Humanism & Its Discontents (Session 8)

progress so hello and welcome to our eighth and final session of humanism and its this content with professor reza negarestani so please reza take it on uh thank you very much uh thank you everyone uh thank you coming to the last session uh i hope you forgive uh my shortcomings So do we have any presentations or anything? Yes. Nima, Gürtman, and Sahaj are going to present to you. Shall we?

Alright, so we decided that we will be doing a presentation with Reza himself. So there won't be any PowerPoint slides or whatever, because I mean, most of us know what inhumanism is like contextually, but we want to focus on the conceptual part of it. Because the last week, the last Friday, or was it Wednesday that Reza told all of us that he regrets the term itself, like inhumanism. Am I right? Yes. So what would you call it right now? I don't have any word for it really, but I mean it's essentially, I would say that I will try to

clarify instead of changing the word i will try to clarify what it is uh we probably have uh got into this uh bits um through the uh presentations by flippe and others uh that there there is a negative in humanism the one that race talks about and there is then a positive in humanism And this positive inhumanism is what we might call to be primarily technolinguistic in its nature, right? For it to actually be able to call be a certain sort of inhumanism.

But then that's word inhumanism as Arman and a couple of others will, I think, have pointed out remains still to be seen how it can actually be the vehicle of certain sorts of collective of emancipatory project by itself, right? Now, of course, Pete, you know, cunningly attaches the word rationalist behind it, to make that this sort of positive inhumanism

inhumanism should have fundamentally rationalist in the broad sense of theoretical and practical, particularly practical reasons, commitments. Now I am willing to take this project, this world of rationalist inhumanism, you know, as a term, so long as we understand that the nature of the project is fundamentally amphibian. In a sense that it is a sort of rationality that self-consciously tries to restrict itself

and also tries to kind of bootstrap itself from its normative infrastructure. hence I would say inhumanism then it is not really a term rationalist inhumanism it's not a term as always it's just a cheeky name for a labor for a particular labor of humanism of a humanism that has already shed itself of its you know those metaphysical essentialists detritus and baggages. So particularly, I would say that this is just a name of a laborer,

and it's just like, you know, kind of a stylistic preference, but ultimately it is really humanism, and it's true enigmatic, you know, shining appearance. Based humanism. Okay, now we are going somewhere. So thank you. So I always thought that like your inhumanism is in fact the humanism itself. And yes, it was more of an attempt, like a Hayekian attempt, like to resolve some of the local knowledge problems around political economy and governance mechanisms in the domain of humanism itself. Because what was the first paragraph of your first text? Like it was the inhumanism's

mission was to replace the theological whatever's of anti-humanism with the practical and real content of minimalist. Minimalist content of humanism, yes. Yes, no, absolutely, that is true. I mean, there are two movements here. One really, as you say, repair the local context of humanism, humanist philosophy or doctrine, but also in a way, reclaim, recharge and remobilize the enlightenment core of it as a kind of a global project.

you know so it is what I would say it is not simply a reformation of humanism but in a sense also a counter-reformation against the kind of passive rational humanism that we have seen in 20th century or at the age of light it is but like a you know uh more uh what you might call to be a uh active sort of humanism okay so this is my last commentary and question as well so i will give the floor to nema i guess

am i right so you have been alluding to this magic or whatever like how to say forgive my English, like jokingly, to in my opinion that Landian anti-humanism. So in my- I wouldn't actually, my reference, I'm so sorry to bring someone else's name. Sumat, I'm going to get blacklisted by literally everyone. Okay. Actually, my reference was not actually at that point to Land, but yes, Land and I have very very serious sort of disagreements but i was referring to like timothy morton and you know the

revival of magic and this sort of stuff i understand that so my last question is it's a bit personal to give the shape of the rest of the presentation do you think that anti-humanism exists because for me anti-humanism does not exist at all even though it's there like as a decor or decorum enlightenment no no anti-humanism anti-humanism oh okay uh You need to elaborate why you say that. Because some people need to like propagate some ideas and they do not have, they haven't

done enough reading and so they had to come up with some concepts on the road. So there we have anti-humanism. So that's why it doesn't exist for me, because it's not foundational. But your inhumanism is foundational because it addresses some serious problems within the domain of humanism itself. I think, you see, I wouldn't say that it doesn't exist. It's nature is fundamentally problematic. And yes, in that sense, inhumanism really tries to bring to the foreground the tacit

problematicity of this thing, rather than just simply accepting it as a matter of fact. Right. And hence, this is why I said that inhumanism is essentially at its core rational inhumanism, if there is such a thing or based humanism or humanism, whatever, should only be understood as a labor of this explicitation project. of the sort of problems that are already, you know, enfolded, enveloped by the question of what is man, what is human, what are we in the world,

so on and so forth. And then the other and all of that sort of, you know, frills that come with it. Thanks. So Nima, shall we? All right. So talking about what is human and referring to your comment around humanity as a disease on the planet, I was thinking about what is human. When a part of me think about it though, you know, only a part of me, which is like, you know, I always try to forcefully put it under my pillow

and not see it or under my mattress. Part of me wants this disease to end soon. By that I don't mean COVID, I mean humanity. Yes. Yeah, humanity as a disease. And so I was thinking about what is humanity and what do we mean when we refer to humanity as a disease. So in my point of view, which is a very speculative understanding of humanity, is that humanity has two main problems. One is that we are the only species that we do not have any sort of goal. And the second is that we are suffering from that we are unable to predict.

So if we refer to our disease and all these causes and problems, is that we are suffering from the brain inflammation. That during the time we are not able to, like our skull cannot resist the amount of our brain. So this virus or disease that we are suffering from, that this disease gave us this intelligence. So we are transmitting this virus to a technology. So for me, it seems that all these virus that contains in our brain that only based on our DNA,

is only can be transmitted to technology and object, which is AI, which might end the humanity. And because we know that our human progression is based on the repression, we think that AI and machine will destroy the humanity and take the role of humanity. because how do we train AI is always interesting for me because we were referring to language last session and you mentioned that language is like a web or like a pattern. And the way that we are training AI,

it's the modality of transmitting of a virus is through language, which is the tool set to create this narrative and which then turn to history and the way that we feed our AI is based on our like human legacy that's why we know that it contains so much repression that if we are giving this control to the ai we are like i know that you are against unconsciousness yes unconscious but go on but but unconsciously we know that we are going to be

dismantled by AI because it's based on our repression, our legacy. And I lost my brain for a second. Where am I going? Help me. And yeah, this like talking about history and patterns. And so, and about unconscious, you asked this question that explain unconscious without saying or using cause or because. And I think like unconscious, the unconscious is the reaction to the unpredictable, I think.

So I believe in unconscious. And because we are unable to predict, we are reacting to unpredictable with our unconsciousness. So and based on talking about AI, if there's some comments on this speculative kind of understanding of the situation. You see, I mean, thank you so much, by the way, both of you so far. The project of AI, as I mentioned for me, at this point, it's technological success.

I would say actually the other way, it's philosophical woes, it's philosophical calamities overweigh its technological success. But that is not, to me, is a recipe for pessimism about future of AI. But of course I'm quite a skeptic of the sort of things, as I've already mentioned. You see, what we are actually trying to say, we want to say that language

understood in the most general sense is not an information processing system or it is an information processing system of a sugenary quality fundamentally qualitative The advent of this sort of web system allows humans to not have organic, automatic goals like in or Thiele says, but the steno projects, right?

Precisely because it allows them to create what's Yaroslav Pregrin has said, normative niche making through rules. It allows us to enforce rules or rather judgments, rather judgments, rational judgments, as a base of our own adaptation, collective, individual and collective adaptation to uncertainties and unpredictabilities. And Yaroslav Praigrin actually talks this with regard to the sort of naturalization of the project of naturalization

of norms by the likes of you know Ruth Milliken and Daniel Daniel Danette and he says that okay we can we can take this whole idea of adaptation with a grain of salt but for a species to I mean this is usually the definition of human in the sense of you know this evolutionary kind of scenarios that a human is a species that can create the most complex adaptive strategies to situations right and

And Pragrin discusses that this sounds good, but that is not the entire of the story. He discusses, argues, why this sort of naturalistic recipe of understanding human as this sort of super adaptable species through cognitive rational means is not actually the entire story and probably not the story at all. That's the only reason that we can actually create a species wherein

there is a certain sort of asymmetry come synchronicity between individual and the collective is based on this fact that we have created a normative niche for ourselves, just like instead of a natural niche in the evolutionary sense, a normative niche. And that normative niche has first was enabled by language, but through the Buddhist wrapping function of language, which is, you know, the discursive practices, broadly speaking, we have created more normative niches tax such that there are ways that we know what it takes to do something correct

or something valid by instituting rules afforded by these normative niches, right? Normative constructions. And through that, this sort of system, metaverse, so to speak, of normative niches, we are the only species that can actually share a vision of a future, build a shared future that's it that's that's what makes us uh not goal following but being capable of making shared futures uh and yes i would say that um the parochiality of today's philosophical by that i

I do not mean technical or cognitive parochiality. The philosophical parochiality of AI today is that it hasn't matured enough to fully grasp one import of language, normative spaces, and most importantly the project of collectivization and individuation that goes into this sort of normative spaces. To that extent, yes, the worst dogmas of humanism can be smuggled into AI as we are witnessing.

And... I wouldn't say they will destroy us, but yes, it would actually quite interfere with any sort of serious consequential, you know, emancipatory project down the line, down the line. Not any, not still, it's too early to be doomy about AI, I would say, in that sense. But that is precisely because I would say that AI is not a project of AI,

is not philosophically matured enough. But by that, I do not mean that they need to actually wait for philosophers to solve the mysteries of the enigma of man, to go on on their projects. What I mean is that they are, they can at least be more self-conscious about the sorts of models and assumptions they are using in order to build, you know, various sorts of AI programs.

But that to me, it still is not really a recipe for panic mongering about AI. Yes, yes, Gorkhan. Gorkhan Kishanisaramanan So sorry, I had to break in here. So first of all, I'd like to tell anyone that we have decided with our team that we won't accept any questions till the presentation is over. And Reza is like among our team. So he is also a presenter. Sorry for that stuff. And I'd like to give the floor to Nima. But before that, I'd like to comment on your, I mean, for some like a minute.

