Arquivo para a ‘Antropotécnica’ Categoria
The question of consciousness
28
Feb
The big issue for artificial intelligence was until
recently autonomy, robots, autonomous machines and now autonomous cars, with all the controversy the project evolves, Germany, for example, already provides a line of autonomous cars for the next decade that will begin.
The new issue is the question of consciousness, it has occupied the minds of philosophers for over a century, and can conceptualize in general terms the ability to take actions and consequences of these actions, which has to do with autonomy, because autonomy It is to analyze the consequences of acts performed by machines, the limits of dangerousness and privacy.
In the context of social or historical consciousness, this was Gadamer’s great debate with Dilthey, to which he attributed a conception of romantic consciousness for the absence of a “historical mediation” from facticity, and asks “how will the task of hermeneutics ”and finds a common ground between Schleiermacher and Hegel” (Gadamer, 2002, Truth and Method, p. 256), with the concepts of reconstruction and integration, and according to him, Dilthey makes the intermediate path between them.
Gadamer explains: “Schleiermacher and Hegel could present the two extreme possibilities of answering this question.
Their answers could be assigned to the concepts of reconstruction and integration. For both Schleiermacher and Hegel, in the beginning there is the awareness of a loss and alienation from tradition, which is what drives hermeneutic reflection” (idem).
However, he will say, each of them will determine the task of hermeneutics differently, and what Gadamer calls reconstruction and integration means the separation of preconceptions and alienation from tradition, and therefore rebuild and integrate.
Schleiermacher’s famous thesis is “What matters is to understand a better author than one would have understood himself,” Gadamer thought about the work of art, but Schleiermacher is stuck with his conception of “history of the spirit” which is his concept.
What Hegel says, according to Gadamer, is the creation of a category by stating that the essence of the historical spirit is not the restitution of the past, but the mediation of thought with the present life, which is the prevalence and idealism of the ideal over the factual questions.
And the origin of consciousness, as it happened, is that Terence Deacon is right in claiming that the mind came from matter, and with it came consciousness, if it is true, it is possible to think that somehow the machine, on the levels of intelligence artificial, you may have “consciousness” and then you will know that it is machine and that we humans are not.
What we relate in the videos of Gadamer and Peter Sloterdijk was to introduce this question, and the question of truth is proposed as the genesis of historical consciousness (Gadamer, 2002, p. 265), so machine consciousness cannot have this level.
GADAMER H. G.(2002) Verdade e Método (Truth and Method), 4th ed., Tr. Flavio P. Meurer. Petrópolis: Vozes (Brazilian edition).
Power and soul
23
Feb
There is nothing in the sociological discourse that actually unveils what the Spirit is, the great
reason why philosophy came to re-work the question of the Other (Levinas, Ricoeur and even Habermas and Chul-Han resumed it) is that the vision idealist is centered on the “I”, vulgar thought has also followed this path: the “mystery”, the key to success, etc.
To have a relationship with the soul, it is necessary to know not the ex-sistence (ex-outside and cistere – cistern), but that God is, his essence is Being in his fullness and thus in him there is ontological fullness and thus the soul, from the Greek anima, is what He inserts into man to give him life.
Thus, its power is ontological, Byung Chul Han manages to relate Heidegger with his conception of power, and also of religion with power, but his reading is dualistic at this point, either religion or ontology, it is true that there is a theo-ontology, but there is a strong relationship.
The relationship that Chul Han establishes is described as follows: “Although God is ‘subjectivity’, this is not exhausted in the abstract identity, without content, of ‘I am I’. He does not remain in an eternal silence and hermeticism´” (Han, 2019, p. 120), quotes he takes from Lectures in the philosophy of religion by Hegel, and it is not surprising that he thinks, he is close to Buddhism and asceticism it’s human.
We already wrote in the previous post that God is power in the Hegelian view, and Chul Han describes it from the idealist idea: “for He is a power of being Himself” (Han, 2019, p. 121), and thus there is no relationship of creation (and not immanence) with everything that exists, including man and his soul. Unlike the Spirit developed by Hegel (Phenomenology of the Spirit), without the relationship with the soul there is no Trinitarian God, in addition to the divine-human Jesus, the Holy Spirit, third person.
Through a true asceticism, man knows a true power, which is not domination in its sociological description, but an ontological relationship with its ascension, through which the biblical reading says man truly rises.
