Arquivo para a ‘Tecnology’ Categoria
The return of evil
19
Sep
Even if due to naivety or social context, from time
to time demons, existing or not, come back to haunt us, there is a truth between reality and fiction: it exists, if not in the imaginary (as some think) also as a real entity.
Horror films, almost all mere fiction, exist, and their audience is not small, as in the case of “The Exorcist” (1973) and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1980), two classics of the genre, but there are films that can stand out as works of art: “Nosferatu” (1922 and remake 2018) and “Get Out!” by director and screenwriter Jordan Peele, who competed for the Oscar for best film in 2018.
In the work directed by F. W. Murnau (1922) there is something of German expressionism, with techniques of using shadows, treated more as a madness around the unknown, also remember that we are in between the wars when Germany and Russia sign the Treaty of Ropallo, trying to form a counterweight in the global geopolitics of the time, an agreement that would last until Hitler.
There are certainly other films, however, they are now reappearing with a more strongly religious tone and color: “The Pope’s Exorcist” (Julius Avery, released this year) which talks about events that happened to Father Gabriele Amorth, who was officially an exorcist from Rome recognized by the Church Catholic, in the film directed by Russell Crowe (Guys – Nice Guys, War Promises – The Water Diviner), the other demon film is Nefarious (Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, based on the 2016 novel by Steve Deace: A Nefarious plot) .
While Nefarious is another fiction about the existence and tricks of the Devil, with some Christian contours, The Pope’s Exorcist is based on real events narrated by Father Gabriele himself, who performed more than 60 thousand exorcisms and certainly some notable ones were selected, among From the conversations that are narrated there, I quote the most important one, in which during a possession he says that the devil can only do what God has allowed, his power is limited.
I don’t like the genre, but I had more patience with “The Pope’s Exorcist” out of curiosity and an attempt to understand the problem, but situated in a context of confusing social issues and the danger of an even bloodier war than those currently underway, but Without Manichaeism, the power of evil is not greater than that of good, and its effects are not comparable.
Evil has a real existence due to the absence of good, so thought Augustine of Hippo, who was a Manichaean in his youth.
Cosmogony, cosmology and eschatology
04
Jul
We have already developed here the
idea of Kosmos in Greek philosophy, which is a time that designates the entire universe as a whole, but it is also “order”, “beauty” and “harmony” for the Greeks, now with powerful telescopes such as the Hubble and James Webb we know that there is also chaos and disharmony in the universe, but the deeper question remains: how did it all begin?
Cosmogonies are a body of doctrines, from religious and mythical principles to scientific ones that seek to explain the order and principle of the universe in its cosmogenesis.
As man became more sedentary, he tried to better adapt to nature to satisfy the needs of animals and plants, needing to look at the sky and understand the seasons to better control crops and pastures for animals.
Practically all civilizations (or civilizational eras) elaborated their cosmogonies, for example, in Western civilization the geocentric model of Ptolemy (the earth is the center), passed to the Copernican model (the heliocentric model), now with the power of James Webb we are looking at the first galaxies and this is possible because the light reaching us has already traveled several light years, so we are seeing a picture of the past.
Thus, our vision of cosmogenesis is gradually changing, at the moment, for example, the telescope that works with a different spectrum of light, the infrared, managed to spot a galaxy 400 million years after the big bang (if this theory is right), which means 13.5 billion years ago (photo), that is, we are seeing almost our cosmogenesis.
Cosmology is then increasingly closer to cosmogesis and this would mean a vision of both, but the essential questions are still missing: where did we come from and where are we going?
Thus, an eschatological vision, beginning and end, is lacking, and one question is already certain, although the planet could collapse and with it our civilization, due to the action of an external cataclysm or a destruction of human artifacts: a war, the very danger of there are so many nuclear power plants on the planet, remember the incident of Fukushima in 2011 and Chernobyl, the planet now has 440 active and 23 under construction, in addition to the military arsenal in several countries.
In the midst of the stormy wind of our time, Christian cosmogony takes shelter and waits in the divine presence of that reading that says (Mt 8:27): “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” when the apostles wake him up on the boat because of the weather and the rough ocean.
Asceticism as human and spiritual elevation
16
May
It is not specific to a religion and is also defined in philosophy, from the
Greek áskesis, “spiritual exercise”, derived from ἀσκέω, “to exercise”, consisting of a practice or more practices that promote spiritual development, the simple idea of renouncing pleasure or the primary needs, must be seen within certain contexts or periods, therefore it is not normal in general and also its opposite does not mean just sinning, but deteriorating, weakening when failing to do certain exercises.
