Hello and welcome to the first session of our spring season. We will start today with Reza Negastani's New Rationalism. And today is the first session of the first module, which is entitled The Shape of Systems to Come. Thank you all for being here. This is very exciting for, I think, everybody and all of us. And, yeah, so I'll turn it over to Reza, and then we can begin the session. Okay, excellent. Thank you very much. Okay, can everyone hear me? Yes. Okay, and I should apologize.
There is some construction, I don't know, cutting trees going on in the neighborhood, the neighborhood so probably will hear saw noise but I hope it just doesn't come true so I think the best way to start this whole series is just give a very kind of a short description of what is really new rationalism is about, and specifically what is exactly new about it. I think for one, the picture of reason
that new rationalism is emphasizing is a socially constituted one. It's rooted in social discursive practices. And for that reason, it is different from the kind of, you know, 20th century Habermasian picture of reason, that reason is simply constituted by the vague and opaque and too generic notion of mutual recognition. And what are really social discursive practices? are the abilities to deploy assertions and inferentially track, revise, or abandon them
by basically entering what Brandon calls the game of giving and asking for reasons, to which, of course, I will get back to later. Reasoning in this sense is proposed as a dynamic activity and rationality as a self-correcting enterprise. Reasoning is being understood neither as a stable or fixed activity that has no room whatsoever for the dynamics of risks and contingency and or basically the the dynamic tendencies of complex systems.
The dynamism of reason is rooted in its non-monotonicity, diffusibility and non-entailment. Non-monotonicity simply is the idea that addition of new premises does not increase our theorems. Basically, they force them to revise. And the way that non-monotonic chain of reasoning grows is highly different from the iterative construction of monotonic reasoning. Defeasibility of reasoning is that they are basically defeasible, both at the level of their claims,
but also how their structure expands. And for this reason, again, they are fallible, they are revisable, and non-entailment, in the sense that the process of reasoning simply and necessarily does not entail all truth values. And for this reason, it basically demands a different form of approach and understanding how process of reasoning, whether on the side of theoretical reason or practical reason, basically are shaped. These are some of the things that, of course, we will get back to later.
So I think, so yeah, back to the understanding of the, you know, that the new rationality emphasizes on the dynamism of reason, which is rooted in its non-monotonicity, non-entailment, and defeasibility. That is to say, its capacity to form and mobilize abstractions as engines of conception and transformation in the sense that difference in thought or how thought is organized are mapped and projected into how differences in the world are made so reason is distinguished by its capacity to detect dynamic tendencies
in the world and turn them into new affordances of understanding and action by reconfiguring and de-stabilizing its own organization and structure. And this de-stabilizing, this reconfiguration that reason entails, it basically administers on the structure of thought highly, you know, opposes it to the kind of 20th century picture of reason, that basically reason is fundamentally a stable edifice. And also it's important to note that in so far as basically reason is a form of tracking
the dynamic tendencies of the world and then basically bringing to focus these dynamic tendencies as new affordances of thinking and action, reason then in this sense should be contrasted with the Hegelian notion of rationality. is not rational, but it is reason that is able to conceptually track it and transform it in an incremental manner. And this incremental manner is, again, very important, something that hopefully we'll get back to when we are talking about reason and time. So this means rationality is presented
as a doubly dynamic project, dynamic both at the level of its socio-pragmatic space and dynamic at the level of its modes, or modes of reasoning. That is, basically, theoretical and practical reasoning. It is often objected that reason is a fixed game. It is unable to engage with massively dynamic, contingent, and risk-driven dimensions of the world. This is, however, only true if we equate rationality with logicism.
But reasoning, both at the level of theoretical and practical reasoning, not only identifies and assesses risks, but also incorporates and feeds on various types of risk, be it existential, you know, aleatory or epistemic. In order to unbind new affordances of understanding and action, this is especially, I think, evident in the diffusibility and creative generativity of abductive reasoning, heuristic, non-monotonic deduction, different modes of hypothetical reasoning, where logical rules are temporarily
suspended or destabilized in order to generate new orientations and cues for basically thinking and action. The identification of reason as a stable and fixed is a caricature, is a picture of reason that is fragile in the face of its material organization, dynamic behaviors, and contingencies precisely because it is too monolithically strong. And compare this with this 20th century characterization of reason in terms of classical logic or foundational axiomatics.
