Arquivo para a ‘Calm Technology’ Categoria
Deceleration and the technique
18
Jul
After convincingly criticizing Baudrillard and categorically asserting that “mere speed
does not suppose great influence on the production of historical sense” (page. 36), goes back to the easy critique of technology.
What counts above all is the instability of the trajectory, the disappearance of one’s own gravitation, irritationen or temporal oscillations. “(Page 36), Byung-Chul Han yields to Baudrillard’s temptation that modern technology is responsible for this Well, but what is the origin of this?
Baudrillard’s Culture and Simulation book is from the 1970s, the internet was born with academic users, and Freud’s civilization was in the 1930s, not to mention Nietzsche who passed away at the beginning of the last century, more precisely on August 25, 1900.
Therefore, it is necessary to return to Han’s earlier arguments which are more solid, “acceleration is not the only plausible explanation of the disappearance of meaning” (page 35), and the expression “atoms of meaning” also leads to an error, because the sense is not nuclear “(idem), takes a small step in the right direction:” rest is not caused by the acceleration and the movement of exchanges, but by the no-if-know-to-where “(page 38) , a lack of goals.
He will also criticize Bauman, for whom modern man is a pilgrim in the desert, who practices a “life on the way” (page 43), and at a glance returns to the meaning affirming “secularization does not entail a demarcation (Demarratovosoerimg)”, but goes back and says that modernity continues to be a narrative, but the printed culture and reproduction does not have the mythical and eschatological character of oral culture, is another narrative, the romantic, Gadamer has already clarified.
The criticism of technique and technical progress is the common temptation, to point out it as religious is at least contradictory since it is the legitimate heir of the lights and reason, it is not history as a history of salvation, but as romantic historical determinism the fashion of Dilthey.
The immersion in digital culture, or in cyberculture, did not deterritorialize (radio, TV and the cinema did it before) nor secularized, those who made it were the lights and financial capital that recognizes neither country nor place, the narrative that omits the process of production of videos, images, photographs and also digital code all over the planet is not only a technical or technological inversion, it is a cultural inversion, thanks to them cultures and people have been reborn.
It is not necessary to walk the world, because the world walks by you, and this is what stimulates young people to know other countries and places, rooted country that is anti-evolutionary and conservative, man walked the world before fixing borders, who fixed the empires, which now erect walls and speeches radical patriarchs, the world is already a global village, what there is now is a nostalgic feeling of a world that never returns
Load weights or a light life
13
Jul
The human mind is prodigious, but it is the first source of benefits and harms, as a body that by
putting spoiled food react, the mind will react to whatever is put there. The bombardment of information, consumption and especially the absence of an ethic and an aesthetic of a light life, leads to the most diverse contemporary diseases: depression, anxiety, workaholic (excessive work), and above all a lack of healthy living.
The Korean-German philosopher Byung -Chul Han wrote that the present problem is no longer acceleration, it has now passed: “it is only one of the symptoms of temporal dispersion” (HAN, 2016, p.9).
The philosopher had already warned these problems in “The society of weariness” and “The salvation of the beautiful”, now penetrates the human soul and says that now there is an atomization of time, each one begins to live his fragment of self as “his little self,” with the “radical loss of space, of time, of being-with (Mitsein)” (HAN, 2016, p.10).
In the society of weariness he developed the theme of the “active vita” reference to Arendt in animal laborans (see our post), which led to hyperactivity of work (workaholic), now it is already “necessary to revitalize the contemplative vita.” (HAN, 2016, p.11).
Reducing daily weights, taking time for nature, for walking and socializing, not walking with lots of weights, bags, and “running over time”, consumption is also a discharge of bad everyday habits, lack of contemplation. It is curious that even to rest we need to carry heavy bags, food and a host of other things that remind us of the heavy day-to-day and without the “aroma of time”, it is like to miss a life that at heart we want to free ourselves . Jesus in sending his apostles to the mission, so that they would not worry about these things, advises to carry little, in Mark 6: 8-9: “He advised them not to take anything in the way, but a staff, bread, no bag, no money on the waist. He commanded them to wear sandals and not to wear two coats. ” Life can be light if we do not carry many “bags” and weights, it is curious to note that even beggars who do not have anything need to carry sacks and trash, it is actually the reflection of the mind that is occupied with strange things and nothing light, even though they live as nothing.
Chaos and small things
14
Jun
Although chaos suggests something totally disorganized, such as physical and mathematical theory it
means highly sensitive and dependent dynamic systems of their initial conditions, and most systems as they are complex, depend on these conditions (see previous post).