A passage from the divine reading, in which Matthew reveals as a lesson from Jesus (Mt 4,25): “For what good is it for a man to gain the whole world if he loses himself and destroys himself?”, that is, if he destroys his soul.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2018) What is power?. NY; Wiley. (2019 portuguese version)
Power and domination
21
Feb
We’ve written in our previous essays about the difference between power and domination, and
while it can be wielded with wisdom and discernment, most of the time it devolves into the purest form of domination: control of opinions and narratives and the exercise of force for this, so it’s very easy to become pure domination.
Byung Chul Han in his book “The swarm” that talks about “psychopolitical” domination discusses the use of media and its control for this, current trends in the use of AI make this more dangerous.
We wrote in a previous post here, long before this war tension looms over our civilization:
“Symmetry, reciprocity, the understanding of human diversity and respect for it are almost always ignored in the models of the beginning of the 20th century, returning to them is nothing but a harbinger of a greater tragedy: the civilizational crisis with deeper roots than the previous ones”, we wrote this well before the beginning of the war in Eastern Europe.
Understanding that this is part of models of political domination of opinions and power narratives, Byung Chul Han’s analysis in his book: “What is power” shows the efficiency of using new media as an efficient and directing form of control even of our “freedoms”.
Among his analyses, we find among several discussions around modern and contemporary philosophy and the routine practices of postmodernity one that is particularly important and that escapes many analyses: gamification.
The game that, in general, motivates participants with its reward system that produces immediate sensations of success is also an exploration tool in psychopolitics. Social communication manifests itself in the grammatical lack of Twitter, in the affective appeal of the like and in the alienation promoted by influencers.
Thus, wanting, which is manageable according to our possibilities and the Other’s reactions, is trained in electronic games as a compulsive wanting, the desire is to “kill” the enemy, and the increasingly compulsive rhythm is being dictated by battles and speed in battles. answers.
Even if you can find advantages in gamification or think of it in educational terms: building a house, a farm or making knowledge games, there is a strong predominance of “battles” and domains of territories.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2018) What is power?. NY; Wiley.
Blindness and new paths
02
Dec
The greatest of all personal blindnesses is hatred, and the greatest social blindness is war, in which men lose their reason and become fanatics.
It is common in times of crisis and few know and actually defend the path of serenity and wisdom in these moments, polarization and war were signs, resorting to authoritarianism and social misguidedness is the consequence.
The visual physical limitation made me have the exact feeling of what this means, first recognizing my own blindness and then knowing how to walk with it and accept the limits resorting to healing.
Socially it is not quite like that because the narratives make men believe in what they say and say and what they imagine they see, we have already posted here Saramago’s essay and other blindness, also their meaning around the pandemic.
The social course of a society in disequilibrium and under tension is always worrying, because common sense does not always win, remember the two wars and their humanitarian disasters and other pandemics.
The Christian liturgy at this Christmas time does not speak only of the advent of the baby Jesus, it also speaks of the Parusia, that is, of a new advent, where it also says that there will be cuts and changes (Mt 3,10): “The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire”, that is, the root of all evils and disagreements.
In religious terms, conversion is asked, a change of route, in social terms it is necessary to recognize what is not in the path of hope and love, and cut it at the root because it is the only way to change.
Not everything that shines is gold
01
Dec
Who proclaims or hears about changes, thinks of values and
immediate situations that indicate earthly benefits and not straight and new paths that lead to a superior ascesis, then this is not the time to come, this is not a new advent.
Structural changes imply a change of mentality, in religious terms they mean conversion, not for this or that particular position, but for a new moral and social asceticism.
Words are often said to convince men, but they do not mean that if in fact there is coherence in what is said, in current terms they mean building narratives to favor personal interests.
Just as not everything that is new is revolutionary, and as the popular saying goes, not everything that glitters is gold, also for those who believe, not everyone who claims to be religious is in fact changing values.
The literal reading is (Mt 7,21-24): “not everyone who says Lord, Lord enters the Kingdom of God, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Therefore, anyone who does not listen to these words of mine and put them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the Rock.”
When in fact the changes start to happen, times of crisis always indicate this, consciences will also be enlightened, they will enter a “clearing”, but for now everything is confused and uncertain, each one wants to prevail his point of view, and so if fanatically opposes what he considers opposed to his interests, but a new advent is announced.
More than prophetic or apocalyptic words, they are necessary conditions and structures for a new social, moral and spiritual time, everything is immersed in conflicts of interest groups and immediate politics.
