Arquivo para a ‘Information Science’ Categoria
The cultural crisis and the pandemic
15
Apr
The second great blindness of the Western crisis is culture, the book Anything Goes
by Theodore Dalrymple, pseudonym of english´s psychiatrist Anthony Daniel who treated dangerous prisoners, is an anthology of short stories written from 2006 to 2009, and called his studies declinology (see the video below) but in the book cited there are beautiful passages on how to read a culture. in many countries.
Since the dawn of human culture, the discovery of the Chauvet Cave (dated 32,000 BC) proves this, man builds and records his culture, and here a parallel with #StayAtHome this is done in a cave, probably a meeting place and protection of families.
It may seem too much the term used by Peter Sloterdijk, but human domestication is nothing other than the structuring of “domestic” life, and also the Greek origin of the word oikos-nomicus (we have already made a post) means oikos – home.
We add here Xenophon’s Socratic dialogue, which refers to the term how to be a good gentleman, Kalokagathos (good in beautiful, in Greek), which is thus a reference to culture.
Byung Chul Han, who wrote Salvação do Belo, where he criticizes the culture of the plain and in particular that of Jeff Koon and his sculptures of “baloons” (figure) that say a lot or nothing, the desire for total immunity, without seeking the co-immunity, concept of its master Sloterdijk, that can be applied to the current pandemic.
A hard article, even for me as an appreciator of Chul Han, about the current pandemic crisis, published in El País, states that: “it seems that Asia controls the epidemic better than Europe”, quotes the data of March 20 when the epidemic had not yet reached its peak in Europe and is based on the disciplined and ancestral structure of the east.
Earlier than us, they bet on Big Data, says the author, and “they suspect that big data may have enormous potential to defend themselves against the pandemic” says in the article by El País, but warns that this could lead to a digital dictatorship, as in China and this is not a change.
About the current culture, the author affirms “today not only the polished is turned to the beautiful, but also the ugly” in the work A Salvação do Belo (page 19), we hope that the scourge of the virus will move our hearts and make us go from discovery from interdependence, as Morin says, to solidarity.
https://veja.abril.com.br/videos/clube-do-livro/uma-aula-de-decliniologia-com-theodore-dalrymple/
#LockDown now
06
Apr
We have entered a decisive week of the pandemic, especially in Brazil, but
also in many parts of the world, contagion will reach poorer areas and countries, where sanitary conditions and the concentration of people can lead to the greatest human tragedy, but it is Easter week. and I have hope.
A huge #LockDown could have a fulminant effect against contagion and this would help fight the pandemic, network studies (in the sense of the relationship between two nodes, in this case it is the proximity of people) show that the network effect exists, and the only now appear in poor peoples.
The possibility of interrupting is to create clusters, isolated sectors of society and a single contact of the one node produces a viral effect.
Carl Latkin, in addition to being an eminent infectologist who works in Global health programs, is also one of the most productive researchers in Social Networks, our study of co-citations in Social Networks works demonstrated this (a PhD in progress), but a given important of this researcher is what shows the presence of HIV in African-American homosexuals.
This study carried out with a sample of 234 African American men, showed that the fact that they are in denser sexual networks, are more prone to contagion.
The analogy with COVID-19 is that peripheral populations are in denser population networks and the relationship within the family is stronger, as they are larger families, as we do not have time to do local sampling, beyond the quarantine period, we’re running a simulation and the risk is real, even the ministry team admits a Covid-19 explosion.
It turns out that workers supporting essential services: truck drivers, cleaning workers and assistants in medical centers, secretaries, etc. it comes from the periphery and displacement is already a problem, they ride on crowded buses and do not have the necessary hygiene conditions.
There is an urgent need for a #LockDown during this week of the end of Lent, not only can the holidays help, but a political attitude of frontal confrontation can help a lot.
Carl Latkin, Cui Yang, Karin Tobin, Typhanye Penniman, Jocelyn Patterson, Pilgrim Spikes, “Differences in the Social Networks of African American Men Who Have Sex With Men Only and Those Who Have Sex With Men and Women”, American Journal of Public Health 101, no. 10 (October 1, 2011): pp. e18-e23.
The changing worldview
03
Apr
The Ptolemaic model changed the Aristotelian worldview by creating a model of
spiral movement for stars and planets known at the time, changing the worldview, but it was Copernicus who changed the view that took the Earth from the center of the universe and placed the Sun, this model helped the anthropocentric worldview by opposing the theocentric worldview.
