Arquivo para a ‘Cognition’ Categoria
Desert or nihilism
06
Dec
Put simply, nihilism is the absence of meaning of things that seems to reflect in the
present day, this makes man not desire the feeling of emptiness, contemplation and desert that on the contrary seeks to capture the deeper meaning of things by doing an “inner silence” and not a nihilistic “void”.
For Nietzsche it was the belief in the categories of reason that made us believe in a world that was constructed by false references, and even critics in modernity, mostly when they do not perceive this idealistic and empty ‘psychological state’, are attached to it and go around in circles looking for answers now in a false subjectivism of various forms (religious, ideological and even poetic), or in a false objectivism of the “active vita” advocated by Hanna Arendt, but which the philosopher Byung-Chul completes with the “contemplative vita “.
On nihilism, according to Giacóia Junior (2007), “Nietzsche thematizes three forms of nihilism, considered as a ‘psychological state’, that is, as a content of reflective consciousness. In each of them, it is always a category of reason, which gives support to an interpretation of becoming and of the value of human existence in the current of becoming, “this falls to the dismay of” was all in go. ”
The second is a need for totality, what is now said as the absence of a single discourse, what Giacóia comments as: “form of nihilism as a psychological state is presided over by the category of” totality “- as a support for a global interpretation of become. The representation of a unity, of a global organization and systematization would connect the chaotic multiplicity of individual, contingent and ephemeral beings to an integrated and organic totality – a rational whole, of infinite value (pantheism, monism, etc.), promoting reconciliation between random finitude and necessary infinity, “as a complete discourse falls on simplism.
The third form, which is nothing more than a conjunction of the previous two, comments Giacomo, is a “form of nihilism arising as an awareness of the mendacity of the metaphysical world, and as disbelief in the category of truth – with the discovery that the coming- being is the only reality – a reality, however, that we can not bear. “, it usually turns to pure idealist subjectivism or to unbridled activism of being “doing. ”
The desert seen with the search for Being, openness to the state of activity of contemplation, or contemplation of activity, is an ontological turn, penetration in the subjective of Being
Understanding and Hermeneutics
09
Nov
Certainly wisdom is the opposite of ignorance, but wisdom is possible that
springs from tradition and wise living, but even these should have present interlocutors who have plunged into the thoughts and reflections of others, and who have read the tradition and the problems somewhere of humanity.
The idea that only a book exists in all wisdom is even refuted by the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas with his famous maxim; “Distrust the man of a single book,” Marx also read the “capitalist” economy of Adam Smith and Richard to write his famous “Capital,” but it must be said that few read the Bible, Capital, or any other book of basic reference to the thought of “tradition” that they claim to have.
Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Geog Gadamer, Emmanuel Lévinas, Paul Ricoeur, Edgar Morin and many others attest that there is a crisis in thought, at least in Western thought, as there is little reading and deepening in the thinking of the Arab and Eastern world , the African is almost incognito.
Another idea is to reduce culture to ideologies, and their exercise is in most cases to subject cultures to their scheme of thought, Paul Ricoeur wrote “ideology is this contempt that makes us take the image for the real, the reflex by the original “(Ricoeur, 2013, page 84) and this is perhaps the greatest Confucianism of our time.
Wisdom involves understanding, and hermeneutics is the science of understanding because it involves interpretation, overcoming preconceptions, understanding and dialogue, and revising concepts, the so-called hermeneutic circle, whose elucidation is made by Gadamer.
Although Gadamer sees him as stuck in romantic historicism, Dilthey has identified three classes of understanding: the first that he calls “larger judgments and formations of thought,” related to science that includes both natural and human sciences, are examples a textbook of biology or mathematics, but can also include concepts such as gravity and others present in common sense; the second is the lived experience and these are the ones who take the actions but should pass through the former, calls this a vital nexus.
It expresses the second as “elucidating how a situation, a purpose, a milieu and a vital nexus intersect in an action, it allows no inclusive determination of the external life from which it arose.”
The third and most essential are the expressions of lived experience, as Dilthey puts it: “An expression of lived experience may contain more nexus of psychic life than any introspection can perceive,” thus partly because of the aspect of understanding that has not yet if it is perceived, to penetrate it leads to a hermeneutic circle returning to greater judgments and formations, although Dilthey did not formulate thus, would be the hermeneutic circle.
