#hegel — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #hegel, aggregated by home.social.
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Brauchen wir Das wirklich?
In den Anfangszeiten der Verbreitung von KI war oft zu hören, dass das ja auch nur ein neues Werkzeug sei und man sich schon mit der Zeit daran gewöhnen würde es so selbstverständlich einzusetzen wie bisher andere Werkzeuge auch. Nun gibt es aber neben dem Verdacht, dass sich die Umwälzung durch KI eher mit der Industrialisierung als mit dem Ersatz von Dampfmaschinen durch E-Locks vergleichen lässt auch noch die Beobachtung, das KI wohl doch mehr ist als „nur“ ein Werkzeug. Mir ist […] -
Brauchen wir Das wirklich?
English Version on Substack In den Anfangszeiten der Verbreitung von KI war oft zu hören, dass das ja auch nur ein neues Werkzeug sei und man sich schon mit der Zeit daran gewöhnen würde es so selbstverständlich einzusetzen wie bisher andere Werkzeuge auch. Nun gibt es aber neben dem Verdacht, dass sich die Umwälzung durch KI eher mit der Industrialisierung als mit dem Ersatz von Dampfmaschinen durch E-Locks vergleichen lässt auch noch die Beobachtung, das KI wohl doch mehr ist als […] -
The actual most interesting man in the world.
"[A]s #Morin always insisted, truth is complex. So, too, was his career, which in many ways reflects the origin story of the #French #intellectual. Born as #EdgarNahoum in #Paris in 1921, his parents were #Jewish immigrants from #Salonica, a city that had been home to #Greece’s largest Jewish community until #WorldWarII. (Nearly 90% of the community, some 54,000 men, women, and children were eventually murdered in #Nazi #deathcamps.) A precocious student, #Nahoum spent his days in libraries studying #German philosophers like #Hegel and his nights in cinemas studying French films directed by the likes of #MarcelPagnol.
Yet everything changed, including his name, come #France’s defeat and #occupation by #NaziGermany in 1940. Making his way to the Unoccupied Zone, the 20-year-old Nahoum, who had been a pacifist before the war, soon joined both the banned #CommunistParty and the #FrenchResistance."
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The actual most interesting man in the world.
"[A]s #Morin always insisted, truth is complex. So, too, was his career, which in many ways reflects the origin story of the #French #intellectual. Born as #EdgarNahoum in #Paris in 1921, his parents were #Jewish immigrants from #Salonica, a city that had been home to #Greece’s largest Jewish community until #WorldWarII. (Nearly 90% of the community, some 54,000 men, women, and children were eventually murdered in #Nazi #deathcamps.) A precocious student, #Nahoum spent his days in libraries studying #German philosophers like #Hegel and his nights in cinemas studying French films directed by the likes of #MarcelPagnol.
Yet everything changed, including his name, come #France’s defeat and #occupation by #NaziGermany in 1940. Making his way to the Unoccupied Zone, the 20-year-old Nahoum, who had been a pacifist before the war, soon joined both the banned #CommunistParty and the #FrenchResistance."
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Warum Bücher wichtig sind.
Beim Ausräumen habe ich 100e Bücher wiedergefunden. Unser ganzes Haus ist voll mit Schallplatten und alten Büchern. In so unterirdischen Zeiten wie diesen, wo selbst ein Knäckebrot von Nestlé einen höheren IQ hat als die Leute, die laut reden (oder bunte intellektuelle Peinlichkeiten versenden, stimmt’s, CCC?). Sind Bücher die eingefrorene Zeit? So wurden im Volksverlag Thüringen bereits 1946 wieder die ersten philosophischen Schriften gedruckt. Engels über Feuerbach und Hegel. Engels beschreibt darin den Verrat der Liberalen an ihren eigene (angeblichen) Idealen – also alles nicht neu.
Im Gegensatz dazu ein Werk von 1915 vom Verlag "Männer und Völker" !! - ebenfalls ein philosophisches Werk –, das den deutschen Idealismus als Vorwand für den Krieg gegen Frankreich und die Sowjetunion nutzt. Also NICHTS hat sich geändert. Reaktionärste Zeiten. Hätte man ein Buch gelesen, hätte man es vermeiden können.
https://word.undead-network.de/2026/05/20/warum-buecher-so-wichtig-sind/
#buch #BrgerlicherMaterialismus #ccc #engels #hegel #HistorischerMaterialismus #krieg #literatur #philosophie -
Warum Bücher wichtig sind.
Beim Ausräumen habe ich 100e Bücher wiedergefunden. Unser ganzes Haus ist voll mit Schallplatten und alten Büchern. In so unterirdischen Zeiten wie diesen, wo selbst ein Knäckebrot von Nestlé einen höheren IQ hat als die Leute, die laut reden (oder bunte intellektuelle Peinlichkeiten versenden, stimmt’s, CCC?). Sind Bücher die eingefrorene Zeit? So wurden im Volksverlag Thüringen bereits 1946 wieder die ersten philosophischen Schriften gedruckt. Engels über Feuerbach und Hegel. Engels beschreibt darin den Verrat der Liberalen an ihren eigene (angeblichen) Idealen – also alles nicht neu.