So we have talked about Metaverse. And people are thinking that Metaverse has been alive, like since Facebook changed their name. but metaverse had been around like four years. It's in low poly mode and this is not to you. So my question would be like for you, Riza, like when you are referring to the other presenters in our team. So there are already AI scripts that can do like social work for you on the metaverse. like they earn for you points, social credits, whatever. What if, I mean, you talked about the annihilation of our IRL species,

like we can be annihilated by any AI mishap in the future, but what if they just, the abstract one, the one on the chain, like can go on and do that adaptation for us or another scenario that essentially the fundamental nature of normative niche construction would be the AI itself you know that basically humans become the AI in the sense of the social being, right?

The guy stick movement. And other than that, sorry to break in. So I mean- I don't mean becoming robots and this sort of stuff, but simply as you say, sort of social massive infrastructure of AI and computational interactions, particularly blockchain, essentially interfere, supplant the canonical models of normative niche making in human species. So you're right. And the real problem about scalability here is not philosophical, because we already have the overabundance of philosophical concepts as to what you have

mentioned, the philosophers like yourself are ready, but the real problem is the storage problem. Like we just cannot store enough data as of now. So we will need a kind of a Cambrian explosion in terms of storage. Then I guess we are set to ready to adapt to become of AIs ourselves. I wouldn't say that it would be the problem of mere storage of data. For example, understand what exactly goes to the normative niche making that makes us different species. It is precisely at its bottom, it's discursive practices, conceptual practices widely.

And concepts are not data exactly. Concepts, essentially qualitative compression of data, such that some of them are being, when needed to be retrieved, some concepts, other concepts can be forgotten. but can be unpacked qualitatively through the interactions of basically human species in the course of the game of giving and asking for reasons. And that's essentially the normative interaction that we were talking about. Okay, thank you. So,

So, Neema? Raj, go ahead. Hi. So, before I... I'm going to take you on a journey. We'll share a little bit of a game. But before we do that, I want you to think of the first... You know, we spoke about language, right? I want you to think about the first time that you became aware of language, the first sound that you made. And it was recognised by your parents or it could even be much later, there was some bully who heard you or someone heard you burp or fart and started laughing at you.

the first time that you kind of made noise, sound, and that was sort of recognized in another person. Just like, take a second and like, get that, right? Okay. I'm guessing everyone sort of has like a vague idea of where they were. All right, now I'm just gonna, yeah, okay. So what we're looking at, and I mean, if you can just kind of like maximize my screen, you'll be able to see it better. I'm sorry, I can't, I would have shared this on my screen, but like that would have crashed the room. So what we're looking at is actually a feral AI program

in this virtual forest. And I don't know if you can tell how it's moving. Can anyone tell? all right let's do this uh why doesn't one person uh i'm just gonna pick at random okay neema why don't you just turn on your microphone and can you make what you thought was the first sound you made that was recognized my sounds so it's it's based on my my sound right yeah so as soon as i'm making some noises it's just react reacting yeah uh but i want you to make the first sound that you think you made like as loud as possible as a as a kid right yeah

wow try it again wow so essentially what we're looking at is this AI program that's driven by multiple AI scripts that are attached to the limbs in its body so each limb has a separate script and these scripts are capable of listening and picking up audio feedback from the computer's microphone and they change the movement of the creature. It's not driven by a single brain that you and I or animals that you know exist presently.

It's actually a congregation or a sort of congress of minds that's kind of bringing this thing to life. each of these scripts then starts interrupting the way in which it moves. So you could think of it as it's kind of these scripts like this, this kind of like, you know, cascading series of, I mean, these scripts are basically proto-minds. They're like a series of like, you know, cascading kind of if then for a very deterministic sort of statements. But then what happens is because they're kind of coming together to produce this motion, they end up creating what is sort of described as emergent behavior in video games. You see this in like say, like racing games when like, you know, say two cars want to take the shortest path, then they'll kind of like bang

into each other and then like kind of become violent in the game and that's not really part of the programming. Similarly here, the motion that this feature is producing is actually outside of the code that I've given it. So essentially, in a really really kind of basic protean sense, it's and I stress this, choosing to project itself in a certain way and move in a certain way. As that happens, the camera that's looking at the creature is also trying to frame the movement and well, I mean, I don't know if it will happen in this sort of like this run of the simulation, you kind of see it in the background but there are multiple other creatures that are sort of wandering the space as well. And when they kind of meet each other, they start interacting and basically these

AI scripts start colliding with each other on my GPU. Essentially what this is, and I'm extending it to the idea of the inhuman. It's like, I said, the inhuman sort of becomes this vessel. In fact, let's just think about the zoom conversation, we're all in this observation deck, this inhuman vessel that is sort of looking at this creature that's sort of essentially wandering this AI that exists at the end of the world. Okay, so the second one kind of came in the way as well.

Now, what this does is that it kind of becomes a way for us to sort of return to the space of reason, where we are sort of witnessing a creature that is sort of at the beginning of thought at the beginnings of a formation of a mind. And when we sort of make our first sort of noises to it, you know, as the last humans, in a language that is unintelligible, it does create responses. That kind of becomes this playground where the reason can be kind of, you know, beginning to shape a new, like we can start like kind of reformulating it on these kind of, I mean, you know, essentially it's this forest boundary of like, like real and virtual.

So, yeah, and then essentially what happens here is like, they're kind of waiting for us, you know, they're greeting us and yeah, they're waiting to hear the songs that we have to sing to them. So what songs would you sing to the future? It's what I'd like to leave you with. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sahaj. Thank you. Thank you for the great Nima and Goran. Excellent, excellent. We had some AI pieces today. I mean, One of my, I absolutely love the source of what you might call to be artistic metaphorization

of the problems. But for example, let's ask a question, does language have anything to do with sound recognition? To what extent, though? You see, this comes back to this idea that I have noticed that some of the kind of the centrist Szilardzian, the best good Szilardzians there are, I've talked about that, look, we cannot actually, no matter what, what sorts of, you know, evolutionary or completely Hegelian

normative, or Hegelian story we have about the generation of these normative spaces, which makes us fundamentally different, we can all agree on the fact that whether they are evolutionary or not in the sense of, in the full genetic sense, we can all agree that we are in a normative space and we can't, and the sort of decisions and judgments we make have become less and less in tandem with nature.

Right? There is a fundamental process of artificialization going on through this idea of self-determination by way of normative spaces. But then he also, for example, like Craig Grin adds that, but we can in fact think about a possible scenario where we could go and decompose the sort of components and ingredients that go into the building of normative spaces into their simple evolutionary elements.

And yes, in that sense, for example, when we are talking about language, I think that at one level, particularly at the level of judgments and what language makes us capable of, it would be wrong. I think it would be wrong to talk the evolutionary language isn't just an evolutionary tool and can be explained away by evolutionary by its evolutionary components but yes in a sense the constitution of language you know as as the sort of

of symbolic platform, obviously, has some very simple evolutionary component. Once, sound recognition, but not all sorts of sound recognition. One of the reasons that, you know, human languages, and human language, of course, the beginning of the self-consciousness of what language could be, right? one of the ways that in evolutionary sciences people talk about it is that it required the evolution of certain, you know, vocal tracts plus, you know, the neoteny of the

brain such that we can have the capacity to chop up gurgling sounds into pieces, make them discreet, stabilize them such that they can be repeated and recognized. And this discretization, in a sense becomes the origin of really primitive sort of syntax, syntax manipulation as a sound recognition. But of course, this is not the entire story, of course, you see. And the problem with all these evolutionary stories is that it is like you are

within the space of language. And you are trying to fully decompose it to non-linguistic components, right? At this point, I can actually say that these non-linguistic components can be understood, but not in evolutionary sense, in this sort of narratives that are quite sometimes fundamentally speculative. But in terms of logical computational components, the fundamental computational, I don't mean computer like AI and stuff, but the sort of web-like interactive computations

that is at the foundation of language itself, that allows, for example, concepts to have this sort of compression of data or where language can allow you to, the inferences done within the language allow you to fork, rather than, you know, the problem with the frame problem, the major problem of AI is that it's not about remembering things, but rather forgetting the right components. You know, concepts allow us to forget a lot of, but not arbitrary, but precisely because there are rules, actually. Concepts are rules at their base, rules that are collectively instantiated, socially instantiated, allow us to forget certain sort of things that are not necessary for a certain, for example, judgment or decision to be made.

And that sort of power of language, I think, might be at some point fully computationally understood. But evolutionary scientists are not good candidates for explaining that way. So, Reza, I had a few responses. So the thing with the program itself is that it's not understanding right now because there's no machine learning or anything like that happening. But it is responding to sound, that's all. The reason why I wanted to go to sound as in painting this post-apocalyptic scenario

is like... So, okay, like this would be another example. I mean, simple sound, I mean, like as an ingredient of world making, you know, like painting, you said, this good man's, like a good manian sense, and also a good man that he says that, you know, you don't need concepts or linguistic entities to create a world. Sometimes you can only have sounds, colors, paints, and so on and so forth. so forth and that's what is really world making is about and that's actually is fundamentally a more conclusive uh sorry inclusive picture of this whole idea of you know uh uh basically uh the human world rather than just linguistic items

