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.

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"