FT24014: Simplification and delimiting

     Abstracting takes the form of reducing a lot of information and experience into a condensed form. The way we can abstract is by general knowledge where we have actually gleaned the point behind what we ruminate on or mere simplification where we reduce complexity to reduce what we have to think about often to ignore something.

    Simplification can take the form of a method we can follow even if we don't understand the steps involved. An algorithmic way to add 2 and 2 to make 4 will work whether you understand the numbers represents units of 1 and like units can be combined. 

    Math explains this fact but rarely do people abstract their daily life into numbers so the meet of these processes deal with qualitative reasoning. Typically the simplification does not have a necessity because the simplification conforms with some underlying reality, but rather we simplify to save our attention for what we value as important. 

    Simplification often shapes our view of reality even though it is somewhat an arbitrary version. Our values are often based on what we like and dislike rather than what is true or false. When our simplifications are challenged and we are forced to consider what is outside them they confront us as an irrationality. Meaning the world we've set universal limitations to is delimited. The delimiting is in two ways that it confronting our personal limitations and de-limiting them in the non-conventional way of the the word, but the world is actually delimiting itself in the conventional way the word is used. 

    There is tension as reality-as-it-is is confronting our personal reality. The stoics advised to be more aware of reality-as-it-is rather than our personal reality because it upsets us greatly to have these conflict. The solution is to have your personal reality mirror what really is even if we don't it. 

    This process has a pragmatic tinge to it and may also be a simplification itself. Meaning we should adhere to reality-as-it-is because we prefer the consequences of this rather than asserting a conflicting reality. I won't explain it further here but this is not the case if the result is abstracting that leads to actual knowledge rather than a preference.

FT:24013: Actualizing Thoughts

     Aquinas sees learning as a process an individual has to undergo personally even with the help of a teacher. Although a teacher is provoking the student's thoughts in a certain direction the thoughts all come together in the mind of the student. However this process has a spiritual level as this process from potential knowledge to actual knowledge comes to be in the student but through God which is the ultimate source of this capability in ourselves. 

    We now have more information about how knowledge forms in our brain through circuits. We may not know exactly how neurons form these systems but there is definite agency in them. This formation of neurons isn't involved with teachers or god or even ourselves. Is this difference of perspective any different in the ultimate idea of a person actualizing knowledge through themselves? 

    The nuts and bolts are clearer than knowing we think somehow within our body rather than some animated flesh as they did in the past. The process of learning still takes place as it did when we did not know about neurons, but we may put less value to it and assume it occurs by a mere mechanical method. 

    Our thoughts are formed still no matter if we assume they are a gift from god, some part of a rational whole, or network of neurons. It does not matter what we attribute them to but it is important to recognize our thoughts beyond the narrative of their origin. 

    Our explanation for their origin complicates what it is we have. If we explain they are a diminutive version of what God has we become ashamed of their inadequacy. If we explain they are mechanical we down play their actuality and emphasize the mechanical. The two origins can also be combined with god giving us a diminutive thought that has its workings within the material. 

    Origins do not allow us to use our thoughts or lay out a road for how we use them. In Aristotelian thinking maybe the origin of our thoughts are like potential thoughts and in this framework are not actual until they are developed into actual. It makes sense to give thanks if we are given them or take care of ourselves because we think better when we are physically healthy. Actualized thoughts go beyond their origin and exist as their own substance.

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"

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.

FT24008: Dwelling and Retreating

     Heidegger muses about bridge building in his concept of dwelling. Dwelling is not so much at living space that meets the basics needs but almost a stepping point from our creaturely habits to the world around us. One such point Heidegger brings up is where we build bridges and they are placed in special spots for us. They allow us to come and go and return to our places we dwell. Bridges are placed in just the same care as we place our homes and have a similar correspondence to our being as he explains in his writing, "Building Dwelling Thinking."

    All of this happening depends on our intention to dwell in the place. When we are overly occupied with other matters such as our work life we begin to dwell less. Dwelling less means our existence yields itself to being arbitrarily chosen. Reality matches less with our being or represents the fleeing of meaning from ourselves.

    In extreme instances we have no opportunity to dwell. Xenophon writes in his retreating from the Persian army this very thing. As he retreats he finds abandoned cities no longer dwelled in. He's rushing ahead of the army pursuing them. There's only enough time to describe the structures briefly before he has to rush out and keep going. Staying in these places longer would cause their capture and execution. They cannot dwell there and the buildings only serve as a momentary amusement in his escape of his hangman. 

    Dwelling in this case requires us to have the mindset to settle down and not chase after fleeting adventures or escape perils. This severs our connection to reality because we cannot build it ourselves. If we are lost in the woods at night the stars cannot give us much more than a momentary delight because they do not light our path and we can only see points of light in the dark. We can only feel part of them only when we know where are because we need to ask nothing of them.

    Only when we settle ourselves can we be comfortable in being and the world we are in. Otherwise we are waiting for something to appear or hoping what we experience will soon change to something else. Our want for change in our world also corresponds to ourself and we become formless and become creatures that escape ourselves. We only have discrete moments to exist.