Im Gegensatz dazu ein Werk von 1915 vom Verlag "Männer und Völker" !! - ebenfalls ein philosophisches Werk –, das den deutschen Idealismus als Vorwand für den Krieg gegen Frankreich und die Sowjetunion nutzt. Also NICHTS hat sich geändert. Reaktionärste Zeiten. Hätte man ein Buch gelesen, hätte man es vermeiden können.
https://word.undead-network.de/2026/05/20/warum-buecher-so-wichtig-sind/
#buch #BrgerlicherMaterialismus #ccc #engels #hegel #HistorischerMaterialismus #krieg #literatur #philosophie -
Vielleicht bestätigt sich damit Georg Wilhelm Friedrich #Hegel im Kern … Erst wenn die strukturelle Verdichtung sichtbar wird (Φ ↓ im #ProjectiveDetectabilityFramework), wird aus Ideologie wieder Navigation … und aus „mehr Kapital“ die Frage nach Systemheilung durch Begrenzung. #PDF 🖖
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Vielleicht bestätigt sich damit Georg Wilhelm Friedrich #Hegel im Kern … Erst wenn die strukturelle Verdichtung sichtbar wird (Φ ↓ im #ProjectiveDetectabilityFramework), wird aus Ideologie wieder Navigation … und aus „mehr Kapital“ die Frage nach Systemheilung durch Begrenzung. #PDF 🖖
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Vielleicht bestätigt sich damit Georg Wilhelm Friedrich #Hegel im Kern … Erst wenn die strukturelle Verdichtung sichtbar wird (Φ ↓ im #ProjectiveDetectabilityFramework), wird aus Ideologie wieder Navigation … und aus „mehr Kapital“ die Frage nach Systemheilung durch Begrenzung. #PDF 🖖
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“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
###
As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #BernardStiegler #ButlerianJihad #capitalism #computing #consolidation #culture #Hegel #history #Kant #LiamMullally #noosphere #OmegaPoint #PatrickTanguay #PeterWolfendale #philosophy #PierreTeilhardDeChardin #socialMedia #Technology #TeilhardDeChardin -
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
###
As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #BernardStiegler #ButlerianJihad #capitalism #computing #consolidation #culture #Hegel #history #Kant #LiamMullally #noosphere #OmegaPoint #PatrickTanguay #PeterWolfendale #philosophy #PierreTeilhardDeChardin #socialMedia #Technology #TeilhardDeChardin -
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
###
As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #BernardStiegler #ButlerianJihad #capitalism #computing #consolidation #culture #Hegel #history #Kant #LiamMullally #noosphere #OmegaPoint #PatrickTanguay #PeterWolfendale #philosophy #PierreTeilhardDeChardin #socialMedia #Technology #TeilhardDeChardin -
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
###
As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #BernardStiegler #ButlerianJihad #capitalism #computing #consolidation #culture #Hegel #history #Kant #LiamMullally #noosphere #OmegaPoint #PatrickTanguay #PeterWolfendale #philosophy #PierreTeilhardDeChardin #socialMedia #Technology #TeilhardDeChardin -
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…
Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).
He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“
… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.
His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.
Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.
I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:
Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]
[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]
This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]
Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…
Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…
… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.
The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.
Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:
To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]
If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]
As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]
The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.
As Max Read (scroll down) observes:
… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…
The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.
We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.
Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.
(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)
* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)
###
As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
#AI #artificialIntelligence #BernardStiegler #ButlerianJihad #capitalism #computing #consolidation #culture #Hegel #history #Kant #LiamMullally #noosphere #OmegaPoint #PatrickTanguay #PeterWolfendale #philosophy #PierreTeilhardDeChardin #socialMedia #Technology #TeilhardDeChardin -
"Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only in so far as something has a #contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and activity." - #Hegel h/t @[email protected]
-
reason is life
Hiott and Ng (both Hegel scholars) discuss the mystery of contradiction as a portal into holding paradox
conversation on #Hegel with #philosopher Karen Ng, feeling the movement beyond #contradiction in the #Phenomenology & how #Science of #Logic might be infused with life & #love after all
https://pod.link/YZLzbj a
https://open.substack.com/pub/lovephilosophy/p/free-love-rethinking-hegels-concept -
reason is life
Hiott and Ng (both Hegel scholars) discuss the mystery of contradiction as a portal into holding paradox
conversation on #Hegel with #philosopher Karen Ng, feeling the movement beyond #contradiction in the #Phenomenology & how #Science of #Logic might be infused with life & #love after all
https://pod.link/YZLzbj a
https://open.substack.com/pub/lovephilosophy/p/free-love-rethinking-hegels-concept -
@YellowTurtle Suppose no thing, which is put together is nothing, is absolute, so implies being is not absolute. Why should an idea be synonymous with what being is; why are the values of the ideas’ concept not absolute? When absolute values are presupposed, as in merely affirmed according to beliefs e.g. the geocentric model of the cosmos is true, which is actually false, they do not transcend their actual values if science is objective. By that I mean its claims can be independently verified and are not dependent on the beliefs in them. Ideas, having not just a form but being the exposition of the concept, transcend being e.g. the cosmos is infinite in time and or space as opposed to the values of the reasons for its dimensions are. #Philosophy
The dialectic is not linear in that its principle is constituted by the comprehension of contradictions, which are real, not transcendental e.g. as there are exceptions to speculative claims on modality that are spurious, as in without proof e.g. it is necessary that there are no absolutes, as nothing is absolute. #Dialectic #Hegel #TheAbsoluteIdea #TheScienceOfLogic
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@YellowTurtle Suppose no thing, which is put together is nothing, is absolute, so implies being is not absolute. Why should an idea be synonymous with what being is; why are the values of the ideas’ concept not absolute? When absolute values are presupposed, as in merely affirmed according to beliefs e.g. the geocentric model of the cosmos is true, which is actually false, they do not transcend their actual values if science is objective. By that I mean its claims can be independently verified and are not dependent on the beliefs in them. Ideas, having not just a form but being the exposition of the concept, transcend being e.g. the cosmos is infinite in time and or space as opposed to the values of the reasons for its dimensions are. #Philosophy
The dialectic is not linear in that its principle is constituted by the comprehension of contradictions, which are real, not transcendental e.g. as there are exceptions to speculative claims on modality that are spurious, as in without proof e.g. it is necessary that there are no absolutes, as nothing is absolute. #Dialectic #Hegel #TheAbsoluteIdea #TheScienceOfLogic
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"Hegel ... sees things in terms of a 'principle of Idealism' ... It is a teleological or quasi-teleological principle, according to which things must be seen as if existing on account of, or as if tending towards, certain consummating experiences, experiences where there will cease to be a barrier between the self and other persons, or between the thinking mind and the world confronting it."
