Arquivo para a ‘Information Science’ Categoria
How to react to fear and the evolution of the pandemic
07
May
Pointing out our weaknesses and anxieties is a way of self-control, but I say what fear
is and how we can control it in a pandemic in which we all find ourselves fragile can be thought of in 7 essential aspects.
A reflection of what causes these feelings in us is important and the first attitude, a little meditation and silence and ask us what awareness we have of the dangers and the attitudes towards them is fundamental, so in addition to bodily health attitudes there are mental ones and / or spiritual, without which we are to blame outside ourselves.
The second already pointed out in the first is awareness, remembering that awareness is always, says phenomenology, awareness of something (or the thing) that means what causes us fear, what is its origin, the phobias of the past, lost ones, relationships social, etc.
The third is to understand that there is a “thing” in the relationship between you and the other that is on the frontier of your fear, attributing it to the other is escapism, I study what causes fear and do not anticipate perceptions, it is what is called in epoché´s phenomenology, in this case, put it in parentheses.
Fears and phobias lead to anxieties, and if it is already present as a result of fear, control of emotions and not making them chaotic and irrational is fundamental, take a step back, note if the relationship with others is not going this way.
Share the fear with the other, but with meekness and clarity, this does not give me security or it is not what I think (it is not your conscience about the thing), but respecting the Other’s vision.
Finally, of course, a specialist can help, I do not know how much they are inserted in the health system, but at the peak of the pandemic these sensations can surface and it may be the case to ask for help from specialists.
Fear between philosophy and reality
06
May
It is necessary to differentiate between fear, anguish and anxiety, those who
blamed the “virtual” world (the virtual comes from virtus which is the root of the virtuous) must realize in the pandemic that they were not correct.
Anguish, another typical feeling in this pandemic, is a feeling linked to not belonging or not understanding the reality we are experiencing, it can be said that it is almost the opposite of fear, since it generates impropriety, that is, we do not face the problem or we postpone it or leave it by positivity, that is, we speed up life, like running from “danger”, being optimistic.
We left anxiety for the end, it is the end of a cycle, we made a post a long time ago to explain that it was not correct to attribute technology to it, there is a book called Information Anxiety (Wurman, 1989) that deals with the topic, however, in psychology it is the end of this cycle: fear, anguish (links to a system of beliefs and systems) that reaches anxiety and can lead to panic and Burnout syndrome, which feeds the cycle with fear. http://marcosmucheroni.pro.br/blog/?p=6199#.XrF_E25FzIU
The first question, therefore, is to treat the fear that is impropriety with ownership, that is, to understand what causes it, to make it conscious and with this the next stage of anguish can be blocked, because we will not escape from reality, the idea of hiding or ignoring facts is what fuels this cycle.
We don’t need to be specialists or in the case of medical pandemics, to understand that some measures are necessary, that without them we get into anguish and this can lead to panic stress, aware that we even face the problem of hospitalization and the social difficulties caused by isolation .
This also explains why people who do only primary reasoning fall into finding fictitious enemies (inappropriate that leads them to the anguish of being unanswered) and in the last stage when the fatalities arrive they lead to panic or the Burnout syndrome, so it makes sense that some cheerleaders who go out on the streets asking for an end to “isolation”, is panic.
As it is the beliefs and systems that take the last step, I treat the religious problem, which has nothing to do with spiritualities that seek balance, and even in suggestions from psychologists you will find do self-analysis and have self-control, good spirituality helps, religious fanaticism harms and accelerates the process.
Peak crisis and do not rush the future
04
May
We are at the peak of the crisis and we are already talking about the post-traumatic
situation, there are many doctors and sociologists who want to hurry up an analysis, China emerged from the crisis, Europe begins the new stage in 3 distinct and elongated phases and Brazil and countries from the southern hemisphere winter is approaching.
The analysis of the curve and the peak made by DataScience shows that the social distance was worth it, however, governmental hesitations and the approach of winter may even if the curve flattens, the data indicate that yes, it may be lengthened, that is, the “new normality” will be delayed.
