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.