Tag Archives: artificial intelligence (AI)

What Science Can’t Do

22 Thursday Aug 2024

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Class War, Culture, Hierarchy, Political Power

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Fragment 208, word count: 366.

Actual Intelligence is Caring

Let it be said. Intelligence is caring, and more particularly, it is idiosyncratic caring, an individual’s caring. None of the machine-based operations currently misrepresented as artificial intelligence is even in the ballpark of actual intelligence, because none of it is in the ballpark of caring. Whatever those huge power-sucking arrays of servers are doing, it isn’t caring or anything like it.

Let’s stop pretending that science, technology such as AI, or STEM education will solve the worst problems plaguing humanity. Mathematical science, the knowledge culture that developed rapidly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, always promises the progressive change that will eliminate miseries of the past and present, but its track record contradicts that promise. Everybody is well aware of dystopian features of investor supremacist capitalism: corporate profiteering from environmental destruction, war, addictions, and rigged markets; broad injustices of stark inequality and brutal imperialism. There has been lots of technological change here and there, much of it devoted to improving the lethality of violence on every scale, including weapons for mass religion, murder and catastrophic destruction of physical culture. The enduring prominence of violence in the intent of technological innovation proves an ongoing commitment by the funders of research-and-development to the preservation of extreme economic inequality, to there being haves and have-nots, to a profound alienation between “us” and “them”, a “them” who don’t matter. It is all part of the fabric of top-down human-on-human parasitism. It also proves an ongoing commitment to placing the highest value on things that can be won, hoarded, and guarded by violence: trophies, property, weapons, bunkers, and appearances that suggest a conquest over ordinary human limitations such as collective and personal mortality. This did not change in the historical transition from the overtly violence-based aristocracy which was embedded in religion, the previous knowledge culture, into the modern investor capitalist oligarchy. So, science and technology are not authentic foundations of progressive modernity but merely new means of parasitic concentration of wealth, status, knowledge, and coercive power. The authentic foundation of the struggling seed of modernity is mass literacy*, bringing with it a new personal experience of spiritual** power.

*Fragment 203, November 6, 2023, The History of Knowledge in Dystopia (word count: 2,365)

**Fragment 108, May 25, 2017, Found Buried in the History of Philosophy (word count 821)

See also:

Fragment 120, December 24, 2017, Two Problems with the Science Story (word count: 1,352)

Fragment 179, July 23, 2021, Knowing is Caring (word count: 621) **

Fragment 184, January 2, 2022, What Knowing Is (word count: 198)

Copyright © 2024 Sandy MacDonald.

Time is a Dual Instability

28 Tuesday Jul 2020

Posted by in Embodiment, Freedom, Nature, Subjectivity, Transcendence

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Fragment 166, word count: 416.

‘Teleology’ means ‘purpose’, ‘reason’ or ‘an anticipatory ideation of agency’. The existence of teleology is a certainty, perhaps the only one, although we also act routinely on the practical certainty of known features of actuality that have been reliably stable. I know what a coffee machine is, where mine is, and how to use it to make coffee. That knowledge is part of my orientation, my sensibility. Let’s accept from science that measurable nature is perfectly non-teleological in its brute material actuality. The completely different existence of teleology is a certainty because it is the very genius of our knowing and caring agency, our living existence within brute actuality. “I anticipate, expect, wonder, and intend, therefore I am.” Since teleology conceives a place and grasp in the non-actual future, it is by definition an idea, a constant re-directing of the willing of an ongoing agency. Every teleology is, of course, an individual person. With teleology at the core of our dramatic lives of knowing and caring (we know because we care, we reach knowing through caring *), we cannot coherently claim uncertainty about its existence or its power to intervene effectively in the arrangement of things in brute actuality. So, we discern reality in its duality, two contrasting but entangled moving streams of instability, one which, in itself, doesn’t matter in the least as it falls insensitively by inertia and entropy. The other is teleology which creates importance and relevance in the personal drama of its individually embodied living. Teleology is the only reason anything matters, and that, along with its ideality, is its claim to transcendence. The notion transcendence tends to lift our gaze to the sky, away from the simple light of individual consciousness. However, it still makes sense to call teleology transcendent when it only belongs to embodied personalities of the familiar kind and not something skyward or cosmic. If teleology (the only certainty) isn’t transcendent then nothing is. The foundational status of ideas and ideality in the world that matters, the world as experienced, lands us in metaphysics, and the whole of metaphysics rests on the single question: What should we make of teleology? What should we make of the anticipatory ideation of agency which is our consciousness of time as our primordial context? The answer lies in conceiving an idealism that identifies teleology as a multitude of individual and locally embodied sensibilities in an irreducible duality with measurable actuality which is perfectly non-teleological: time is a dual instability.

* Artificial intelligence (AI) can’t care, so can’t know.

Copyright © 2020 Sandy MacDonald.