Galileo’s great controversy with the theological view was not the cosmological view, but the question of interpretation and biblical reading by the “common”, not by chance the first popular version was called “vulgate” and when deepening the biblical reading some interpretations exegetical activities have been set aside.
However, Galileo before the Holy Office actually affirmed “E pur si muove” (translating Italian and then moves) that today he could look at the whole universe saying “E pur tutto si muove”, everything is in motion and the dynamics no longer resist the classic worldview Being and Not Being, there is an excluded third party that can be thought of as Not Being is still Being, quantum physics and the string model indicate a third state, which is already used in quantum applications.
So the theoretical models and the idealistic worldview together with their universe model collapsed for some time and even the Standard Physics Model that explained particle physics seems in check with the studies of dark matter and energy that are nothing more than 95% of the universe.
The vision of seeing the world through a shock of opposition is gradually crumbling, when admitting an excluded third party (as the Sourbone professor Florent Pasquier calls it) admitting not a synthesis (the result of idealistic opposition, thesis and antithesis), but a third possibility that conjugates with the other two. It must affect the religious world, it is a great support for a time to unite minds and hearts to fight the world pandemic, and it can be the germ of great changes.
A biblical reference to the subject is the moment on the cross that Jesus cries out to God, who no longer calls him Father, the tradition says in the Aramaic language of his mother Mary, and feels separated from the Father, prays in the Trinitarian vision in that Jesus is also God, it is a paradox to separate from the Father.
Jesus on the cross is repeating Psalm 21 “My God, my God, because you abandoned me”, and it seems to be the cry of all humanity in the face of the pandemic, and it is also possible to read the “excluded third” where we learn that the opposition has time and the answer must be everyone’s.
However, the mystical explanation is precisely the third excluded, the human nature of Jesus is reconnecting it to the Father, if we want Teilhard Chardin’s noospheric vision to the Universe, the reading says that it was a great night.
Not wanting to heal
26
Mar
A system in crisis, whether for social, economic or political reasons, it tends to become
more confusing and toxic until it finds a way to heal itself, when the reason is a natural catastrophe or a disease is not much different, but these affect life directly.
Not wanting to heal and defend life is an attitude of self-sabotage whether for conscious reasons or unconsciousness explains psychology, it is that attitude of creating obstacles and obstacles that hinder tasks to find ways, in this case healing and preserving lives, and so he thinks that there is no way to achieve the goals of cure or co-immunity, the immunity achieved by joint actions.
From a cultural point of view, it is both ignorance, and in this case the view of specialists and health agents must be the “technical” view that prevails, including the economic view, it is thus a blindness, saying it is just a flu or we are dead end (unconscious self-sabotage) is a phenomenon of directing the mind to mistaken thoughts, and this exists culturally.
The biblical narrative tells that a man spent 38 years in a bed and could not reach a natural pool called Siloam (in Hebrew means envoy) and I need Jesus’ intervention to tell him to take his bed and walk (John 5: 7- 9), a miracle but also a break with paralysis and in this sense it is also a metaphor.
But there are those who thought they saw and did not see, the blind man born who is healed in the Bible is someone who did not have a cognitive system prepared to see, and the fact that he comes to see is a miracle but also another metaphor, which due to cultural and contextual blindness it is not possible to see, when leaving this context it is possible to see.
Now wanting to heal or not is a psychic attitude, wanting to see and having the physiological system to see it takes effort and overcome the self-sabotage that makes blindness a comfort zone.
Sensibility and public cause
16
Mar
Health is a public cause, almost everyone agrees, but when proposing protective
measures, many people, not seeing the cases explode and the number of infected people growing, do not understand why and make them a joke or disdain, it was like that in countries that later woke up, this is the case of Italy, whose number of deaths exploded yesterday, Spain and Portugal where the movement on the streets disappeared and many products on the market as well.
Italy recorded 368 deaths, an increase of 25% just this Sunday, and the number of infected people went to 3690 this weekend, Spain and Portugal the number of people who decided to stay at home practically paralyzed the country and for this to be as possible, families have stocked up in supermarkets, they have reduced offers, those who have not been prevented may be left without some products.
Several authorities have commented on the effects, there is a real video of a meeting that took place at Incor (Heart Institute), and a fake attributed to Stanford University, it is also false that Cuba sent vaccine to China, a fake and ridiculous fake is that lemon and vitamin C fights the virus.
The politicization of the issue is also of little concern for the population, we must all fight because soon the explosion of the coronavirus will happen in Brazil, what many experts are concerned about is the capacity of the Health System to respond, all over the world and also in Brazil , with protection the curve will be less steep and the system will have a response capacity, the graph above explores with and without protective measures.