This is, of course, a caricature to which both, I think, reactionary irrationalism and fundamentalist rationalism of the 20th century have vastly contributed. What reason does to how we perceive ourselves in the world, i.e. the mappings between thinking and being, is supposed to shed doxastic conservatism and expunges cognitive biases. It interrogates the uncritical dimensions of knowledge by intercepting epistemic approaches presented from the viewpoints of spontaneity and the epistemic given.
I use this word, spontaneous philosophies, in conjunction with uncritical pre-modern philosophies. The word spontaneity here resonates with what Sellers calls the given. The myth of the given is simply the idea that there are some basic items of knowledge which are given in the sense that they are known directly or immediately without any other knowledge. In other words, they are allegedly presupposition-less knowledge, even though they are formed by way of aggregation of seemingly fundamental assumptions.
And what reason in this dynamic structure does, it interrogates this spontaneous image qua knowledge of ourselves and the world from the viewpoint of the epistemic given. Finally, new rationalism is, you know, following Salars, is a project aimed at integrating empressism and rationalism. So you see in 20th century, and this is something that next session we will get back to, you know and which will be Ernest Sosa's chapter in 20th century there is this
rift between rationalism you know axiomatic logical intuitions and you know and precision observations and you know evidences there is a rift between the two what's the large tries to do is to basically come up with a project of rationalism that simultaneously detects the pitfalls of that kind of logicism or no kind of fundamentalist rationalism and also detect and basically tries to
rectify or circumvent the biases of empiricism. Reasoning is simultaneously presented as an abstract and embodied, both at the level of social formation and at the level of cognition activity. So reason in new rationalism is an embodied activity with embodiment being understood in the broadest possible sense, as I said, whether it is a pragmatic social dimension of reason, the idea of going back and forth between assertions and inferences,
or it is basically at the level of cognition, you know, embodied cognition, distributed computation, so on and so forth. But ultimately, I think new rationalism, as I mentioned, and this is really the aim of this whole series, both modules, investigates the capacity of reason in how we perceive ourselves and how we transform ourselves. In this sense, it is still in tradition rational ethos oriented thoughts since the dawn of philosophy the unity of the unity and the necessary link between conception and transformation proposed
by the likes of the stoics spinoza can't hegel mark sellers and for example new conch new Chinese Chinese new Confucian philosophy such as motion sent the The emphasis of new rationalism is, however, on how to shift the reciprocation between conception and transformation or cultivation from one that is necessary and dormant to one that is sufficient, active, and amplified. This is why we are going to approach our subject matter under two distinct but interconnected modules, paradigms of self-conception, the knowledge of ourselves in the world, and thesis
of self-transformation, or propositions regarding the realization of self-transformation or self-cultivation according to refined and revisable self-conceptions. So the first modules are basically this understanding of what is exactly self-conception, and basically What is the most robust self-conception, namely the knowledge of ourselves in the world? And then the second module would be these paradigms of self-transformation that are in accordance with these robust self-conceptions or self-conceptions, rational self-conceptions.
It is in the latter category, namely theories of self-transformation, that we are going to address the role of reason in constitution of history, in the sense of history being a sequence of self-constituted transformations whose task is to maximize freedom and unbind intelligence by turning the meaninglessness of time into cognitive and transformative gateways. So to this end we will give a survey of rational philosophies which pose the question of what it means for creatures endowed with history or creatures for which there is a necessary link between self-conception and self-transformation to reconstitute themselves,
to realize their self-conception into a vector of engineering their reality. And this would be a wide range from, you know, a stoicism to, you know, thesis, functionalist thesis, regarding artificial general intelligence and sufficient social realization of cognition. So, this would be the structure of our basically new rationalism series and would be a kind of a short definition of what is exactly new rationalism, why is it new, and of course we get back to all of these, elaborate them throughout these eight sessions.
So before we move forward with kind of this, what I said, this kind of abstract narrative of the structure of thought after Copernicus in order to be able for us to formulate a robust account of self-conception, I think it would be best to just pause a little bit and see if anyone has any questions. Yeah, I guess I mean, I kind of put a little note there on the side. I was curious, I guess, and you brought up risk previously,
and I guess I know you've written about trauma in particular in the past and the way that it sort of transforms the way to the self-conception. So I guess I'm kind of curious maybe a bit about if you see a sort of historical or temporal relation here then between maybe a conception of trauma and risk, and maybe risk perhaps being like a future relation and trauma being sort of like a past relation or how you maybe conceptualize some of those things temporally, or is that getting too far ahead, I guess? Actually, no, I hadn't thought about risk, I mean trauma as risk, which as you say, it is true that trauma is essentially an ontological account of risk in the sense that it basically
has an anterior structure in the sense that as you say risk is already embedded into the structure of basically thought and formation but this is something that I'm going to get back to when I'm talking about reason and the relation between reason and time. First of all, I think it's very important to, I think, distinguish different accounts of risk. Are we talking about existential risk? Are we talking about epistemic risk or aleatory risk?