DILTHEY, W. Obras escolhidas – vol. 3 A fundação do mundo histórico nas ciências humanas, 2002.
RICOEUR, P. Hermenêutica and Ideologias, 3ª. Edition, São Paulo: Vozes, 2013.
Information and Knowledge
08
Nov
When information is in our mind it becomes knowledge, but this does not always mean
understanding, repeating maxims (sayings, beautiful sentences, etc.) does not mean that we have knowledge, because information has not passed through the stage of understanding.
This is not a modern pathology, or simply that the TV, the Internet or some virus has invaded our minds and harmed our ability to know, although some people may have difficulties, someone with Alzeihmer or a dispersive child, but I have the impression that the so-called “attention deficit” has gone too far, and it is a social factor that makes it difficult to understand, in Germany and in France, there is always a social worker on duty, not a doctor or pharmacist to give medicines to children.
One of the serious problems of our time, says Edgar Morin, is that we are accustomed to believe that thought and practice are separate compartments of life, or more seriously to already structured thinking, the world of theory and practice.
So for ideologues means that whoever thinks the world does not make the world and vice versa.
But if we look throughout history there was a time when sages, eventually called scientists or artists, circulated through various fields of culture. Mathematics, physics, architecture, painting, sculpture were the raw material of thought and action, Morin also recalled in a lecture in 2015 in Brazil, in the Millennium Program.
The industrial revolution overturned the idea of Renaissance knowledge, and since the 19th century, specialization has been gaining strength and we have forgotten to reconnect knowledge, a call from Morin for education.
Asked how to teach and what is knowledge, Edgar Morin replied: “I propose, in teaching, the introduction of fundamental themes that do not yet exist. That is, I propose to introduce the subject of knowledge, for we give knowledge without ever knowing what knowledge is. But since all knowledge is a translation followed by a reconstruction, there is always the risk of error, the risk of hallucinations, always. ”
How many in the areas of science, technology and what is most lamentable in the area of pathologies, has never seen so many pathologies, classifying people according to pathologies is only the most serious pathological form, you see only the gray world, there is no light and nor hope.
Asked about the tools that have emerged in recent decades, including the digital world, Morin replied: “First of all, it is true that information is not knowledge. Knowledge is the organization of information.”
So we are immersed in information and how they succeed each other day by day, in a way, we can not be aware of it. On the other hand, knowledge, as I said, is scattered. You have to unite them, but you lack that complex thinking. ”
Simplicity is the most disorganized form of information.
Complexity, simplicity and purity
03
Nov
They seem contradictory in times of crisis, but it is not really reductionism is
the attempt to reduce the human, the natural and all the complexity of life into dogmatic truths and therefore nothing simple and nothing purê, because simplicity ou nor simplificity.
The Complex is precisely to understand that each person, the whole of society, each being of nature and the whole of the universe interact, interact in a complex whole and that all this is simple if you are open to the Other, the Natural and the All Universe that surrounds.
We find in simpler people the complexity of life and the wisdom that penetrates the deeper revelations of Nature and the Universe,
Mahatma Gandhi claimed that if all Western literature were lost and only the Sermon on the Mount remained, nothing would have been lost, and he was not a Christian.
Einstein argued that it was easier to break an atom than a prejudice, for it is in the complexity of human formation and thought that we encounter many problems, greater in times when modernity wants to assert itself in the face of already decaying values: its morality, its model of state, social harmony and worldview are all in check.
Among all the blessings that are narrated in the biblical text of Matthew, all beatitudes are important, but two are directly in the center of the revelation: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see the face and God and Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God, for they both set us before God: from his face and as his sonship.
In a time of such malice, of ever greater confidence that generates divisions and confrontations, purity (which is not reductionist naivete) is an essential value, Adorno claimed in Minima Moralia, “what world is this in which even a child distrusts a present, “and we would say of the world that not even the justice we should have respect for does not seem to deserve it.
What kind of peace do we want, what kind of meekness do we want (Happy the meek because they will inherit the earth), that is the question that is challenged by the dark times we live.
Several images can be reminiscent of the beatitude of the bible: the Samaritan (who rescues someone who has been outraged), Zacchaeus (who was a usurper and repented), blind people, vipers and so many other characters, but perhaps the greatest blessedness of Madalena, the ex-prostitute who changes radically of life and was one of the most faithful in the following of Jesus.