The most complete video on the subject, because it also deals with the cultural aspect and behavior in combating a pandemic, is that of the profa. Dr. Claudia Feitosa Santana, from University of São Paulo, Brazil (is possible setting to English):
The golden book
11
Mar
Written in 1962 and considered one of the great novels of the 20th century, the 
Golden Book (O Caderno Dourado in Spanish, in the photo), tells the story of Anna Wulf, a writer immersed in a personal crisis who decides to tell her story, from the black book for his literary life when he lived in South Africa, the red book on his left-wing political activism, the yellow his emotional life and the blue his daily life.
Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 85 (2007) when she expected nothing more, herself made a joke about it, but the recognition was deserved and little is known today of this consequent feminist and who refused to adhere to fashions and conjunctures followed his struggle.
Themes such as friendship, motherhood and sexuality have much deeper tones and outlines in this author, in novels such as “As grandmothers” (2007) where old age is seen in a different light, especially for women, or about politics in its book “The sweetest dream” that she suggests as an autobiographical one, and that reflects deeply on her humanitarian vision.
But if I had to highlight a novel by her, my favorite of the youth “Prisons we choose to live in” (1987), it attacks in a subtle and extraordinary way the question of political rhetoric (or what was decided to be politically correct) where it instigates individuals to come out of social constraints and build a better world, in fact and above everyday fashion.
He does not fail to attack in this novel ignorance and the lack of personal responsibility in the desire for applause and mere repetition of mottos, how current his speech would be, anticipating the times, because it was precisely because of the excess of rhetoric and the absence of concrete acts that we fell into pitfalls and we help contemporary ignorance and demagogy.
His sentence that seems to sum up his thinking was: “I cannot and will not hurt my conscience just to adhere to the fashion of the day”, and he said this not for conservatives, but for the apparently advanced positions of his time that were not directed towards attitudes concrete.
Between phenomenological reduction and eidetic variation
04
Mar
Asking about Husserl consciousness will propose a radical method to “search”
the phenomenon, recovering and modifying a Greek concept that is the phenomenological reduction (epoché).
Epoché is suspension means in ancient Greek, that we do not erase from our conscience the judgment we have about things, but the Husserlian perspective is “in brackets” which is more realistic, because we cannot erase, at least completely, the memory, however forget what we think about what we learn about the experiential world.
Thus Husserl manages not to do a high attitude, like the Cartesian cogito that does not erase the ego, but a “natural attitude” to review how we relate to the things of the world. So learning something means capturing them as they are, so phenomenology seeks to focus the phenomenon in the sense of how it appears to us, without using what we already knew before and its applications of how it has already been seen, with the aim of reaching its!
Originality !, its “purity” of phenomenon, It means leaving aside all prejudices, theories, definitions and trying to acquire a new concept about concepts, without prejudices about the “thing”.
Epoché does not intend to doubt the existence of the world, nor, even less, to suppress it. The world around presents itself only in consciousness.
For Husserl, the objects of the world are already placed for us in different perspectives and we almost immediately adopt a meaning for it, in general what we do not know we attribute an essence and it should remain unchanged because we gave this object its original meaning.
Husserl’s second fundamental concept is eidetic variation, precisely what differentiates his view of eidos from contemporary idealistic culture, where he calls noema what is of the object itself, what is the thing, which the ancients call quality, while it calls of Greek noesis νόησις, it means the immediate apprehension that may not have the necessary dianóia, that is to say, to think about the thing that links it to the noema.
So the fixation on objects and the misunderstanding of their meaning on the other hand, is part of the contemporary world, this desynchrony between noema and noese.
Infinity and human complexity
03
Mar
Nothing weaker than wanting to arrest the man who makes him a hostage of ideas
or static methods, so there is no thesis and antithesis, but to be and not to be, Husserl stated that “by conceiving ideas, man becomes a new man , who, living in finitude, is oriented towards the pole of infinity ”, but the idea here is the eidos of ancient Greece.
This concept comes from a Proto-Indo-European root “weid”, “see”, origin of the words, εἶδος (eidos) and ἰδέα (idea), according to the “American Heritage Dictionary”, and its pre-Socratic origin is linked the investigation of what things are in essence, and thus the idea of substance appears, as what a thing is independent of its changes in “shape”.
