Arquivo para a ‘Cognition’ Categoria
The cure of the blind from birth
26
Oct
In his Essay on Blindness (in brazilian edition of the Companhia das Letras, 2002), José
Saramago gives a very simple lesson on ontology: “Within us there is something that has no name, this is what we are”, social interaction, culture and politics reveals us gradually to others.
In a way we all see a little and we all have “blind spots” and we need the Other.
Among all the biblical miracles, certainly many consider the resurrection of Lazarus as something extraordinary, but I remember many cases of people who have been in a coma for years and come back to life, I consider the case of the most fantastic birth blind (John 9: 6- 7), why?
A person who has never seen does not have the functional cognitive part prepared to discern the worlds, until the 2 years are the sensations of distance and obstacles that are stimulated attached to the movements, until the child walks, until the age of the symbolic constructions where each object of the complex universe of things is identified.
Therefore to cure blindness, is ultimately to reconfigure the symbolic system of a blind, in a democracy means to grope from the “infantile” universe until reaching a symbolic universe of values that must be present in a mature democracy: respect, tolerance and discussions the symbolic universe.
We would say that democracy in Brazil has matured, it has had little space in history to develop, it is at the end of the critical age of adolescence, energetic parents seem to solve problems, but at the same time they distance youth from dialogue.
But there is another passage that is that of the blind Timaeus, who wants to be cured of blindness, is the case of some in Brazilian democracy, and asks Jesus: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Mk 10,49 ) and Jesus heals him and says, “Thy faith hath saved thee.”
The vow of those who have true faith and who want to cure true blindness can decide an election, if we want peace, justice and a country that will make us proud, we can reflect on our own blindness, the difficulty of seeing everything clearly and ask for healing
Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence
24
Oct
Having already almost surpassed the point of singularity (see our post), the point that the
machine would surpass human intelligence, the question now turns to consciousness and a well-considered point is the question of consciousness.
In this sense the main criticism is the perpetuation of prejudices, which would avoid what I call hermeneutics, but it is an incorrect view of the evolution of digital technology, for example, the use of Digital Ontologies and the ability to seek scientific studies outside of Wikipedia.
This is what recently announced an article in The Verge, and the most serious omission after researching scientists who are omitted from Wikipedia, was to note that 82% of written biographies are about men.
In a blog post, according to The Verge website, John Bohannon, director of science at Primer, explains the development of Quicksilver tool to read 500 million original documents, sift through the most cited numbers and then write a basic article about the work of these scientists not mentioned in Wikipedia.
Two examples of illustrious women found and written for AI are Teresa Woodruff, a scientist who designed mice ovaries using 3D printers, was cited by Time magazine in 2013 with one of the most influential people in the world scientist, and the other case is that of Jessica Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London, who wrote the new entry for Pineau.
Wade was one of the scientists who said “Wikipedia is incredibly tantalizing, and the underrepresentation of women in science is particularly bad,” and praised Quicksilver stating that with it you can quickly find large amounts of information very quickly.
Wikipedia will have to evolve with Machine Learning tool, this may happen in the coming years, the fact that there are specific tools for this does not invalidate Wikipedia, shows that it has weaknesses and should be corrected
The expulsion of the Other
23
Oct
Byung-Chul Han’s gaze on contemporaneity could not be more authentic for the author of 
, the Salvation of the Beautiful and the Aroma of Time, among other books of course, but has in its first pages the relationship with all this and the beautiful: “If a flower had in itself its ontic fullness, it would not need to be contemplated” (Han, 2016, 13), this sentence is paradoxical but it is not, it is in his book “A expulsão do Outro” (the expulsion of the Other) (Han, 2016).
The author analyzes the question [in Max Scheler] of Saint Augustine to attribute “in a strange and dangerous way ° a necessity to plants:
“That men behold them, as if, through a knowledge of their being guided by love, they experienced something analogous to redemption” [Han apud Scheler, 2016, p. 13).
Han clarifies that knowledge seen in this way is redemption, but it should be noted that there is no way in this form to separate subject from object in contemplation, which is discussed at length in his other book, The Society of Fatigue. object while another.
In this the author distinguishes the simple news or information, “to which the dimension of otherness is utterly lacking” (idem, page 13), that which would be able to reveal a new world, a new understanding of what it really is, suddenly that the new one appears (idem).
Going back to Heidegger, he asserts that all this false objectivity means nothing other than “otherwise this blindness to events” (Han, 2016, 14).
Although his view is excessively pessimistic about the network and the digital, he is right in saying that “proximity brings in itself distance as its dialectical opposite. The elimination of distance does not generate more closeness, but rather destroys it “(Han, 2016, p.15) and pronounces it categorically, which in the absence of distance or the identical that it creates contains life.