Yeah, exactly. And like, so in order to make the world immune, we would need language. The point I'm trying to make is that we wouldn't need, like sound would be a part of it, like multiple sounds because the universe would die only when they're like, you know, in whispers, right? In the last whispers is when the universe would sort of go out. In fact, it began with this bang. I mean supposedly, right? So we have noise as this. Okay, so for example, there's this TV show, you know, this post-apocalyptic show called Sea where like everyone's blind. And it's actually a really good meditation on like, you know, what if the world could

be, like no one in the world could see. It basically, the entire world building project of that show is around sound. Like, you know, so everything from, like, you know, the blade hitting water to, like, you know, the rustle of the grass to, and, like, every noise is kind of registered and, like, really kind of essential for people to communicate with each other and even know, like, you know, to recognize the other before even, like, kind of, you know, cutting their thoughts which is quite a violent show. But I was just thinking, like, even if you take this to, like, you know, the first men, the first human beings, like even then, like, even as a survival response, like, you know, say you want to warn like your tights men

that like, you know, there's this beast approaching, you would make noises and they probably wouldn't be in sight, in your like line of sight as well. So they probably wouldn't see you, but they'll hear you before they see you. And then taking that forward to like, you know, the way oral histories have sort of been like kind of carried down before the written word, like, you know, we We've learned, it's just like, if we were to uncouple intelligence and intelligibility from the human, intelligence itself has carried, or let's say, walked with us up until this point, through sound, in a lot of ways, you know, through noise, in every kind of form, like, you know, like, even, even in its visual sort of representation, or like, even in the text form,

there's always noise that comes with it, you know, before it becomes intelligible. And that's kind of where I was trying to get at. Like, you know, the space of, like, what I need to say is, like, when we begin to chart that kind of, like, middle ground of reason collectively with, you know, post-human entities, like, the first thing we'd have to, like, kind of contend with is the unintelligibility of sound. but then in that, like kind of, you know, like I guess, even out that sense of reason, you know, and like recognition and then reason, you know, by making things intelligible. Yes, yes, no, no, I completely understand your point. I mean, someone said something about,

actually, give me one second, I'm coming back, one second, sorry. So does anyone know, are we talking about translating sound as a type of data to another data or no? Yeah, as in I guess just in the retelling or like in the representation, you know, when

you tell the story over again, you would change it. Just by changing your intonations, your inflections, in those very kind of like granular ways, you would end up sort of changing data from data as well, right? there will be obviously like, you know, the whole thing of Chinese. Is that what you're trying to get at? Sorry. You mean in your, Sahesh, you're talking about about programming or from what perspective are you discussing

um discussing sound and how it can be translated into other substances um i'm talking just in terms of like uh not even in terms of programming not even in terms of code uh or not even in terms of like talking but i'm just saying um in the uh you know when when say one uh packet of information becomes another like say even in like sort of telling a story or like you know uh in the way a poem is heard and like set out and then is heard uh there's that change that's already happening between two people like i mean uh misunderstanding is kind of like part of that that change of data in that sense uh or like you know say you encounter a painting and then

you know, you kind of read it in a way that's completely different or outside of the way it was the painter would have intended it, for example, like, you know, I mean, that that constantly happens, right? Like, maybe... Yeah, yeah, it's a hard topic to understand what artist was intended to say, really. My apologies. So, you see, yeah, I was saying That obviously, two things. There is no reason to actually think that the sort of natural language that we have

could only be used by this sort of ingredients or those sorts of ingredients. Stephen Jay Gould actually has it in a thought experiment called rewinding the tape. Rewinding the tape is a name of thought experiment that imagine that you could rewind the tape of evolution, completely put a different source of constraints, and it would be completely conceivable and not inconceivable to actually having lizards, who have a bird singing, having the sort of language, or not having the same language as us,

but having the similar capacities that we attribute to language, right? So that I agree with that. That is not a problem for me. But I would say we should actually make a distinction between intelligibility proper as a matter of judgment, conceptual judgment, and intelligibility as a matter of mere awareness recognition. Of course, there is a very interesting story about entanglement of these two. And of course, Sellars is good at talking about it. but mere awareness and differential responsiveness to a sound and the sort of recognition that goes

into it is at a different level than the sort of intelligibility, rational intelligibility, which is conceptual we are talking about. But this, as I said, within even that sort of society that has that sort of mere awareness, differential responsiveness. There is no reason to imagine that given the proper constraints, it cannot actually evolve to having something like conceptual competency, right? what was it ronald farm french mathematician and philosopher there is this

passage if i remember correctly where he calls normative space of language as the space of constant wakefulness as opposed and he has a story uh that as opposed constant wakefulness constant normative wakefulness uh afforded by normative space of language as opposed to basically transient alertness. And he has a, as it creates this sort of speculative scenario story that

we create a pattern, I mean organism create a pattern of sound recognition about the of a predator you know stalking through the grass uh you know approaching predator all these patterns and stuff and this pattern becomes sometimes stabilized such that the the prey does not actually need to see the predator right but simply the sound of it and he actually uh says that these sorts of gestalts for wayfulness are in fact basic components of things that like the sound of of the genitive of

is a really you know uh what you might call to be the uh grandchild of that sort of transitory alertness but now fully gone within uh entrenched within the space of language as a normative construct Renathom is the name of it t-h-o-m I think it's mathematical morphogenesis and mathematical models of morphogenesis. I think that's the book.

So, Rizal, would you say that like intelligibility and unintelligibility are essentially both capable of producing intelligence, right? Like, I mean, they're both sort of, you know, kind of intrinsically correlated to intelligence because like even if- They're intertwined, yes. I mean, unintelligibility, but again, unintelligibility is, the intertwinement of unintelligibility and intelligibility is under the jurisdiction of judgments. Because once they are being decoupled without judgment,

then unintelligibility simply becomes the case of unknown unknown. You know, shit happens, right? Like it's all bloated concepts of contingency and uncertainty, right? Shit happens everywhere. But the whole point is that it really is the intertwinement of unintelligibility and intelligibility on reason and reason under the jurisdiction of judgment that creates a dynamic force between them. such that you become capable of revising some of the facts about the world of which we are a part, right?

um cassia i think you have a question uh yeah it's not something very uh developed uh something i was thinking here uh and actually it relates back uh these questions of better recognition as some kind of infrastructure for the development of normative practices with what Reza was talking earlier about the formation of normative niches and under the point of view of what you called Reza the prehistory of intelligence.

I was talking about, I was thinking about actually the question of persuasion as Wittgenstein touches upon in uncertainty, as something that may have something to do with the interaction between these normative niches, as in he talks about we persuade someone that is, let's say, in another form of life, perhaps by imagining reasonable doubts to that kind of normative niche. And I was thinking how we could develop

some kind of an ethics that may account for all these aspects in regards, it's very vague question, but there's a lot of things coming to my mind. How hegemonic attitudes comes in place with regards to, I don't know, dealing with type constructors and type destructures in the context of persuasion in actual interactions between normative niches. I don't know if it's clear.

Yes, yes. Well, I don't have really an answer to this. You see, precisely because this is why I would say again, is a weak point of the rationalist inhumanism project in sense of the emancipatory, creating an emancipatory hegemonic movement, right? Obviously, persuasion comes to play a decisive role. So far, every story about persuasion that I have read among rationalists, this is perhaps the weak point of rationalism as a philosophy.

from Brandon to Yaroslav Pragrin. And Pragrin actually talks about this quite a lot, about the idea of persuasion, and why rules matter about living, and his essay, Living in a Human World. they all come down these accounts come down to a certain sort of as if it was something that could be rectified by itself right

through appeal to normative structures to create better normative structures so on and so forth Yes, that all sounds good, great. But I would say that there are elements of game theoretic, fundamental game theoretic elements in these sorts of interactions between different normative niches that should be also taken into account.

But the problem that remains is that rationalism tends to give too much, I would say, social political autonomy, valence of social political autonomy to reason. And again, theory tends to completely empties itself of rational judgments,

normative sort of the rationalist picture of these interactions between normative niches. I would say that any sort of persuasion should be, should integrate these two aspects. Because as we have seen it, and good Marxist organizers, you know, Trotsky and all those people knew, appeal to the idea that there is a way that the

normative metaverse itself corrects its normative niches such that as true rules of this normative space, things can be corrected. It's not fully a realistic picture in the game of persuasion. You see, when you are in a battlefield, whether social or military, there are different sorts of methods of persuasions that go into it, different sorts of calculations

that are not really fully what you might call to be of the sort of rational normative quality that we are talking about. So I really do not know about this, But I mean, it is good to actually go back to see what is the nature of persuasion with regard to normativity. You know, obviously it is not reward and punishment, right? But it is also reward punishment in a certain other sort of way. a in a way that the the mechanism of rewarded punishment has been entrenched extremely subtly

within the collectivization of norms themselves the and the entrenchment of rules normative rules uh such that uh sometimes, and that comes back to the whole idea of morality, sometimes people do not, just because they can do something, they don't do it. Just because you can kill someone, you don't do it, right? And that is also a persuasion, a persuasion that has been built by an extremely subtle, rational, entrenched in the rational space of rules that's, it

dissuade you from doing something, right? But that's only one, one tiny part of, I would say that this, this kind of of a pre-Gaganean story about kind of self-rectification of normative space is only one part of this story. I think when there is actual concrete sociopolitical persuasion, there should be other sorts of factors, other sorts of calculations should be put into the equation, but

these sorts of extra components should always be, I would say, should be at the service of the, you know, kind of normative collectivity. That, you know, basically the inclusion, the expansion of the normative space rather than kind of emptying it or in a way basically making a coup against it. I mean, look, how many of you have read these sorts of

books by Richard Green, The Art of Seduction, or Trump's The Art of the Deal, and this sorts of stuff. I mean, look, they can persuade people. But if we are actually thinking about the sort of emancipatory project we should also understand that this persuasion needs to be understood within its basically normative context it cannot simply be mechanized without its content normative content without its justificatory content once it is emptied of its justificatory

content, it is just the art of the deal. Thank you. Absolutely. No, I mean, one of the greatest people who have written about persuasion in a game theoretic, I'm not talking about the vulgar books that have been written about this sort of stuff. One of the best ones is Thomas Schelling, Thomas Schelling, Art of the Conflict. It is a fundamentally important book.