So, while the house is being put in order, everything looks upturned and uncertain, and in fact it is.
Wisdom and Love
29
Sep
*The previous text is wrong, because I had some security problem with my blog.
Perhaps the greatest of paradigms and thus the most susceptible to human
errors is Love, one can speak of the Greek classification: eros, philia and agape, but I want to link it here to wisdom in the sense of full happiness, not the one that produces utilitarian but spiritual fruits.
There is a book “The shadow of love, on the concept of love in Heidegger” and another that was Hannah Arendt’s thesis, they do not seem to be but are linked, because it was during the thesis period that Heidegger and Arendt had a romance and so she began to be mentored by Karl Jaspers.
The great scientific theory of our time, both for Karl Popper and for Thomas Kuhn, two great philosophers of science, is the possibility that there will always be a course correction in scientific methods and theories so that man knows more about himself and nature that surrounds it.
Heidegger’s text, which is a compilation of letters, only exists in French, so let’s return to the German concept of “Dasein” now to re-signify it and give it a connotation linked to Love:
“In the usual meaning, however, it means, for example: the chair ‘is there’; the uncle “is there”, he arrived and is present; hence: presence” (Heidegger, 1994b, p. 300).
It may seem like a simple literary maneuver, but it is not, other authors (Fernandes, 2011) also make this allusion and even compare it with “parousia” and “adventus”, which acquire a more religious connotation, here it is not necessary.
Thus, it is a presence of an absence, but love also passes through language and thinking, so “thinking is, therefore, to found, in the human, the “medium” to give oneself to the truth of being. It is, therefore, to co-found the human as presence: to be the there-in-being. In this sense, the fundamental ontology is a rush towards the passage, to pack itself for the leap, a first movement in favor of the foundation of the truth of being in the human as presence. This entails a transformation of the human from the lord of beings into the shepherd of Being”.
And this is Sloterdijk’s main contestation in Heidegger, the failure of this human domestication, or what in Heidegger is “care” and that modernity has not been able to resolve.
Heidegger’s main idea about Love is its presence in an Absence, to which we can add what we developed in previous topics: working with uncertainty and errors, that is, knowing how to live and work in the face of the natural difficulties of life.
Quantum physics, for example, has its beginnings in the enunciation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which stated that it was not possible to know exactly what the position of the particles of an atom was with exactitude, Planck who did not agree, it is his statement “I do not agree may God play dice”, went to the laboratory to prove this principle.
NASA (in the photo the crash of the spacecraft colliding with Dimorphos) has just made a scientific feat which is to hit a satellite of a small meteor, which does not pose any danger of collision with Earth, just to prove that it is possible to change course some celestial body, and with that, in case of danger to Earth, change its route.
The DART project is a test for a possible future mission to deflect an asteroid from colliding with Earth, for cosmic dimensions Dimorphos is small (160 m) and orbits another larger asteroid (780 m) called Didymos and form a binary system, the spacecraft that hit it was traveling at 22.015 km/h and the image seen from a telescope in Hawaii on Monday night (26/09) shows that the impact produced many fragments, the deviation from the route, however, is small.
Changing route is wise, when you admit the mistake, but it requires two steps: admitting the mistake and then having the humility to change route.
Reference:
HEIDEGGER, M. (1994). Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann
Fernandes, M. (2011) A. O cuidado como amor em Heidegger. Rev. Abordagem Gestalt. Vol. 1, n. 2, Brazil, Goiânia.
Wisdom and training
27
Sep
The most beautiful image that Plato made of Socrates about
philosophy was not the ordering of knowledge, the epitheme that is also necessary, through which the sophists were fought, but the image that exists in his book Symposium, the one with which we have access to philosophy and knowledge of the Supreme Good and in it “the” wisdom.
The one that says that a philosopher is not moved only by a “know-how” as the utilitarian world wants, the presence of Socrates by the “testimony” of Alcibiades, with an appearance without any compatibility with the Beauty of classical Greece, and which imposed to whom he was questioned a change of attitude, not a passive receiver of ideas.
Questions and interrogation are no less important than putting oneself actively in front of oneself and the world, there is a desire to take the lead and to respond to really important questions.
As we read in Theaetetus, Socrates is defined as atopos, with “no-place”, or even “weird”, as one who creates aporias, that is, he does not solve things, he only raises questions, he does not then help the harmony of the “polis”. ” or the cosmos.