I think if we make a conflation of these and then say that rationality doesn't have any account of risk, then we are basically creating kind of, I think, a very biased position. Well, my proposition is that reason has a method of engagement for different categories of risk. But before, I think, before jumping such a long leap to the future topics that we are going to cover,
However, I think generally, I think rationality has resources, and this kind of dynamic rationality has resources to not only assess and evaluate risks, but turn risks into opportunities. And these would be the affordances of, you know, thinking and action. to forgo rationality on the basis that whatever we do entails a form of risk, that the structure of contemporary world is risk-driven,
is basically to expose humanity to a crisis of indetermination, resignation, and inadequate self-consciousness. So you mean to accept contingency as a sort of fundamental ontology? Would be a kind of mistake? Yes. Yes, it's not a mistake. It's the understanding that the relation of these risk and contingency needs to be, I think, carefully elaborated with regard to reason.
But as I said, if we just say that, oh, okay, reason is a stable activity. It's fixed. It does not have room whatsoever for contingencies and risk. I think that's a completely a caricature of reason drawn on the simply, you know, kind of bad equation, which of course, as I said, both reactionary rationalism and fundamentalist rationalism of 20th century have massively contributed to. And that's really the equation between reason and rationality and logicism. Can I draw an analogy, and this kind of ties into that question, and I have my own question with that.
I'm coming from a computer science background, and one of the major shifts with that is you're dealing with distributed systems where you no longer have a canonical account. Every system has its own state, and it takes time to actually unify those states into an equilibrium to determine what's actually true. And it's called eventually consistent systems. And the monotonicity, non-monotonicity, that comes up quite a lot. But the thing is when you get into the brain sciences, you see the same situation where you know Dennett talks a little bit about how at one level of resolution you can talk about whether or not somebody knows something.
But when you zoom in and you start looking at specific parts of the brain, you can say, well, this part of the brain knows this, but other parts of the brain don't yet know this. And there's no real fact of the matter as to whether the brain or whether the person knows this thing because there's an inequality. And the other thing is you're forced to act before you're able to consolidate that knowledge. And so there's that risk of action and anticipation in which given the not yet equal, having not yet achieved equilibrium, you yet have to act in the expectation of equilibrium. And in many cases that is justified, and in some cases that becomes not justified because it stabilizes in a way that's different from how you expected it.
So I want to toss those out there and see how those align with what you were going with. Yes, I think, well, I will get to Dennett's or, you know, kind of like the kind of naturalism without normative term. Dennett and certain philosophers were basically trying to undermine, you know, the functional autonomy of normativity. I will get back to these via, you know, understanding of basically that at the level of, even at the level of the mechanisms, this is not incommensurable with how mechanisms are basically structured in complex systems. I will get back to this.
But I think what you are saying is completely true. And that's exactly what really the heuristic dimension of practical reasoning is. or abductive manipulation in the sense that abductive manipulation is not a essentially a truth preservation procedure it's a procedure that is designated to preserve and mitigate ignorance at the same time via asynchronous processes. And again, this is something that I thank you so much. This is actually quite an interesting topic. I will get back to this. I plan to actually address Dennett and some of the kind
of philosophers who basically try to supplant the functional autonomy of the normative dimension of reason with basically the asynchronous structure of cognitive dimension, brains. Or for example, we see it in the social domain. And I think these are for people who are interested, I think in order to answer some of these questions,
and this is something, again, we get back to it later, is to differentiate reasons and causes. And Brandon has, I think it's, I can't remember the title. It's on YouTube. It's, I think, the Critique of Genealogy, which basically tries to show that the genealogical critique of normativity or rationality, whether this genealogy is social genealogy, namely causes that are basically sociopolitical conditions, whether these causes are natural regularities that extend in the structure of complex systems, the brain,
at the level of genes, so on and so forth. These fall apart when they try to basically supplant reasons with causes. I get back to this in terms of addressing some of the issues with various theses of semantic nihilism. More questions? Yeah, I have a question. Just a second.