He retakes the theme of another book “The Agony of Eros”, saying that “in pornography all bodies resemble” and the body is reduced to sexual does not know anything else.
He makes a quick analysis of the animation film Anomalisa (pictured above) made by Charlie Kaufman in 2015, which reveals the hell of the identical, puts the painting Golconda by René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist in his book “Swarm”.
The book also analyzes the terror of authenticity, fear and alienation before analyzing the language and thought of the Other, modern thought is nothing else as a consequence of the “forgetting of being”, the separation of subject and object, expulsion from the other.
HAN, Byung Chul. A expulsão do Outro (portuguese edition). Lisbon: Relógio d´água. 2016.
Scientific vision and ontology
16
Oct
Contemporary science is the fruit of an a priori concept construction, which can be
thought of as that which is prior to experience or perception, in terms of philosophy, this corresponds to two forms of knowledge or argument, when we say in my experience I feel that … it is the argument of perception, when I say I see it this way … it means that I have a world view and I am resorting to it.
In the ontological phenomenology an “a priori” is also admitted, but it does not mean an “a priori construction”, since it must be dissociated from “empiria”, because in fact even if we can not make explicit our world view, it was socially and culturally constructed, which in the hermeneutic circle are the preconceptions, in the sense that they are somehow formulated.
Just as both scientific research and ontology have concepts “a priori” they can converge, but in practice ontology requires a purification, ie, the explanation of which are the prejudices, for example, idealism or culture.
Every scientific investigation makes an a priori that is the “fixation of the sectors of objects” and is only possible from an opening to the being of being, that is, what is the ordinary experience that it has of the world, sometimes difficult to explain and question.
In order for a true scientific question to be asked, it is necessary to determine the region of the entities, often called contextualization, but at most only corresponds to a romantic view of history (read Gadamer), the region means being taken to the horizon of the original experience, the horizon of the fundamental relation of the entity that questions with the questioned world, usually done in reverse.
In medieval philosophy, the whole discussion of these a priori leads to the quarrel of the universals of Boethius (470-525), who translated Isagoge from Greek into Latin, soon perceived the magnificent program that Porphyry’s questions proclaimed.
At bottom the quarrel is whether there are universals, which would be them, that triggered a struggle between nominalists (everything is name) and realists (they exist independent of the names).
Existential analytics “is before all psychology, anthropology and, above all, biology.” (Heidegger, 2015, pp. 89), although we already say in the previous post Paul Ricoeur affirms that there is in Heidegger (he would say in all ontology) an a priori that is based on anthropology, which we call original for cultural reasons.
Heidegger, M. Ser e tempo, 10a. edição, Trad. Revisada de Marcia Sá Cavalcante, Brasil, Bragança Paulista, SP: Editora Universitária São Francisco, 2015.
The paraconsistent logic
25
Sep
Kurt Gödel’s paradox, that a complete system is inconsistent was fundamental to
a new phase in formal logical principles, and cooperated with the emergence of the computer.
It was the Peruvian philosopher Francisco Miró Quesada, unknown to many Latin American scholars, who coined the word paraconsistent in 1976.
The Brazilian Newton da Costa who developed this theory has become very important in several areas, including philosophy and Artificial Intelligence. In the figure, the axis to the side that goes from u 0 and u 1 , is called degree of belief, but the truth has points A for consistent and C for inconsistent, having a lot of application to everyday life.
The study applied to semantics mainly explores paradoxes, for example, it can be said that a blind man sees certain circumstances, also the study of different forms of perception and abilities can help the parameters of the deep mind.
We have already stated that neologicism can precisely help AI in this phase of deep intelligence, for example, in the study of natural languages, the language of everyday life.
The idea that A and non-A could exist was inconceivable in Western philosophy, is the principle of the excluded third, which comes from Parmenides and was consolidated in Aristotle. Paraconsistent logics are purposively more “weak,” terms to refer to this break with classical logic, for they solve few valid propositional inferences in the classical sense of logic The logic of paraconsistent languages, however, are more conservative than those of classical counterparts, and this changes Alfred Tarski‘s hierarchy of metalanguage.
The influence on natural language was anticipated in 1984 by Solomon Feferman who stated “… natural language abounds in expressions directly or indirectly self-referential, although seemingly harmless, all of which are excluded from the, because in daily life, in truth we are paraconsistentes.
Quantum physics and politics
24
Sep
Mechanical physics, especially the celestial mechanics of Sir Isaac Newton, took the idea of cause and effect
in the same proportions of a mechanical machine, it is said popularly to each cause there is a contrary reaction in the opposite direction, it was for politics as ” man werewolf “of Hobbes.
