Arquivo para a ‘Information Science’ Categoria
Simplism or complexity
06
Aug
William Ockham proclaimed that between two explanations about a certain
phenomenon one should stick with the simplest one, this principle became known as Ockham’s razor, but what to do with problems that are complex, as is the case of the current crisis of the corona virus, the more simplistic explanations are fake News, conspiracy theories or simple lies.
The complexity problem came from Biology, the ecological problem and the ecosystems showed that the phenomena are more interconnected than previously thought, there is a whole food chain going from the simplest, cellular to the most complex organisms and this includes the man.
However, the Arrábida Charter of Transdisciplinarity, signed by serigraphists Lima de Freitas, by Barsarab Nicolescu, written in 15 articles, highlighted “… the contemporary rupture between an increasingly accumulative knowledge and an increasingly impoverished inner being, leads to the rise of a new obscurantism, whose consequences on the individual and social level are incalculable ”(Arrábida, Portugal, 1994).
As method was Edgar Morin who thought about complexity, written in six volumes: Method 1 – The nature of nature (1977), Method 2 – The life of life (1980), Method 3 “The knowledge of knowledge” (1986), Method 4 – “Ideas: habitat, life, customs and organization” (1991), Method 5 – “Humanity of humanity: human identity” (2001), and Method 6 – “Ethics” (2004), however the epistemological question developed in a December 1983 lecture in Lisbon, which became a book, published in Portuguese in 1985.
In essence, thinking about complexity is outlined in three new concepts: the dialogical operator (understood as different from the dialectic), the recursive operator (which means understanding the consequences of acts, in a cause-effect relationship that produces a new cause) and the holographic operator (the part is in the whole and the whole is in the part, it does not separate all and part).
So it can be summarized from Transdisciplinarity to the Complex as an essential problem of humanism, we are 100% nature, 100% culture without dualism between them, solving the question of what we are as a “natural” man, as well as the ecological problem as well as the humanism are intertwined, the problem of nature is a human problem and the fundamental problem of man is his relationship with nature including the Other as part of his nature, regardless of race, color.
Cultural differences of the pre-Socratic and the modern
05
Aug
It was Karl Popper who drew attention to the origin of modern Enlightenment,
so it is not possible to criticize contemporary Enlightenment idealism and empiricism without an attentive re-reading of the history of Western thought.
First because it is the history of thought, much of the civilizing night is in the crisis of thought, warns Morin, and also Marx when making the Critique in Theses on Feuerbach (1845) actually pointed to the idealism present in modern Christianity, but the root Jewish-Christian is another, the division occurs in two points of history the liberation by the Maccabees (167 BC – 37 BC) and the incursions of the apostle Paul.
Returning to the pre-Socratic Enlightenment, the root of Western thought, Popper made a foray into the three greatest philosophers of this period Xenophanes, Parmenides and Heraclitus: “the greatest and most inventive period in Greek philosophy”. The author notes that the “adventure of Greek critical rationalism”, and identifies a principle of crisis already in Aristotle who after developing his episteme: “he killed critical science, to which he himself made a major contribution.”
As Popper develops “it was this conception of demonstrable knowledge, presented by Aristotle, that eclipsed the critical attitude developed by the pre-Socratics, and thus all the modern inheritance of this demonstrable“ logic ”, although admitting Popper’s development as this enlightenment having ontological (and not logical) roots, the famous maxim of Parmenides: “being is and non-being is not”, with no third hypothesis besides dual logic and an included third, besides the classic excluded third, there is no third hypothesis.
Only in the 20th century with quantum physics formulating the already proven hypothesis of a third state of matter called “tunneling”, and Barsarab Nicolescu’s proposal for the third included, can one be thinking about a being and not be simultaneous, in the Trinitarian god there is also a third possibility.
Only in the 20th century with quantum physics formulating the already proven hypothesis of a third state of matter called “tunneling”, and Barsarab Nicolescu’s proposal for the third included, can one be thinking about a being and not be simultaneous.
It is not a question of affirming the paradox of the existence of something and its contrary, there would be an evident reciprocal annulment, there would be no possibility of predictions and the scientific approach of the world would be collapsed, which Quantum Physics admits, and Barsarab is based on this. is that there are countless immutable connections on which to experiment or interpret results, it is both Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” and Popper’s “falsifiability” method.
It does not abolish the logic of Yes and No by Parmenides and Aristotle, it only admits a third hypothesis, the philosophical, social and political consequences are evident, the scientific is what was formulated as transdisciplinarity, while we are confining the third to a specialized disciplinary theory hypothesis seems unfounded or non-existent, if it looks from another angle it appears.
