to analyze them (as we can with trivial machines) and we may wish to establish links between one state of affairs and another, but there can be no way of inferring from the existence of one situation to an entirely different one, and there can be no causal nexus to justify such a claim, certainly not from the inference that events of the future can be inferred from those of the past
so we enter a transcomputational domain #1 - in principle, the machine identification problem is unsolvable because non-trivial machines are analytically undeterminable, unpredictable, and unmanageable - which brings into effect the questioning of the reliability of any coherent narrative or theory
this is a question of ontology: ontology of being, descriptive ontology (interface), constituitive ontology generally its understood that ontological abstractions and the concrete world never meet though it is clear that such conceptions do ground various philosophical, legal, secular and religious traditions in their exercise of authority and power
so classical ontological discourse sets about trying to reveal the various ontological articulations in order to understand how they enfranchise various contemporary practices, and how these practices organize power relations within cultures - ontologies always are in practice and thereby structure and occlude various ontological possibilities
1. for example, if we assume that all human brains have about as many states as each other then in a classroom a teacher will find him/herself faced with a class of students who have the number of states his brain has, exponentially raised to the power of the number of students in the class -→ it doesn't need many students for this to become transcomputable -→ a teacher traditionally tries to control class by reducing their brain state magnitude to his/hers, the variety of one brain, by methods that reinforce a uniformity of behaviours