Arquivo para a ‘Cognition’ Categoria
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.
Philosophy and ascesis today
19
Sep
The civilizational crisis that led to two wars were direct consequences of
thoughts, philosophy, and social structures that even starting from seemingly reasonable principles, such as the concepts of nation, state and moral, led to barbarities and atrocities that is the result of a naive awareness of the role philosophy, thought and knowledge.
Nietszche characterized this, especially referring to German culture as “herd” culture, Peter Sloterdijk more current speaks of immunology, the fact that we want to eliminate all viruses and diseases, but also leads to an idea that starting from the true civilizational crisis, we must defend ourselves from the Other, from other cultures and worldviews.
Nietszche asserts that this has its origins in Greek culture, which would never have abandoned the idea: “in their instinct of popular law, the Greeks denounced, and even at the height of their civilization and humanity, they never failed to utter words such as: belongs to the conqueror, with wife and child, with goods and blood. It is the violence that gives the first right, and there is no right that is not in its foundation arrogance, usurpation, act of violence “, in” “The Greek state” (Brazilian edition of 1996).
What man after modernity wants, this is Sloterdijk’s thesis is no longer a spiritual, but physical ascesis from exercises and immunology (perfect nutrition, athletic rigor, etc.), what Nietzsche at the end of Genealogy wrote about values that would be able to guide the lives of men in the twilight of the gods: “vitality, understood somatically and spiritually, is the medium that contains a gap between the more and the less. It has within itself the vertical movement that guides the ascents, it does not need additionally external and metaphysical attractors. That God should be dead in this context does not matter. With or without God each one arrives only as far as his (physical) form allows, “which is written in You have to change your life, (Du musst Dein Leben ändern. Über Antropotechnik, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2009, still without translation to Portuguese).
The fact that we call football coaches, coaches of masters is not mere chance, soon also personal training, nutritionists and various other types of immunologists will also be masters of our lives, they direct our being.
The rebirth of being, the noosphere of spirit and mind, are forms of return to true life, the Lebenswelt and Lebensphilosophie, logic and philosophy of LIFE
Active Vita and tiredness
11
Sep
Still Chyul-Han, the Korean-German of “The society of fatigue”, part of Vita
Activa’s analysis of Hanna Arendt (we translate Vita from Latin, for life up to here), explaining that it starts from the prevalence in the Christian life of the contemplative life , clarifies in a note that she seeks “a mediation between active life and contemplative life … as described by St. Gregory: ‘we must know: when we demand a good program of life, from the active vita to the contemplative life, it is often useful if the soul returns from the contemplative life to the active life, so that it is called the contemplation which has been kindled in the heart to transmit all its perfection to the activity “(HAN, 2017, 39)
The author points out that she [Arendt]: “a new connection between her new definition of active vita and the primacy of action” (page 40), she goes on to heroic activism, but unlike her master Heidegger who ” was a decisive action on the subject of death “(ibid.), it is guided by the possibility of the” birth of man himself, and in the new beginning, by virtue of his nascent character, men should perform this new beginning by action. ”
The author explains that this action as birth contains a quasi-religious dimension: “the miracle consists in the fact that human beings are born purely, and together with them, they give the new beginning that they can carry out by action by virtue of his being-born … “(pp. 40 and 41), quoting Hanna Arendt.
But he concerted a possible modern interpretation, for Arendt, who saw in the unheard of heroic action of all human capacities a “cessation in mortal passivity” (p. 42).
Thus he clarifies that Arendt’s descriptions of the modern animal laborans are not those of the performance society, the “postmodern animal” is provided with the ego to the point of nearly tearing itself apart. He can be anything but passive. “(Page 41)
He adds that the “modern loss of faith, which concerns not only God and beyond, but reality itself, becomes radically transient human life” (page 42).
He claims the homo sacer of Agamben, “are like undead. Here, the word sacer does not mean ‘damn’, but ‘sacred’. Now, naked life itself, which has become radically transient, naked is sacred, and must be preserved at all costs “(HAN, 2017, 46).
HAN, B. C. A sociedade do cansaço. (The society of fatigue). BR, Petrópolis: Vozes, 2017.
Activa’s analysis of Hanna Arendt (we translate Vita from Latin, for life up to here), explaining that it starts from the prevalence in the Christian life of the contemplative life , clarifies in a note that she seeks “a mediation between active life and contemplative life … as described by St. Gregory: ‘we must know: when we demand a good program of life, from the active vita to the contemplative life, it is often useful if the soul returns from the contemplative life to the active life, so that it is called the contemplation which has been kindled in the heart to transmit all its perfection to the activity “(HAN, 2017, 39)The author points out that she [Arendt]: “a new connection between her new definition of active vita and the primacy of action” (page 40), she goes on to heroic activism, but unlike her master Heidegger who ” was a decisive action on the subject of death “(ibid.), it is guided by the possibility of the” birth of man himself, and in the new beginning, by virtue of his nascent character, men should perform this new beginning by action. ”
The author explains that this action as birth contains a quasi-religious dimension: “the miracle consists in the fact that human beings are born purely, and together with them, they give the new beginning that they can carry out by action by virtue of his being-born … “(pp. 40 and 41), quoting Hanna Arendt.