Deacon and the Biosemiotic
24
Oct
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerges from Matter is a book by 
Terrence Deacon, an anthropologist and biosemiologist, who addresses the origins of life and the philosophy of mind, with new attempts to respond to how nature has emerged.
The book seeks to explain concepts such as intentionality and normativity in a different purpose from that of phenomenology, but considering them with a more functionalist purpose, calls entenational (in the ontological sense), but grouped and therefore “national”.
The book explores the properties of life, the emergence of consciousness and the relationship between evolutionary and semiotic processes. The book speculates on how properties such as information, value, purpose, meaning, and ultimate directed behavior have arisen from physics and chemistry.
Critics of the book argue that Deacon strongly lured the works of Alicia Juarrero and Evan Thompson without providing complete quotes or references to the author, but an UC Berkeley investigation has cleared Deacon who is a professor there.
In contrast to the arguments presented by Juarrero in Dynamics of Action (1999, MIT Press) and by Thompson in Mind in Life (2007, Belknap Press and Harvard University Press), Deacon explicitly rejects the claims that living or mental phenomena can be explained by dynamic systems approaches.
Instead, Deacon argues that the properties of life or mind only emerge from a higher order reciprocal relationship between self-organized processes.
Terence Deacon will be in São Paulo at the EBICC Cognitive Science event.
(Português) Complexidade, consciência e AI
16
Oct
Complexity, consciousness and AI We have already stated that both 
complexity and consciousness are phenomena that belong to the biological nature, but AI (artificial intelligence) continues to have advances, what would be the misconceptions of mistaken notions in this field?
The response of MIT technology professor Rodney Brooks, who works with robotics for Panasonic, is that there are seven deadly sins, and he cites Amara’s law by saying that people tend to underestimate both the short-term and the short-term effect. long-term technology while examining a nonexistent technology, while another is confusing hypotheses where the AI would have an equal competence to solve the problem of a nonexistent technology.
A third factor pointed out by Brooks is that the assumption often of practicing a task is often confused with a task performed by AI equal to competence.
Brooks also says that people are prone to parallel AI progress in learning a given task for the same process in humans, so it always comes up with the idea of human hybrids / machines.
Brooks also asserts that people should not expect AI to continue to make steady progress on an exponential path, but rather on adjustments and reevaluations, and we should not believe in media scenarios with unexpected AI scenarios.
This is the science fiction of Odyssey 2001, where the computer that made diabolic decisions never existed and watch the movie today shows the unreality of that fiction, Blade Runner was updated in 2049 and asks if machines have souls, the writer’s question that inspired the film is whether machines dream of electric sheep (in Philip K. Dick’s novel, and why machines would sleep? and why would machines sleep?
Incidentally the figure of the dog of the old Andromeda songwriter, also calling Harrison Ford for the role was interesting in reference to the novel that inspired the film.
The full article by Rooney Brooks published in Technology Review´s last week is quite interesting and separates 7 fallacies about AI.
Androids hunter is replicating
09
Oct
The replicant means a machine with humanoid features and in few things besides the
feature approaches the human, in the case of Blade Runner androids 2049, the eye or rather the bottom of the iris that has an orange tone is the great differential, but being a machine has characteristics that are superhuman, for example, strength, speed and many other characteristics may be human, but robots would have soul?
Or ask the most common question in the media, robots slept counting sheep that are machines, though the strongest question since the beginning of the first version of the 1982 movie, is whether Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), the android hunter is a also android.
A question that the director has already answered affirmatively, but there is a hint in the film when he tells us that he dreamed of a unicorn (the reference is already by our classification a replicant because it has superhuman things like a horn), and someone already knew his dream, that is, the replicants have even their projected dreams, but because the “creator” has preserved it, a question that he himself makes.
Or another dialogue by Rick Deckard clarifies: “Replicants are just like any other machine – they are a benefit or a danger. If they are a benefit, it is not my problem “, that is, it is important to build a machine so that it can take care of the danger that others offer.
But this is enlightening in another point as well, there are humans worried about the machines and this means that without knowing that there are dangers, in the dialogue Deckard says like any other should not be a hindrance to its existence, the bottleneck in the background is fear, for this in my opinion there is always this somber tone in the first and second version, called by the cult refinement of “noir”.
Machines and advances always bring problems, they dislodge things from the comfort zone, but there is no way to make an omelet without breaking the eggs, you have to see the ones that are rotten, the “dark” computers of the 2001 Odyssey have passed, the androids will pass , the future belongs to us, man is the protagonist of his future, or at least he must wish to be.