What kind of wisdom is this then, “not knowing” is very significant for Socrates, he is a scathing critique of the pretension of the known, after all their knowledge is not the result of conversation, of dialogue, it is not aware of the contradictory questions of the your knowing.
Every Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian edifice did not resist the brute force of the Roman empire, and falls into ruin before the mighty Roman army, as war won Greek wisdom, acquiring it and making it serve its purposes, the Roman gods were no other. but those corresponding to the Greek gods, but philosophy has decayed.
This is the possible current parallel, there is an almost general feeling that regret is no longer useful or reasonable, and philosophy would be nothing more than mere speculation, says Sloterdijk “it is not a favorable time for thought”, or we go for pragmatism of action or for the deleterious.
There is little room for the birth of the new, for Paidéia with its effect of education and training, everything goes towards the immediate and the market.
Even in environments where culture is present, it seems that the ideals of wisdom are under suspicion and vulgarity is promoted even with a certain ‘status/’, the way out is to call men to conscience and common sense.
Plato. The Banquet of Plato. CHICAGOWAY AND WILLIAMS, 1895. (pdf).
Scalation of war
26
Sep
We warned last week that the risk of a Ukrainian advance would
provoke Russian anger and this is indeed what is happening, the government has called up 300,000 reservists, and the UN OVD body reported that there have been protests in 38 cities and 1,400 people were detained (source RTP Portugal).
The war in eastern Ukraine begins to reverse the trend, on the eve of a plebiscite held by the Russian government, Ukrainian troops advance in the Donetsk region, strategic because it has roads and railways to reach the regions to the east, including Mariupol and Kherton.
What the next steps will be will depend on the severity of the Ukrainian advance, at first these young people and parents of families who are being called up will go to the front so the idea of waiting for the winter and trying to contain the advance of Ukrainian troops seems like a first strategy, but provocations of the use of nuclear weapons continue and US media outlets report that the Biden administration had made a private call to the Russian government.
Putin has so far kept protests and opposition to the war under control, at the cost of arrests and a certain restriction of press freedoms, most regions are also ruled by pro-Kremlin authorities, but it is possible that the internal situation will worsen (protests in photo).
An aggravation that is uncomfortable for the Russian government are the border disputes between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and also Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and Russia itself has a territorial dispute with Georgia, in addition to the various border conflicts (Finland, Moldova, etc. ), in practice, Russia would like to return to being the great Soviet federation, but the scenario is already different, and the Chinese government called this weekend for there to be no “overflow” from the war.
The Russian issue is that NATO takes advantage of these conflicts to have new allies, in addition to the post-war territorial expansion, which is the main reason alleged for the war with Ukraine.
The siege of Leningrad, today Saint Petersburg, was to prevent Russian trains from reaching the city and there was a food ration card, when a person died the first thing they did was steal the card, also if someone was transporting food. in the city was robbed, the city had about 3 million inhabitants and the only passage to Russia was Lake Ladoga.
Winter came and the lake became frozen and possible to be used as a route, while the situation of the German army was that it faced difficulties in supply and conditions to withstand the cold.
The current situation in Ukraine is that there is all autumn for winter to accompany the Dombass regions, and avoid the Dombass ones, while the Russians want to stifle the resumption, first through a referendum that guarantees support for the Russian and then with the sending of more troops.
Further Russian defeats could exacerbate the nuclear issue and Ukraine itself could suffer from the cold if forced to shut down its Zaporijia plant.
Meanwhile the Europe of gas spend the winter, has already returned to using fuel fuel to avoid the use of gas in nuclear agreements, strategically wait for the winter to avoid the use of nuclear energy, strategically wait for the winter for their investigations .
There are possibilities for a peace agreement, but they lack a reasonable agenda, a polarization mines as possibilities.
The Einstein Ring and the Spheres
08
Sep
It was the philosopher Sloterdijk who was the first to create the
relationship between man and his spheres, from the maternal womb to the planet, he is largely right, also in criticizing cynical reason, the one that justifies spherical reality is largely correct, it is a metaphor, but very good.
Let us think of the fetus, which remains within the sphere of the uterus until it leaves and looks at its ex-sphere, the mother, will still feel her dependence for a long time, it happens that this sociological, anthropological, semiotic reality has its own topological properties that are hidden in the cynical reason.
One of them is to understand that there is an immunological relationship whose primary purpose is to protect, nourish, train and immunize homo from an unknown sapiens exterior, like the baby who at birth depends on the mother, he needs her immunological protection.
