Arquivo para February, 2023
The question of consciousness
28
Feb
The big issue for artificial intelligence was until
recently autonomy, robots, autonomous machines and now autonomous cars, with all the controversy the project evolves, Germany, for example, already provides a line of autonomous cars for the next decade that will begin.
The new issue is the question of consciousness, it has occupied the minds of philosophers for over a century, and can conceptualize in general terms the ability to take actions and consequences of these actions, which has to do with autonomy, because autonomy It is to analyze the consequences of acts performed by machines, the limits of dangerousness and privacy.
In the context of social or historical consciousness, this was Gadamer’s great debate with Dilthey, to which he attributed a conception of romantic consciousness for the absence of a “historical mediation” from facticity, and asks “how will the task of hermeneutics ”and finds a common ground between Schleiermacher and Hegel” (Gadamer, 2002, Truth and Method, p. 256), with the concepts of reconstruction and integration, and according to him, Dilthey makes the intermediate path between them.
Gadamer explains: “Schleiermacher and Hegel could present the two extreme possibilities of answering this question.
Their answers could be assigned to the concepts of reconstruction and integration. For both Schleiermacher and Hegel, in the beginning there is the awareness of a loss and alienation from tradition, which is what drives hermeneutic reflection” (idem).
However, he will say, each of them will determine the task of hermeneutics differently, and what Gadamer calls reconstruction and integration means the separation of preconceptions and alienation from tradition, and therefore rebuild and integrate.
Schleiermacher’s famous thesis is “What matters is to understand a better author than one would have understood himself,” Gadamer thought about the work of art, but Schleiermacher is stuck with his conception of “history of the spirit” which is his concept.
What Hegel says, according to Gadamer, is the creation of a category by stating that the essence of the historical spirit is not the restitution of the past, but the mediation of thought with the present life, which is the prevalence and idealism of the ideal over the factual questions.
And the origin of consciousness, as it happened, is that Terence Deacon is right in claiming that the mind came from matter, and with it came consciousness, if it is true, it is possible to think that somehow the machine, on the levels of intelligence artificial, you may have “consciousness” and then you will know that it is machine and that we humans are not.
What we relate in the videos of Gadamer and Peter Sloterdijk was to introduce this question, and the question of truth is proposed as the genesis of historical consciousness (Gadamer, 2002, p. 265), so machine consciousness cannot have this level.
GADAMER H. G.(2002) Verdade e Método (Truth and Method), 4th ed., Tr. Flavio P. Meurer. Petrópolis: Vozes (Brazilian edition).
A chance for peace
27
Feb
Contrary to what was imagined for a year of war, completed this weekend, the Russia-Ukraine
confrontation may have a different outcome, there is finally a chance for peace.
Brazil made a new proposal for a motion at the UN, in addition to offering to mediate the negotiations, China also seems willing, even if on suspicion of possible military aid to Russia and all this changed the voting scenario for a new motion at the UN, more lenient, condemning the Russian invasion.
The motion approved with some inclusion of the Brazilian text, had a very significant vote, 141 votes voted in favor (more countries than the previous one), 32 abstentions, with China being significant, and seven against: North Korea, Nicaragua, Eritrea , Belarus, Syria, Mali and Russia itself.
Russia says it accepts possible mediation by Brazil, and China obviously would be fine, but already in this case there is distrust in the West, as the text proposed by China speaks of Russian “rest”, if China sends arms to Russia, even with NATO’s aid to Ukraine would be very fragile.
Proposals for amendments were made, Belarus, for example, wanted to remove the part of the text that blamed Russia for starting the conflict, but the Brazilian text, even though it was milder, made Russian aggression clear.
So now there is a greater possibility of a bloc for bilateral peace negotiations from an ideological point of view, and a greater awareness of the attrition and humanitarian damage of war.
Peace is finally starting to be thought of realistically and by both sides in conflict.
Power and interiority
24
Feb
Clarified in the previous post the difference between soul and spirit, the concept used by
Hegel to develop the (metaphysical, for him “subjective”) idea of power uses an analogy of digestion, which Byung Chul Han takes advantage of:
“Power is, for Hegel, already effective at the most elementary level of life. Digestion, in this way, is already the process of power in which the living being takes with him, little by little, his other identity” (Chul Han, What is Power?), he goes so far as to say that the living being generates identity with the other, but ignores that in its genesis there is a metaphysical process.