the strategies of conflict, the strategies of conflict, if I remember correctly. Because, you know, when it comes to the sorts of interactions that require certain sort of when we are saying persuasion obviously we mean that we want someone to do something or not to do something right and we are not simply talking about usually in these scenarios between two individuals that are very rational people and can actually, even if they come to a disagreement,

they can actually say that, okay, you can have it. I'm fine with it. We are usually talking about the conflict interaction between two different normative niches, right, with their own members. So in such scenarios, it's extremely hard to appeal to you know kind of rational simple individual rational dialogue

as as as the only means as the only means there are other sort of dynamics that go into these sorts of scenarios. Sometimes you don't even know the entirety of, for example, points or, you know, goals or wants of another normative niche. Sometimes they purposefully, they do not actually give you what they actually want. Thomas Schelling has this magnificent metaphor of two

paratroopers. I think you can easily search Thomas Schelling, two paratroopers, where basically one of the paratroopers purposefully shuts down his radio to persuade the other person to come to his rendezvous point and him not making a job of meeting him on a third point. You know, there are all these sorts of, so when we are talking about persuasion, I think that we should also talk about things like Matisse, Conning talk about punishment of reward, and all sorts of tactics and strategies that go

into such dynamics. And this is of course very important for revolutionaries to understand that you cannot decouple these tactics from their rational, justificatory content. You should actually try to synchronize them because once you decouple them, then it's essentially a disastrous recipe. But I mean, when it comes to, for example, a sort of revolutionary, I mean, Trotsky was a goddamn engineer when he came to the

art of persuasion, but mostly through extremely intricate forms of inducing fear in the enemies and also emptying them of basically choices. so and these are i think that these are the things that are genuinely are missing in the the rationalist inhumanist project in a sense that uh

As a whole, it's absolutely an emancipatory project as a point of collective self-determination, individual and collective self-determination. through various means, you know, renegotiation of gender and identity, hijacking technological means, you know, renegotiation of, you know, positive freedoms. But what is not clear to me, and this is, of course, something that needs to be worked on, uh it's that the moment that it actually makes a concrete contact with a real emancipatory project

that can be instantiated okay my apologies uh Michael Thanks, that was really great. I had a kind of a very specific question that I was debating, just writing something up, maybe and posting it on discord, because I wasn't really sure it would connect in a meaningful way. But I think it actually does end up connecting with persuasion. And I apologize, I have to kind of bring in some really naive, stupid thoughts about humans and, and humanism that have kind of been with me for a long time and are not as exciting as kind of all the problems that have come up in this seminar but I am now wondering how they might be made use of

so there are two out of many two kind of concepts that have come up already of the relationship between like sounds and patterning uh versus um what i say um uh versus intelligibility and concepts as forgetting as a uh a method to deal with uncertainty um and there are two extreme i would say extremely ideological and um certainly not uh people who are kind of blind to a lot of the questions of this seminar, who have kind of come at parts of these problems in their own specializations. And I'm thinking of two pop-sci books, one by Judea Pearl, who

kind of had a big impact on Bayesian reasoning and stuff, made a lot of innovations there as a statistician and probability theorist, and Noam Chomsky, sorry, who has a book called Why Only Us, and these two are interesting to me because they put forward a kind of specific, very simple, tangible, this is what separates human from non-human animal, and I think not by coincidence, they both connect, they both don't know what to do with the concept, but do try to connect it to imagination. So for Judea Pearl, it's the idea of a do operator that allows you to have causal inference, not just associational inference. And for Chomsky in this book, Wyoming, which I am not

judged, I'm not qualified to judge, you know, really any of the claims in there, but he tries to give a, it's actually with a Barwick collaborator who probably did all the real work, if we're honest, who they try to delineate the like, what can we say is or isn't evolutionarily contributing to language in and in what way. And their kind of conclusion is that things like linearization and audio kind of translation and other sorts of things that and association are things that other non-human animals have in abundance, essentially, and they hypothesize an I language based on a merge operator as kind of Chomsky's universal grammar and say that that's

an internal thought tool and not communicative at all. It's not aimed at, from an evolutionary perspective, doesn't develop towards communication at all. And so originally, I just wanted to ask what we might do to kind of reclaim and take in some of these kind of naive, not the naive movie isn't the best word, but these kind of straightforward positivist concepts to point towards reconstructing kind of the concrete techniques of constructing normative spaces. But second, when you brought, I really glad Cassia brought in persuasion and Reyes's response was really great because it actually connected that for me to another kind of reference point

that I have a bit more kind of philosophical sort of affinity for, which is Paolo Freire, who is a dedicated humanist and a revolutionary humanist, whose notion of dialogue is about men meeting in the world to act on the world, mediated by the world. And that notion of dialogue to me ties together these two kind of simplistic things. The do operator is how you hypothesize a change to the world. And that's something that also has come up is like, we can change the conditions of the world. And then the merge operator as this, this thought tool that makes that happen. And then coincidentally allows you to connect it with communicatively with other subjects or whatever. And it's, at first I was like, ah, well, this, I, all this stuff about

persuasion blows Frere out of the water because his whole thing is like, we can have revolution if we can get everybody into these cultural circles or kind of collaborative communal learning sessions and do dialogue. And then we'll have genuine perception as a result of dialogue, as opposed to, you know, what we might call ideological sort of false consciousness, et cetera, et cetera. But as you say, you can't just rely on rational dialogue. You have to construct a normative space and you have to be able to renegotiate that normative space. But then I thought, is it, maybe there's actually kind of a simple, just kind of just do it solution to the problem, which is like, and this kind of goes back to the problem that has really stuck in my craw this whole time, going back to Risi Bredati and who is we and who's allowed on the

after whatever, maybe you can just do something as simple as let's make our goal be honing our sense of who is genuinely engaged in dialogue, who is in whatever our normative space is and isn't trying to subvert it. And maybe if we can just figure out that, then we can just say in or we is whoever is participating in this normative space and and accomplishing dialogue and then uh assuming there are kind of too many errors then you'll have enough uh of this furrian dialogue that more and more genuine perceptions will happen and uh and the genuine perceptions will lead to reconfiguring that normative space and eventually affecting material conditions in

whatever radical progressive way you want. There's obviously a lot of questions still in there. So those are my two kind of like contributions slash questions is like, how can we make use of these simple positive kind of scientific differentiators of related to intelligence? And then also, maybe there's a shortcut kind of or a way towards a normative space that can go forward somewhere in there. Thanks for bearing with me. Absolutely. Let me actually, while I'm thinking about the first half of your question, about the second question, with regard to Rosie Bredetti, I actually like that point. But you see, the thing is that when we are saying that,

let's actually first figure out who is in genuinely in a kind of dialogical position, right? This comes back to the idea that essentially everyone is practicing dialogical discursive practices, right? We are all held by these ever more subtle and supple links of what makes us human, right? But the fact of that does not mean that there could be, you know, different normative niches, right? That they do are actually make dialogues

among their own members, right? By virtue of being, occupying the normative space. but it would be extremely difficult to say that let's genuinely the first step would be genuinely to understand sorry to understand or to designate or to recognize who is in a genuine dialogue if we are actually might be occupying each of us multiple different normative spaces, you know, with regard to everything that holds us together. So that would be a little bit that sort of criteria, I would say it's not impossible,

it requires again going back to honing out and fleshing out the unbinding of rationality and justification, and hence collectively revise our own portraits, self-portrait here and now, such that we can actually make a better sort of conglomeration of these normative spaces. But I would say that there is a more humble, very more humble way to actually do this, at least amongst ourselves. You know, you have seen that meme, everyone is in a Spider-Man dress and showing each other left, left, left, and just like pointing at each other.

It's your fault. It's your fault. So, look, at the very least, we can create a systematic dialogue or recognition of who is genuinely into a dialogue within our own specific, you know, normative niches. And then we have to decide which one it is, right? Because as I said, the problem with the normative space is that it's a metaverse. So each of us at once as individuals occupying multiple numbers of these normative universes

in terms of economy, thoughts, psychology, so on and so forth. So it should be every, any sort of task should start with unpacking of at least one of these normative spaces within its members, and then trying to reach out, right, coordination and organization problems. And then, yes, but that is also a very, actually, I would say, an arduous task. As I said, the fact that I have never seen, I mean, all of you probably know that,

I've never seen more fights among my Marxist comrades anywhere. Even if when I was in elementary school, I didn't see that much fights. So the creation of dialogue, I mean, the understanding that who is genuinely in dialogue, I think it should start from basically a very specific normative niche and its occupants, and then moving forward. But then it all comes back to this. So again, part of the emancipatory project.

so what what happens to people uh whether you know members of the same uh normative niche or another niche that appear to you not having a dialogue or genuinely not interested in dialogue because as I said all of any person any person by that I mean agent that inhabits a normative niche is always practicing dialogical uh uh discursive practices and is in dialogue with something

It's just that it might not be your dialogue, right? So these are, remain, you know, questions of consensus making that I would think that are of utmost importance. But then what they need to be, I would say that they need to be taken in babiest steps, fundamentally babiest steps, unpacking one task at a time, working on one normative niche space

and its members at a time. And this is all again coming back to the idea of the navigational practices. You know that if done through these sorts of unpacking, you can have ramifying basically paths you can actually create expansive normative spaces within which you do not need to persuade another normative members of another normative niche to accept you but rather they join persuaded

to join you precisely because they do not need to think what else they can do right The art of persuasion again. The whole point is to make people, as Pragyin says, to make them not to do something even if they can. And this, of course, come back to this whole subtle connection between what we can and what we ought to do, right? What we should do.

Aaron? Oh dear. I need to take a counter stance to this. We go bit by bit and one at a time. But I love that we've kind of settled on this question of persuasion because to me, it's sort of the foundational question of philosophy and the Western philosophical tradition. This is sort of my favorite moment. We go back to Plato's Republic and to the very first scene of Plato's Republic where Socrates and I forget is Glaucon or some brother of Plato's they go to the festival

and they're about to leave they they watch it and they're about to leave and it's just to make a senses slaves and they ordered them to stop and Plato says oh I'm tired and Socrates says oh I'm tired I want to go home and Drosimachus says there are five of us and two of you do you think you you're going to go home and Socrates says what what if I I have good reasons for wanting to go home what if I what if I give you reasons and Drosimachus says what if I don't want to listen to your reasons. If I'm not correct, I think they can draw either before or after.