J.N. Findlay
#Findlay #Hegel #Idealism #Philosophy #Consciousness #Phenomenology #Nonduality #Teleology
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"Hegel ... sees things in terms of a 'principle of Idealism' ... It is a teleological or quasi-teleological principle, according to which things must be seen as if existing on account of, or as if tending towards, certain consummating experiences, experiences where there will cease to be a barrier between the self and other persons, or between the thinking mind and the world confronting it."
J.N. Findlay
#Findlay #Hegel #Idealism #Philosophy #Consciousness #Phenomenology #Nonduality #Teleology
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"Hegel ... sees things in terms of a 'principle of Idealism' ... It is a teleological or quasi-teleological principle, according to which things must be seen as if existing on account of, or as if tending towards, certain consummating experiences, experiences where there will cease to be a barrier between the self and other persons, or between the thinking mind and the world confronting it."
J.N. Findlay
#Findlay #Hegel #Idealism #Philosophy #Consciousness #Phenomenology #Nonduality #Teleology
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"Hegel ... sees things in terms of a 'principle of Idealism' ... It is a teleological or quasi-teleological principle, according to which things must be seen as if existing on account of, or as if tending towards, certain consummating experiences, experiences where there will cease to be a barrier between the self and other persons, or between the thinking mind and the world confronting it."
J.N. Findlay
#Findlay #Hegel #Idealism #Philosophy #Consciousness #Phenomenology #Nonduality #Teleology
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"Religion, right, ethics, and everything spiritual in human beings, is merely aroused. We are implicitly spirit, for the truth lies within us and the spiritual content within us must be brought into consciousness."
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, p. 161
#Hegel #Recollection #Anamnesis #Philosophy #Religion #Ethics #Spirit #Consciousness #Mysticism #GermanIdealism
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"Religion, right, ethics, and everything spiritual in human beings, is merely aroused. We are implicitly spirit, for the truth lies within us and the spiritual content within us must be brought into consciousness."
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, p. 161
#Hegel #Recollection #Anamnesis #Philosophy #Religion #Ethics #Spirit #Consciousness #Mysticism #GermanIdealism
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"Religion, right, ethics, and everything spiritual in human beings, is merely aroused. We are implicitly spirit, for the truth lies within us and the spiritual content within us must be brought into consciousness."
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, p. 161
#Hegel #Recollection #Anamnesis #Philosophy #Religion #Ethics #Spirit #Consciousness #Mysticism #GermanIdealism
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"Religion, right, ethics, and everything spiritual in human beings, is merely aroused. We are implicitly spirit, for the truth lies within us and the spiritual content within us must be brought into consciousness."
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, p. 161
#Hegel #Recollection #Anamnesis #Philosophy #Religion #Ethics #Spirit #Consciousness #Mysticism #GermanIdealism
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DEdK (4) - Warum wir alle überhaupt hier sind und wie wir hierhin gelangt sind (und wie nicht)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI4ILSRhriU
#UlrikeHerrmann #Kapitalismus #Entstehung #Marx #Marxismus #Hegel #Ökonomie #Ökonomik #Zivilisatio #Fortschritt #Vertrauen #Guru #Autorität #Hörigkeit #Demokratie #Gleichwertigkeit #Rassismus #Klassismus #Akademismus #Platon #Rhetorik #Philosophie #Intellektuelle #Denken #Menschenfreundlichkeit #Demokratie #Demokratisierung #SystemischesDenken #Offenheit #DieOffeneGesellschaft
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Die #Satzstruktur des #Systembegriffs sei vielleicht am besten mit #Hilfe der aus der #indischen #Logik gewonnenen #Figur des #Tetralemmas zu #veranschaulichen, die den #hegelschen #Dreischritt in einen #systemischen #Fünfschritt zu #erweitern erlaubt und ihn dabei im #Anschluss an die #Biologie und die #Kybernetik um das #Moment einer zunächst #transzendentalen, dann #totalitären #Einheit korrigiert.
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Emergence Spirals… sounds sort of woo-woo but it's not, despite what Yudkowsky says… nonzerosum.games/emergencespirals.html #evolution #feedbackloops #biology #systemstheory #complexity #Yudkowsky #LessWrong #Popper #Hegel #Parasites #Symbiosis #Science #Nature #Philosophy #History
EMERGENCE SPIRALS -
Emergence Spirals… sounds sort of woo-woo but it's not, despite what Yudkowsky says… nonzerosum.games/emergencespirals.html #evolution #feedbackloops #biology #systemstheory #complexity #Yudkowsky #LessWrong #Popper #Hegel #Parasites #Symbiosis #Science #Nature #Philosophy #History
EMERGENCE SPIRALS -
Alles schon bekannt...
"Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, dass Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben."
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich #Hegel - Vorlesungen über die #Philosophie der #Weltgeschichte
#Merz #BTW25 -
Alles schon bekannt...
"Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, dass Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben."