Nietzsche will develop this issue as the will to power, in this case confused with the domination that we have already dealt with here and which is a sociological category, but power as a metaphor, in our view the most appropriate, is what we generate in our digestive interiority.
How do we digest the image of the other as our identity or not, as we recognize differences not only in the genotype, but mainly in the differences in feelings, judgments and decisions, more broadly according to our cosmovision.
So the desire for peace or war with what is different, tolerance or intolerance in diversities of thought about the world and things should not be in the category of right and wrong, of course, wrong should be punished, but what is wrong it must be circumscribed within the limits of the human, so if killing is wrong, war is a serious mistake where one people can exterminate another.
The renunciation of this metaphysical power, generated in our interiority and our vision of the world, must always be internalized (digested) also as a will, a command, of the non-power.
The biblical lesson on this issue, described as the “temptations of Christ”, is found in the passage Mt 4,1-11.
In the passage after fasting and renouncing the power to turn stones into bread and saying that he should fall on the city of Jerusalem, the devil tempts him with power and shows him the kingdoms of the world: “and he said to him: “I will give you all this, if you kneel before me to worship me.” Jesus said to him, “Get thee behind me, Satan, for it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. Then the devil left him. And the angels approached and served Jesus ′′ (Mt 4. 9-11).
Power and soul
23
Feb
There is nothing in the sociological discourse that actually unveils what the Spirit is, the great
reason why philosophy came to re-work the question of the Other (Levinas, Ricoeur and even Habermas and Chul-Han resumed it) is that the vision idealist is centered on the “I”, vulgar thought has also followed this path: the “mystery”, the key to success, etc.
To have a relationship with the soul, it is necessary to know not the ex-sistence (ex-outside and cistere – cistern), but that God is, his essence is Being in his fullness and thus in him there is ontological fullness and thus the soul, from the Greek anima, is what He inserts into man to give him life.
Thus, its power is ontological, Byung Chul Han manages to relate Heidegger with his conception of power, and also of religion with power, but his reading is dualistic at this point, either religion or ontology, it is true that there is a theo-ontology, but there is a strong relationship.
The relationship that Chul Han establishes is described as follows: “Although God is ‘subjectivity’, this is not exhausted in the abstract identity, without content, of ‘I am I’. He does not remain in an eternal silence and hermeticism´” (Han, 2019, p. 120), quotes he takes from Lectures in the philosophy of religion by Hegel, and it is not surprising that he thinks, he is close to Buddhism and asceticism it’s human.
We already wrote in the previous post that God is power in the Hegelian view, and Chul Han describes it from the idealist idea: “for He is a power of being Himself” (Han, 2019, p. 121), and thus there is no relationship of creation (and not immanence) with everything that exists, including man and his soul. Unlike the Spirit developed by Hegel (Phenomenology of the Spirit), without the relationship with the soul there is no Trinitarian God, in addition to the divine-human Jesus, the Holy Spirit, third person.
Through a true asceticism, man knows a true power, which is not domination in its sociological description, but an ontological relationship with its ascension, through which the biblical reading says man truly rises.
A passage from the divine reading, in which Matthew reveals as a lesson from Jesus (Mt 4,25): “For what good is it for a man to gain the whole world if he loses himself and destroys himself?”, that is, if he destroys his soul.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2018) What is power?. NY; Wiley. (2019 portuguese version)
Power in the current conception: finitude
22
Feb
Undoubtedly one of the most enlightening books on the issue of power was written by Byung
Chul Han, not only because it is in the current context but also because of the excellent philosophical review it does.
Although he passes through several other authors: Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger and Lehmann, among others, it is his opposition to Foucault that establishes the best relationship, his psychopolitics is opposed to Foucault’s biopolitics, there is no doubt that today’s society (through media propaganda) ) strong pressure.
However, at the beginning of the book he uses a definition by Max Weber that I think is more accurate, and develops it like this: “power means the opportunity, within a social relationship, to impose one’s will also against resistance, not important on which such opportunity is based” (Han, 2019. 22, quote from Weber’s Economics and Society).
After this, he concludes that the concept of power is sociologically “amorphous”, so he replaces it with the concept of “domination” (we already posted something about this here), which is “obedience to an order, which is sociologically “more precise”.
However, it will be when the concept of “spatial” (or territorial) and “temporal” (a mandate for a certain time) is recovered, that in fact this precision is, in our view, really achieved.