The name “new normality” already excludes all analyzes that indicate any impossibility of returning to the previous stage, that is, an agitated and unprotected life, what Edgar Morin calls everyday “intoxication”, and an accelerated economic development, with its added price.
The moment in Brazil and I believe that most countries in the southern hemisphere is to create even tighter conditions to disadvantage “social relaxation”, in a way even understandable since the quarantine if it were even 40 days, it would be running out, everything indicates not. To further complicate political crises, in the Brazilian case, they deepen and seem to have no end, the problem of governability and political instability accelerates and deepens the health crisis.
Concentrating our efforts and focusing only on the health crisis, the economic and the social exist, however, they should not justify deaths and crisis in health care, we must consider that we are at the upper level of the curve, and the numbers seem to stabilize, they are high, it is true, if if we take #lockDown seriously we could already be seeing a way out, but that’s not the case.
One of the consequences of the pandemic is the so-called Kawasaki Syndrome, in England for example, the Health System (NHS, the acronym in English) has already detected an increase in the number of children with multisystemic inflammation, gastrointestinal problems and physical inflations.
In the middle of spring, but already with signs of summer, Europe will gradually return to activities, and we will be able to see how the social and economic problems will be faced, here is the future.
Between the passage and the door
01
May
Every passage is about some danger: a precipice, a narrow path with ferocious
animals around, at Easter, death and resurrection, in the current pandemic: deaths and deprivations of liberty, and an uncertain future, but which should open a fusion of “ new horizons ”, but because the dialogue must be between cultures and civilizations with different worldviews and not in closed groups.
The door and the “path” (one can think of science as a method) through which we can and must pass to enter a new reality, which may well be the common home, the harmony between men and these with nature and going further away with the cosmos, which we know has laws even less known to us.
The complexity that this future will involve must have a basic assumption, or we emerge from a sad crisis together, or we deepen it and we will have an even tougher reality in the next worldwide virus (it may be a new crisis or not), the passage must have a door and we opened it together.
We will be poorer at first, this is absolutely true, conspiracy theories that this or that will do better is mere speculation, even for the wealthy, the bags plummet, I saw an owner of a chain of Brazilian stores raging, even the doors of churches then closed, so whoever will pass through the door is the one who learned solidarity.
We will only make the transition after the end of the pandemic if we continue to dream and seek a door. The truth and the complexity of the existence of God are many biblical passages, the prophets before the coming of Jesus had mysterious revelations in dreams, Isaiah predicted the captivity in Babylon, in Babylon Daniel unveiled the dream of King Nebuchadnezzar, among several others until Joseph when he heard that Mary was pregnant he fled and in a dream the angel warned him of the truth.
Historical truth (in Gadamer´s sense) precedes mystical truth, John the Baptist was the last and greatest of the prophets, and Jesus repeatedly pronounced “in truth, in truth I tell you” usually when he told a parable, in one of the passages he says he is the “door” and states (Jn 10, 10): “The thief only comes to steal, kill and destroy. I came so that everyone can have life and have it in abundance ”, but is imperative the door truth.
May this time of harsh test of the pandemic serve us to open our souls and recreate a more fraternal world, where life is full for all citizens, but this will have to be built.
The eidetic variation, method and phonesis
30
Apr
The philosophy that tried to overcome Kant, but was still somehow linked to its
logical tradition, is called continental philosophy, Frege is a bit of a departure because it moves towards what was called analytical philosophy, with serious consequences even today, but the subject it’s deep. Thus, the hermeneutics from Scheiermacher to Dilthey is still the one that, due to a certain “logical construction”, we arrive at interpretations of the texts in a “correct” or “objective” way.
Paul Ricoeur and Hans Georg Gadamer will free us from this, outline an ontology where there is a recognition of the pre-concept (the way of writing is ours) and the final understanding can have openings and “merging horizons” where the temporal context affects the ontology of the interpreter.