As the system evolves and if we can think of this system over many years, the system that could move “linearly” undergoes profound changes, and this time when the system undergoing changes becomes unpredictable, it is called Lyapunov’s stability period (the above fractal), for example, this calculated period for the sun is approximately 50 million years, it can be calculated for any dynamic system.
At this point complexity theory are united, dynamic systems are complex if seen for long periods, sensitivity of the initial conditions, they can determine the changes in these periods of Lyapunov and Chaos theory, all systems are in constant organization and this can cause great instabilities , depending on the weather.
So small things are unstable over the years and depending on the initial conditions, they are small things like a butterfly wing.
What we can do over the years then is to apply these concepts to human culture, to civilizing processes and to daily conversations and dialogues, thinking about human systems.
Thinking about nature, the planet and indirectly in society, it is necessary not to change the treatment of soil, water, plants and animals, so that in the future a little distant, now not so much, guarantee the stability of the planet, planting of food and an indispensable harmony of nature, in flowers, fruits and beauty.
The theory of chaos is therefore not a theory of the mess, it is precisely the opposition to it, if Francis Bacon and others spoke in the field of Nature, not least his maxim that said “you can not dominate nature without following it “Which means to obey its laws”,
Butterflie´s effect and the little things
11
Jun
It seems that to change the world to change everything we must do great things, great projects
and in fact not really, small things can make a lot of difference, and the first thing we can change is ourselves, according to Plato’s phrase: “if wants to move the world, the first step will be to move oneself. ”
The butterfly effect, researched and defended by Edward Norton Lorenz, who even created the figure to the side, has double meaning first that he discovered that a butterfly’s wing beat could influence the climate, according to which the graph that created this effect physics heat convection model has the shape of the wings of a butterfly.
Lorenz was simulating global climate models on a computer, and executed another model that by removing some houses after the comma the processing time would be shorter and the result quit faster, in practice it slightly changed the process conditions, and the results were quite divergent.
This means in practice that small actions and interventions in phenomena can along a course influence them deeply, which gives us hope because so little that we do correct, honest and ethical inspiration can in the future dramatically change things, Of course, other people will need to do small things.
A personal experience was to lose a loved one by suicide, made me think a lot wondering what could have happened to that person, after much suffering a psychologist explained to me that not only social and emotional but also genetic, physical and emotional factors could determine the action of that person.
Thinking in the positive sense we can make small gestures, a child asked me to play ball with her, I was hurrying, I stopped and I played for five minutes with her, there the neighbor of a building that saw me with a bag in hand, told me can go now I play with the kid (kids in Portugal).
Also thinking about Brazil, the enormous suffering with all negative social and political events, we must try to see small actions that can be done, to make people aware and to listen when someone is very convinced of their point of view.
I see that Portugal left the crisis winning and recovering the optimism as a people, they did not lose hope, although the crisis has reached many people and still there are reflexes, but it is noticeable the improvement.
Law, Pharisaism and the fig tree
01
Jun
The excess of legalism and rules kills life, the fig tree is a tree that
is long “dry” and then the leaves and fruits leave, but for some time it seems dead.
Pharisaism are those moral, religious rules and in our time “from the state” that has become a god, who kills life in the desire to control it, Petr Sloterdijk wrote about it in “Rules for the human park”, although it does not agree with all, in essence his diagnosis is correct, except for the fact that he made a “religion” out of this dispute.
His proposals, which were a response to Letters on Humanism by Heidegger, which made me deplore him for a long time, gradually understood philosophers and theologians, that there was a conference at Elmaus, in Basel, which later compiled and turned into book.
Sloterdijk’s diagnosis that the human fig tree has dried up due to “domestication” can be clearly read in the excerpt from his book:
“What still domesticates man if humanism has sunk as a school of human domestication? What domesticates man if his previous efforts of self-possession only led, basically, to his seizure of power over all beings? What domesticated man if in all previous experiences with the education of mankind remained obscure who or what educates educators, and for what? Or is it that the question of the care and training of the human being can no longer be formulated in a pertinent way in the field of mere theories of domestication and education? “(Sloterdijk, 1999a, 32).
Here is the human fig tree, this is Pharisaism and its “religious” or “state” rules, after reading it again, I read at the beginning a sentence of Jean-Paul that Sloterdijk quotes by writing to Heidegger: “Books are letters addressed to friends, only longer, “and I understood that deep down he is a Heideggerian, but with a fair and well-placed criticism: where is humanism?