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich #Hegel - Vorlesungen über die #Philosophie der #Weltgeschichte
#Merz #BTW25 -
Peter Sloterdijk attestiert dem heutigen Europa Schwäche und Realitätsverlust. Ohne ein neues Bewusstsein für seine Eigenschaften drohe ihm Bedeutungslosigkeit. Eine Rezension
Ziehen wir die möglichst konfliktfreie Freizeitgestaltung der Arbeit am Europa von morgen vor? Peter Sloterdijk formuliert diese Diagnose. Eine Rezension (Rezension zu Der Kontinent ohne Eigenschaften von Peter Sloterdijk)#Europa #Sloterdijk #Musil #Spengler #Abendland #Fanon #Kolonialismus #EuropäischeUnion #EU #Rom #Untergang #Hegel #Geschichtsphilosophie #Kultur #PsychologieHirnforschung
»Der Kontinent ohne Eigenschaften«: Weltgeschichte – in Zukunft ohne Europa? -
Peter Sloterdijk attestiert dem heutigen Europa Schwäche und Realitätsverlust. Ohne ein neues Bewusstsein für seine Eigenschaften drohe ihm Bedeutungslosigkeit. Eine Rezension
Ziehen wir die möglichst konfliktfreie Freizeitgestaltung der Arbeit am Europa von morgen vor? Peter Sloterdijk formuliert diese Diagnose. Eine Rezension (Rezension zu Der Kontinent ohne Eigenschaften von Peter Sloterdijk)#Europa #Sloterdijk #Musil #Spengler #Abendland #Fanon #Kolonialismus #EuropäischeUnion #EU #Rom #Untergang #Hegel #Geschichtsphilosophie #Kultur #PsychologieHirnforschung
»Der Kontinent ohne Eigenschaften«: Weltgeschichte – in Zukunft ohne Europa? -
Peter Sloterdijk attestiert dem heutigen Europa Schwäche und Realitätsverlust. Ohne ein neues Bewusstsein für seine Eigenschaften drohe ihm Bedeutungslosigkeit. Eine Rezension
Ziehen wir die möglichst konfliktfreie Freizeitgestaltung der Arbeit am Europa von morgen vor? Peter Sloterdijk formuliert diese Diagnose. Eine Rezension (Rezension zu Der Kontinent ohne Eigenschaften von Peter Sloterdijk)#Europa #Sloterdijk #Musil #Spengler #Abendland #Fanon #Kolonialismus #EuropäischeUnion #EU #Rom #Untergang #Hegel #Geschichtsphilosophie #Kultur #PsychologieHirnforschung
»Der Kontinent ohne Eigenschaften«: Weltgeschichte – in Zukunft ohne Europa? -
Peter Sloterdijk attestiert dem heutigen Europa Schwäche und Realitätsverlust. Ohne ein neues Bewusstsein für seine Eigenschaften drohe ihm Bedeutungslosigkeit. Eine Rezension
Ziehen wir die möglichst konfliktfreie Freizeitgestaltung der Arbeit am Europa von morgen vor? Peter Sloterdijk formuliert diese Diagnose. Eine Rezension (Rezension zu Der Kontinent ohne Eigenschaften von Peter Sloterdijk)#Europa #Sloterdijk #Musil #Spengler #Abendland #Fanon #Kolonialismus #EuropäischeUnion #EU #Rom #Untergang #Hegel #Geschichtsphilosophie #Kultur #PsychologieHirnforschung
»Der Kontinent ohne Eigenschaften«: Weltgeschichte – in Zukunft ohne Europa? -
Peter Sloterdijk attestiert dem heutigen Europa Schwäche und Realitätsverlust. Ohne ein neues Bewusstsein für seine Eigenschaften drohe ihm Bedeutungslosigkeit. Eine Rezension
Ziehen wir die möglichst konfliktfreie Freizeitgestaltung der Arbeit am Europa von morgen vor? Peter Sloterdijk formuliert diese Diagnose. Eine Rezension (Rezension zu Der Kontinent ohne Eigenschaften von Peter Sloterdijk)#Europa #Sloterdijk #Musil #Spengler #Abendland #Fanon #Kolonialismus #EuropäischeUnion #EU #Rom #Untergang #Hegel #Geschichtsphilosophie #Kultur #PsychologieHirnforschung
»Der Kontinent ohne Eigenschaften«: Weltgeschichte – in Zukunft ohne Europa? -
Dietz-Bücher schenken, Tipp 20 ❤️ THEORIE, based on #Marx, bietet 13 Bände zur Vielfalt & Relevanz marxschen Denkens für die Gegenwart: https://dietzberlin.de/reihe/theorie. Guter Grund, unliebsamen Verwandtschaftsbesuch kurz und Lese-Feiertage lang zu halten. Nice dazu: https://dietzberlin.de/produkt/marx-tote-bag-baumwolltasche
#marx #karlmarx #kapitalismus #geld #klasse #klassentheorie #dekolonial #postkolonial #antikolonial #entfremdung #technologie #feudalismus #linkssozialismus #gender #familie #macht #dialektik #hegel #foucault
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Dietz-Bücher schenken, Tipp 20 ❤️ THEORIE, based on #Marx, bietet 13 Bände zur Vielfalt & Relevanz marxschen Denkens für die Gegenwart: https://dietzberlin.de/reihe/theorie. Guter Grund, unliebsamen Verwandtschaftsbesuch kurz und Lese-Feiertage lang zu halten. Nice dazu: https://dietzberlin.de/produkt/marx-tote-bag-baumwolltasche
#marx #karlmarx #kapitalismus #geld #klasse #klassentheorie #dekolonial #postkolonial #antikolonial #entfremdung #technologie #feudalismus #linkssozialismus #gender #familie #macht #dialektik #hegel #foucault
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Dietz-Bücher schenken, Tipp 18 💜 Franz Heilgendorff hat mit »Kategoriale Kritik« ein „überwältigendes Buch geschrieben, „das den Zusammenhang von Kategorie und Begriff bei #Marx virtuos ausbuchstabiert“ (Sebastian Klauke). Auf den Wunschzettel packen: https://dietzberlin.de/produkt/kategoriale-kritik
#marx #karlmarx #dialektik #philosophie #hegel #gesellschaftskritik #begriff #kategorie #daskapital
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Dietz-Bücher schenken, Tipp 18 💜 Franz Heilgendorff hat mit »Kategoriale Kritik« ein „überwältigendes Buch geschrieben, „das den Zusammenhang von Kategorie und Begriff bei #Marx virtuos ausbuchstabiert“ (Sebastian Klauke). Auf den Wunschzettel packen: https://dietzberlin.de/produkt/kategoriale-kritik
#marx #karlmarx #dialektik #philosophie #hegel #gesellschaftskritik #begriff #kategorie #daskapital
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Javier Milei, der Anarchokapitalismus und die zahlreichen heutigen "liberalen" Möchtegerntyrannen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qauhhU4eTyk
#FailedStates #Freiheit #Demokratisierung #Hegel #Staatlichkeit #WolfgangKersting #Gesellschaftsvertrag #PolitischeTheorie #PolitischePhilosophie #Hobbes #Rawls #Aristoteles #Demokratie #Antike #Attika #ChristianMeier #HannahArendt
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♥∞♪☮☯☭Ⓐ☆ 🏴☠️🇵🇸🏴🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🌻❤️☀️💚🌿😍💚😍🍃🍉
I don’t sing because I am happy; I’m happy because I sing.
