FT24012: AI as a Nihilism Bank

    Understanding in the days of old consisted of things read for us. These things drew attention to our ability to recognize them revealing an inner world of ourselves and our rationality. Aristotle was a good example of this method. Heidegger nuanced it with a Faustian twist. Underneath what we observe is a hidden layer that reveals us a truer understanding. This means to recognize true objects we have to be specialists and see the atoms at play or the stats behind something that first appears random. 

    In this pursuit we want to make a super intellect with our computers. This new intellect does not see things as things but grids of normalized numbers. This is the atomized intellect that corresponds with this new rationality which is not mediated by concepts like our human understanding is. In order for us to understand it we have to then link it to a known concept we do recognize. 

    This new intellect doesn't do what Heidegger says we do, reveal. We don't know what it is doing and we cannot interpret it conceptually and it doesn't map to our experience. As we do this we further isolate this process of revealing what is hidden to something that is more like that hidden. We could could see thinking moving towards this creation and then reverting back to a more human centered way of thought letting this process of truth we cannot see maintain the knowledge of the truth we cannot see. 

    The culmination of this project has been at the expense of our sense of meaning. Nihilism has been a noticeable part of culture because our values may obscure or dim perception of what is hidden. Nietzsche was sure this project of seeing hidden things in a cascade of hidden things a source of weakness in our psyche. He was stumped as how to overcome this vaguely referencing some Buddhist like methodology that needs to be translated to western thought.

    Maybe a more realistic way is we create a machine to be nihilistic better than we can. Humans often think in terms of reaching completion like Aristotle does in his teleological thinking. When something is more complete than we can be we don't gravitate towards it. We take conceptual thinking and rationality as a goal in many ways because we only see it in humanity. Humanity has not always emphasized nihilism and we may accept computer do a better job of it than ourselves freeing ourselves back to our more qualitative and conceptual origins as thinkers.

FT240011: Space and Kant

    Space and mind have a similar arrangement for Kant. Our minds heavily analyze what's in space but Kant does want to distinguish that space is independent of our experiences and our on looking is all but contingent. In a way--a mind outside a mind.

    Space though is filled with concepts just as we have in our mind and we are attuned to it. This is also similar to Heidegger's idea of 'dwelling' in that we are not simply observing but making our observations our own. Another feature is space must be similar to our way of observing for this to work.  Hegel wants to nuance this familiarity as he sees our mind and the world as intimately combined but through a process of negation. 

    Hegel's negation means we recognized the phenomenal world is mind but outside of our mind. Is this different from Kant seeing Space and mind as fundamentally the same? Kant seems to limit our experiences in a way umpires do in the sense of calling balls and strikes but Hegel does not see so clear a separation. Kant sees limits between mind and the world while Hegel is persuaded that these limits are also a distinction the mind makes. Kant's view can explain the world as we observe it while Hegel may not grant this directness in observation and convinced we always observe from a distance and the world is ourselves that we make inverted by observation. 

    Hegel makes us work harder to fully understand existence making the content of phenomena. One reason to think this is he doesn't define space like Kant does. Kant views space as where phenomena happens and Hegel thinks this clearly defined place for events is problematic and the reason that Kant then quickly limits what space can ultimately be in terms of our understanding of it. Kant sees space as a mind we cannot fully fathom working independently from us. Our roll in observing makes little difference in its appearance and we lack a certain agency. 

    Kant's limitation separates us from connected whole we were part of in earlier philosophies and something Hegel responds to giving us back this connection setting a framework where Heidegger's idea of 'dwelling' can make sense where it would seem unimportant in Kant's framework.