I think that they are inebriated either through that conversation or after that conversation. It's before the conversation. Look through the inebriation, you can actually be convinced to do anything. But this is, it's like the very first page, it's like the opening, there's this debate, like, they're like, Socrates is basically coerced into having the whole dialogue, right? Like, you're in political society, you're in life, like, collectively, and he would rather go home and contemplate philosophically on his own, but he's forced to have this whole conversation to sort of serve as entertainment at the end. at the dinner party about why we should try to have a society

that follows rules and is based on norms rather than a society based on sort of a coercive social order. He's forced to have this conversation to argue philosophically for the necessity of a form of life where we could make decisions based on rule following and the rule of the better reason rather than um rather than where the bigger group of men gets to tell the smaller group of men what to do is the whole basis of the whole dialogue and the whole philosophical tradition that comes from that and they're like the the central conceit is that there's no way out of that um right i i guess that's that's the place to start um

That's the platonic scenario, of course, which I do believe fundamentally. And my idea is quite really parochial. This sort of idea absolutely does not actually going to work on this through a foundational, ground up education of why we are such a species to children right to children you know still humans one by one as I said human children one by one reformat them, put them back in but obviously

that platonic story hasn't happened right we're uh we're looking uh and and and the question is that what now you don't know what now and i see that the inhumanist rationalism is at its own uh basically best moments is a very platonic thesis right particularly if you think about the early plato to the late plato where Plato actually gives a Promethean import to this project, you know, in Philippus and other later dialogues. But then, but again, as I said, the question is that, the question of methodology, how are we going to pull this off?

Right? Because you and I and all our small rational niche can talk about this. We can agree on that. And you can convince me that Reza, you do not need to go home and wallow on your stupid philosophy. Come and we have a dialogue. And yes, I say, of course, I will come. First of course I will kick and spit and then I will come. But that is only amongst us, just like Plato's dialogue. What about the others? So this is why I really like Sellers' essay. He has a couple on Plato, but there's one, I think it's a less well known one called like Reason and the Art of Living.

that's specifically about the republic and where he kind of gives a very boring, formalistic way of talking about practical reason with like baking a cake or something and then tries to spin this out. But I think it's a brilliant essay and it kind of goes like this. It's like if you take yourself to be engaged in an art or technique or practice and you want to achieve, that means that you are trying to achieve some sort of ideal purposive direction of that practice, right? If it's baking a cake, you're baking cakes. If it's steering a ship or being a doctor, it's health or reaching a port. And that's the sort of, you can have debate about

the practical ways of achieving that end that is sort of objective and present and that the concept of the good is sort of, it can be sort of naturalistically formulated in this way as a series of recipes to achieve a certain end. And if you take yourself to be in this practical identity, then you ought to be doing such. And he kind of gives this structure of practical reason in that way. And when, I guess last time we were talking about Marxism and teleology, I feel like this is the structure of a kind of Marxist or Marxist humanist argument. Like if you take yourself to be a human being, then you take yourself as committed to a certain set of ideals of rational autonomy that the free development of each individual should be the condition of the

free development of all, then you ought to be committed to X, Y, Z practices to bring about and a or whatever. I feel like this is the kind of meta discourse that needs to happen. And there's just no avoiding it. And it has to be, I guess this is what I was trying to bring up as the issue with psychoanalysis specifically. I don't, I mean, that's sort of a great between psychoanalytic and Pittsburgh readings of Hegel, that's less important. But what's important is that we're speaking in this way where we can be understood in the most maximal sense. Like that we're not speaking a language

that is only intelligible to a narrow tradition of French philosophical thinkers who think Freud is central to understanding and doing philosophy when it at least seems to me no one else outside of France even views Freud as a sort of an eccentric, like historically important Viennese literary critic or whatever. But it seems like we, especially with climate change, the reason that it's worth defending humanism is that we need to build a sense of human agency and take it that if you're committed to humanity, you're committed to preventing global climate collapse, right? And you need to build up this discourse of practical reason around these sort of commitments to this ideal that ought to include the full extent of we.

I guess the other way that I think Sellers relates to this nicely is that his definition of philosophy is about sort of trying to get all of these normative, what you call metaverses or normative niches to relate to each other maximally. right that's all that philosophy is for him is the sort of the like a totalistic commitment to relating normative claims in one area to any other area right to take this meta view that yeah you can have relative autonomy of these different languages but to be committed to knowledge as a project to be a philosopher to love knowledge is to recognize the weight that any norm like

has on any other norm. And that's unique to philosophy. Yes. I mean, that's essentially in a sense that inhumanism wants to do this by putting the burden not on human, but what makes human human? Self-correcting rules, right? And then unbinding these self-correcting rules, expanding them as a value system, and not merely epistemic, as a value system, as an axiological system, such that the expansions of self-correcting rules, revising them, becomes tantamount to completely revise the self-portrait of the

human because as long as a self-portrait of human here and now is with us we are basically it's just like an albatross around your neck you need you need to really i think to to eject the core of the project of humanism and make it independent, make it fully bring it to the foreground. And that's really understanding self-correcting rules, their expansion, their revision as a value system, as a value system in a Ricardian sense, as the principle of objective morality.

and once you do that self-revision of the portrait of human in terms of self-conception and transformation is inevitable in a sense because those rules will allow you to have a radically different sorts of conceptions as values, self-conceptions, as values toward which you can strive and by way of which you can be radically transformed. So I think that there

is a sense that the emphasis of the project of inhumanism should be transformed to the very idea that the unbinding of reason from the human animal should be the very principle and basically the pillar upon which practical ethics of practice and morality system of values can be built like rules become the system of values and nothing else like literally the expansion of the you know space of self self-correcting reasons becomes

the fundaments of all values not life not anything else and in that sense then there is there will be a tension here uh that i have noticed that it has come up uh so on so forth as like for example with regard to the climate change then what are we exactly trying to save that is that becomes the main

question you see we do not yet know what we are actually trying to save Well, at the moment, we're just trying to save the sort of spontaneous production of sort of market mediated values, which is why we're unable to do anything about it. I guess I'll just say one more thing and then I've said enough. But I kind of always viewed sort of the inhuman within humanism as a bit different. It is both this kind of rational necessity that goes beyond human proposiveness. But I guess I brought up Scott Baker last week because I feel like what he's talking about sort of brings up some of the difficulty.

like the inhuman is a is a darker kind of speculative point in which certain basic elements of how we take ourselves to be agents or um or how we orient our lives can be broken down by theoretical and practical reason and how how sort of the possibility of radically revising our orientation of our lives around sort of like something like a vocation or romantic isn't it the fact Aaron that Mark Fisher was completely right about Scott Baker that the protagonist and the end of the story of neuropath true that this sort of inhumanism emerges through technoscientific means but the inhuman

is actually becoming even more edipal than it was supposed to be. Edipal human has, you know, it actually creates a certain sort of, and this is why Mark was saying that, look, one of the things that Scott Baker, Scott Baker is an inhumanist in a very special sense. But what is actually missing is to plugging this sort of inhumanism to the project of collective self-determination, right? No, it's absolutely a failure. Yeah, the attempt at sort of short-circuiting these. It's sort of... Nothing short of wedding Mao with Metzinger

can make us through this. No, yeah, it's just sort of the dark possibilities of how easy it would be to sort of technologically manipulate the very basic ways in which we take sort of manifestly ourselves to be agents. Yes. That's the inhuman is this sort of where the scientific and manifest image clash in such ways that the actual possibilities of our agency would have to change or we would have unrecognizable forms of agency, of self-realization. I don't know. I think romantic love is a good model. it's hard to imagine being a person without that but we could easily do away with it in a kind of in a rat like i think uh i i absolutely think that the the the project of inhumanism

should be understood as the unbinding of reason um unbinding of reason in a in a negative sense and a positive sense. First, that the reason is what makes the human this sort of thing, sui generi animal, sapiens. Second, reason, once unbound in a collective sense, its first mission should always be to curtail its, you know, maybe curtail is not a good word,

to question its wholesomeness. You see, questioning the wholesomeness of reason should always be a rational enterprise. That's, that I actually begin, and that, this I believe is part of the project, a healthy project of humanism or rationalist inhumanism, in the sense that if reason does not question its wholesomeness and mistake itself as a totalized state of affairs, it becomes suicidal. It actually finds itself in a collision course whereby a pinprick

of disaster contingency, historical or otherwise, will make it to start fantasizing about its own death, right? That's the classic idea of suicidal reason, a reason that has not put hypothetical constraints upon itself. It hasn't tapered itself and hence it becomes the worst of its enemies and ultimately brings the reign of pure and complete irrationalism as the most destroying and annihilative power.

And this whole idea that the reason should create constraints, and constraints, put constraints on itself, hypothetical or not, in a kind of Persian sense, abducting itself by creating more questions for its own activities should lead to certain sort of you know, maturation of reason, whereby reasons becomes fully revisionary in its own sense,

right? It won't actually be the sort of glorified thing as the residue of classical humanism, right it becomes truly inhuman i mean inhuman is literally another word for a reason understood all things considered as a self-constraining and self-conscious revisionary project. Reason different from rationality.

In a Galilean sense, it does, but mightily. reason that I'm not using rationality because I actually can use rationality, but rationality has, has at least for some people, as this connotation of reasoning, as a system of reasonings, reasonings rather than reason, right? So reasonings are not essentially everyone can reason, right? But what I'm talking about is this whole idea of reason, as I mentioned, as a system of rules that is the base, the objective base of all values.

reason is not a rationality it can actually rationality yes there is a certain sort of sense that i'm a little bit uh well of course these are these are the stuff that can always be throughout the dialogue can be unfolded and stretched, explicated. Yes, there is a certain, I would say, fear or anxiety in me that rationality can be understood as a sort of utility function, which I actually do not want to have that sort of connotation, right?

If anything, reason is basically that which is being used by reason. Reason doesn't have a utility. Matthews? Yeah. Thanks, Reza. I was thinking, and perhaps this is also interesting if people from the Wolfendale group wants to answer, because I was thinking on something of the reformity in the Homo Satan's paper, in which he says something like that inhumanism is a project, like he was saying, of the unbinding rationality.

from animality. He says it also in terms of a universality of protocol with varying platforms. Now I was thinking if we could perhaps think the fundamental distinction between inhuman and post-human projects as the inhuman project being a universality of protocol of varying platforms and the post-humans actually looking for a universality of platforms like in material platforms with varying formal, communicational, organizational protocols and things like that. Yes.

Yes, I think it makes sense. Well, it comes back to this point that you know, I know that you're going to hate me for this, but I'm quite Parmenelian at this point. Thinking and being are one. Absolutely. And thinking of being one, and this one is the universality. And this, of course, being renegotiated, and we can talk about this quite through the long road of modern history, that yes, reason has its universality in one, right?