— William #James
"All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I #know? 2. What #ought I to do? 3. What may I #hope?"
— Immanuel #Kant
[67] Κάθε τμήμα της ύλης μπορεί να συλληφθεί σαν ένας κήπος γεμάτος φυτά ή σαν μια λίμνη γεμάτη ψάρια. Αλλά κάθε κλάδος ενός φυτού, κάθε όργανο ενός ζώου, κάθε σταγόνα των σωματικών του υγρών είναι επίσης ένας παρόμοιος κήπος ή μια παρόμοια λίμνη.
— Gottfried Leibniz - #Μοναδολογία
[67] Each portion of matter can be conceived as like a garden full of plants, or like a pond full of fish. But each branch of a plant, each organ of an animal, each drop of its bodily fluids is also a similar garden or a similar pond.
— Gottfried #Leibniz - #Monadology
He that begins to #live, begins to #die.
— Francis Quarles, Hieroglyphics
#Death, like #birth, is a #secret of #Nature.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV, 5
🇬🇷 Ζήσε και άσε τους άλλους να ζήσουν.
🇬🇧 Live and let live.
🇩🇪 Leben und Leben lassen.“People ‘have an effect upon’ one another: Not by virtue of their nature, but rather by virtue of motivations brought forth through mutual understanding.”
— [Edmund Husserl, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 172]
#Law is concerned with #freedom, the worthiest and holiest thing in man, the thing man must know if it is to have obligatory force for him.
— [#Hegel’s Philosophy of #Right, § 215 – Ethical Life / Civil Society / Administration of Justice / Determinate Law] [at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prcivils.htm]
“No #morality can be founded on #authority, even if the authority were #divine.”
— A. J. #Ayer, Essay on #Humanism
All #punishment is mischief. All punishment of itself is evil.
— Jeremy #Bentham, Principles of #Morals and #Legislation
Έτσι γίνεται φανερό, ότι τα προβλήματα της πολιτικής επιστήμης είναι και προβλήματα της
πολιτικής αγωγής και των πολιτικών και πολιτισμικών αξιών του κάθε #πολίτη.— Κοσμάς Ψυχοπαίδης – Εισαγωγή στην Πολιτική Επιστήμη (παραδόσεις)
#Κομμουνισμός - «μια ένωση στην οποία η ελεύθερη ανάπτυξη του καθενός [ατόμου] είναι η προϋπόθεση για την ελεύθερη ανάπτυξη όλων».
— #Marx & #Engels, Manifesto (1848)
#Communism - “an association in which the free development of each [individual] is the condition for the free development of all.”
— #Marx & #Engels, Manifesto (1848)
“Στην #αναρχία δε θα φτάσουμε ούτε σήμερα, ούτε αύριο, ούτε ποτέ. Στην αναρχία θα πορευόμαστε σήμερα, αύριο και για πάντα.”
— Errico #Malatesta
“#Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established , an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
— Friedrich #Engels & Karl #Marx - The German Ideology, 1845
Σήμερα η αναρχία είναι θυμός, θανάσιμο μίσος και αιώνιος πόλεμος ενάντια σε όλους τους καταπιεστές και τους εκμεταλλευτές που υπάρχουν πάνω στη γη• είναι η απαράγραπτη διεκδίκηση των καταπιεσμένων, είναι το σύμφωνο συμμαχίας τους, η πολεμική κραυγή τους˗ ανελέητος πόλεμος όσο στη γη θα υπάρχει ακόμα έστω και ένα αφεντικό, έστω και ένας εκμεταλλευτής. Αναρχία σημαίνει ακατάπαυστη, αδιάκοπη εξέγερση, ενάντια σε κάθε κατεστημένη τάξη• πόλεμος ενάντια σε κάθε κρατική αρχή, που διεξάγεται με όλους τους δυνατούς τρόπους και με όλες τις δυνατές μορφές: με το γραπτό λόγο και κάθε άλλο μέσο έκφρασης, με τις πράξεις περιφρόνησης και εχθρότητας και προπάντων με τα όπλα.
— Είναι από το κείμενο του Ιταλού αναρχοκομμουνιστή Κάρλο #Καφιέρο “Επανάσταση”, Αναρχία και Κομμουνισμός.
«Το κεφάλαιο είναι νεκρή εργασία, που σαν βρικόλακας, ζει μόνο ρουφώντας το αίμα της ζωντανής εργασίας. Και όσο πιο πολύ ζει, τόσο πιο πολύ αίμα ρουφάει.»
— Karl #Marx
Αρθρον 1. - Ο σκοπός οπού απ’ αρχής κόσμου οι άνθρωποι εσυμμαζώχθησαν από τα δάση την πρώτην φοράν, δια να κατοικήσουν όλοι μαζί, κτίζοντες χώρας και πόλεις, είναι δια να συμβοηθώνται και να ζώσιν ευτυχισμένοι, και όχι να συναντιτρώγονται ή να ρουφά το αίμα τους ένας.
— #Ρήγας #Βελεστινλής, “Τα Δίκαια του Ανθρώπου”
«ΑΝΑΡΧΙΑ ΣΗΜΑΙΝΕΙ ΜΗ ΒΙΑ, μη κυριαρχία ανθρώπου σε άνθρωπο, μη επιβολή βιαίως της βούλησης ενός ή περισσοτέρων στους υπολοίπους. Είναι μόνο μέσω της εναρμόνισης των συμφερόντων, μέσω της εθελούσιας συνεργασίας, της αγάπης, του σεβασμού, της αμοιβαίας ανοχής, είναι μόνο με την πειθώ, το παράδειγμα, τη μεταδοτικότητα και το αμοιβαίο όφελος από την επιείκεια που μπορεί και πρέπει να θριαμβεύσει η αναρχία, δηλαδή μια κοινωνία αδελφών ελευθέρως αλληλέγγυων, η οποία θα εξασφαλίζει στους πάντες την μέγιστη ελευθερία, τη μέγιστη ανάπτυξη, τη μέγιστη δυνατή ευημερία»
— Ε. #Μαλατέστα
"The consistent #anarchist, then, should be a #socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat."