Our knowledge is anthropocentric, rejects even the technique that is human production as “strange”, we have at bottom a contempt for processes of change, those who criticize it as fascist must remember that it was the idea of ”strong” state that motivated fascism and dictatorships.
The idea of pharisaical authority that frightened Jesus in the biblical writings, while Sloterdijk also criticizes religion, recovers it by saying that there is a “non-spiritual asceticism,” which transformed temples into places of robbery and filth, is no different from the modern state, to all who worship and revere it, there is a general mistrust of politicians.
Sloterdijk, Petr. Regeln für Menschenpark, (1999a) Frankfurt/M. Suhrkamp. In Brazilian Edition:
Regras para o parque humano – uma resposta à carta de Heidegger sobre humanismo, São Paulo, Estação liberdade, 2000.
Birds live in nets
29
May
We have already posted on the blog a few years ago (in 2012) that
the birds know the nets, in a work done by the University of Oxford, coordinator by the researcher Ioannis Psorakis.
This work stated that it was possible to automatically identify that the periods of intense social activity of the birds, they have “friends”, but also relate to passers-by, trying to identify who are members of the same group and which birds regularly go to others in “events,” informed the researcher Ioannis Psorakis, then did a Big Data analysis with a larger volume of data.
Now we want to relate this to another fact by noting that many bird species are disappearing in Europe, and I think this is not just about food and fruit, but pollen bees and especially herbicides.
Close to where I live I noticed that in the morning, after forming a cloud of pollens that causes irritation in many people, many birds came in the gravel “pecking” these “pollen”.
The Oxford team’s result indicated that birds did not randomly form flocks, but had a predilection for interacting with members of the population and also communicated feeding points, say a food court, and there they found their “life social “and thus perpetuated the species when mating.
I read in a report of 2015 that in the island of Galapagos was observed that the birds looked for to feed of pollen due to the shortage of insects, this was a scientific fact that was published in Nature Communications and made by researcher Anna Traveset, but all I found on the Web was that she is a researcher at the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies.
I read on a Portuguese site that pollen levels were going to increase this May, and it was official because the alert was from the Portuguese Society of Allergology and Clinical Immunology (SPAIC).
I am putting together facts that are scientific facts alone, but the whole ecosystem gives an alert for a type of allergy that I see very common among the Portuguese. Maybe I need a more accurate research on the subject, but for me it’s the first time I see a chain process affecting man so bluntly, it’s great the number of people with these allergies is a big alert.
Effect contested by Einstein is proven
23
May
The phantasmagoric effect at a distance, which is the fact that particles can relate 
to distance and the effect of being “felt” by the other distance, is definitely proven in an experiment published by Nature on May 9.
This test is called Bell, due to John S. Bell, was first shown by Alain Aspect who did an optical experiment in 1982, showing this action at a distance. Now the experiment was done recruiting 100,000 human participants to play an online video game that encourages the rapid entry of unpredictable selections and illustrates Bell’s test methodology, participants generated more than 97 million binary choices that were directed through a Web platform Scalable to 12 labs on five continents, where 13 experiments tested local realism using unique atomic photons, atomic clusters and superconducting devices (illustration).
For a period of 12 hours on November 30, 2016, participants around the world provided a sustained data stream of more than 1,000 bits per second for the experiments, using different human-generated data to choose each measurement configuration, correlations strongly contrast local realism and other positions in so-called bipartite and tripartite scenarios.
The results of the project included closing the “freedom of choice” gap (the possibility of scenario choices being influenced by hidden variables to correlate with particle properties), the use of video game methods for the rapid collection of generated randomness and the use of network techniques for global participation in experimental science.
Two data are fantastic from this experiment, proving the phantasmagoric distance action that Einstein contested in an article called EPR, the use of network methodologies in participation in global experimental science, and the use of the video games to simulate data.
A pause for Cannes
14
May
Cannes is not very charming, they say here in Europe, but I disagree when looking at some films that are
there, I would say that about 5 people caught my attention, but at least 9 could be watched closely, especially by Brazilians. I read anything about 5 and 4 films I knew.
From the filmmaker Asghar Farhadi (Golden Palm in The Past of 2013, The Apartment of 2016 and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2017), his film name Todos lo saben, set in Argentina and Spain has Latin actors known in Brazil, as Penépope Cruz, Jarvier Bardem and Ricardo Darin.
The second one I think is worth it is Wim Wenders’film Francis: Man of His Word (from films like Wings of Desire, City of Angels and Paris Texas) and the main actor no less than Pope Francisco, I still remember that he made a documentary also about brazilian photografic Sebastião Salgado.
