FT24017: Thought as Reality

    Aristotle viewed the reality as forms of inseparable matter that moves from one contrary to another. Potentiality exists and it actualizes itself from within its being. Much later we have carved out these changes and compose things as separable. German Idealist like Kant and Hegel go back to this way but not abandoning the science of separability. What they concoct is reality mediated by thoughts. This mediation is not the Aristotelian sense, but returning to that state from vantage point we know we lost this connectedness. 

    Language is seen as the glue that hold being together for Idealism. It is given that the world is seemingly atomized in the way it shows us, but as we ponder it we realize it's atomization is irrelevant in our conception of it and in a deeper way our conception of reality is also a mirror to what reality is. In this way it very much like glue and we few things as separated when we don't understand them. An example of this would be how we view the environment and our transportation as separate but knowing our transportation, I'm meaning cars here that use gas engines, take part in the environment by either polluting the air. In a naive way we see a car and a cloud as separate and we only see they relate by thinking more and conceptualizing the relatedness.  

    The car example is a simple one. Knowledge is gained by reason which seems to be empirically gathered. Empirical observations are isolated and disconnected. Reason sees the connection and makes concepts whole which returns back to Aristotle's philosophy of seeing being as stark boundaries that are internally unable to be broken apart.

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.

FT24010: Images in Step

     Heidegger describes artworks much like things we observe in any other situation. Particularly they 'appear' to us and their actuality merge with our thought of it. He also describes how artwork can be different from normal experience in that the context of the artwork can be severed from it's actual context. This poses a puzzle for the observer to parse together what something is outside of the context we would normally observe things in our day to day observations.

    Heidegger address the puzzle of the observer of art but not that of the creator of art in this paradox. Heidegger seems to diminish the actual role of the artist as some sort of channel for art to express itself. However when an still life is set up before painting, the idea of the object is considered. The ability for the viewer to distinguish the foreground from the background is an important step.

    In a forest there is an anarchic array of trunks of trees which over take the field of vision. To experience the entire tree that is above ground we have to move our head and cannot receive the image in one instance. This is why many landscapes are of fields flanked by tree lines. It's easier to perceive out of context when there is a clearing or reduction of things. While we are in the woods we are percieving without confusion. A painting of the deep woods would be disorienting to the observer in a way that it isn't when there is context surrounding it.

    Heidegger's observation that the reduction of context of a perceived object in art may not be as special as he describes it. His description seems to be pure Art peering through observation is at work in this case. This simplification is done by the Artist to be sure and not some outside abstraction. Yet this simplification may open itself to open interpretations.

    Aristotle was keen in logic to reduce words to the conventions we recognize in in algebraic equations. X's and Y's stand for something distinct and lack alternative interpretations. It is known that language and words opens itself to ambiguities that can complicate communication of distinct ideas. The simplification of the still life or the landscape isn't to reduce ambiguity but mainly to have clear recognizable objects. Without this simplification there would be no interpretation rather than many because nothing is clear. However, few would admit art's simplification is to plot objects on an x and y axis. 

    In this way art more readily codifies observation in language. Yet what can be said with visual language is more vague than even a word that can mean more than one thing. Heidegger is preoccupied with truth being what is revealed by an object. Truth of an art work is not the understanding of it as a linguistic entrapment of observation. The understanding of an individual work of art is it's truth and not the entire field of art itself. Heidegger's paradox of art still persists in how we derive meaning from something out of context. Our role as this discussion making is distinct from our role of observers of reality. Yet this idea of 'World' Heidegger uses is used for the revealing of truth which reality and art both do. In both cases we are still building our World and inhabiting it. 

note: Heidegger's views on art captured from his writing "The Origin of the Work of Art"

FT24009: Contraries, Movement, History, Recognition

    Aristotle's mind thought in contraries and being moving from one to another is a process of becoming from potentiality. Virtue was a process of arriving at the perfect point such as a healthy weight contrasted to being overweight or underweight. The people who are virtuous are distinct from those who are not. Everything is connected and in some coherent thing and even if you chopped something from it, it would be a piece of that thing rather than a mixture of other things underlying it. Being is granted and doesn't wear a mask and trying to find mysteries behind the thing other then what is is would go against what the thing is. 

    Hegel's dialectical method from basic perception to absolute knowing invokes the Aristotelian contraries but since it's a historical development it is about arriving at an end point that cannot be overshot. In Hegel's system someone can lack absolute knowing but cannot have a gross amount of absolute knowing. The Stoics mused about whether it's possible for a wise man to lose his wisdom and agree that wisdom is obtained and cannot be lost since that would be foolish and contrary to wisdom. But virtue must mean more than having and lacking for it to be meaningful. 

    Virtue is a quality of a person and not measurable. This means it cannot be measured like the distance between two cities. Having and lacking is the most simplistic of measurements as it either is or isn't. The boolean values of a program are not truth or false as qualities but something arbitrarily assigned to make a program work. Why does assigning true and false to something amount to a simplistic measurement? In the stack of logic values can be true or false like was said earlier to get a result of the program we want. There is no requirement for us to actually assume these values to be the case. We could internally feel otherwise and only assign truth to get our desired result. We could think nothing of it and run the program thousands of times.

    Hegel's arrival at absolute truth come about from a large body of thought. Aristotle's thought begins where Hegel has stopped. Aristotle's world is already absolute and his task as a thinker is to extend the actuality to the world. The difference of thought is seen in the two thinker's ethics. Aristotle's ethics is personal and how we fit in with society while Hegel see's this as regular work-a-day petty matters which are in the shadow of a state that decides what is ethical. Hegel puts emphasis the finding and defining what is ethical while for Aristotle what is ethical is already written in the logos of the world and noticeable when we deviate from it. To define what is ethical would mean one does not know what it is to begin with and likely not a mind that obtains it. What is most virtuous is what is least moved.

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.