— Noam #Chomsky - In Daniel Guérin, #Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, 1970
"[…] Την δήμευσιν δεν την φοβείται αυτός που δεν έχει τίποτε, εκτός εάν έχης ανάγκην από αυτά τα σχισμένα κουρέλια μου και τα ολίγα βιβλία μου, που αποτελούν όλην την περιουσίαν μου. Την εξορίαν δεν την εννοώ, εγώ που δεν περιορίζομαι εις ένα τόπον, και δεν έχω ιδικόν μου ούτε το μέρος που τώρα κατοικώ, και κάθε μέρος είναι ιδικόν μου όπου και αν ευρεθώ ή μάλλον, κάθε μέρος είναι του Θεού, όπου εγώ είμαι ξένος και περαστικός. […]"
— Μέγας Βασίλειος
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of #patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble #war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
— Albert #Einstein
Ο κομμουνισμός όπως τον έμαθα από τον Μαρξ: 1) "ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΚΑΘΕΝΑ ΣΥΜΦΩΝΑ ΜΕ ΤΙΣ ΙΚΑΝΟΤΗΤΕΣ ΤΟΥ, ΣΤΟ ΚΑΘΕΝΑ ΑΝΑΛΟΓΑ ΜΕ ΤΙΣ ΑΝΑΓΚΕΣ ΤΟΥ" 2) Συνεργασία των παραγωγων/καταναλωτων με σκοπο να καλυψουμε τις αναγκες μας και να ευημερησουμε ΟΛΑ με τον ΜΙΚΡΟΤΕΡΟ δυνατό μόχθο (και χρονο) ...ετσι ωστε να εχουμε αφθονο ελευθερο χρονο για να καλλιεργησουμε τις ΑΙΣΘΗΣΕΙΣ μας, το νου μας και τις (διαπροσωπικές) σχεσεις μας.
Communism as I learned it from Marx:
1) "FROM EACH ACCORDING TO THEIR ABILITIES, TO EACH ACCORDING TO THEIR NEEDS" 2) Cooperation between producers/consumers with the goal to meet our needs and for ALL of us to prosper with the LEAST possible toil (and time)... so that we have plenty of free time to cultivate our SENSES, our mind, and our (interpersonal) relationships.
Der Kommunismus, wie ich ihn von Marx gelernt habe:
1) "JEDER NACH SEINEN FÄHIGKEITEN, JEDER NACH SEINEN BEDÜRFNISSEN" 2) Zusammenarbeit zwischen Produzenten/Konsumenten mit dem Ziel, unsere Bedürfnisse zu decken und dass WIR ALLE mit dem GERINGSTMÖGLICHEN Aufwand (und Zeit) gedeihen... damit wir ausreichend Freizeit haben, um unsere SINNE, unseren Geist und unsere (zwischenmenschlichen) Beziehungen zu pflegen.
«Η ανακάλυψη, η δημιουργία και η ικανοποίηση νέων αναγκών που προκύπτουν από την ίδια την κοινωνία· η καλλιέργεια όλων των ιδιοτήτων του κοινωνικού ανθρώπου, η παραγωγή αυτών σε μια μορφή όσο το δυνατόν πιο πλούσια σε ανάγκες, επειδή είναι πλούσια σε ιδιότητες και σχέσεις—παραγωγή που είναι το πιο ολικό και καθολικό δυνατό κοινωνικό προϊόν, γιατί, για να λάβει την ικανοποίηση με πολύπλευρο τρόπο, πρέπει να είναι ικανός για πολλές απολαύσεις, επομένως να καλλιεργηθεί σε υψηλό βαθμό - είναι επίσης μια συνθήκη παραγωγής που βασίζεται στο κεφάλαιο . . . Η ανάπτυξη ενός συνεχώς διευρυνόμενου και πιο ολοκληρωμένου συστήματος διαφορετικών ειδών εργασίας, διαφορετικών ειδών παραγωγής, στο οποίο αντιστοιχεί ένα συνεχώς διευρυνόμενο και συνεχώς εμπλουτιζόμενο σύστημα αναγκών». #Grundrisse, σελ. 409.
"The discovery, creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself; the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being, production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and relations—production of this being as the most total and universal possible social product, for, in order to take gratification in a many-sided way, he must be capable of many pleasures, hence cultivated to a high degree—is likewise a condition of production founded on capital . . . The development of a constantly expanding and more comprehensive system of different kinds of labour, different kinds of production, to which a constantly expanding and constantly enriched system of needs corresponds." Grundrisse, p. 409.
“Freedom
[in the sphere of necessity] can consist only in this, that socialized
man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature
in a rational way, bringing it under collective control instead of being
dominated by it as a blind power” (Marx, [1894] 1981:959).The capitalist gives back to the worker a part of his own surplus
labour in the form of an /avance, /for which he must reimburse the
capitalist not merely with an equivalent, but with surplus labour.
[MECW 29: 37]“The power that each individual exercises over
the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner
of /exchange values/, of /money/. He carries his social power, as also
his connection with society in his pocket” (Marx 1986:94).“It is a characteristic feature of labour which posits
exchange-value [value] that it causes the social relations of
individuals to appear in the perverted form of a social relationship
between things” (Marx 1970:34)....υπάρχουν δομές βίας που λένε στους ανθρωπους να σωπάσουν...
...there are structures of violence telling people to shut up...
