FT24007: Technology of Cognition

    Hiedeggar sees technology separately from the crafts of ancient Greeks that informed Aristotle's causes. The causes Aristotle uses apply the clarity of our senses. We wonder about the things that appear to use. Technology is something different in that we anticipate something unseen in our observations that has to be elucidated. This elucidation is not based on observation but a testing of a framework we apply to our observations meaning because we don't directly observe it we have to imply it is there. This goes beyond mere imagination because as we adopt these assumptions we have greater agency than when we don't. 

    One example Hiedeggar gives is a cultivating a farm. A field is easy for us to imagine growing plants from it. With technology we see more than what a field is to increase the growing capacity of the earth. Particularly we imagine all the components of invisible matter that composes the field. Hegel wants to do this with philosophy. In the early stages of his phenomenology, he states that philosophies prior to his only promote a 'love of wisdom' rather than achieve actual wisdom. Much of how he attends to this project is to go into the mind past what is clearly spoken about in cognition to make a science of cognition.

    There is a characteristic problem with atomizing cognition which Hegel is keenly aware of. The relation between Subject and Object is not so separate. When we atomize cognition, we atomize it through our cognition. Plants will still grow in a field we make obscure to increase its growing capacity even if we don't study why as a farmer benefits from science even if the farmer doesn't study science and knows nothing about why the field grows more plants. The mind atomizes itself through itself and to use this new science of the mind the mind must study itself. For the field to be fertile it must have the enhanced fertilizer and must deliver the nutrients to the plants and the plants have to assemble this into their bodies. In philosophy the mind is the field and must do all this work for itself. For it to benefit from these studies it must know all the bits that are needed rather than rely on plants to grow for it. 

    What happens to this heightened sense of self-awareness.  It does not seem to go as far as Nietzsche's overcoming of man. Hegel does not promote a self that creates its own values as this self is still planted in Reality that cannot be ignored. In Hegel's project we may not even change what it is we are doing but just have a more intense and realistic understanding of who we are. Unlike many technologies receiving boundless funding now, there does not seem to be gains to be made with this science that we promise by atomizing things like biotechnology and computer science. We are still in the middle of our humanity and its limitations that aren't broadened from where we started.

     

FT24006: Creation and Thought

     Theistic philosophy sees God as a creator. Creation as a god cannot come from a material source so this creator is often given the property to create by thought. Much how our imagination is limited, God is not, and everything we see is in fact a thought of God. Humans have a limited capacity to share in this. These philosophies often see our roll, not as creators of the universe, but those who observe it. Being is generated by god but our capacity is a diminutive form of it. Instead of creating being we recognize it and name it. 

    Naming can almost seem a form of creation. If we name something few have experienced or few can understand we are credited for this naming. This naming still has the abstract quality of being and all its vagueness. Our names are generalities that can be applied over and over again to different observations. We take this practice when we name our children names that have named countless other people. However, names that are oddly specific or names of well known people strike us as odd. So odd we wonder if their parents are not capable of thinking clearly. Here it is clear that naming is important to allow multiplicity and avoid being overly specific. 

    Mathematical naming is an extreme example as an exception to our naming schema. In logical practices like these it's import that a name cannot denote anything other than the very thing at hand. In mathematical formulas its important that a symbol mean something specific and not allow the vagueness words bring in such as different understandings of what a word means. An equation cannot be calculated if this is not the case.

    Reason involves the matching of our understanding with what is created around us. We attach words to these understandings but if we become too descriptive we lose the pairing of our understanding towards reason. For instance, it's common for someone grappling with a concept to expect a knower of this concept to relate it in a clearly assembled set of words--in much the same way as a succinct formula. This is rarely a possibility and rejecting this simplicity is often the first step in learning. This succinct, precise language can be bound by logic but it does not amount to Reason. 

    To come back to the point of theism, we should recognize that Reason would be us adjusting our understanding to God's thoughts. The question is does Reason have currency in atheistic philosophy. Here being does not have a starting point that is outside our self. Descartes does give god the credit of a creator but he does launch a train of thought that could go in another direction. His famous "I think therefore I am" does amount to giving our thought as a generative power much like God. His rationalism give our source of thinking first before we can then intuit any concept of God.

    Other stand-ins for God include society and further yet the individual. This wraps up philosophy in the terms of politics and our will. Particularly the existentialists took hold of this and promoted the individual as the locus of being and creating being but curiously preoccupied with nihilism.

    As philosophies move away from theistic foundations the source of being becomes less important. The role of language can even mock this non-significance. The vagueness in words can suggest a multiplicity that lacks intelligibility. Word play can be a spectacle about our distinct inability to know Reason in any meaningful way. There is no grand thinker causing the being around us in this case. The words we use to correspond with Reason are empty.