Edgar Morin’s complex thinking goes in the same direction, but let’s leave that for the next post.
POPPER, K. The world of Parmenides: pre-Socratic enlightenment. Portuguese translation: Roberto Leal Ferreira. BR-SP: UNESP, 2014.
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The dark night of humanity
04
Aug
Watching political debates or even relevant issues of public life, a brief look at
culture and religion, any angle that looks at the moment aggravated by the pandemic, it is relevant to point out the confused features of this civilizing moment.
It is a fact that we have already been through another pandemic, in frightening numbers the so-called “Spanish flu” in the middle of the 1st. world war, it was a great and humanitarian disaster that challenged humanity, and even then came the second war, the concentration camps and the Hiroshima bomb, but the contours of this moment seem even more serious, there is a crisis of thought.
What can be observed are phrases made with a doubtful impact, appeals to impossible optimism in the face of the pandemic scenario or the hope “after all this is over”, however as the vaccine does not reach reality it imposes it, even on the wise on duty a little sobriety, but still without the solidarity and humanity that would be desirable.
The crisis of thought already pointed out by Edgar Morin, Nicolescu Barsarab and many others, in addition to the scientific and technical debate, is the difficulty of composing elements that should go beyond the limits of specialties to solve problems beyond the disease, the social and the religious, to tackle the problem together would require an overall view and not an impoverished disciplinary view of specialists.
When less is seen by pure and simple analysis, the darker this night becomes, the foundations lost, even if the civilizing foundations can be overcome: the Greek culture, the Judeo-Christian religiosity that so many scholars had, also the Islamic with Avicenna, Averroes, Al-Khwarismi and more recently Abdus Salam, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979.
Science is still strongly linked to the positivism and logicism of two centuries ago, while Karl Popper, Tomas Kuhn or Bachelard are still little known and confined in circles of “experts of the scientific method” which indicates a shallow reading of these questioners of conventional science.
The last century gave us Gustave Klimpt, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, the bold architecture of Antoni Gaudi, by Brazilian Oscar Niemeyer, but the straight façades, the abuse of glass and crystals that appear for the first time in the Crystal Palace (photo), English architectural structure of the 19th century that invoked a recreation center for “education of the people”, cited by Sloterdijk and his disciple Byung Chul Han as representative of current architecture, as centers of consumption and “an architectural form was proclaimed as the key to capitalism . condition of the world ”(SLOTERDIJK, 2005, P. 279).
The Creator’s greatness and daily novelty are a stark contrast to repetitive, outdated religions that say nothing to the world today, about the pandemic oscillating between simple adherence to current discourse to models of solidarity and defense of life that are too fragile for tragedy pandemic.
SLOTERIJK, P. Crystal Palace, Chapter 33 of in Globalen Inneren Raum des Kapitals: Für eine philosophische Theorie der Globalisierung (In the Global Inner Space of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005, pg. 265-276.
The historical origin of hiding pandemic data
03
Aug
The idea of hiding data about the pandemic had already occurred in the Spanish flu,
which received this name only for political reasons since Spain remained neutral during the First World War, the original name was trench flu because it affected many soldiers and weakened some armies.
The idea of hiding the disease was even supported by prestigious institutions, such as the Royal Academy of Medicine in London, until the end and 1918 few believed in the flu.
The name of Spanish influenza is also old, Brazilian newspapers (there was an article from the magazine A Careta, n. 537) used the name but as now the beginning of the fight against the disease was troubled, and the coercive measures defended by the sanitary Oswaldo Cruz were seen as a sanitary tyranny in the country and political groups opposed to the Wenceslau Braz (see the Brazilian daily) government saw the flu as a government pretext for intervention in the lives of the population.
Political use has also been made, but at this serious moment in history, it is desirable that true humanitarian spirits disarm themselves to defend the lives of the population, the action of doctors, aid groups and efforts for the vaccine.
The insistence on polarizing in such a tragic moment reveals only the decadence of the most expensive values of compassion and solidarity, even by groups that should be more committed to joining efforts, and curiously we find even those on the other side of both solidarity and those seeking divert attention from the real enemy: the pandemic that affects everyone.
In the country, lost the opportunity to do a #lockDown when the disease was still located in some regions, now it has spread throughout the country and only the measures already known should continue to be adopted, I see medical teams and support services reaching depletion , the cases of infection of this true heroes continue to grow.
What is new is a worldwide tension in truly worrying limits, the departure from abandoning the basic foundations of society and attitudes that vary between conformism and the simple abandonment of any measure of protection and social isolation, such as the march of thousands of people in Germany.