Peter Sloterdijk, an agnostic, speaks of this despiritualized asceticism, in the sense that we are a society of exercises, but that they do not provide either a human or spiritual elevation, a clear example of this is the number of academies that grow in the country and in many places of the world. world, another example is the demonstrations of virility as a human elevation, of course it is important to take care of health, but sometimes excessive exercise and medication do the opposite.
From the human point of view, what we experience is a decadence that goes from the moral to the religious, subjects so clear until recently, today they are seen as having almost absurd controversies to the point of the immoral being considered “normal” and “human” and the religious being identified with atrocities.
The series of humanitarian crises could not fail to affect the economy, these are not simple market crises, they are at the epicenter of wars and economic fallacies, it is not necessary to be an economist to see that simplistic formulas do not work at either extreme: the wild capitalism and socialism without freedom and without human quality.
It seems difficult to recognize what a true spirituality would be then, even with the principle of asceticism, which means human elevation in social relations and in the inherent dignity of every human being, in respect for nature and in the preservation of its benefits, in short, in the love of life .
Even for the concept of peace we go back in history, the pax Roman seems to be the principle for many wars, whatever the one that subdued “enemy” territories to declare peace, not even the eternal peace of contemporary idealism is claimed, although it also have limitations.
It is a harbinger of great tragedies, including war, what is hoped is that somehow forces that still have a human and spiritual background can interpose this contemporary reality and revert the dangerous situation that we all face and few work for its reversal (photo about Pulitzer Prize in 2023).
Visit to Rome, Counteroffensive and Pulitzer Prize
15
May
The week was all about Ukraine: a visit to Rome and the pope, advances in
Backhmut and photos from the war that drew attention when they won the Pulitzer Prize, the photos are shocking and perhaps say more than words, since today there is even incomprehensible rhetoric favor of war.
In the strategic plan, there is no Portuguese analyst Germano Almeida pointed out: “here in the West we are not yet aware of the plans, so there is a Ukrainian idea that this is just the beginning and nobody knows where in fact this counter-offensive can be launched because the Bakhmut’s question could be a first diversion maneuver [discussion] and the essential thing and the mass offensive could be elsewhere”, says Almeida.
The visit to Italy, in addition to the country’s already declared support, the visits to Italian President Sérgio Mattarela and with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, he also participated in a talk show on Italian TV, about the pope, all that is known is an agreement humanitarian assistance to refugees.
The images that won the prize also have a Brazilian on the list: Felipe Dana, from Rio de Janeiro, who filmed and photographed scenes from Bucha, the most cruel and violent massacre carried out by Russia in Ukraine (first photo below), it is worth remembering that the war was also from Vietnam had awards on the horrors there.
Some images from the 2023 Pulitzer Prize given to several Associated Press photographers, including the Brazilian, if words don´t move, maybe the images will.
The electronic narrative
02
Mar
The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence, after a serious crisis towards the end of the
millennium, brings a mystifying aspect to the scenario of scientific dissemination and sometimes even to scientific research itself, which sees it beyond the real possibilities or below what it is able.
That is why we pointed out in the previous post the real evolution and sophistication of Machine Learning algorithms and the growth of Deep Learning technology, this is the current rapid evolution, the evolution of electronic assistants (several of them are already on the market such as Siri and Alexa) is still limited and we commented in a post about the LaMBDA machine that it would have “sentient” capability.
Sentient is different from consciousness, because it is the ability of beings to perceive sensations and feelings through the senses, this would mean in the case of machines having something “subjective” (we have already spoken about the limitation of the term and its difference from the soul), although they are capable of of narratives.
This narrative, however complex it may be, is an electronic narrative, an algorithmic one, with the interaction of man and machine through “deep learning”, it is possible that it confuses and even surprises the human being with narratives and elaborations of speeches, however it will depend on always from the human narratives from which they are fed and create an electronic narrative.
I cite an example of the chatGPT that excites the mystifying discourse and creates an alarm in the technophobic discourse and creates speculations even about the transhuman limits of the machine.
A list of films considered extraordinary, exemplifies the limit of electronic storytelling, due to its human power, the list gave the following films: “Citizen Kane” (1941), “The Godfather” (1972), “Back to the Future ” (1985), “Casablanca” (1942), “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001), “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994), ” Psycho” (1960), “Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) and “Pulp Fiction” (1994).
No mention of the Japanese Akira Kurosawa, the German Werner Herzog or the Italian Frederico Felini, just to name a few, about fiction would not leave out of the list Blade Runner – the hunter of androids, well connected to the technologies of “open AI” or the historic Metropolis (from 1927 by the Austrian Fritz Lang).
The electronic narrative has the limitation of what feeds it, which is the human narrative, even if it is made by the wisest human, it will have contextual and historical limitations.
