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.