To enter the question of power from the point of view of religion, he takes it from Hegel, and what he considers as “spirit”, and which in the philosopher’s conception is totally dominated by the question of power: “God is power” (pp. 121), and what defines as spirit is nothing other than human subjectivity (comes from idealist dualism) and thus is also enclosed within the finitude of man himself, there is nothing beyond and greater than time-spatial finitude human.
Hegel says that religion is based “on the desire for an absence of limits, for an infinity that, however, would not be infinite power” (p. 123), and what removes the sin of ignorance from him is that he affirms, saying of its true limits is not an unlimited will to power: “Religion is fundamentally profoundly peaceful. She is kindness” (p. 124).
However, he sees this as a “pure concentration of power”, when it is the opposite, remind several biblical readings “Remember that you are dust and to dust we shall return” (Genesis 3,19) and so it is not difficult to see that God made man of clay (of course, they were metabolic structures capable of duplication, but water is a vital element) and it is not difficult to know that when we return to another physical plane we return to inorganic dust.
Ash Wednesday, in the Christian rite, is to remember this human finitude and to humble the power that man thinks he has, he will always be finite and spatial.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2018) What is power?. NY; Wiley. (2019 portuguese version)
Power and domination
21
Feb
We’ve written in our previous essays about the difference between power and domination, and
while it can be wielded with wisdom and discernment, most of the time it devolves into the purest form of domination: control of opinions and narratives and the exercise of force for this, so it’s very easy to become pure domination.
Byung Chul Han in his book “The swarm” that talks about “psychopolitical” domination discusses the use of media and its control for this, current trends in the use of AI make this more dangerous.
We wrote in a previous post here, long before this war tension looms over our civilization:
“Symmetry, reciprocity, the understanding of human diversity and respect for it are almost always ignored in the models of the beginning of the 20th century, returning to them is nothing but a harbinger of a greater tragedy: the civilizational crisis with deeper roots than the previous ones”, we wrote this well before the beginning of the war in Eastern Europe.
Understanding that this is part of models of political domination of opinions and power narratives, Byung Chul Han’s analysis in his book: “What is power” shows the efficiency of using new media as an efficient and directing form of control even of our “freedoms”.
Among his analyses, we find among several discussions around modern and contemporary philosophy and the routine practices of postmodernity one that is particularly important and that escapes many analyses: gamification.
The game that, in general, motivates participants with its reward system that produces immediate sensations of success is also an exploration tool in psychopolitics. Social communication manifests itself in the grammatical lack of Twitter, in the affective appeal of the like and in the alienation promoted by influencers.
Thus, wanting, which is manageable according to our possibilities and the Other’s reactions, is trained in electronic games as a compulsive wanting, the desire is to “kill” the enemy, and the increasingly compulsive rhythm is being dictated by battles and speed in battles. answers.
Even if you can find advantages in gamification or think of it in educational terms: building a house, a farm or making knowledge games, there is a strong predominance of “battles” and domains of territories.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2018) What is power?. NY; Wiley.
In the week of a year of war
20
Feb
There are intense bombings on the combat fronts in Ukraine and missiles over the country,
there is no prospect of ceasing shooting, internally Ukraine had a 30% drop in its production, while Russia manages to circumvent international sanctions, but not internal dissatisfaction.
The fear of a more intense war is so great that a part of Russian pregnant women, who can travel, went to Argentina, for the sympathy of the government there and it cost, since Argentina has a serious economic crisis that devalued the currency. .
The military maneuvers in the South Atlantic generated protests in the West, Russia, South Africa and China carried out joint military exercises, from the countries that make up the economic bloc of the Brics, Brazil maintains neutrality and should talk this week with Zelensky, while India makes efforts her peace.
The Brazilian government refused to deliver ammunition to the tanks that Germany is sending to Ukraine, but the conversation between Zelensky and Lula could change the scenario, since there is an express request from the American government, and Lula met with Biden recently.
This all shows that there is not just an ideological context, the geopolitical context is thought of, there is even an undeclared agreement between Russia and Israel, which throws the Arab world to the Soviet side, among these forces the fearsome Iran that has been sending drones to Russia.
All this is a cold analysis of the war, but some sources point to 60,000 dead in clashes on the Russian side, and more than 100,000 on the Ukrainian side, thousands of mutilated people, an absurd number of exiled Ukrainian people, in addition to material damage.