Artificial intelligence and planning
26
Jan
We all want ideal and perfect situations, as Margaret Boden says, obviously this is not restricted
to AI, our daily lives, our travels and the future depend on this planning, simple voluntarism, or simple desire (it is fashionable to mentalize desires) do not solve any problem and most of the time cause anxiety and frustration.
In the case of computing, “planning enables the program – and/or the human user – to find out what actions have already been taken and why. The ‘why’ refers to the goal hierarchy: this action was performed to satisfy that prerequisite, to achieve such and such secondary goals” (Boden, 2020, p. 44), this in some computer program designs is called “requirements engineering”.
In the case of AI, there is both a “forward thread” and a “backward thread”, which explain and help the program to find solutions, for this there is also a hierarchy, there is also a hierarchy of tasks and the author adds that both planning as hierarchy was rejected by “roboticists” in the 1980s, and today it has been incorporated into the field.
There are several AI constraints that are not clearly exposed and that better explain what AI is, for example, “there are a lot of simplifying non-mathematical assumptions in AI that are generally not mentioned. One of them is the (tacit) hypothesis that problems can be defined without taking emotions into account” (Boden, 2020, p. 46) which is addressed in the next topic and whose subject is just initialized.
The artificial neural networks that greatly helped the development of AI are very different from semantic networks, since the latter are already developed from experience and human interaction and only after these topics is that Chapter 6 does the author ask the question about what is real Artificial Intelligence, like the key questions “Do they have egos, moral stance and free will? Would they be aware?” (Boden, 2020, p. 165), and this question we cannot escape without presenting some philosophical, theological or anthropological insight, perhaps an in-depth synthesis of the three would be more interesting.
The question in times of serious civilizing crisis is necessary a previous question: the human conscience what would it be? How do we treat it? The dictatorship of the same, the insensitive and the standardization of even thought leads us to a false impression that the machine can overtake us (the point of singularity).
BODEN, Margaret A. (2020) Inteligência Artificial: uma brevíssima introdução (Artificial Intelligence: a very brief introduction). Brazil, SP: Ed. UNESP.
Doctors are for the sick
12
Sep
Number of cases and studies of studies falling for a perception
that the pandemic would have come to an end, it is from a certain number of studies as in cases, but as much as studies of studies scientists continue to advance in future treatments
Diseases were little known and medicine at the time was too expensive to have no purchasing power, even the fact that a paralytic was placed in the presence of Jesus descending through the ceiling, has a mistaken interpretation, they would not let him pass.
It is a fact that we already have chairs and seats in the queues for elders, pregnant women and the sick, but there is still a mentality of the community of the pure, the saints or the perfect, after all, efficiency cannot come from those who are not physically prepared for it.
This was how the pandemic was dealt with, many said that the sick isolate themselves and society will continue its rhythm, but what we saw was society as a whole losing its rhythm, and the result of this pressure gradually turned into many psychic diseases. , even for those who made them.
Treating and working with imperfection, illness and purity is only to promote the social integration of people, the idea of being a “model” for others is a Kantian idea of ethics, which can lead to an ethics and a partial view of sociability and what is imperfect.
In terms of religious culture, it leads to isolation, the formation of a bubble in which values are reaffirmed, but many are excluded and are not invited to participate and live with differences, this is one of the main religious paradigms that Jesus broke in his time.
Talking to women, leaving space for children, healing lepers and cripples broke the Pharisaic concept of what was considered “unclean”, went against sinners and the sick.
It is true that the blind cannot guide the blind, but doctors are for the sick, says the biblical passage (Lk 15:1-3): “At that time, publicans and sinners came to Jesus to listen to him. The Pharisees, however, and the teachers of the Law criticized Jesus. “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” , then Jesus tells the parable of the lost sheep and then the prodigal son.
The Pharisaic mentality not only does not cure the sick, it becomes a social disease itself.
Difference and identity in philosophy
11
Aug
The western philosophical system opposed difference and identity
in different fields, only Leibniz tried to create something different that he called the Law of Identity of indiscernibles, while Kant, in the face of the objectivity of his thought, will say that all objects are different even if there are similarities, because they are in different places.
Modern structuralists and poststructuralists make a distinct unification, claim that difference is constitutive of meaning as much of identity, more bluntly, identity (and also personal identity) is seen in non-essentialist terms as a construct, because they only produce meaning through the interaction of differences.
But neither structuralism nor poststructuralism adequately resolves this issue, Derridá coined the term “différance”, a deliberate misspelling of différence the correct word in French, as a conceptual hook on processes of meaning in writing/language, this device intended for an essentialist ontology critique, and for its Being.