— David #Graeber
Έτσι: Η #αστυνομία είναι #γραφειοκράτες με #όπλα. Αν το καλοσκεφτείτε, αυτό είναι ένα πραγματικά έξυπνο κόλπο. Γιατί όταν οι περισσότεροι σκέφτονται την αστυνομία, δεν τη θεωρούμε ως #επιβολή των κανόνων. Τους θεωρούμε σαν να #καταπολεμούν το έγκλημα και όταν σκεφτόμαστε το «έγκλημα», το είδος του εγκλήματος που έχουμε στο μυαλό μας είναι το βίαιο έγκλημα. Παρόλο που, στην πραγματικότητα, αυτό που κάνει κυρίως η αστυνομία είναι ακριβώς το αντίθετο: ασκεί την απειλή της βίας σε καταστάσεις που διαφορετικά δεν θα είχαν καμία σχέση με αυτήν.
“So: #Police are #bureaucrats with #weapons. If you think about it, this is a really ingenious trick. Because when most of think about police, we do not think of them as #enforcing regulation. We think of them as #fighting crime, and when we think of "crime," the kind of crime we have in our minds in violent crime. Even though, in fact, what police mostly do is exactly the opposite: they bring the threat of force to bear on situations that would otherwise have nothing to do with it.”
― David #Graeber
But what can function as an archetype in a fragmented society?
― [Raoul Vaneigem - Basic Banalities: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/all/display/10]
It should not be forgotten that hierarchical power is inconceivable without transcendence, without ideologies, without myths.
― [Raoul Vaneigem - Basic Banalities: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/all/display/10]
"All becoming is a criminal revolt from eternal being and its price is death."
[...] Privative appropriation and domination are thus originally imposed and felt as a positive right, but in the form of a negative universality. Valid for everyone, justified in everyone's eyes by divine or natural law, the right of privative appropriation is objectified in a general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in an essential law under which everyone individually manages to tolerate the more or less narrow limits assigned to his right to live and to the conditions of life in general. [...]
― [Raoul #Vaneigem - Basic Banalities: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/all/display/10]
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Die Hollywoodisierung des Politischen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbU9Pct8aHg
#Starwarsifizierung #LordofTheRingisierung #Manichäismus #Weltgeschehen #DasMenschlicheMaß #Anthropologie #Psychologie #Verkehrspolitik #Wissing #VolkerWissing #MaiThiNguyenKim #Systemisch #SystemischesDenken #Helden #Schurken #Bösewichtei #Gut #Böse #Licht #Dunkel #Großgesellschaft #Entwicklungen #Personenunabhängig #Historie #Geschichte #Hobbes #Hegel #Luhmann #Aischylos #Solon #Kleisthenes #Thukydides #Heroen #Heros #Aristokratie
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http://bit.ly/3R7WXqu
Classical view of #History considers that historical events are due to the providential appearance of a #GreatMan.
Despite hero theory, all this rests on the #Philosophy of #Hegel, that great man who is mortal and perishable is a "incarnation" of "idea" that is eternal and immobile.History would be nothing more than biographies and lists of dates of births, battles and deaths.
Xix century is also that of #Romanticism, which in #Europe gave rise to #Nationalism. -
A review of V1 of the paper "On the Infinitude of Twin Primes" by Dr. Ryan Matthew Thurman ( @rythur ).
Shared in one of his posts under the url https://ef.msp.org/articles/uploads/ant/submitted/230524-Thurman/230524-Thurman-v1.pdf#TwinPrimes #Primes #NumberTheory
#TwinPrimeConjecture #UnsolvedProblem #Proof #SolvedProblem
#Simple #Insightful #PrimeClockMethod #Modulo
#Puzzle #GameLike #Thrilled #Captivating #Excitement #Reading #ReadingRecommendationMy background for this review: a layman person without any #degree, with very weak #Math interest (I knew what were prime numbers but never heard of the twin prime conjecture) and lack of math background except for what is taught in high school and the occasional math that pop here and there from my adjacent interests in the process of thinking of process both formal and informally (mainly from #lisp lore for the #ComputerScience side and #Hegel lore for the #Philosophy side of the story)
And now, only after almost 1 month since I have read it, will I review this paper (flushed face 😳).
A paper of 10 pages of content.
The paper is very pleasant and simple to read. Managing to catch our attention and make us read it in one sitting with a child-like excitement and joy. So if you have tendencies to leave things half-done, do not fear, you will get drawn into finishing it without having to fight a moment of boringness.1/3
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A review of V1 of the paper "On the Infinitude of Twin Primes" by Dr. Ryan Matthew Thurman ( @rythur ).
Shared in one of his posts under the url https://ef.msp.org/articles/uploads/ant/submitted/230524-Thurman/230524-Thurman-v1.pdf#TwinPrimes #Primes #NumberTheory
#TwinPrimeConjecture #UnsolvedProblem #Proof #SolvedProblem
#Simple #Insightful #PrimeClockMethod #Modulo
#Puzzle #GameLike #Thrilled #Captivating #Excitement #Reading #ReadingRecommendationMy background for this review: a layman person without any #degree, with very weak #Math interest (I knew what were prime numbers but never heard of the twin prime conjecture) and lack of math background except for what is taught in high school and the occasional math that pop here and there from my adjacent interests in the process of thinking of process both formal and informally (mainly from #lisp lore for the #ComputerScience side and #Hegel lore for the #Philosophy side of the story)
And now, only after almost 1 month since I have read it, will I review this paper (flushed face 😳).
A paper of 10 pages of content.
The paper is very pleasant and simple to read. Managing to catch our attention and make us read it in one sitting with a child-like excitement and joy. So if you have tendencies to leave things half-done, do not fear, you will get drawn into finishing it without having to fight a moment of boringness.1/3
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CW: This excerpt of Zizek speaks of bodily functions. Long read.