The future of thinking machines
05
Oct
We made a point of making the classifications (post) between cyborgues, 
androids and humanoids, showing that the hybrids are still a fiction for some and a delirium for others, as our view is the point of singularity of Raymond Kurzweil.
Points of singularity m (it is good to say technological, since there are others) would be that point where there would be a surpassing of biological human to a post-human technological, of silicon or even something more futuristic, photonic or neo-biological (biological chips, for example ).
Raymond Kurzweil’s definitions are clearer and more precise, he wrote in 1987 The Age of Intelligent Machines and then in an even greater delirium an update to The Age of Spiritual Machines where he seeks to find where the so-called Transcedent Man (documentary 2009), and then we can outline his ideas.
You can delineate your ideas in 4 points: technological evolution up to its definition of singularity is one of the tangible objectives of humanity (will be?) By exponential progression, the functionality of the human brain is quantifiable in terms of technology and can be built in a near future (but only functional); average advances can keep a significant amount of their generation alive enough for the increase in technology to pass human brain processing (one thing does not imply the other, could be done with future generations), and a point that is socially interesting that the theory of accelerated evolutions.
This theory says that the theory of accelerated change refers to the increase in the rate of technological innovation (and sometimes it may be accompanied by social and cultural evolution) and is always present in history, which may suggest faster and deeper change in future, although this is true how much accelerated depends on the historical perspective.
We define this evolution as the noosphere, a sphere of mind or spirit, based on the idea of John Searle, that the mental “real and ontologically irreducible” to the physical, and that technologies evolve and accelerate human growth but are separated by what Juergen Schmidhuber calls “uniqueness of the omega”, something at once similar and different from the omega of Gregory Chaitin, because it is not a number or a number, but what Teilhar Chadin (1916) defines in his noosphere as the beginning and end of the human , but wrapped in a connection of minds and spirits as if they were communicating vessels.
For Juergen Schmidhuber, the next Omega – 2040 (there was no film Blade Runner 2049) from his series Omega – 2 ^n human lives (n <10; human lives (n <10; a life – 80 years) about major stages of events would occur in human history.
He questioned the validity of such changes by suggesting that they merely reflect a general rule for “both the individual memory of the single human being and the collective memory of whole societies and their history books: constant amounts of memory space allocated to get exponentially greater, adjacent time slots more and more into the past, “and it is memory and not Moore’s law that speaks of the growth of digital memories.
His suggestion is that “the reason why there has never been a shortage of prophets predicting that the end is near – important events according to their own vision of the past always seem to accelerate exponentially,” so both ancient and modern prophecies are no longer that oracles that establish this reconnection between the “omega” of the beginning and end, announcing great changes and at the same time connected to them.
There is a very clear example of Jürgen Schmidhuber’s acceleration, given in Wurman’s book, “Information Anxiety” (1991), where he says that a person who read the New York Times for a year read more than the best of the men of the eighteenth and earlier centuries, then of course there is more reading today than in previous centuries, but thinking … need evolution.
Autonomous robots?
03
Oct
Autonomous robots are a denomination for those who are within the environmental
limits, can achieve the desired goals (by humans or by tasks organized in an algorithm) in these unstructured environments without a human help, by this they are in certain levels.
For example, within a factory where mechanical tasks are performed, to avoid accidents, their geographic space is limited and deficient to detect the defect that can be fulfilled by a forged task, since a space robot should have fewer limits and be the most autonomous autonomous, for being without possibility of direct human action and having communication difficulties due to a distance.
The project called SWARM, funded by the European Union and we have already made a post, now has the first multi-robot system of autonomous assembly that has sensory-motor coordination observing similar robots around them, they will vary in shape and height in white according to a task and / or work environment.
A central “cerebral” central coordinating system, all of us, through a system called MNS (Mergeable Nervous System), and thus are reconfigured observing different capacities but combined by a single central controller.
They can also split up and perform self-repair tasks, eliminating defective body parts, including a brain unit with some defect, of course, one can define which are defeats and self-repairs.
In autonomous robots, learning and strategy according to the environment, what you can do with your autonomy increases, but for what you can print, the article is still not the case.
The current model has 10 units, and the authors point out without paper published in Nature Communications, claim that the Project is scalable, both in terms of computational resources for robotic control and time of reaction to stimulus, whithin the system.