The third, for Star Wars enthusiasts and also for the main actor who participated in the two Blade Runner films, Harrisson Ford who played the role of Han Solo in the original series, but now done by Alden Ehrenreich, still very young when the pilot of Millennium Falcon meets his friend Chewbacca and Calrissian (Donald Glover) well before joining the Rebellion.
According to the news reports of the movies, this one was stuck since 2015, but now appears in Cannes, the Brazilian Cacá Diegues The great mystic circus, which tells the story of five generations of a circus family, with Juliano Cazarré, Bruna Linzmeyer, Antonio Fagundes, Jesuita Barbosa and Frenchman Vincent Cassel, apparently promises, is worth checking.
The fifth and last I make a comment, it’s back the racial question brings back Spike Lee, who tells a real story in Blackkklansman, a black cop Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan and reaches the lead a local group.
Movies that I have little information but the critics are commenting on are: Under the Silver Lake (by David Robert Mitchell, Bad Current), Fahrenheit 451 (Ramin Bahrani), The House that Jack Built (from the controversial Lars von Trier) and The Man who killed Don Quixote (Terry Gilliam) which brings a repagination of the historical novel Don Quixote.
Today I return to Artificial Intelligence theme.
The singularity and the tecnoprofetas
09
May
Before Jean-Gabriel Ganascia talked about the Myth of Singularity, the idea that
machines would surpass man in human capacity, had already been analyzed by Hans Moracev in his work: Men and Robots – the future of human interfaces and robotics, careful and ethical Ganascia did not fail to quote him.
There are groups that study the ethical issues that this involves as the Center for the study of existential risk at Cambridge University, but also groups engaged in this project with University of Singularity, with weight sponsors such as Google, Cisco, Nokia, Autodesk and many others, but there are also ethical studies such as the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies that Ganascia participates in, and the Institute of Extropia.
In the account of technoprofetas, the word was coined by Ganascia, a genius prejudice Kurzweil is one of the most extravagant, injected drugs in the body preparing to receive the “computational mind”, but with prediction for 2024 already spoke and now it is for 2045 to 2049 , something that is incredible for someone who is said to have no beliefs, for this fact is very distant if it occurs.
Ganascia thinks this is a false prophecy and Moracev analyzes the difficult real possibilities.
The Gartner institute that works on forecasting predicts neural computing still crawling with predictions for 20 years from now, interfaces like Amazon’s Alexa and Hanson’s Sophia, are human interaction machines that learn things from everyday language but are far from the so-called machines of a general artificial intelligence, because human reasoning is not a set of propositional calculations as they think.
One can argue more this is because people are illogical, but this according to what logic, what we know is that men are not machines and what we ask if machines are men, is the essential question that inspired the series Blade Runner, the book of Philip K. Dick “Do androids skeep dream of electric sheep” from 1968, which inspired Blade Runner.
I think dreams, imagination and virtuality are faces of the human soul, robots have no soul.
Clearing and revelation
04
May
Will there be in the whirlwind of answers and anguishes of the man of
our time, present more than ever in our daily thinking and also in those who seek the roots of our contemporary difficulties? What is the maze with no way out?
The answers are not the same, but the diagnoses are almost always the same, in addition to the pessimistic baumanian liquidity, the diagnosis is the needs of education for life, respect for diversity, income distribution, and man’s empowerment for this future .
Although the majority already feel and see the awakening of this new era, the reactions to the changes that are more than necessary, are urgent, there is greater balance in the planet, control of tax havens, elimination of atomic weapons, and especially respect for diversity.
What keeps us still are the closures in bubbles, which despite the “liquidity” can not be solid, since they are ephemeral and just look around you will find people from other world views, other cultures and other religions, this is solid and definitive.
What Strikes Us Attention Byung-Chul Han in The Expulsion of the Other, I believe is his most recent book, is that the tendency toward uniformity, even the desire for it, stems from not-so-solid values, the demand for a centralizing and ” strong, “the lack of truly open dialogue between religions, cultures, and especially ideologically centralized currents, will not carry out the task of a new, more collective, more dialogic and fraternal society.
There is no single answer, single party, Portugal for example, created the Gerigonça, but still we are slaves of convictions and bets on single totalitarian currents that have failed to much.
The biblical message is old, but it seems to have been little practiced, the time of bondage has passed, says the biblical passage, of Jesus to his fellows Jo (15,15) “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what your lord. I call you friends, for I have made known to you all that I have heard from my Father “, but slavery is there, says Chul Han:” global communication and of the likes only tolerates the most equal; the same does not hurt! “, this is today’s bondage.