This “opening” is coherent with the models of physics, where the observer is part of what is observed, and his worldview directly interferes with his interpretation, so it has a temporal aspect that is what Heidegger reveals in the “Being and time ”(1927), but the description of the hermeneutic circle in a systematic way only appears in Gadamer’s “Truth and Method ”(1960) and Ricoeur’s“ Time and Narrative ”(1983), a term that is widely used and little known.
Before understanding the fusion of horizons, using Kantian subjectivity, we can say that there is an intersubjectivity, after a text is published it ceases to have the authorial intention and is subject to interpretation and there is not a single “correct” reading, however it does not mean relativism.
An impactful text provokes the readers’ experiences, Gadamer’s method of finding the truth is one that everyone could join in the dialogue, accepting the real world experience, said by the author as follows:
“The understanding and interpretation of texts is not merely a concern of science, but it obviously belongs to the human experience of the world in general ” (True and Method, 1960).
This is what goes beyond the merely theoretical attitude (even from those who claim the practice and hide its methods) adhering to what the Greeks called phronesis (practical wisdom), and gives us the possibility to converge, and makes the dialogue useful and useful, the opposite is proselytism.
The process by which the coronavirus vaccine must pass, in addition to complying with a protocol, must through successive interactions with the real world, testing on animals, observing reactions until human use undergoes successive analyzes beyond experimentation, is a type of phonesis .
Beyond idealism, new logic and pandemic
29
Apr
Kant’s simplification led to abstract formulations so complicated that it would
be inappropriate to call them complex since he intended the opposite, but the attempt to reduce 12 categories and three central ideas: the psychological (soul), the cosmological (the world as a whole) ) and the theological (of God).
This will produce an ingenious, rational but very complicated construct, which are the three judgments that would link Subject (A) to predicates (B), the judgments: analytical, synthetic a priori and a posteriori, the idea of a priori judgments was the most controversial because it sees the mind as having a natural memory.
Edmund Husserl and Gottlob Frége, who had a strong arithmetical logic formation, looked at this Kantian theme, imagining that logic could not be reformulated based on action, that is, we do not change our mind because our way of acting changes, this is based on all who seeing the change in the logic of everyday life caused by the pandemic, they imagine that the mind does not change.
Husserl’s departure from mathematical logic to the world of experiences, under the strong influence of Franz Brentano who worked on intentionality (see the previous post, the other eidos), made him formulate a new world of experiences, from human emotions to total life of the world (Lebenswelt).
While the Logical Investigations date back to 1900 and 1901, their idea of intentionality formulated in their phenomenology as the return to things themselves, or how they appear to consciousness through phenomenological reduction, their epoché, which is to place our concepts and thoughts in parentheses, a clear disagreement with the Cartesian cogito.
On its return to the Greek eidos, it will promote eidetic variation, which can be explained as from the phenomenological epoché (putting concepts in parentheses) it produces an eidetic variation on the idea we had of the thing (concepts, thoughts or objects) and it can produce in the end new “horizons”, a fundamental category for the dialogue about the new.
Our pandemic phenomenon produced an “colletive” epoché, a new look at a deadly virus, we had to produce an eidetic variation, what we think of this “little flu”, and this should produce new “horizons” about the concepts of how to live the day to day: attitudes health, economic solidarity and total reformulation of family life: spaces, time, food and relationships and the use of technology.
Idealists continue to imagine that everything will be as it was before, they did not do the epoché pandemic.
Simplification, idealism and pandemic
28
Apr
The idea that we can simplify phenomena that are complex seems a good way,
but to simplify what is by nature complex is to ignore the set of phenomena and interpretations that are within the phenomenon you want to analyze, whatever the nature.
It is very different from the search for essence, the pre-Socratics sought to define what was the essential element of nature: fire, air, atoms, numbers, the Being, and thus defined the main pre-Socratic schools, when realizing that it was a broader phenomenon Socrates, which is read by Plato divides into two worlds: the world of Ideas and the sensitive world, however any attentive reader will not say that his school has simplified, it only paved the way for greater complexity.