The levels of the pandemic in Brazil remain stable, neither is it true that the pandemic is under control, nor is it true that there is a genocide in the country, simply the measures that could be taken were not, and time passed and the disease spread.
We are left with the hope of the vaccine, that of Oxford, one of the most reliable due to scientific criteria, the transparency of the working scientists (a detailed article was published in The Lancet magazine) and the rigor of the vaccine’s release stages, without being hit.
The post-pandemic is frightening because there are no attitudes of sobriety and balance even in conscious sectors of society, the impression of a humanism that is more political than true.
There is no healthy citizenship without areté
31
Jul
The construction of wisdom and virtue (the Greek arete) in the fight against doxa
(mere opinion of the relative truth) and the sophists, who despite being wise were corrupted by the taste of power, passions and instincts, made Socrates, who we know him from Plato’s dialogues, and Plato himself to build a new model of citizenship that needed to educate, to leave the Cave for the light and to organize knowledge for the true Good.
It is a fact that the sense of excellence was adopted by state authorities, but its etymological origin remains valid and to defend it is to defend the good, otherwise we fall into sophist relativism, any truth and any argument is valid, the Socratic maieutics is still valid and to ask is to dialogue.
Martha Nussbaum, one of the most renowned philosophers today in classical antiquity, pointed out in her book The Fragility of Goodness: “… indolence, error and ethical blindness cause countless tragedies”, are relevant aspects that Democrats must remember for the defense of democracy and the risk that modern sophists will seize power and manipulate opinions, these are not just fake news, mistaken and authoritarian positions, it is necessary to defend the values of true citizenship, areté (in picture sculpture in Ephesus).
We have already explained the biblical meaning of the net, the fishing and the casting of the nets, in another passage after returning from the Sea of Galilee Jesus and the disciples meet the crowd, and since the place is deserted, the apostles think of dismissing the crowd for lack of food, but Jesus says to see what was food and makes the well-known miracle of the multiplication of bread and fish, from 5 loaves and 2 fish.
It is clear that Christian virtue is beyond the proposal of the Greeks, it extends personal morality and the understanding of mercy, but it does not exclude the citizen arete and dominion of instincts and passions, nowadays so flourishing and reaching even the religious , poor reading of the multiplication of bread and fish that is more related to Christian arete than polis, as they were “in a deserted place” (Mt 14,15), that is, a kind of “retreat” of the polis.
The virtue of compassion is necessary for the distribution of goods, the process of concentration of wealth has accelerated with the pandemic, without collecting the few loaves and fish left of an economy in crisis to help thousands who are hungry, jobless and many without hope, this should be the real new normal if we want better days, only if there are better days for everyone without forgetting the millions who lost jobs, hope and family in this pandemic.
Areté. virtue and ethics of the State
30
Jul
The ethics of classical antiquity thus had two bases to aretê, virtue (understood as citizen formation but with moral values) while the ethics of the sophists who made Greek democracy go into crisis defended a relative truth and man gave up his passions and instincts .
At the beginning of the Roman period, these two currents reappear with the Neoplatonists, Epicureans and Stoics, on the one hand, defending an ascetic morality and, on the other, thinkers such as Cicero and Lucrécio, who included a set of laws and rights in the period of the Roman Empire, of which the modern law has a strong influence, it is what we call the State ethics, to differentiate the concept of ethics from the city-state of Plato and Aristotle who also defended the virtues, the Greek arete.
Although it is not possible to make a clear allusion to the sophists in the period of the Roman empire, their thinkers are legislators, the Neoplatonists are current out of power and take refuge in Christian and Muslim thinkers, such as Saint Augustine, Alfarabi and some Stoic thinkers who would bring influences in the Roman power, like Seneca who was Nero’s tutor, although they defended virtue did not defend an ascetic morality.
Epistemic influences emerge in this period, such as the quarrel with the universals of Boécio and later Abelardo, Duns Scotto and Tomás de Aquino, will resume questions about being and essence, the existence of Universals (what we call the concept) or just private individuals.
In the treatise on virtues Tomás de Aquino made the difference between moral and intellectual virtues, considering that the holy philosopher made a review of Aristotelian ethics, incorporating Christian values, while the moral virtues perfect the speculative and practical aspects, the moral virtues will improve the appetite potentials, name given to the passions and instincts whose discussion comes from the period of the sophists.
Idealistic morality will follow the Kantian maxim: “act in such a way that it can become a universal law”, while creating the transcendental subject outside any religious characteristic, he has a subjective cognitive capacity having: reason, understanding (of the categories ) and sensitivity (pure forms of intuition, space and time), based on this morality that Hegel will elaborate the morality of the State.