Edmund Husserl foreseeing that the idealistic philosophy that became fixed in forms and that no longer saw the essence would result, affirmed “philosophers, at present, are very fond of criticism instead of studying things from the inside”, it is due to this fact that we fixate on forms and effects without ever referring to the essentials and things.
This is how his phenomenological philosophy was established, it is necessary to return “to the very things”, in a famous expression by Husserl, and his phenomenology is this way back to things, to the world of lived experience or the “lebenswelt” (world-of-life) ) which is the opposite of the world of ideas, from Parmenides, through Plato, to Kant and Hegel.
Phenomenology was born from the social psychology of Franz Brentano recovered the idea of intentionality, coming from the ontological concept of consciousness, which itself highlights the most important point of this experience, that is, the intention clarifies the structure of what is conscious.
What is hidden in every experience, then, is the intention of what is conscious, and if all consciousness only makes sense as awareness of something, psychology deals with what is not conscious.
Self-help, spirituality and psychology
02
Mar
The difference is quite large, but for many, including bookstores, these issues are in
the same session, making a joke I would say that the first one gives the idea that you alone resolve yourself (self-help) and the second you need a professional, so it is more expensive. However, the issue is deeper and more serious.
Self-help has created a series of popular beliefs, for example, Rich Dad, poor son, so self-help suggests Rich Son, or Retired Young and Rich or Poor Father for young people, anyway the list is immense, if it were true everyone would say the same, but life does not have these magic formulas.
So, the objective of every self-knowledge process, including psychology is one, can be effective if it is based on real experiences and facts of a person’s life, so it cannot have a general formula, and this is as old as epistemic thinking “Know yourself”, but this must not be a doxa, that is, a mere unfounded opinion.
Clinical psychology, just to give an example, has found that our symptoms, our problems, our suffering arise and grow from unconscious sources, this means that there is a layer that we consciously have little access to, that give rise to what we are.
However, today there is an even more serious problem where charlatans and false promises of self-help reside, spirituality without a personal and social context, “unspiritualized asceticism” as stated by Peter Sloterdijk, a kind of catharsis or self-help that leads to fanaticism without spirituality.
Even to call it spirituality is a mistake, it is self-help with a manipulated religion and unfounded beliefs, but true spirituality exists, and it is a way of providing balance and helping us with unconscious sources of problems or even solutions.
Anyway, it would be good to separate the three fields, personal, social and work self-help formulas, clinical treatment of psychological problems and true spirituality that does not co-exist in all three, a form of personal or community asceticism that leads to improved relationships and greater happiness conviviality.
The supper of ashes
26
Feb
That defines how or man is by nature also understands or is a nature, or a
substance proposed in an infinite number. and an initial structure in the philosophy of Nature and in the 1584 work (*Supper of Ashes) of Giordano Bruno, linked to Copernican theory, which creates an infinite universe with an omnipresent divider, an eternal matter and a permanent mutation.
Bruno declared himself a “realist” Copernican in 1582 in Paris, and when he arrived in London a year later, he placed himself on a non-cosmological level with extravagant ideals for the time, epoch or universe in which he lived and at the time of his living rooms. class. they are suspended, dedicated both to the theological radicalism of its Protestant public and to “atheistic” Aristotelianism.
A curious aspect of Bruno, like Leibniz and Spinoza or produced, is named his protagonist of Theophilus present in the Bible and what is meant by “son of God”, or that he too will separate himself from his Catholic religion or thought that Philosophy should to be independent of religion, through the passage through the Copernican heliocentrism through an infinite universe that we owe to Bruno.
According to his policy and / or being able to involve this infinite movement, he stated: “What ingenuity to ask to burn, to be able to move or to be able”, that was or its package with the donations of the power of religion and the nascent academy.
In his book “The supper of ashes” he made an extraordinary statement for the time: “The earth and the stars … how they dispense life and food from things, restoring all material that entrepreneurship, are themselves endowed with life, to a much greater extent, and to be alive, and in a voluntary, orderly and natural way, the second intrinsic principle, that they will move towards the Spanish and Spanish spaces with which I agree ”, he said, a universe of Copernicus.
t is important not to be true of Bruno, who also has controversial works on the Eucharist and the Virgin Mary, more or more important for our time and restoring a lost dialogue of old data, and for which the inquisitors continue. apostates Giordano Bruno took a big step in science and wanted a philosophy to be independent because of power and religious not inculturation, even if it leafs through and needs to overcoming fundamentalism and establish the Dialogue.
*Bruno, G. (1995) The Ash Wednesday Supper. Lawrence s. Lerner ¨Edward A. Gosselin (editors), University of Toronto Press.