It's a platform on which things can be built, right? Including shared futures. Whereas I would say that the multiplicity, the multiplicity, affirming the multiplicity of platforms in their communication, Prima Facie, is actually a fundamentally different story, right? It's a very anti-Platonic, anti-Badiouian, and in fact, I would say anti-universalist story. but then we are not talking about universalism as the hackneyed way that people make fun of

that you know you have a certain sort of image of man and then you project it to everyone else no it's precisely because the universality of the human can only be found in the universality of one that which is the reason And you see that there are coming, I mean, when we think about these kind of humanism, inhumanism, post-humanism. We are actually, when we start to decompose the problems,

we arrive at the preneal questions of philosophy, right? Being and becoming. Thinking and being are not the same. The confoundment between the two, and so on and so forth. and that's that's as I mentioned it's just like the honing of the problem constantly and there are more confusion will be introduced to the problems but then you still have more capacity to address the problems that you thought don't exist within such new concepts one second my apologies

one second I have to do something here If anyone else wants to comment on that distinction makes sense based on open day, I think Arman and Will are here from the presentation as well. It made sense for me.

I was just going to say something actually in this line, that if I understand you, you are referring to one as a perennial question of philosophy, one, multitude, and stuff like that. I want to say that for them, at least in theory, the one becomes, as you said, platform or nature, Spinoz's idea of the one. And for rationalists, guys, the other way around, I agree. But I wanted to ask everybody, but especially Reza and Aaron, that would they say that one is in itself a practical concept? That is one, there is no real in one. Everyone is a practical one.

And if I think in Philip was actually Socrates, or maybe it is in Parmenides, Socrates says something like this. he says that i i say what i say the thing that is that is uh is the power of doing or something like that i mean maybe the oldest pragmatic thing that someone had said oh at least i have um i have to read it anyway that's my question do you think one is by nature uh practical and another question that I think that would be interesting for anybody in a democratic country. I say that I go vote and vote with all my heart for say President Biden and President Biden is not a very good person.

So after a year, his approval rate is under 40% or something. Is this for me as a citizen of this democratic society, Is it for me to protest this guy because I just understand that no, this is not the guy that I thought I'd vote for? Or is it for me to be bound to the law and wait for another four years and then go and vote again? And if the latter, which I suppose all my democratic friends would say, if the latter is the answer, then I would ask what makes people not to, what makes, what stops people, politicians from not lying in a very peripheral manner of tourism actually but what's stopping

them from lying and then bound the citizen that must wait four years for another what would get us out of this cycle that is well this is this is the whole point is a fundamentally problematic in in the first place, you see, as long as we are, if we are fully self-conscious of being the sort of normative critters we are, we should not actually accept the fact that particularly in after this whole historical transition, that leaders or politicians or any individual leaders can actually make a better world for us.

The point is to change the conditions such that leaders can only be representative in the most fundamental sense, and nothing more than that. To change the conditions is different than changing a leader. And we have what we can't, that's the whole point that I was trying to, if there is an emancipatory project, it should be changing the conditions which are, you know, constitutive to that which is unjust. that which is you know uh basically as you say uh false changing the conditions the most important

things otherwise and this is why i have said it uh numerous time that the point of emancipatory project is not the abolishment of a slavery in all sorts of ways. It's the great, Jean-Pierre has, Jean-Pierre Caron has his new course, The Great Unlearning. It's the great unlearning of a slavery, of servitude. The great unlearning should be a conditional, a project of reconditioning the existing conditions, right? And without that, so the whole point is that you can say that, well,

you know, are you, for example, saying that abolishment of slavery was not successful or was spurious? I would say that, no, it was successful. It was not spurious, But that is not really the point of such an emancipatory project per se. The project should be creating a sort of new conditions where the conditions of slavery can be always challenged. Because if you think that the abolishment of slavery has been totalized, then you are actually moving from one sort of servitude to another, right?

isn't it and that's why that there is completely I agree with Pete that there is a certain communist in the fundamental sense of communism in rationalist in humanism in the sense that the point is to recondition the conditions of life for sapiens such that any illusion of totalization starts to dissipate and by extension the conditions of injustice

because because injustice comes hand in hand with illusions of totality of reason the totalization of history the totalization of society political economy so on and so forth so to create that sort of movement requires a different sort of spirit a different sort of ethos and Will was asking that Raza is saying that I have to do something sorry there is a stew in the kitchen when I'm saying that I have to do something that means that I have to check it yeah Please.

Reza, I'm kind of curious to telescope out a little bit, and I'm thinking of the Foucault text actually, where he's talking about source, domain, and limit, and kind of grafting those three terms very beautifully onto the three critiques, where And I think this also kind of has to do with JP Caron's World Making Project. But I'm curious to just graph this kind of normative niche stuff and the self-correcting, revising reason onto, you know, is it, can we think of it in terms of negotiating the relation between source, domain, and limit, you know,

and the ongoing negotiation and correction of the three critiques, as like the project of the inhuman. I'd just be curious to hear you talk more about in terms of that kind of broad scale of source, domain, and limit. Yes, yes, absolutely. As I said, yes, that is exactly, and I would say that it is, I was probably very mean to Ray's essay. That was for a reason. I actually wanted to bring something out so we can actually talk about it. I absolutely think that what he's doing extremely brilliant

is just that it's not my method, right? My philosophical methodology, right? he can challenge my method I can challenge his but the point is literally the renegotiation of the source and limit which comes back both to the idea of human and the idea of reason that even if there was no limit you have to hypothetically abduce it in a Persian sense. Even if there was no such a thing as drive or unconscious compulsions

or capitalist commodification, he reason ought to abduce the hypothesis of it being manipulated right that's negotiation uh to me is at the core of of any sort of uh honest to god rationalist project. However, I do not actually think that we can do that by positing things

a priori to basically the powers of reason. It is only a reason that can entertain its own limitations. This is why I would say that any project that ends up being positing extrinsic limits to reason should be should either see itself

as empirical sciences, empirical natural sciences and the narratives of such sciences or should see itself as a certain sort of tacit irrationism. But the thing is that empirical natural sciences, even though they have created an accumulative assault on reason and rationality, they are based on basically rational enterprise, self-correcting project of reason. It's just that their objects and the sort of narratives that are being created around the objects,

the findings of empirical sciences tend to, for example, yeah, say that there are these extrinsic elements. But these are, as I said, all within the historical unfolding of reason. And this is why I always have this problem saying that, you know, you know, think about matter being with capital B. They are not thinking. They are not equatable to thinking. Yes, they are not equatable to thinking. But they are only not equatable to thinking in so far as they have evolved so within the unfolding of thoughts, historical unfolding of thoughts.

So there are, as I said, there are always, in a sense, historical reflections of reason upon its own limitations, right? and it's of course a very classic hegelian story though in a sense that reason is the absolute right and but the but the absoluteness of the reason of reason is fundamentally undetermined and abstract It should go through a geistic motion, a geistic social motion, in order to unbind its concreteness,

to see its limitations, and to finally, through this process, realize that it is really the vehicle through which everything else was achieved, from objective facts to the constraints about reason, so on and so forth. You know, and of course, I agree with Ray on this point. And this particular sort of unfolding should not be taken as a narrative. It's not a theological or a teleological story. It is rather, in a very Hegelian sense, a logical story.

Like, that's where the phenomenology of the spirit ends. and hegel and logic in hegel's logic starts that uh the so-called narrative is purely a logical uh one it's not a narrative it is a sort of what you might call to be dynamics that is necessary for any sort of robust consequential historical materialism to emerge in the first place I would say

oh by the way with regard to your suggestion and with you He's a friend. I have only read his work on Cosmotechnics in China. I haven't read his work on contingency and recursivity. Is that the title? No, I haven't. I plan to... I do not know actually what Yook means by computation and language.

I would say that I can agree with some of his judgment based on cursory reading of commentaries on his work. but I think that it's just that our concepts of language are fundamentally different so as our way that we approach computation what what is the essence of computation I would say that he he rightfully actually attacks a lot of this stuff, like language and computation, precisely because he's attacking them from the perspective from which they are being received

by these AI communities and these sorts of people who are working with these sorts of concepts. But they are not my concepts, though, right? Language and computation, for me, are fundamentally different than someone who actually works in an AI project. We can have a shared repertoire of concepts about what is happening, but the nature of these concepts are fundamentally different. And I think that, yes, I think that this is correct to challenge this source of, you know, concepts that are being taken for granted, manipulated, and then reproduced into

social projects. I think there's like a bit of kind of Bernard Stiegler influence too on the reading of the computation too. You know, it's kind of a different conceptualization of it. Yeah, yes, yes, definitely. So yes, for me, computation is, when I say that, you know, I would say that nature of human is purely computational. When I say that, I do not mean digital computation. I do not, in fact, mean analog computation. I mean it in a sense of certain scale or level of qualitative computations that are sui generis, that are exclusive to this sort of interactive social activities, right?

and more we have learned about computation the more it has been shown the computation is by default a very interactive activity it's just that the interactivity of that sort of process of the computation in like church tiering has been rather background it. It's kind of implicit. And there have been so many attempts in theoretical computer science since the 1950s to actually bring this for, to understand the nature of computer

computation as an interaction and then link it to the sort of logic that goes into the social nature of language, right? You know, Jean-Yves Girard, Ludix, Georgi Giapparizzi, logic of computability, Andreas Blass, you know, semantic games, and so on and so forth. So the thing is that our concept of computation, just like our concept of human, is quite parochial at this point. But that, but that's, yes, but that's why I'm actually doing this sorts of stuff.