FT24005: Will and Anger

    Ressentiment for Nietzsche combines the lust for revenge that never gets satisfied. This is unhealthy and disfigures a soul that is consumed by it. He doesn't discard revenge in totality but advocates that the strong willed exact revenge in a way that satisfies an insult. He often connects this with an old world cultures that appear in pre-christianity to show how the modern man is developing into a pathetic set of thoughts.

    Yet, writings from this old world do not always agree with this. Old writers emphasize the toll anger exacts on us. Servants and slaves cause rumination on this topic. Nietzsche mandates that this period is categorized by the strong dominating the weak. These old writers would fit this category in that they are masters over people with less status fully subjected to the Nietzschian will to power. What happens is these servants perform tasks poorly and in their position they can exact any punishment that they see fit. Writers like Plutarch caution against this from the stand point of what becomes of you as you act in rage.

    All these annoyances sum up and Plutarch responds with a common motif of ethical thinking from the period. He asks us to look at people that have obvious problems with rage and how we react to them. We see these people as out of control and by their habits lose themselves to their emotions. Plutarch admits it's better to let people squander on trivial tasks like failing to remember buying bread for dinner than distort yourself in anger in punishing it. 

    Another writer of these times--Seneca--also has a similar conclusion. Instead of conjuring an instance of someone else, he has us imagine what our faces look like in the mist of rage reflected in a mirror. Our sober self would cringe at the sight. The transformation of our selves in this way is a clear indication of lack of virtue. This virtue is not some decree by the will to power as Nietzsche genealogizes morality to be but some fundamental recognition of stability. 

    Here there is a conflict. Nietzsche has morality be this code that is arbitrarily imposed by those who rule. He uses the past to justify the violence we see in this time but it is also the time which virtue ethics culminated. True, he does acknowledge Aristotle but only to undermine him and show his ethics is just a cloaked version of the will to power. These ancient thinkers had more cultural lee way in how they treated others yet they did notice that behavior--even if allowed--causes a disfigurement just as much as the ressentiment of Nietzsche.

FT24004: The Will in the Present

     The will is located in the present. It is not an integral part of our history and it isn't clear what the future holds. The will is a fundamental part of an individual and exist at the same time as we think. Our present does not stay the same and our will is fundamentally different in different parts of our life. Our actions are provoked by our will and commands us to focus on certain things rather than others.

    Philosophers attribute certain qualities to the will and what motivates it--re: Nietzsche et al. These qualities seem to exist prior to any formation by experience and experience can even tarnish the will. Yet we also see the will develop in philosophies like Hegel. We experience as we will and this experience we have to understand and see how it fits with our willing. Hegel has a passage contrasting the will of the heart vs. the will of the world which focuses us on how we actively have to measure our will with reality.

    This constant reoccurring projection of our will into the present has an iterative nature and each present vanishes into another present. If there were no source of change each present would be the same present much like some coral in a the sea staying the same until it dies. Defining the self as the will is problematic in that it doesn't account for why this will changes and why we choose to disregard our will much like how Hobbes defines the our contract in society. 

    With our experiences, we filter these presents differently even if there is no fundamental change in what we will. There has to be some connectivity with the past that forms our present--even if the present us is what is most real meaning what we exist in. The shaping process of our intellect is very much the accumulation of past experiences. The past shape is also a limited shape and this contrasts with present which opens itself to many possibilities. The present using the past shape to slightly nudge the past shape is a part the will plays in but does not define a person fully.

    The will as a thing separate from anything else cannot be subject to ethics. Alone it has no account for where it has been and where it needs to go. We can account for this because the will is integrated into how we think and our memory of the past. Even though our wills are important in our existence in the present it is not what makes us ourselves.

FT24003: Skepticism and Statistics

     Skeptics deny the direct apprehension of things and the mediation by our senses then caste everything into doubt. Their origins want to create a mind that's not deceived by appearances and guide someone to ataraxia. This process often starts from something that appears clear and by continually reminding oneself that nothing is clear a person can see through the charade. 

    This attitude is also the same in statistics when we give a probabilistic measure that something is the case or it is not the case. The first step is to see what is in question as possibly true or false. The Skeptics practiced this, too, but only to see this dual possibility as a reason to reject either case at the same time. Yet the statistician role is to use probability to conclude whether something is likely or not by the end of the calculations.

    But the truth of a statistic is never fully granted and either possibility is still granted some validity. Nothing is truly apprehended in this way in comparison to a truth we find indisputable.  The statistic also undermines any knowledge of causality. For example, in some philosophies the belief in God asserted with no possibility for God to be false. Furthermore, in these philosophies the creation of our existence is also given as an absolute reality. While there are observations within this system that are 'indifferent'--as the the Stoics say--there is no place for chance in the important matters. 