But he concerted a possible modern interpretation, for Arendt, who saw in the unheard of heroic action of all human capacities a “cessation in mortal passivity” (p. 42).
Thus he clarifies that Arendt’s descriptions of the modern animal laborans are not those of the performance society, the “postmodern animal” is provided with the ego to the point of nearly tearing itself apart. He can be anything but passive. “(Page 41)
He adds that the “modern loss of faith, which concerns not only God and beyond, but reality itself, becomes radically transient human life” (page 42).
He claims the homo sacer of Agamben, “are like undead. Here, the word sacer does not mean ‘damn’, but ‘sacred’. Now, naked life itself, which has become radically transient, naked is sacred, and must be preserved at all costs “(HAN, 2017, 46).
HAN, B. C. A sociedade do cansaço. (The society of fatigue). BR, Petrópolis: Vozes, 2017.
Society of Tiredness
30
Aug
Byung-Chul Han’s book “The Society of Fatigue” analyzes in a deeper and less 
individualistic way the deeper question from the ontological point of view of man at the end of modernity: “Neuronal diseases such as depression, deficit disorder (ADH), borderline personality disorder (BPD), or Burnout Syndrome (SB) determine the pathological landscape of the early 21st century. “(HAN, 2017, p.7)
The individual question of the romantic hero of Don Quixote fighting against windmills, or of the historical determinism of the question of consciousness in Dilthey, are in fact traces of romantic idealism, circumvent the problem and try to solve it from the psychological point of view only.
Without considering the social that is broader. Chul-Han’s analysis goes in this direction, to say that “the object of immune defense is strangeness as such” (page 8), using a Sloterdijk concept makes it clear that the last century was an era in which a ” Clear between the inside and outside … the Cold War followed the immunological scheme.” Thus “even though the stranger has no hostile intention, even though he represents no danger, he is eliminated by virtue of his otherness.” (pp. 8 and 9)
He will explain on page 10 that “otherness is the fundamental category of immunology”, the difference is that “it does not provoke any immunological reaction,” “the strange gives way to the exotic,” the “tourist travels to visit him.”
The concept is due to the twentieth century where the idea of combating bacteria has led some people to the extreme of even considering the microorganisms necessary for life, as those who must also be combated and not infrequently find someone with this Touch.
Recovering the concept of Immunitas from Roberto Esposito, considering it a false hypothesis, considering the excess of information, clarifying what is common to combat a new epidemic (by immunology): “resistance against the request for extradition of a chief of Foreign state accused of human rights violations, reinforcement against illegal immigration and strategies to counteract the latest computer virus attack? “(page 11), the author will say that nothing separates them. It will say that “the immunological paradigm is not in line with the globalization process… The hybridization, which dominates not only the theoretical-cultural discourse but also the feeling we have today, is diametrically opposed to the Immunization. “(Idem).
“The dialectic of negativity is the fundamental trait of immunity.” (Idem) and how many discourses this trait reminds us, apparently within an “engagment” is actually empty, since it is absent from true alternatives, it is purely immune because it accuses the Other . Quote on page 15 Baudrillard, who speaks of the “obesity of all present systems,” in a time of overabundance, “the problem turns more to rejection and expulsion” (ibid.).
It gives a true diagnosis, applies both to “disciplinary systems” (the pseudo-ethics) and to the logic of production: “what causes depression of exhaustion is not the imperative to obey only oneself but the pressure of performance. “(Page 27)
HAN, Byung-Chul. A Sociedade do cansaço (The society of fatigue), trans. Enio Paulo Giachini, 2ª. Ed. Expanded, RJ: Petrópolis, Vozes, 2917
Aspects of phenomenology
02
Aug
Both the so-called “pure” sciences and other experimental sciences depart
from empirical data or “practical” hypotheses to develop their postulates, Husserl warned that the instability of empirical data as well as much of the theoretical postulates do not provide the necessary rigor as regards To philosophical inquiry.
In essential aspects, positivist science or its field of analysis to the experimental, or considers as “phenomenon” regions that are veiled by some methodological rigor limiting a general analysis more comprehensive and not explanatory of certain phenomena.