I'll be, #Zizek does get there (see: https://fediphilosophy.org/@Eph/110471776328493702) (by referencing others that do), or at least very close to the #ExodusEarth realization. He/they reframe idea of setting free that which we have come to know and love further, paraphrasing page xxi 'if we #love the #earth/#nature then for our sake, and the earth's/nature's sake, we must set #earth/#nature free.' Zizek only needs to extend his reasoning a little further. Maybe he does elsewhere, we are still neophyte Zizekians.
It is natural to not consider exodus-ing earth to live in space. We prefer the idea of finding another planet to exploit. We tend to repress the idea of living in the vacuum of #space in favor of another planet (diagnosed as planetary chauvinism by Isaac Asimov).
Or if we do empathically and compassionately realize we are no longer healthy for the earth and nature and we need to be removed, we may even contemplate something graver like self-extinction of ourselves, our species.
The #reason (from a gross amateur psychoanalyst) is the idea of living in space is akin to acknowledging the *das ding* of the 'real.' Here, we repress, or maybe more accurately, we are forbidden to acknowledge the existential truth that all existence resides precariously within a vacuous void of unpredictability and unknowing. Or represented more colloquially here by the real idea of living in the vacuum of space. Such an existence isn't imagined as comfortable or cozy for humans or any other earth mammalian species. It literally repulses us we think
We may think there must be another way. But if if we free our philosophy to reach its own conclusion and liberation, as recommended in The Sublime, the ACT will liberate the earth and humanity. We allow the truth to manifest philosophically without the subject, us (xxii).
This is hubris humans sacrificing themselves on the cross of earthly existence so that the earth can be reborn and man abolveres/sublamates to heaven, free of guilt, shame, and other fetters that had up til now invisibly enslaved them.
The most important thing to realize here, practically, as a first step, is that exodus-ing Earth is achievable now. We need not consider deep space, exploring the universe, etc. for now. Exiting Earth is about NEAR SPACE, to orbiting the earth, staying close to our mother but also weaned from her. This is the most profound, liberating, and loving thing we can do for ourselves as a species, but also for the sake of the Mother. It is, as Zizek refers to elsewhere in the preface, *absolvere*.
Collectively, our repressed guilt for being too good at what evolution made us, master exploiters, is destroying us psychoanalytically as it is destroying the earth and all life on it. Exodus Earth will not only exculpate our guilt but allow us to become angels in the sky for our Mother and all her other children.
The Sublime Subject of Ideology, Preface to the New Edition: The Idea's Constipation? Slavoj Zizek
p. xxi
"So, to pursue the rather tasteless metaphor, Hegel was not a sublimated coprophagist, as the usual notion of the dialectical process would lead us to believe. The matrix of the dialectical process is not that of excrementation externalization followed by a swallowing (reappropriation) of the external
ized content, but, on the contrary, of appropriation followed by the excremental move of dropping it, releasing it, letting it go. What this means is that one should not equate externalization with alienation. The externalization which concludes a cycle of dialectical process is not alienation, it is the highest point of disalienation: one really reconciles oneself with some objective content not when one still has to strive to master
and control it, but when one can afford the supreme sovereign gesture of releasing this content from oneself, of setting it free. Which is why, incidentally, and as some of the sharper interpreters have pointed out, far
from subduing nature totally to man, Hegel opens up an unexpected space for ecological awareness: for Hegel, the drive to exploit nature technologically is still a mark of man's finitude; in such an attitude, nature is
perceived as an external object, an opposing force to be dominated, while a philosopher, from his standpoint of Absolute Knowledge, experiences nature not as a threatening force to be controlled and dominated, but as something to be left to follow its inherent path."End quote.
The realization that we must exit the Earth is traumatic and we will naturally protest and argue the conclusion and its cure and even compromise to going to another planet to exploit. The reasons for living in space are legion from free resources (energy) to space travel itself. The most dangerous, expensive, and resource intensive aspects of space travel is leaving and entering a planets atmosphere. But most profoundly and analytically, is that living in space, where we have nothing to exploit but each other, we have the possibility of truly coming to know ourselves and maybe evolve from Homo exploitus to becoming truly Homo sapiens.
One of frustrating aspects of #scifi is that human nature follows us where ever we go? It doesn't matter how we engineer society or utopias, our nature doesn't allow us to abide Eden. We think we know ourselves and we certainly do not know ourselves from an evolutionary psychology(analysis) perspective. Even worse than not knowing ourselves, we believe we have the will power to change. Our will power is not enough. The more we ignore our true biological and evolutionary natures, the more destructive we become. What we resist, persists. We are uber exploiters, it is the ground of our being (personal thesis). But we can change with wisdom. But not by just willing it, again, our will is not superhuman, but our drive to exploit is. An no amount of therapy can change it, but it can let us see it, for what it really is, an apparently inescapable ideology of nature and evolution.
#Mindfulness is becoming the preferred method of coming to terms with our true nature, Homo exploitus. Mindfulness creates both the space and time to be discerning ourselves before we act. It allows us to act compassionately and consciously. We don't change in that our true natures, Homo exploitus, is still there, but we can sidestep that reality and truly ACT in the Zizekian sense.
The biggest danger is ourselves. Even now, those at the forefront of #FreeSpace aren't advocates of FreeSpace, but capitalists.
Need some inspiration? Try these music video youtubes:
Sting's 1985 (remastered) Video of "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free." Don't worry, your monitor is just fine. 4:05 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSGl3d4KOMk
And
Peyton's 2009 vdeo (warning bright flashing bright club light) "A Higher Place." 3:56 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFfEOnNfD1o
#philosophy #Hegel #evolution #psychology #psychoanalysis #Lacan #space
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A thought in response to RK's comment —
That strikes me as a problem in cross-paradigm communication — an interaction among communities of interpretation using different analogies to comprehend object situations which may or may not be the same or even compatible.
Whether it's #Dialectic in #Aristotle's or #Hegel's sense the logic of shifting paradigms is the #Logic of #Abduction.
#Peirce #Analogy #Paradigm #Anomaly #ParadigmChange
#Commensurability #Incommensurability #DifferentialLogic