Because I actually do not believe that language can be reduced to information or computation can reduced to sort of syntax manipulation only in this very sort of a specific way so on so forth but that's a different story Aaron, before taking your question, I want to read this part from Pete's thingy. Yeah, go ahead. paper, which I thought it was very good. Insofar as the concept of the human articulates our

cultural self-understanding, it is not merely subject to passive change, as we have seen the transition within pre-classical, classical, and modern eras, but open to active revision in accordance with the norm of collective self-determination. Inhumanism turns humanism's commitment to self-determination upon itself by elaborating the consequences of this radical revisability. So in a sense, what we were talking about that inhumanism versus rational, rationalist in humans and versus rational

enlightenment humanism is just to bring that sort of activity to the foreground that Pete is talking about, you know, the active revisibility. And that active revisibility is part of essentially the project of self-determination. Yeah, I mean, I think describing this as playing the game of reasons or as this like, yeah, pragmatically sort of irreducible being in real sort of purposive, being a purposive

agent in the world trying to accomplish goals, playing the game with other agents, is sort of irreducible to any particular, yeah, any particular way to determine what language is. Self-recognition that what is that we are doing when we are taking responsibilities, is an obligation seriously, right? What sort of practice and what is the value of the practice is for us that undergirds what we have always been doing,

perhaps completely in the dark? Yeah, I guess the part that I wanted to interject in was on this idea of totality. And I think maybe my understanding of that concept is different people use it in a lot of different ways. But it seems, particularly in this kind of post-war sort of anti-Hegelian tradition, to be about this sort of totalizing system that tries to dominate everything. Not a totalizing system. My apologies if I actually said the wrong word. I'm fine with totality and totalization. What I meant by totality as a negative,

in a perjurative sense was what appears to be the totalized state of affairs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that's exactly the right way to think about like reason is a social totality, right? in the Hegelian sense, is that it can never be a total state of affairs, that there can always be, and there always will be, more interjections, more rational demands that you can't perceive, and that if you take yourself to be committed to the game, if you're serious about responding to rational necessity and the force of rational necessity, then you always have to respond in new ways to new kinds of demands.

That this sense of society as unitary in some way, sort of in the same way that the space of reasons is the space of reasons, that it's unitary, that there's only one ultimate space of reason. And that anyone who comes into it and makes a demand, if you're committed, you can't ignore it. Right, and that this includes recognizing new forms demand as long as they're intelligible. Right? Such as being transgender or being a cyborg or being an orangutan who's been taught sign language. Like, I don't know. Yes, absolutely. You're completely right. I mean, thank you for correcting me on this

usage. Yes, I guess you call this being open to the outside, right? Right, right. But I guess, yeah, that seems to me to be so central to, and that's the inhuman element of it, that we'll have to, at some point, we'll have to accept demand and the sort of normative weight of demand made by beings who are other than we take ourselves to be is the inhuman element. Absolutely. It is. It's the totalizing process of reason. Come the untotalized state of affairs within reason is actually the drive

Sorry to use this Freudian word. No, no, no. For the inhuman. No, I don't have a problem with it. I mean, I think Peter uses it in a totally, totally reasonable way. And I think he's great. I guess I just want to pick at some of the ways in which this could happen. Or ways, because I like to think of this in terms of the manifest and scientific images. And I like that Peter uses the examples of weight and mass, right? How like weight is this manifest concept. Like we have a psychophysics of weight. When we like see an object, we like automatically sort of have internal computations as to like, could I be able to pick it up?

What would it be like to throw it? or as mass is abstracted from our geolocation, from our gravity. Like we can't, I don't know if we imagine human beings in space, like a sci-fi show like The Expanse, where you have to be aware of like the fluctuations of gravity in your acceleration. I don't know, there are other contexts in which we could consider sort of how this how this conceptual revision has to be reincorporated into a bodily framework, right? Like you have to relearn how to ride a bike. Yes, no, I mean, this is one of the things that I have, so Carl Sachs has this idea that, look, there are,

probably we shouldn't call them images, scientific and manifest images, but rather we call them explanatory, constitutive explanatory frameworks. We can also, what is the word for the thingy, the electromagnetic thingy that you put it near an iron and it attracts the iron? On robot. the magnet, the magnet, sorry, the magnet. So the difference between manifest image and

the scientific image is very much like the difference between magnet and electromagnetic field. So you see, you can actually, just like the concept of weight of mass, you can explain the constitution of a magnet by way of electromagnetic theories. But then it happens that it is a theory that can only be explained by certain sort of concepts.

And there is a whole conglomeration of concepts about magnets that cannot be explained away by electromagnetic theory. Maybe by other sorts of things, but the properties of the field of a magnet can be explained by electromagnetic theory. But there remains a conceptual core, a very conceptual core about a magnet that cannot be exhausted by electromagnetic field theory. It is not because that it cannot be explained by sciences.

No, because these concepts that also enable electromagnetic field theory and hence the properties of magnets hold or held in a very tightly knit web of connections, conceptual semantic connections. That web is a lean image of the manifest image that should be preserved. The rest, get rid of the fat, right? The web is important.

Because, you see, electromagnetic field theory or the concept of mass, these explanations for weights or a magnet, while they're working and apparently explaining away the properties of a magnet, could not actually work without very specific micro and macro connections with other sorts of theories and concepts, scientific theories and concepts within them. So that is actually shows that there is something to the manifest image,

and that's its web-like conceptual competency or conceptual suppleness that web cannot be taken apart so easily by by empiric by natural by empirical natural sciences or empirical sciences you can explain away the properties of a magnet but then soon you find yourself that you actually explain away the properties of a magnet in terms of electromagnetic field generation only through the use of other concepts

and those concepts individually can also be explained away but then they require unfortunately attachment and connections with other concepts Hence, the manifest image, I would say, is fundamentally, in a sense, remains unvoidable, in a very lean sense. in a very lean sense. And that's, I think that the project of inhumanism should strive

at that point to get the fat out of the manifest image of the human, you know, sometimes by the scientific image through neurosciences and so on and so forth, and sometimes by using algorithms, showing that such capacities can be actually bootstrapped from mere basic computational processings, but nevertheless, I would say that there is a part that doesn't go away, and it's the interconnectedness

of concepts within theories with one another, right? That's part of the normative space of concepts, which I don't think has anything to do with human as a biological species. It has everything to do with human as sapience. As a user of generally conceptual discursive practices. Well, yeah, because it's the concepts are webbed, are interlinked by the rational purposiveness

of our practices by which we make them useful and intelligent, right? And it's that element that's always that. Carl likes to point this out too, that last bit of science and the manifest scientific image of man essay, where he's like, well, what would be the point of doing away like where you can't even make these judgments about a scientific or putting knowledge to use without the assumption of that you're doing this for a reason. You can't throw that, you can't even make the scientific arguments without arguing for the reasons. Absolutely. This is actually a very strangely, this was actually something that was put forward

by early Vienna Circle, right? The most staunch positivistic philosophers. They were saying that one of the greatest things about knowledge is that it's the locus of freedom. You actually can choose what to know and what to not know, right? Systematically, systematically. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if there are other people with questions. I don't want to monopolize. Maybe that would be a good point to go back to Armin's Parmenides question.

Kenneth has been raising it. Yeah, please go. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think this connects and I hope I can land the plane. But something that I'm curious about is this kind of assumption of objectivity in a lot of ways when we kind of use these analogies of magnetism and different kind of what we would argue could be objective in the world. And what I'm kind of interested in is this question of concepts that are reflexive and can actually kind of create the conditions they're trying to name or so for example you know I'm even thinking of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes and like that this the idea of the grifter you know that you kind of throw the idea out there and just kind of hope to garner enough.

Oh, are you having my bad blood? Well, what I'm wondering is this kind of reality shaping power, right? Like certain concepts and certain ideas are able to latch onto a reality shaping power where they can kind of reflexively create the conditions to justify the construct. So even if it's logics of property, et cetera. And I guess the only question I have is would we be having a very different conversation if anti-humanism was working? You know, if it was actually producing, if it had reality shaping powers, and was actually reflexively changing or creating conditions, would we be having a very different conversation?

Yes, but that would be saying that as if chimeras did exist, right? as if Elizabeth Holmes could actually grift a community of science. Well, he didn't. She didn't, right? But people do. I mean, that's the thing. She didn't. But I think, you know, again, there's the kind of Edison lying for 10 years about making the bulb. But they ultimately get cuts. But they ultimately get cuts. Some do, some don't. I mean, and I think that's the question, right? It's like which one... The scientific community is extremely hard, within the scientific community particularly, it is extremely hard at this point to actually do a long con, right?

She thought she can do it, right? But my god, I mean, look, you don't even need to actually ask for the principles, what is wrong or right in this sort of scientific sense. You just see the instruments, the box, the Edison box, and you see that every lab test has come from these boxes, and they are like more than 60% off the mark, right? Empirical data. I wouldn't say that Elizabeth Holmes is a good example because you see, in science you can actually do create a web of statistical comparisons between sorts of data,

and that's what science is really great at. I mean, the fact that she actually thought she can pull this off means that she's even more stupid than she is but within any sort of extra scientific realm yes you can actually do a great con you should only need a certain sort of negotiation skills and power of persuasion and yes understanding of how beliefs are generated opinions right but then again I would say that all such attempts will ultimately fall sooner or

later, the reason that they don't actually fall right away is precisely because the sort of conditions in which they are generated and allowed for degeneration, right? Like American Trumpism, neoliberalism, capitalism, so on and so forth. But I don't see how opinions, mere opinions, can actually go so long without being destroyed in the face of reason. The only reason that they don't get instantly destroyed, as I said,

is because of the conditions in which they have emerged. And that sort of conditions are pathologic, make the normative niches create conditions of pathologies and normative niches, like kind of Freud's idea of unconscious. So you might actually believe them. But under non-pathologic circumstances or conditions, there is no reason that they can actually survive. Right? But yeah, I mean, Elizabeth Holmes, or worse than Elizabeth Holmes,

who was that guy who invented bloom green energy? hydrogen-based boxes of pure green energy, putting it, selling it to every state in the US, and that they actually take the waste from these boxes and dump it in forests. Greenergy 101. Yes, this is why I think that really we should understand that there's a great Marxist line here,

that the reason that usually opinions, mere opinions, go for so long and actually create a cult around themselves is precisely because there is a predominant condition of exploitation and pathology that is all around us. And that fundamentally changes the game. Right? Well, here I think Elon Musk is a great, well, where sort of the illusion of economic value or

stock value can replace actual utility, right? Can like replace Toyota and Hyundai make, I don't know how many magnitudes more of cars than Tesla does and produce better electric cars. The stock value of Tesla is so much higher simply because of all of this slugoneering and hype. One quick question that maybe could connect all these. Could you give your account of intentionality? Like what you think intentionality is fundamentally and how it relates to objectivity? I guess I have a kind of Heideggerian account of this that I think is useful and could link us back to Ray's essay by John Hoagland,

same with sort of Dasein and humanity. But I wanna hear how you relate these. I actually, one of the things that I truly hate the most is philosophy of mind in today's parlance. The talk of conscious, consciousness, intentionality, desires, and all sorts of stuff. Now, intentionality is not an object of consciousness, because consciousness is a fundamentally So the unexplicated concept, intentionality only becomes intentionality, an objective, when it is an object of self-consciousness.

