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.

FT24002: The Will and Nihilism

    The will is central in many philosophies as it is a locus of our self particularly in the present. Many try to ascribe an innate character to the will. For Nietzsche it is the will to power and for Schopenhauer it is the will to procreate. These philosophies of the will also describe the denaturing of the will as a form of nihilism. Remarkably, one can go on with a denatured will, but in shadowy way that ethically blocks the person from reaching an eudaimonic conclusion. 

    Schopenhauer and Nietzsche also see Christianity as flipping of the will. For Nietzsche, loving each person equally hinders the will to power over others. Schopenhauer also sees a flipping Christianity in terms of chastity. This chastity flips the procreative element of the will and shows a will that wants to end life.

    A more recent philosopher, Foucault, also see an important element of the sexual life but in a way that makes a person more radical and differentiates into an individual. He does not agree with Schopenhauer that this is a reduction of the will but the will itself. Foucault's views on sexuality have little to do with causing life. To this end it is interesting that the chastity of Christianity and the abundance of sex with Foucault are related in what philosophers of the will report as nihilism in Schopenhauer's system. 

    However in these cases, the will's temporal nature does not describe a person from birth to death. One's will is often a small slice of someone's life that is under continual flux. The ideas of Aristotle have a broader out look where Society is a container of all our wills past and present. In the Aristotelian view we have to moderate our wills to fit into our society so that at the end of our careers we can achieve our goals while being in good repute with our neighbors. 

    Individualistic philosophers tend to see nihilism as a denatured will that an individual recognizes as insufficient while a societal view of ethics puts society as the judge of the will. If society judges one's will, it is possible for an individual to will but not recognize the quality of their will. An individual that is judging the quality of their will doesn't look to society for approval and many ways sees society as an obstacle in their willing.