Then came the empiricism of Hume, in fact it is more connected to the theory of knowledge, which comes from the idea that I can only say something from my sensory experience, just as mechanicism, all knowledge and object of it is out of being and only there are perceptions. With politics, it is what the masters of political marketing exploit, working with people’s emotions so as not to give them a reference to the truth, but to deceive them.
The critique of this political “philosophy”, since the subject is more comprehensive, comes from the middle ages where in 1200 it was already defined as “state science”, but all criticism of this set of empirical and idealistic ideas is called Empirical-criticism,
Marx developed it but later was updated by the Microphysics of Power, the idea no longer of the state but of the power that constitutes the “individual”, which Peter Sloterdijk, Gadamer, Ricoeur and others consider already already surpassed.
If we want to adapt the quantum physics of the physical world to the world on the human scale, which is ontological, we can think that there are two possible, more democratic strands that lead to the understanding of the world as Nature and the other as the search for “the Just” .
John Rawls, Habermas and Michael Sandel, all still strongly influenced by so-called “critical theory”, and in the matter of Nature thoughts Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Norberto Bobbio, Phillip Pettit, Robert Nozick, and of course there is others.
The assertions of quantum physics with the infinitely small (the particles) and the infinitely large (the bodies in the universe) change our idea of causality, in politics of which the winners tell the story, for in quantum physics the energy dimension, mass and energy that is 94% of the universe, and has an influence on it, would be an approach of the collective unconscious, the forces that do not appear and that influence the political process, present in the “unconscious.”
Another important part is that the observer’s gaze defines reality, so the suspect idea of neutrality has been overcome, Werner Heisenberg, Eugene Wigner, Roger Penrose, and Erwin Schorodinger have developed this quantum view.
In politics it means that the sight of simple people does influence politics, education is essential to democracy, and only manipulating it into a disaster.
We’re getting close, but what?
17
Sep
At age 20, Carl Seagan’s book “Contact” (1985) impressed me in such a way that it never left my
Film Contact, Hormholes and AI detect.
imagination, spoke of wormholes (wormholes are possible paths for the fourth dimension), theology and search for lives on other planets, I made a road to materialism that lasted 20 years, any ilusions.
At 42´s years old, the film Contact (1987) once again impressed me, the protagonist to Ellie Arroway (Jody Foster), in the fiction era of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), I now discover that the department exists at the University of Berkeley and there they are picking up signals from a star coming from a distant star.
Curious and thought-provoking, it is precisely the phase in which I return to study Teilhard de Chardin’s Noosphere and search the fourth dimension, we are preparing a hologram and an Ode to Christus Hypercubus at Lisbon, just a reference of Salvador Dali’s fourth dimension.
SETI researchers from Berkeley, led by student Gerry Zhang and some collaborators, used machine learning to build a new algorithm for radio signals they identified in a 5-hour period on August 26, 2017 (pull my birthday ), but it should only be a coincidence.
Zhang and his colleagues with the new algorithm have resolved to reanalyze the data for 2017 and found 72 additional explosions, the signals do not seem like communications as we know, but real explosions, and Zhang and his colleagues foresee a new future for the analysis of radio astronomy signals with use of machine learning.
As in the film the signal needed a long time to be decoded, Turing who studied the Enigma machine captured from the German army during World War II, would love to study it today, he deciphered it. The code universe is not therefore a human artifact, space is full of it, not to say it is from any civilization, but they are there, the background radiation for example, discovered in 1978 by Penzias and Wilson, ratified the Big Bang and gave them a Nobel Prize in Physics.
The new results will be published this month in The Astrophycal Journal, and is available on the Breaktrough Listen website.
The truth and / or method?
12
Sep
The positive truth established by science and the enlightenment had two foundations: the idea 
(idealism) linked to experience (empiricism), whose inglorious attempt was to create a universal encyclopedia of knowledge, Kant’s sapere audi great achievements of modernity were insufficient to abolish the war, created a crisis of values, a concentration of riches and a worldview with signs of fragility.
What transdisciplinarity and sober educators are demanding, a return to life-giving sciences, the humanistic perennials, Heidegger’s Charter on Humanism, in which he cries: “But in this we must not forget that” subject and object ” are inadequate expressions of the metaphysics which took over very early on the interpretation of language, in the form of Western “Logic” and “Grammar” (Heidegger, 2005: 8).