In the State of São Paulo, the governor decreed the end of mandatory vaccines in public environments and the federal government will no longer release daily reports on the pandemic
Wrath and Peace
17
Feb
It is true that the history of humanity is punctuated by wars, but what would happen if it were the other way around and men sought in all circumstances to find a more solidary and less dark path for their conflicts.
However, an international conflict at this moment would be a tragedy that could put the civilizing process itself in check and whose consequences would be unimaginable numbers of human lives lost, nature contaminated and material damage.
Meanwhile, the conflict in Eastern Europe is taking on an increasingly international outline, a Russian frigate loaded with unstoppable hypersonic missiles and with a range of a thousand kilometers is heading across the South Atlantic towards the American east coast.
The Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 BC–65 AD) who wrote a treatise on Anger, which unlike many others says that there is no wisdom in it, wrote in his work: “No man is made more courageous through anger, except one who, without anger, , would not have been courageous: anger, therefore, does not come to help courage, but to take its place” (I.13).
So war is not only a bad adviser, it takes the place of courage and true heroism, that which leads humanity to harmony, tolerance and true civility.
It may seem altruistic, but the true Christian teaching is present in many religions, remember Ghandi’s Hinduism, which intransigently defended peace, so says the attentive reading of the Bible: “You have heard what was said: An eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth! I, however, say to you: do not face those who are evil! On the contrary, if someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer him the left as well!” (Mt 5,38-39).
We can avoid a civilizing catastrophe, but not without forgiveness and concessions. There´s still time.
Anger and social issues
16
Feb
One of the strongest arguments for anger is the social issue, before economic, now
cultural and ethnic.
The book by the American John Steinbeck, caused a great malaise in society, was cited with a certain reverence when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 although the book is from 1929, the book was well received in Soviet Eastern Europe at the time and in the Scandinavian countries.
At the time, the book was burned in public squares and banned from schools, it was the beginning of the cold war and McCarthyism (persecution of communists in the USA), although the author never had an affiliation.
The book begins with Tom Joad, the central character of the book, asking for a ride after 7 years in prison which was his sentence for having murdered someone as a result of a bar fight, even though it was in his self-defense he ended up being declared guilty.
He finds nothing in his old house and ends up discovering that they had sold all the belongings and going to Uncle John’s house and getting there he realizes that everyone is ready to leave and discovers that the big companies and farms are closed and the farmers are leaving to California to look for work.
It is the period of the great American depression, and social issues are emerging, the book shows the conditions of work and exploration in the fields of fruit plantations in California, Steinbeck is from the Salinas region, where the novel takes place, which although fiction has a connection with the region.
The question is how far can the limits of this type of revolt go, is it just violence and ideological struggles when these conditions are present, what are the alternatives to the problems, is it likely that we will enter a new recession, in addition to the risk of war, the book by Steinbeck gives us a similar scenario (recession and war) and may point us not to a return to the past, but to a new possibility for the dark future that awaits us.
Steibeck, John. (1939). The grapes of wrath. First edition: New York Viking, 1939.
Anger and social issues
15
Feb
One of the strongest arguments for anger is the social issue, before economic, now cultural
and ethnic.
The book by the American John Steinbeck, caused a great malaise in society, was cited with a certain reverence when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 although the book is from 1939, the book was well received in Soviet Eastern Europe at the time and in the Scandinavian countries.
At the time, the book was burned in public squares and banned from schools, it was the beginning of the cold war and McCarthyism (persecution of communists in the USA), although the author never had an affiliation.
The book begins with Tom Joad, the central character of the book, asking for a ride after 7 years in prison which was his sentence for having murdered someone as a result of a bar fight, even though it was in his self-defense he ended up being declared guilty.
He finds nothing in his old house and ends up discovering that they had sold all the belongings and going to Uncle John’s house and getting there he realizes that everyone is ready to leave and discovers that the big companies and farms are closed and the farmers are leaving to California to look for work.
It is the period of the great American depression, and social issues are emerging, the book shows the conditions of work and exploration in the fields of fruit plantations in California, Steinbeck is from the Salinas region, where the novel takes place, which although fiction has a connection with the region.
The question is how far can the limits of this type of revolt go, is it just violence and ideological struggles when these conditions are present, what are the alternatives to the problems, is it likely that we will enter a new recession, in addition to the risk of war, the book by Steinbeck gives us a similar scenario (recession and war) and may point us not to a return to the past, but to a new possibility for the dark future that awaits us.
Steibeck, John. (1939). The grapes of wrath. First edition: New York Viking, 1939.