The eidos of Plato and the pre-Socratic Parmenides is different from modern idealism, because in it there is so much the concept of form, for example, a chair whatever form it has its Being as being made to sit.
The Greek eidos from which the etymology of the word idea comes, has two accepted meanings, one that is a synonym for concept, but in a broader sense it is thought of as an expression, with the implicit principle of the idea of intentionality (*), and this concept it was only taken up in modern philosophy by Franz Brentano and later in Husserl’s phenomenology, who was his student.
Modern idealism, whose fundamental basis is Kant, although it has a common part to the Greek eidos, which is the idea that when studying the thing we have a projection of knowledge on it, reducing the idea that this study would be what characterizes the object of study (objectivity), and thus introduces a specific type of subjectivity, abstracting it from Being, this abstraction has in Hegel the apex.
Kant came to think that it would be possible to reduce all thought to a few concepts, it would be a great facilitator for study and thought, but his thinking resulted in an even greater complexity, and his simplicity fell into the subject x object dualism, which we suffer.
Every simplification leads to some kind of subjectivism or objectivism, even in religious terms, when studying The Human Phenomenon, Teilhard Chardin declared that Man is the complexification of nature, difficult for theologians and exegetes to accept, but I ask you the question: why did Jesus use of parables to explain things that apparently could be simple¬, because it isn’t.
Idealism is basically a “doctrine” that contains the belief that it is thought and not the physical world that is at the origin of all things, that is, the objective world, which we discover with the pandemic, and physics quantum already knew and actual cosmology is deepening, is that uncertainty is part of knowledge, and we are faced every day with a new phenomenon.
After all, one of the assumptions of Kantian idealism was the submission of nature, she rebelled.
This is the original novelty that idealists do not accept, and this novelty should give us back the humility, proclaimed by all, but as idealism gets stuck in duality, the error is the others, we knew the truth, not even science, nor faith could imagine the complexity of the phenomenon that all humanity lives, the first step to face the pandemic is this: I depend on the step of the Other, and that we can take steps together, it still seems difficult.
*Encyclopædia Britannica, Available in: https://www.britannica.com/topic/idea , Access in: 04/26/2020.
The pandemic in Brazil and a hope
27
Apr
We started the week with a scenario not only of suffering, it has been happening
since the beginning of the world pandemic, but of political turbulence and misinformation about the pandemic.
Through graphics and hard numbers we tried to show, even to a lay audience and except for those who are in health, we are all a little lay, we showed the rise of the curve and that showed no signs of easing (which would be starting a less steep climb) nor of cooling.
The information and intervention policy of the Minister of Health that came out was encouraging, but the current policy, in addition to showing a cold´s numbers and “betting” on an easing of the curve, there is still no clear intervention in the disease, which is treated as a fatality.
We continue to defend #LockDown for Brazil, but the policy is to bet that the peak will be in May, without any convincing analysis for this.
There are signs in Europe that the peak has passed, the leader of Brexit (leaving England from the European community), British Prime Minister Boris Johnson infected with invite-19 thanked two foreign doctors who, in his own words, “saved my life” .
The pandemic has already changed the way and culture of how we think, media leaders and thinkers do not change, they are defending their establishment discourse that yield expensive lectures and the cultural and social misinformation we live in, I have already mentioned two thinkers, Edgar Morin who he told L´Obs that our “toxic” way of life is changing, and Byung Chul Han (in daily El Pais), who showed why the oriental culture that is disciplining (do not confuse with the authoritarian) favors the fight against the pandemic.
We must always have hope, and the greatest thing we can have in these pandemic times is what humanity has always dreamed of, a homeland for all, care for the “common home” and the gathering of religious leaders: Muslims, Christians, Druze and Jews in Jerusalem (photo above) is a sign that there is something changing and that the change deepens.