What Husserl understood as a “comprehensive analysis” is that which refers to consciousness and this in turn is based on experiences (Erlebnis) of the world occur in and through consciousness, henceforth its postulate “all consciousness is consciousness of something”.
It is in this perspective that Husserl takes from his master Franz Brentano his most essential category of intentionality, so intention is a general characteristic of this consciousness.
This is the first point in the analysis of the phenomenon, so different from the Cartesian cogito which gains a new meaning from the intentionality (the consciousness of something) that, contrary to being “clear and distinct” as Descartes wanted, is directed (intends) to something.
In addition to the intentionality Husserl considers intuition and apodic evidence, being the intention of an object (the example is a book on the table), there being the “meaningful content” (Bedeutungsintention) of something, then “we mean intentionally” (meinen) some Object, without even considering its presence,
Intuition is then the fulfillment of an intention, then it may consider “evidence” to be the consciousness of intention, therefore it is intuitive but insofar as there is a “consciousness of the phenomenon”, and in this sense it is apodictic, ie it is self-evident , there is no need for empirical evidence.
A last aspect is the hylé, the “subjective matter” that composes any perception, although there are the “hiletic data” that would be “constituted by the sensible contents, which comprise, besides the external sensations, also the feelings, impulses, etc. ” (ABBAGNANO dictionary, 2000, page 499). Are not only the “matter” upon which consciousness is given, and are not empirical.
Then appears the Husserlian epoché, which is the parenthesis, we will explore later.
Identity, dialogue and transparency
22
Jun
Three elements that seem distinct are in deep connection in a globalized time,
which is reflected in the incomprehension of the emergence of a certain form of nationalism, see the US and French elections, Brexit in England, but on the positive side of the dialogue is exactly the Understanding of which cultures have roots in originating societies
The confusion that we can see in Brexit now that the first deals begin to be negotiated is that from the economic point of view is a complicating element while in the aspect of immigration and relationship between nations is a very high tension.
Identity means to be aware of identity, and we have already done in several posts the analysis that is necessary for this awareness the dialogue with the different, since dialogue with equals is monologue, it can be said that the deeper the dialogue with the Other, The more you are aware of your own identity.
Transparency is the complicating element, so we said above that there is “a certain kind of nationalism” that sees only the pairs and never the different ones, it is a kind of closure that does not lead to greater identity because it is not transparent and authentic with itself and with the Other.
It is necessary to distort facts, to work with the relativism of truth and mainly to resort to prejudice, and all this leads to an absence of transparency both in the individual and in the social field, what is wanted is to shape society to a national mirror, inconceivable In an era already globalized, with people walking all over the globe.
What we see with the lack of transparency is an inevitable polarization in prejudices and ideologies, which is conceivable at an early stage of dialogue, but impossible to build relationships in a time that demands increasingly broad and open relations. It is possible to make the discourse that the conflict is necessary, but where it should move, to the closing in groups and bubbles, because the fragility of this discourse is evident, of course it is possible that in a point of the dialogue the tempers become heated, without the Fusion of horizons and a walk forward an epoché (put in brackets), open the ears to the listening of the Other
Epistemology and crisis of thought
01
Jun
The British philosopher David Hume, in the eighteenth century, writes in the
Treatise on Human Nature, a questioning of induction as a valid mechanism for scientific discovery, was the part of this question that Karl R. Popper in The Logic of Scientific Research by Karl R Popper (1902-1994), brought the “novelty” in the philosophy debate of science by repeating the Humean idea.
The problem formulated by Popper was based on the separation of metaphysics (pseudoscience) and true science, “empirical science”, but Thomas Khun (1922-1996) in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Will question this.
The history of science would already demonstrate this, that is, that periodically, one paradigm was replaced by another, although this is not by a simple observation incompatible with the theory, as it attested the principle of the falsperabilidad popperian, what happens is a change of Thought, he quotes Copernicus, but Heisenberg with the quantum principle and Albert Einstein with the Theory of Relativity are more general.
The Hungarian mathematician and philosopher Imre Lakatos (1922-1974) followed Popper’s ideas and the principle of falsifiability by softening it: the history of science would demonstrate that theories were never completely abandoned, even when refuted.
Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) developed a radically innovative argument in his work suggestively titled Against Method, stating that there was never the possibility of establishing objective criteria for the evaluation of scientific theories. Denying the whole method of logical positivism, which defended a unique methodological standard.
However, this crisis has already deepened, we have already mentioned Edmund Husserl, who looked at the crisis of the European sciences in the development of his phenomenology, among several statements we find: “With the awakening of the reflection of the relation between knowledge and the object, abyssal obstacles . Knowledge, the most obvious thing in natural thought, suddenly appears as a mystery, “and will have between notable later influences like Heidegger and Gadamer, who take up the ontological question, where consciousness is essential.
The Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos, in his writing A discourse on the sciences, revalues the controversy introducing that the attenuation of the distinction between organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman would be useless, but the question of the conscience is not touched.
Edgar Morin, H.G. Gadamer, Lévinas and Ricoeur, and other contemporary thinkers agree that it takes a turn in thought, wrapped in complexity and experiences
Hermeneutics and fanaticism
29
May
From the Platonic philosophy, which was an overcoming of the discourse of the
sophists that served only the rhetoric of power, the dualism of knowledge between the Doxa that is the opinion and the Episteme that would be the true knowledge, but some authors see Doxa as first knowledge.
All discourse and Socratic logic, which Plato uses abundantly, is nothing but the dialogue between knowledge as presented and its elaboration through questions.
The fact that we fall into a labyrinth of doubts and crises in modernity, even with systematized knowledge is nothing but the return to what is in fact the episteme, how life changes, the logic of life would also be expected, must change and so Changes the method of investigating it.
I call this requirement of our time “epistemological openness,” allowing new systems and new ways of thinking to be possible and amenable to analysis, so “doxa” or simple opinion may not be just a modern form of sophistry, but a “Unveiling”.
Fanaticism is generally the refusal to an “epistemological opening,” is the closure in a scheme “that worked” for a period, but may no longer serve the logic of life today.
Of course there are several levels of fanaticism, but in essence it is a closure to the discourse of the Other, to the hermeneutic circle where some form of fusion of horizons is possible, as the philosopher Gadamer calls it.
So to speak is the communication that another discourse different from that of my epistemic circle is not accepted, it is not tolerable and should be banished, hence to get violent forms of communication is not a step, but it is an almost inevitable path.
It is not an epistemic closure, a help is Marshall Rosenberg’s book “Nonviolent Communication” ranges from self-help to freedom from conditioning and negative experiences, to philosophical schemes and problems of political positioning so common in all spheres of our Life today
The Symbolic of Evil
02
May
Thirteen centuries after the “conversion” of Augustine of Hippo who changed 
Manichaeism through Christianity, the key to reading about “evil” returns to the foreground with one of the greatest hermeneutics of the twentieth century: Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005).
His extensive philosophical work with about 30 books, in addition to lectures and interviews, takes up the issue of evil, which for Augustine of Hippo is the “absence of good” and will discuss the presence of evil through the “symbolic” of evil.
The hermeneutics of Ricoeur keeps the tradition phenomenology, but it searches in original ways and distances of prejudices reaching unpublished sources and unusual readings.
For Ricoeur one can only access the human being in a mediated way, through his symbols and myths, something ignored by the spiritual “dryness” of modern thought.
For him, while Hegelian Idealism (which purported to be a “Phenomenology of the Spirit”) that reduced man to spirit and Positivism to the state of object, the “thing” and therefore married well with materialism.
The task of hermeneutic phenomenology has the task of recovering what has fallen into oblivion, that is, “going back to things” as Husserl put it, and founding a “true philosophy”, but Ricoeur will also discover the insufficiency of phenomenology.
What is accessible in access to itself is a world that lacks interpretation, for it is symbolic, in the sense that it is a conscience directed towards something, but that it must also turn to what is meaning, a world of meanings, Which should before returning to self-understanding.
The development of this symbolic is what Ricoeur will call the “long way”, not in opposition to the short path of the mystics, which is Agapic Love, but in opposition to the hermeneutic Gadamer calls Dilthey’s Romantic, and that in the case of Ricoeur is
Search for a “long way”, has ontology as a horizon, to arrive at the understanding of being is necessary to pass through the analysis of languages, understanding of signs, symbols and their reflection. The reason why Ricoeur does not accept this inversion proposed by Heidegger, although he disagrees with Heidegger, since his symbolic hermeneutics also has the ontology as a horizon, but that it does it through the mediation of the conflict and of the different interpretations of the things “in Yes “.
For Ricoeur, symbol and interpretation become related concepts: “there is interpretation where there is multiple sense, and it is in the interpretation that the plurality of the senses is manifest” (RICOEUR, 2013).
But for him the symbol is more than a sign “because it is in the place of” in a different way, expressed by it as follows:
“I call a symbol to any structure of signification in which a direct, primary, literal meaning appoints another indirect, secondary, figurative meaning which can only be apprehended through the former. (RICOEUR, 2013).
Gradually, we will penetrate this “symbolic of evil” aided by Ricoeur, to understand how this still hinders the walking that is ontological of humanity, but the interpretation of the ways and the understanding of the paths of consciousness.
RICOEUR, P. The symbolic of evil. USA; Harper & Row, 1967, 357 p.