The search for other spaces, inhabiting the moon (the new mission finds it difficult) and mars (astronauts think it would be horrible to live there) does not resolve the planetary spherical relationship, in crisis, it is necessary to open up to the other and leave of the hut, some psychologists speculate about the hut syndrome, which the pandemic has accelerated, not wanting to leave a sheltered, spherical environment.
The super telescope James Webb photographs Einstein’s ring in a place far away and physically unreachable by man (the image), at least under current technological conditions, and the physicist’s prediction was “photographed” (actually the instruments are of frequencies and not of “photos”) with formidable precision, one can extend Sloterdijk’s metaphor.
Gerald’s 1916 theory of Gravity revolutionized physics by creating a physics that claimed that gravity is a curvature of the space-time continuum caused by the mass of objects, almost two massive objects were perfectly aligned with the Earth this space-time would deflect the photons forming rings around the alignment of these two objects.
An English physicist named Sir Oliver Lodge suggested that this phenomenon of a massive gravitational field would not only deflect light from an object behind it, but also magnify it forming a gravitational lens, and the recent James Webb photo confirms this phenomenon.
What is the metaphor, massive immunological spheres, cultures, religions or ideologies whose purpose is to protect themselves when close (or on a collision course which makes the metaphor more complicated) not only form a strong gravitational field that draws bodies around, they do not they only distort space-time, but they are also lenses that, if carefully observed, allow us to see what is behind.
So it is time to look beyond the differences, the imperfections of the spherological models and enable a gravitational attraction that helps to better understand the civilizing process.
Dark times and virtues
19
Aug
Dark time of politics, threats of war and pandemic do not
completely hide the paths of the clearing, although its true meaning is debatable, neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment were in fact “clearings” and Sloterdijk has revised Heidegger’s clearing, it is possible in times of anger to see virtues that lead to the clearing.
Sloterdijk, in his book/essay “Time and Ira”, points out the exhaustion of traditional models of political processes, I argue from a historical review of the great global political impacts, inverting the biopolitics advocated by Foucault to a social psycho-politics.
He points to affections that he calls “thymotic”, especially anger, as well as its degenerate derivatives, resentment and the desire for revenge, for example (but there may be others such as incitement to hatred), become the fundamental driving force of history and politics, so it’s about mobilizing these forces, and the populists do it well, to mobilize the population.
Virtue, good proposals and the call for dialogue seem to lose strength, however, the author himself points out that psychic ecosystems (among them moral) can produce these “affections”.
Written in 2006, the author already showed that anger, whose capital is precisely the dispersed and globalized world anger, produces a cultural omnipresence that he calls the “metaphysics of revenge”, but does not develop that the types of moral “affections” can be an opposing force.
It was not without this force that the Greeks developed the concepts of the citizen of the polis, it was not without the encounter with the human (excessively anthropocentric, it is true) that the renaissance made a re-encounter with humanism, after its modern development, now check me out.
The virtues seem heroic, impossible and almost despicable, the theft of the public thing, dialogue and the de facto respect for democracy (polarization favors dictators), seem to have no other way out, but the virtues exist and they are subject to our humanity (Picture: Giotto: The Allegories of Virtues, 1303-5).
It is not just about the female figure, racial forces and the countless forgotten people in politics, the important thing is to highlight that a social turn must be composed of moral and social virtues.
The figure of the mother was even developed by the writer Máximo Gorki in his historic book “The mother”, which does not mean anything other than the generation of good virtues, also those that generate social justice and peace between men, the Greek Maieutics , Sloterdijk perhaps alludes to the “matrix in grêmio” (in the mother’s lap) in her spheres.
In biblical terms, the figure of Mary, forgotten by some and even despised by Christians, is nothing other than the memory that from her “birth” comes a redemption, a salvation and it is not by chance that she is seen as all virtuous.
The biblical passage in which Mary tells her cousin Elizabeth that she was pregnant with Jesus is clear in her cousin’s greeting (Mt 1:42-43): “With a loud cry, she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit from your belly! How can I deserve to have the mother of my Lord come to visit me? , being human (and divine through participation in childbirth) is within our reach.
SLOTERDIJK, P. Time and Wrath (Tempo e Ira), Brazilian edition: Estação Liberdade, 2006.
SLOTERDIJK, P. Spheres I: bubles (Esferas I: bolhas). São Paulo, Brazil: Estação Liberdade, 2016
