//Future_Total:A-AD1974
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Heidegger - The human essence is derived from being. Thinking is derived from this "being" and therefore cannot be the essence.Computer languages, while language in feature, are not as akin to language as they appear at first. While there is structure to language, it is in its flexibility that language succeeds. Computer languages have no flexibility. While layers of abstraction can be added, making the computer speak and understand more and more naturally, it all must be summed. At best, misunderstandings create bugs (a feature present in the natural language) and at worst is creates program or system crashes (a feature not present in natural language). All that is mentioned above about Computer Languages is provable in a way that natural language is not. Descartes - Human essence is derived from thinkingAnd on this relationship to technology.Technology is "functions and raw materials" - the four causalities - material, form, effect and causeFeenberg - "[t]he fundamental problem of democracy today is the question of how to ensure the survival of agency in this increasingly technological universe""Within our current technological constellation of intelligibility, [o]nly what is calculable in advance counts as being. This technological understanding of being produces a calculative thinking which quantifies all qualitative relations, reducing all entities to bivalent, programmable information, digitized data, which increasingly enters into what Baudrillard calls a state of pure circulation.[8] As this historical transformation of beings into resources becomes more pervasive, it increasingly eludes our critical gaze; indeed, we come to treat even ourselves in the terms underlying our technological refashioning of the world: no longer as conscious subjects in an objective world but merely as resources to be optimized, ordered, and enhanced with maximal efficiency (whether cosmetically, psychopharmacologically, genetically, or even cybernetically)."Meditations for computers are an opportunity to reject the optimal, to be fanciful, absurd, magical. Quantification should no longer be the way we define things ontologically. "Can it be formalized?" should not be the means by which we determine somethings existence.To play with data, sub-optimally.How can we interface with our technology in a way that acknowledges that which the computer is entirely blind to?However, computers are becoming more articulate. They are seeing more than ever before, finding the nature of texts through curve definitions (A.I.) and articulating things in the world that, at once, felt formless. What is the true relationship between the curve that an AI defines, vs the experience that we have of a thing? Is the beauty that we find in ourselves simply heuristic? Do we feel that there is something ontologically at stake as the algorithmic defines the world around us more articulately, outright dashing certain experiences as illegitimate, beyond the scope of opinion/identity? It is as though the march of science, to measure the world, places things into boxes. If we fit, we can agree with them and commend them, but if we find disagreement, we thrash about, complaining about our housings. The likelihood is that this thrashing does nothing to alter our housings, the housings were always there, we just never felt them before. The thrashing only serves to numb us to the reality of these boundaries. But that which is within us exists to some extent, right? Dreams, visions, creations, memories, aspirations. Jung acknowledges all of these pieces in the Self. But these are not formalizable entities, but they are the entities that we experience the most. There is a sense in which all that exists is simulacra, the essence is not important. Even if science dictates the nature of a Thing, that nature is far more opaque to us than the way we experience that Thing, a body of "experiences" that are entirely abstract and subjective. The subjectivity is not formalizable and cannot be put into the computer. This feels, somehow, truly out of reach, unlike the benchmarks of a computer defeating a player at chess, or "seeing".Perhaps with time we will, too, find these mechanisms. I live too far within the march of technology and the heritage of computers surpassing our every doubt to say that there is anything that is sacred, but, for the time being, I do not see the stepping stones toward digital interiority. Even if I did, I'm not sure that there would be a real way to measure my interiority even if the mechanisms of interiority were discovered.