In line with Kantian morality, Hegel will elaborate ethics, elaborated on the question of “self-determination of the will”, no longer in subjectivity or in the transcendental, but in the objective unfolding of free wills, that is how the State is the regulator of free wills , and ethics is a quality of ethics, which remains in the private field, and which the State through its laws can make it objective, so the inner moral qualities and virtues are valid only for these aspects and according to the state’s determinations that can interfere in subjective life.
Modern sophistry and practical wisdom
29
Jul
Sophists accredit education and are not born, but because it is a relative age 
and a code of ethics that prevents or satisfies human instincts and passions, even though Socrates worked out happiness as a combination of virtues (in Greek it means time of moral and political excellence, today in opposite fields), and its method is irony and pharmaceutical.
We explicitly explain in the post that irony is not about proximity or skepticism, that there are exceptions to Greek origin, but that the Greek word has a definite meaning, but with successive verbs in a discussion that Socrates left against each other . part of his method is mayo-art, which is the art of parity, which is not the end or the social method, because irony takes or the opponent realizes that his preconcepters have the capacity to reflect and only conceive ideas that lead the truth.
We retaliate so much that the sophists assume that, as far as they are concerned, they do not formulate formulas, but that they satisfy their instincts in a way that satisfies the idea of virtuous politics and ethics or at a moderate pace by Socrates when the illusion is natural. because of its instinctive benefits.
Plato, as a disciple of Socrates, does not believe that Socrates himself is in Plato and refuses the Protagoras’ sophistry, or the dialogue that takes place in the virtuous vise, whether incisive or not, and this is the fundamental point for Plato’s birth. , second historians, approximately 384-383 BC, located in the gardens in the suburbs of Athens (pictured in the mosaic of Pompeii, now in the Archaeological Museum of Naples).
It is mandatory to educate or homosexuals for the sake of seriousness and assimilation to the decadence of Greek democracy brought about by the sophist school, so that you can have a relative opinion and verdict, but it is based on whether you are sensible or intelligent, dialectical or basic here, where it will be essential and overcoming doxa, an opinion and a construct of epistemia, knowledge organized in universal universes.
The evolution of dialogues, especially in Plato’s Republic, shows the dialectical evolution (it is not and could not be Hegelian for historical reasons) of the terms of the episteme until it constitutes an ethical structure that leads to the formulation of laws, but ethics as we know it today it comes from the school of one of Plato’s students, Aristotle, who elaborated “Ethics to Nicomachus”, a teleological and eudaimonist conception (Eudaimonia was happiness for the ancient Greeks), around a practical rationality, what the Greeks called phronesis, one of the elements of ethics, that it is logos plus ethos.
Aristotle created then wisdom as a virtue of practical thought, or just practical wisdom, the objective is to describe the phenomena of human action through the dialectical examination of opinions, the residue of the Socratic method, but to discover in them immutable principles, thus it is possible to overcome the doxa and reach episteme knowledge, one can describe this dialectic as knowing-understanding-knowing.
Later Aristotle. one of the students of his Platonic school, is going to do his Lyceum, which was essentially made by walking, therefore also called peripatetics, but the school has a gynasium for physical exercises, and also for socializing the acquired knowledge.
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics will rework the Phrase by systematizing Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, creating a hermeneutic philosophy.
Sophisms and fake news
28
Jul
Sophism is a wisdom used for convenience in some situation, it may be, for example,
politically correct, or it may be to favor interest groups that has the greatest correspondence with the historical origin of the word.
They were contemporaries of Socrates, who was opposed to this utilitarian knowledge, the sophists were thinkers who traveled from city to city giving speeches to attract students and charged fees to offer them education, any similarity with modern media is not a coincidence.
Fake News is false news, conspiracy theories and myths that, due to the ease of communication, spread much more quickly, but the half truths of sophisms that spread by sellers of wisdom and maxims without scientific proof and history also exist today, it is just check the price of some speakers who talk about everything, even what they have never studied.
What they sell, happiness with magic formulas, easy success, management models that do not consider the pandemic crisis, although it is true that many make money from it, the honest majority will have difficulties to put their services and products on the market, even with use of the virtual, because the reality is that the economy is in recession worldwide and many aid and solidarity will be needed.
What needs to be said is that easy news, easy success and shallow explanations are often not true, those who seek ease and simplism fall into this trap, but this has happened in all history, Karl Kraus complained in the 1920s that the press it was building a war and it happened, we may be building another, and the leaven of crisis and human difficulties will help this war happen.