What we call interpretation, Heidegger asserts in paragraph 32 of “Being and Time” (it is mentioned in “Truth and Method”), is actually developing “the projected possibilities of understanding”, it means a dialogic process where it is possible to retrieve the pre-concepts and a new “fusion of horizons”, in this sense the Hermetic is opposed to the hermeneutic.
The preconception, seen as anticipation of human experience, attests to our bond to the tradition in which we are immersed, but we need what Gadamer calls “consciousness of the history of effects” (possible translation of “Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein”), as explained in her text “determined by a real historical becoming, in such a way that it does not have the liberty to situate itself in the face of the past”, hence its criticism of Dilthey.
Our estrangement from the truth, Gadamer begins with aesthetics, a culture of appearances – through which his book begins, recapitulates in the idealists the ideas of taste and experience (“Erlebnis”), the latter always put more emphasis, albeit in ways in Dilthey and Husserl.
They will be developed in such a way as to falsify the “sciences of the spirit” (see in his work “The Extension of the Question of Truth to Understanding in the Sciences of the Spirit”), in an analytical effort to concretize the so- his whole critique of Schleiermacher’s romantic hermeneutics, the “Aufklärung” (Illustration), and the historicism of Droysen, Ranke, Dilthey, and Hegel.
His criticism goes to the bottom of the notion of aesthetics of a work of art, when a painter, with certain technique or style, goes to painting with a certain technique, what is read in the picture is not the soul of artist.
Her analysis is also from the hermeneutic analytic, in criticizing Schleiermacher also gives reason to say that in the work of an artist, a poet, a writer would be the foundation to perceive the authorial intention, so the exegete would know more closely than his own author and not only his letter or painting, to know the Gospel of St. John would be, first of all, to know Saint John, in which Gadamer rejects the postulate of the Romantic school.
But he will accept the romantic school in “Let’s face the facts” of “Aufklärung”: “he reads the Johannine text as Protestant, as a Catholic, a third as a historian of Palestine.” If we swept all these presuppositions, perhaps in the written lines, pristine, “now the Aufklärung” desired the
meeting of an unprejudiced interpretation, which would remove both the tradition of authority and the authority of tradition (ie idealism!), in which the romantics were right.
There remain two snags, Sloterdijk’s answer to Heidegger and Ricoeur’s question: would it then be Truth or Method (or, not and), that is, truly ontological?
Why did artificial intelligence emerge?
22
Aug
The long road covered by Artificial Intelligence includes the construction of languages such as
Lisp, Prolog, Haskel, but environments like DialogFlow, Watson, and
At the end of the 20th century there was a major crisis in AI, but the emergence of researchers in the Semantic Web resumed study and gradually, subjects like IoT (Internet of Things), Natural Language and Machine Learning (there is no translation, but we could say learning by Machine) emerged.
The fact that scares some is linked to the concept of “intelligence” and “mind.”
This emergency has awakened the five largest technology companies in the world: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, which have started investing in smart people who can talk to humans.
Now 28% of consumers in the United States currently use some virtual assistant, these devices that integrate the AI technology of a voice assistant with a common home product has had great success, such as Alexa, Echo and Google Home, but the increase of sales to 39% annually were celebrated by companies.
In companies the concern for privacy, the operation is done using cloud storage, companies with sound assistants use different measures to protect the personal information of their consumers, but know that there are flaws in these defenses.
The audio sent to Google and Amazon is encrypted before being transmitted, leaving the data exchange supposedly safe, but the people database needs to be accessed in order for the machine to “develop” its learning ability.
Recently a researcher in the field of information security has demonstrated that it is possible to transform an Echo manufactured before 2017 into a perpetual recording instrument whose audio can be transmitted to a remote location without the user knowing.
To protect yourself from hackers, a good practice is to access your account and erase history of interactions with the services from time to time, but it remains to be seen if it has not been hacked in this period.
Apple’s Siri, instead of associating the recording with the user account, associates the collection of the interaction with you with a series of random numbers.
With or without security, this market has grown and companies are watching, it is irreversible.
Beyond pragmatism
15
Aug
In physics there is no more cause and effect reasoning, the pure mechanism still present in the contemporary world, even among scholars.
For example, about ten years ago, James Crutchfield and John Mahoney (University of California at Davis) have mathematically demonstrated that many sequences of statistical data have “embedded” an arrow of time.
An observer who sees the data reproduced from beginning to end, like the frames of a movie, can model what will come next using a modest amount of memory about what happened before.
In quantum mechanics the distinction between waves and particles no longer exists. This unified physics, clarified phenomena, but did not change the way of thinking, as this depends on the culture.
Micro bodies that are normally seen as particles, such as electrons, can behave like waves in certain situations, while objects we normally think of as waves, such as light, which are now seen to behave like particles.