The neologism différance is thus defined as “the non-original, constituting a disruption of presence”, creating spaces, ruptures and postponing the presence of the presence of Being in its totality, since the word differ in French is both to defer and to postpone.
Someone could be confused with the quantum lapse, what the physicist Nicolescu Barsarab, using a principle of the included middle of Stéphane Lupasco, space between two “quanta”, but it is necessary to remember that neither space nor time are absolute measures in quantum physics. .
Dualism is the basis of many modern authoritarian theories, all of them under the influence of Kantian idealism and, to a certain extent, Aristotelian philosophy, where being is and non-being is not.
It justifies the exclusion of a third term, of something that is different and similar at the same time, it is an opening to “fundamentalist”, “racist” and “scientist” philosophies, origin of Manichaeism present in modern culture, in quotation marks because there is true faith and science.
Thus, for the ontology of the included middle, being is, not being is not, and a being that is not and is at the same time, the included middle T is possible.
Small worlds and closed circles
05
Aug
Small groups can potentiate their effects on a network, not only due to the ability to influence or cohesion, but also due to the degree of connectivity between nodes, which in technical language is called clustering, has nothing to do with closed circles, but the few connections are called Small Worlds.
This model of Social Networks (seen as a mathematical model of graphs and not just as media) observes a curious phenomenon called Small Worlds that was first proposed by Duncan J. Watts and Steven STrogatz in an article published in the journal Nature in 1998, the The model establishes that in a network there is a degree of separation between the points (network nodes) called six degrees of separation.
Albert L. Barabasi’s book “The New Science of Networks”, which expanded and corrected this model for larger scales, called scale-free, is thus described on pg. 47 of the book:
““The surprising discovery of Watts and Strogatz is that a few extra links are enough to drastically reduce the average separation between nodes…thanks to extensive bridges…connect nodes on the opposite side of the circle…”.(Barabasi, 2009).
So this is not the same as closed circles, since despite few connections, there must be bridges with nodes on the opposite side of the circle, so this “opening” is necessary, as mentioned for us on the opposite side of the circle.
This explains how many cultures and information expand or close according to the types of connectivity they have (the issue of clustering, in the graph p=0 to p=1) and due to the wider possibility of information today due to technology, the factors become more psychopolitical than geopolitical.
But it is also possible to explain the expansions of previous periods that depended on mobility and the “opening” of circles to other different cultures, Christianity for example, the book by Barabasi quotes, depended on the strategy of Paul of Tarsus which was to speak to the “Gentiles ” and to peoples who did not have Jewish culture, and from there it expanded into a network.
But they were a small group (12 apostles and then 72) but who traveled through the western world at the time, this idea of small worlds is still present in Christianity until today, although numerous, the precepts of Love and Solidarity are not always observed, and this reduces it to closed circles.
The future is also expressed in Christian culture (Lk 12:31): “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom”, then the parable of the administrator is told. they do not know the time that will arrive and must always act waiting for you to arrive and find them attentive, in this case it refers to true treasures that we have already dealt with in previous posts.
War and famine
26
Jul
War is not just a dispute over markets and measuring “ideals”,
it is above all an atrocity on a scale, if murder is reprehensible why wouldn’t it be a war? during the Serbia/Bosnia war I asked a Serbian activist why she wanted to destroy Bosnia, she told me that they were historical factors that would be difficult to explain, but she said that her country was a “victim” of bombings that had no justification.
Such is hatred, intolerance and the absence of dialogue, often concealed with docile words to win public opinion, but every war has as its principle some atrocity, some unjustifiable hatred and some cultural intolerance (it can be of many types), not there is no other way to go back other than repentance (on both sides of course) and acknowledging that they chose the worst way, of course, and then sitting down at the table.
One of the consequences, already inevitable, even if there is an agreement for Ukraine’s grain exports, will be the lack of grains on the world market, as shown in the chart above, the country at war is responsible for 42% of sunflower oil in global exports. , 16% of corn, 10% of barley and 9% of wheat (2019 data, see graph) as Russia exports fertilizer and gas to Europe.
There was an agreement mediated by Turkey, but due to the war it is a fact that part of the production was lost and the price of food has already risen worldwide, the current crop will be exported, but little or nothing can be said about future crops, good part of the population left Ukraine, including in rural areas.
It is difficult for a process of regression, apparently throughout the world the confrontation and cultural and social hatred has spread, even among those who should proclaim peace.
Last week we explained the importance of friendship and empathy between men for a true spirituality, which can help civilization in this difficult process.
There is only one way, to change the climate of empathy, peace and solidarity among people, so that politicians and leaders who grow up around hatred may lose ground.