Even if we want peace, spreading false news is creating radicalizations, sparking small wars that polarized into big wars, there are well-intentioned people who do this, baseless denunciations and half-truths are there, so at the origin of a fake news is a sophistry, often built by intelligent people who should not favor ignorance.
Dictators know that ignorance favors them, but also those who know the horror of dictatorships and wars can favor them with half truths, to facilitate the exposure of a social, cultural (including religious) and political position is more easy to throw a half-truth, everyone in this or that position is corrupt, fascist or communist, but this is the beginning of a small war.
The truth costs a personal price that is often expensive, but it favors that the war ahead is not waged for an unjust reason, for a stone or a shot fired at an innocent, our daily “wars” against diversity of opinion , they are not dialogues and do not favor peace, in the post-pandemic they need a lot of solidarity and the good will of everyone to overcome difficulties, there is neither happiness nor easy peace.
How to live a crisis and the stable plateau
27
Jul
Edgar Morin and Patrick Viveret wrote in 2010 “How to live in times of crisis” 
(Portuguese edition of 2013), and they certainly were not considered a pandemic, but they are already being seen as a potential horizon for humanity, and that horizon has certainly been aggravated .
Thus, philosophers and other types of visionaries who try to have a peaceful future have no foundation, or may even have, but based on philosophies and thoughts already overcome, a pandemic that demands even more from the great strategists and humanitarian thinkers.
On page 37 of the book it shows the symptoms of the crisis: “Wall Street knows only two feelings, euphoria and panic”, even without knowing it is what they think or promise “happiness”, but it is false and it follows depression, once analyzed more sensible can prepare for the next challenge.
The stable plateau has arrived, in terms of deaths, because the infection data are inaccurate, shows these peaks, now it is moving towards a stable plateau not only in Brazil, but in the world as a whole, it is because the infection cycle has reached the whole world, and in Brazil an entire country.
The cycle can be perceived as not as isolated poles of infection, even countries without new cycles that can be affected, but note that New Zealand and Taiwan are islands, so isolated by sea, they are more controllable, but trade can also reduce these countries.
Edgar Morin and his collaborator published in the book “Three mutations” important in the crisis and which are valid for a social situation of the pandemic, as they represent the ancient world, the world “nation states, industrial society, a segmented organization (see conflicts in the USA x China)… or the ecological challenge poses a question about what we are going to do with our planet ”(p. 57).
An industrial revolution put life in a frenetic way of life, “a classic industrial society that organizes itself in the classic sesame that you make of your life?”, And that remains a question that questions everyone, or recently launched in Portuguese “You have to change your life” by Peter Sloterdijk puts this around anthropotechnics, bringing to the debate a technical question.
MORIN, E.; VIVERET, P. Como viver em tempo de crise? (How to live in times of crisis?) Tradução: Clóvis Marques. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand do Brasil, 2013.
The eschatology of goodness
24
Jul
Just as any worldview has some allegory for the beginning and end, in the case
of the Christian Genesis and Heaven and Hell, and others propose that we are born of plants or animals, or that we come back to life through reincarnation, the good has its eschatology, while evil is a symbolic “structure”.
It is not just the definition of religious views, also in the classical philosophy Plato in the Republic and Aristotle in Ethics, Nicomachus addressed the issue and we have already made some posts here, but it was Democritus who defined our current situation more closely, saying that good depends of man’s inner desire, the good man not only practices good, but always desires it.
So it is in human history too, without historical determinism or romanticism, we walk for good if we exercise from within each man, but socially practicing what the Greeks called “virtue”, but we also have the vicious cycle of evil.
The vicious cycle of evil leads to a “crisis” of good, symbolic evil can be structured in such a way that a given social structure can lead to an end, it can be the end of an era that is very tragic, but it can also lead to a serious civilizing crisis if there is no way out.
Humanity has always found ways out, this gives hope, but tragedies are part of the change, and the severity of the tragedy depends on the resilience of good, although it is fragile that can indicate the new path, a way out for earthly citizenship, for the future human civilizing.
Biblical reading indicates three metaphors for the eschatology of goodness, and compares the “kingdom of heaven” (Mt 13, 24-43) with the planting of the growing tares and wheat that should only be harvested and separated from the eschatological end. mal (the chaff), the second parable the mustard seed, the smallest of the seeds, which gives a beautiful and leafy tree where “the birds come to make their nests”, and the third is a bread recipe, a woman mixes three portions of flour.
The third “parable” the woman mixes three portions of flour, one part should only be fermented, those would be those that have the virtue of good and it should be practiced in order to produce good fermentation in the rest of the dough, the other two portions, then yeast is good.