and self-consciousness is uh you know again a semantic web neatly tied around a community of uh agents and language users discursive users i i have zero interest in all these discussions about intentionality and consciousness in philosophy of mind. Zero. Like literally zero. Well, I think this is Hoagland's account in authentic intentionality. It is. It is. Yeah. Yeah. That it's a social product. I have much to share with him. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I guess Joseph Rous does this too. That intentionality is fundamentally a normative status. yes right and that this is what i wanted to bring up with um i guess carol had shared that long book about um the sort of genesis of anti-humanism and how it's mostly a reaction to existentialism and this idea of intentionality of authenticity as an ethical concept in the same way that they were the the anti-humanists wanted to reject um alienation as an ethical concept and i think the same sort of error is being made with regard to both of these uh that they're not ethical concepts in this way they're concepts that are about normativity

uh and how practical reason goes like has to function through the medium of normativity I think actually Pete gives an account that's pretty parallel to this idea of intentionality as a normative status in his, it's like a short blog post, but where he talks about sort of feeding normative authority to the object. Right, that intentionality is in our dispute, we're feeding the correctness or incorrectness to how the object will behave in terms of our theory. Right, do you know that? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. He has a very simple account of it, but it works so well. And it is, it is, yes, how basically to be authentic is to respond to the object, how the object behaves in the theory, independent of our presuppositions of it.

Yes, I have noticed that people who are attacking, particularly there's a certain post-humanist wing that I have seen coming from kind of Scott Baker and David Rodin, and precisely attack rationalist humanism by trying to make intentionality the object of mere consciousness, like mere awareness, right? I think that this is a false move. intentionality is absolutely not the object of mere awareness.

I don't think that any philosopher since Kant, to the end of German idealism, actually had this idea that intentionality can be equated or can be deemed as the object of mere awareness or consciousness in that sort of parochial, you know, neurophysiological sense. No, absolutely not. But then I would actually argue that

within it, it comes back to the idea of heterogeneity, that there are elements within conceptual self-conscious intentionality that might be heterogeneous in a sense, right? And that would be basically point of Freud, I would say, right? You know, the unconscious motifs and reasons that kind of eclipse partially self-conscious intentionality.

Isn't that a problem with Husserl as well? Maybe I'm not as well grounded in Husserl, but it seems to me the root of a lot of the misconceptions in the sort of French Hegelian tradition that it's all read through Husserl, that we can have this kind of unmediated grasp of intentional structures just in phenomenological epoch. Or naturalized phenomenology, yes. No, I mean, intentionality is mediated. It's just the question is that to what extent it is mediated by our normative discursive practices and to what extent at the background it is mediated by

by certain sort of causal factors, which are not of reason and rationality, right? Which would just be Solarzian picturing, no? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Solarzian picturing, yes. Solarzian picturing. But I would say that, Solarzian actually would say that intentionality as we know it, aboutness, is fundamentally normative, right? And hence, he tries to explicate the concept of intentionality so that there is a grade of intentionality

which is inside pattern recognition, picturing, and so on and so forth. And there is a kernel of intentionality which ought to be preserved and it is only within you know the normative space of reasons guys can I ask a really basic question because I have a difficulty even in text and literature understanding the meaning of intentionality and it always seemed has seemed to me as it still seems to me as I listening to you guys as a vacuous concept I don't understand it if you if you're talking about thought that is human act of talking about the world, something

like that, of course, how can it not be intentionality? How can it not be something inside the space of intentionality? That is only Russell, I think, would say something like that, because you can or something that somebody who has, I say, a fetish for quantification. But even if you are not talking about thought then what what we are talking what what we talk what are we talking about are we talking about the moments that are between thought and uh i don't know non conceptual uh so no we are we are talking about uh you can armand think about this in the nebulous realm of the hosserlian phenomenology when uh basically uh intuition unfolds right in the

the Kantian sense. At that point, you don't need the full arsenal of understanding and reason, right? You still can have a certain sort of intentionality, but what sort of intentionality is it? When you say that I see a pen, I see a red thing, right? A red dot, whatever. Probably is it wise to call it intentionality at that point? Is it not? I would say that yes, it is a form of intentionality, but there are different grades of this. And philosophy of mind,

just as it confounds different grades of consciousness, it confounds different grades of intentionality. Philosophy of mind, to me, at this point, I do not want to be very mean about this is a very enemy of rational philosophy. But I think Heidegger is actually very good. I don't know. I guess this is just the account that I received of it that made sense to me, but Heidegger is very good on this. And it It can go back to Armin's question before about being, or one, like, I think you can consider

the difference between being and beings in terms of this Kantian manifold, right? Where, like, the world shows up as differentiated because of the distinction between being and beings. And Heidegger kind of almost sort of repeats the like Berkeley and thesis of Essay at Perkippe, right? Without Dasein, there would be no being. Being. And being is in a way similar to the sophist. It's what all beings share in so much as they are. It's that we can talk about the world as having this property of being, that we can predicate any entities at all.

I guess this is his opposition to Hegel's indeterminate immediate, but the point he wants to make with it is fundamentally Hegelian, right, in that the point that it's not indeterminate is that we're already engaged in a practical world such that things show up mediated and we can investigate it. We do individuate objects. We do engage with a world that fundamentally is divided between persons and non-persons. Objects show up as useful or belonging to others. And this dimension of authenticity or eigenlichkeit of owning your relation to them is the dimension

by which we can have something like objectivity or a shared discursive world in which we can interrogate rationally. Heidegger doesn't like the term reason, but I don't see any reason why we can't think of this sort of, I don't know, for Hundenheit as the sort of the like structure of practical reasoning under which we're already engaged in the world. Don't you agree that the whole idea of being in the world is already a very rational idea? Yeah, that we have this whole structured, I don't know, this is why I really just know being in time and late Heidegger makes no sense to me because it just seems like this kind of attempt to recapitulate Kant and sort of make certain idealist points against Wusserl.

that our practices are already sort of only rationally. So if we are taking the idea of being in the world as a rational idea, then what can we do with it? That's the inhumanist question. guys i i just think um maybe we should pass the word to arman and akshat who also raised his hand for a while oh yes yes yes start wrapping it up students i have it's two it's two time one second it's two time right one second yeah sorry i can't see when other people have their hands raised so please cut me off but

My question was in the context of your conversation with Reza. I wanted to ask both of you to come back from this. So, I think. Yeah, I just think we can connect this back to Ray's paper because he's dealing with sort of Gerrida Heidegger on similar questions. And we can do more justice to it than we did on Wednesday when I hadn't actually had time to really go through it. So let me just put some ingredients of John Searles in the question so that the conversation become pop and really I can understand what he's talking about.

he's in Chinese room, the stuff is talking about intentionality, right? The difference between the person that cannot understand what Chinese is and is putting out the signs and the person that is that understand what Chinese understand Chinese, it's difficult to say in English, yeah, knows Chinese, knows. That's a very interesting thing that you guys talk about the meaning of languages knowledge that I have never thought about this before sorry but somebody who knows Chinese and somebody who doesn't know Chinese but do the same thing in the in the room is some of them the first one is intentional the other one is not intentional something like

that the difference between those I read for example that like look I think netbook he very interesting he talks about the difference between these two he tries to say that yes the difference between these two is that one of them has some experience of knowing and the other one has not and this is this is a fact that we cannot deny and if this is intentionality i really don't understand what it is because if we are talking about a holistic set of rules for understanding the concepts, then the person who is on the box, and if it's a person that is has a capacity faculty for understanding rules and behaving according to rules, then would attach something

of a semantic needs to the science that is acting upon and it's not a if you can follow rules, But the machine that is not supposedly following rule is non-intentional. So we come back to the idea of rule following. Again, we are talking about intentionality as rule following and rule following as concept. All of these in a cycle goes around and around and we cannot, maybe I cannot understand it. I cannot understand the point that these triangles make. I think the thing that Random talks about, I think, what is his? I'm back.

Hello. Discursivity, Iron triangle of discursivity that has a practice, has a syntax and has a semantic. This triangle seems like a given, like an organistic given. And it seemed to me that Peter are trying to say that this triangle doesn't have anything to do with the body. In a younger Socratic manner, I should say, that's okay. But you would really excite me if you showed me that the practice doesn't have anything to do with the two other syntaxes. That is a that is the artificial intelligence.

This dream of artificial intelligence that wants to practice out. It either has a dream, it has a has an answer. That is, we say that this is this is the delusion we have living with 3000 years, or doesn't have an answer is a nonsensical or pseudoscience to the problem of philosophy. I think this is the point and we can, but we must address this point. Not as a metaphysical point, but as a, maybe as a metaphysical point, I don't know. But, sorry, I hope I was coherent and you guys understand what I'm saying. So one thing, I think that we should stop recording, but before we stop recording and then talk for a little bit, and then I have to go back and finish my great food.

the thing is that I wanted to say one thing that was missing and I completely forgot to talk about this that the prospects of the rationalists in humanism as it is formulated will eventually might lead a fundamental expansive and expanding rift between individual psychology and experiences, within collective normativity, and between technical individuation of sapience, right, such that

that either the collective or the individual will fall behind. You see, I think that the sort of formula that we have been talking about within the idea of rationalist inhumanism might lead to a scenario in which the prospect of synchronicity between the individual, the collective, and the technical might be untenable. That would be a true nightmare. A true nightmare. Okay, maybe you should stop recording.

I can say that I love you all and we are going to talk after the recording stops. Love you all. thank you and thanks to all of those people who died during the class and left i love them all the fallen comrades