    A statistical view or a skeptical view do require a basis of thought underlying them. This is obvious when a statistical model is formed from metrics that do not relate to each other. Because of the formulaic nature of statistics even poorly formed metrics can be calculated and assessed by calculation. What is most troubling is often statistics is used in cases where something is not clear to us. Why would we bother with all the work to calculate the probability of, for instance, the likelihood a person will die or live indefinitely? Because statistics is used to clarify something we do not have a grasp on, it is hard to judge if the criteria of the model is rigorous or even coherent. 

    Statistics are also largely generated from some type of measurement by a machine. These machines are not always precise or accurate. If we had a machine that grossly measured speed wrong, we could statistically surmise that there is no indication that the velocity of something falling increases with time as it falls to the earth.  The skeptics are concerned about our biological machines--our senses. And variation bothers the skeptics and they often use the diversity of thing of a particular genus as grounds to reject forming fixed opinions about them even if we see them clearly with our eyes. 

    Yet the conclusions made from statistics reject a mindset that values concrete reality just as the skeptics do. Statistics differs from skepticism in that its goal is to assent or reject some observed experience. Both ways of thinking do not organize experience in a coherent framework of thinking derived from first principles. Statistical expertise would largely fit into Aristotle's explanation of 'working knowledge' rather than 'actual knowledge'. 'Actual knowledge' is knowing the causes behind experience. Statistics can have some agency in our decision making but we can not fully deduce from it because it lacks the rigor of known premises. Statistics makes a recommendation on what is real or not but does not have a framework for reality. The distrust of reason is implicit in statistics as it is in skepticism.

FT24002: The Will and Nihilism

    The will is central in many philosophies as it is a locus of our self particularly in the present. Many try to ascribe an innate character to the will. For Nietzsche it is the will to power and for Schopenhauer it is the will to procreate. These philosophies of the will also describe the denaturing of the will as a form of nihilism. Remarkably, one can go on with a denatured will, but in shadowy way that ethically blocks the person from reaching an eudaimonic conclusion. 

    Schopenhauer and Nietzsche also see Christianity as flipping of the will. For Nietzsche, loving each person equally hinders the will to power over others. Schopenhauer also sees a flipping Christianity in terms of chastity. This chastity flips the procreative element of the will and shows a will that wants to end life.

    A more recent philosopher, Foucault, also see an important element of the sexual life but in a way that makes a person more radical and differentiates into an individual. He does not agree with Schopenhauer that this is a reduction of the will but the will itself. Foucault's views on sexuality have little to do with causing life. To this end it is interesting that the chastity of Christianity and the abundance of sex with Foucault are related in what philosophers of the will report as nihilism in Schopenhauer's system. 

    However in these cases, the will's temporal nature does not describe a person from birth to death. One's will is often a small slice of someone's life that is under continual flux. The ideas of Aristotle have a broader out look where Society is a container of all our wills past and present. In the Aristotelian view we have to moderate our wills to fit into our society so that at the end of our careers we can achieve our goals while being in good repute with our neighbors. 

    Individualistic philosophers tend to see nihilism as a denatured will that an individual recognizes as insufficient while a societal view of ethics puts society as the judge of the will. If society judges one's will, it is possible for an individual to will but not recognize the quality of their will. An individual that is judging the quality of their will doesn't look to society for approval and many ways sees society as an obstacle in their willing.

FT24001: Verbal à la Text

    Reading text and listening to a conversion have drastically separate modes. Reading is a means to speedily receive information while a conversation is not remarkably fast. Instead conversations are how to receive updates on the state of something known. Reading text, one can read as leisurely as one pleases but we often want to choose a pace that efficiently incorporates the meaning of the text into our attention. However, videos largely serve as a means to pass time. They may have some educational stance but the density of information because of the limits of the verbal amount of ideas that can be easily be presented.

    It is possible now on many websites to speed the playback of videos. In away this is making more assumptions that one is consuming the video like it is a text. The outcome is more information in a shorter period of time but there is still a limitation. One is that the jarring change of the voice that is sped up which we will have to tolerate if we want to choose this method. Reading at different speeds does not fundamentally alter the appearance of the words we are understanding. Second is that the information is not made at the speed which it is sped up to and the quality of information is still not dense like a text is.

    Most academic works are in text. Lectures expound on these texts but only in reference to the original textual material that one would expect to read if one takes the subject matter seriously or is expected to have an expertise in the information. To this end, if a verbal interview was subsequently converted into text, the quality of the ideas compared to an edited work originally intended for text would still apply. There is a fundamental distinction of a train of thought made primarily for text.  

    Words are how we interact with our own being and the beings that surround us. Yet verbal conversation is not how we fully immerse our self and is more closely related to pure experience prior to forming ideas. Text is where our mind is more rooted in being purely and where we like to document our fuller understanding of whatever it is we are thinking about.