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.