The ascent to the Divine, how to live in crisis
23
Apr
It is in these moments of crisis that the human nature of God and the 
divine nature of man are discovered, hands that save, that help, that show solidarity and that point out unthinkable paths, but where is God, what does this pandemic say with so many people dying .
Edgar Morin and Patrick Viveret wrote “How to live in a time of crisis”, the Brazilian translation is from 2013 and the original French version of 2010, so they are not talking about this crisis, knowing Morin and reading the book we realize that it is that night of thought that we speak (see post).
Consistent with our thinking, he goes against ambiguities, and makes a comparison between Pascal and Descartes right from the start: “Pascal brings a sense of ambiguity to him, the human being brings the best and the worst in himself. Descartes not, we must be Pascalians” (pg. 10) and if we allow the religious sense also Easter beings, to pass from death to life, and to live in crisis.
There is a deep thought in Morin, which he has expressed in other ways, which in this book is more surprising: “I would like to propose, regarding the historical period that we have entered, a reading close to that of the Apocalypse, in the original sense of the expression (sic), not of catastrophe, but of revelation, of a critical time of humanity with itself, allowing it to work the essentials ”(pg. 34), to accuse him of being religious would be ignorance and hopeless, bad reading.
The model of the crisis we live in is called DCD, “deregulation, unrestrained competition, displacement*”, in a note explaining the latter, it is manufacturing production displaced from one country to another, concentrated in China, for example, the case of necessary equipment and masks to fight coronavirus.
This model with economic foundations, is called by Karl Polanyi “market society” and which is currently called by Joseph Stiglitz “merchant fundamentalism” (p. 36), the authors give the diagnosis of the crisis: “formed by this double excess/malaise ”(p. 40).
They also give two essential and surprising diagnoses, saying that bin Laden, who was a Muslim, cited the Satan of the Apocalypse to refer to Rome, and says “what is the great strength of the prophets? It is precisely to say that the question of inhumane is inward” (p 58), “The idea that others are evil prevents us from treating our own inner barbarism” (idem).
The entire chapter 3 of the evangelist John is marked by a revelation, which is made when walking with men, and shows how the divine reality of the Risen Jesus is contextual and adapted to the world, however “the one whom God sent speaks the language of God “(Jo 3, 34), and it is clear that a good part of the religious discourse does not express this, but only conflicts in the human nature.
MORIN, Edgar; Viveret, Patrick. 2013. Como viver em tempo de crise (How to live in times of crisis), Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, Brazil.
The way up
22
Apr
For both faith and science, the way up is to contemplate the truth and as the
philosopher of science Karl Popper proposes, treading the path of falsifiability and science as a human project, is not impassive of transformation, that is why several theories arise.
However, the arrogance and use of authoritarianism is incompatible with faith, the Encyclical Veritas Splendor of John Paul II, next to the affirmation of faith also establishes in paragraph 39: “Not only the world, but man himself was entrusted to his own care and responsibility. God left him “left to his own decision” (Sir 15, 14), so that he could seek his Creator and freely reach the perfection Achieve. it means personally building up such perfection ”, it is not a matter of Platonic perfection.
But rather the rise that Teilhard Chardin proposes, it is, therefore, a path and not a state, so there are people capable of external attitudes, but without values. Dialogue can be established in these circumstances, and there are certain issues, such as medicine and many other professions, that the truth, or the verification of falsifiability as proposed by Popper, must be verified by science.
A comment on the faith, it is interesting that the Risen Jesus who appears after Easter, goes to bake a fish, talk to Thomas who doubts that he would be alive, exhort the disciples, but there is no demonstration of spectacles or miracles in him.
The Enlightenment intended to present its light, but it is in the Heideggerian “clearing” that modern philosophy found a way, the ontological resumption, and only through it can one better get out of the pandemic crisis, look at an earthly world where the Being lives.
We have to walk in the light, but with everyday life and not reject the truth, but the path of falsifiability, that is, proposing that some assertion is false until it proves its truth is a safe path for science and faith it is not blind, otherwise it gives no real hope.