Hi, I'm Jason. Hello. I'm the guy working with Tony and Mo. Nice to meet you. Yes, of course. Okay. So, yeah, I just had a question about, you said reasoning, in new rationalism, reasoning is both abstract and embodied in the broadest possible sense. So I was kind of wondering, like, would you say that this is, that new rationalism is a type of materialist rationalism, or is materialism something that would not, is this sort of a bridging of materialism and idealism through reason, or is it maybe in the way Spinoza does to some extent? Yes, sure. It comes from a completely Spinozian direction,
which of course Cellars amplifies this. And that would be the understanding that the functional autonomy, we need to understand that the abstract autonomy of reason is materially constrained. But the material constraint of abstract protocol of rationalities can be sufficiently addressed, they can be disentangled, so as to allow for basically realizability of reason in its implementation within different social structures. And this is why we are going to kind of verge toward in the second module toward artificial general intelligence and some of its thesis in philosophy.
For example, Brandon's Between Saying and Doing, which he discusses, he proposes an analytic, pragmatic model of artificial intelligence or, for example, Chinese Confucian philosophy of Mo Zhongshan. We will get back, I mean, we will cover these. And also we covered this idea of, you know, this understanding of this material constraint or the material dimension of embodiment, the question of a structure, and then the question of function. We will address them under the two different basically bifurrication of the self-conception. Basically how we encounter ourselves in the world is according to different images as
Solars suggests. One is the scientific image and one is the manifest image. Scientific image is the posterior alternative to the manifest image. Manifest image comes first. It's like the metric in geometrical relations. It's action and distance that you have an immediate access to. And by virtue of that you use its resources. But then it leads to the scientific image. And the scientific image has the capacity to basically introduce revision into this manifest image. And now this manifest image needs to be understood more on the side of the functional autonomy of conceptual reasoning, the functional autonomy. And then the scientific image needs
to be understood more on the side of basically the ever-deepening investigation of structures or causal uniformities or object uniformities in nature. And these are the ones that put constraints on the functional autonomy. But then SELAR proposes to create a stereoscopic view in the sense that each eye indexes a different picture. But the stereoscopic view coheres different elevations of two different seemingly incommensurable picture
and integrate and fuses them into one image. And this one image is basically the understanding of a robust self-conception that then accounts for robust consequential self-transformations that admit both to the constraints of realizability of conception and confirm the partial functional autonomy of conceptual practices. namely the venue of the basically normative patterns, sorry, normative rules that constitute the manifest image.
So this idea, and I'm getting to this right now just in order to start our first session. This is basically, people think that the manifest image is kind of a rudimentary image just because by the virtue of coming first. But manifest image is actually quite a sophisticated image. And it has actually resources even to revise itself. And this is, as we will talk about, is because manifest image is basically the landscape of normative activities, of concept formation, concept tracking, so on
and so forth. And one other thing I felt like I detected when you were referring to fundamentalist rationalism and reactionary irrationalism, it seemed as though that was more of a kind of a noun-based concept of reason, whereas when you're referring to new rationalism, I'm hearing a verbal dimension a lot more of reasoning. Am I correct to pick up on that or no? Yes, no, I said, yes, sure. I mentioned that rationality needs to be understood both as a project, which is basically the ultimate amplification of the necessary link between self-conception and self-transformation.
That is in the tradition of, you know, rationalist philosophies, working with the idea of reason, like, you know, the Stoics to Hegel, so on and so forth. and also a project that cannot really implement this kind of picture of reason as the amplification of the necessary link between self-conception and self-transformation without the dynamism of reasoning. So in order to basically effectuate this kind of project, Reason with capital R, it needs to basically draw on the resources of dynamic reasonings. Basically, the understanding of how we navigate the space of reasons
by way of quite sophisticated and complex rule-governed activities. Great. Thank you. Any more? I guess I'm kind of curious I mean this is maybe like I was thinking about the manifest image and it's sort of I don't know if this is quite the right word for it but it's kind of functional finitude so far as it's materially constrained and that material constraint also I guess its material and functional constraint also makes it express itself in its sort of normative manner would I be correct in kind of following that?
chain of thought, like, I mean, it becomes something that is... Yeah, okay, this is, I think, a really complex question. This is, I will, and this gets back to what, you know, one of the previous questions in terms of, you know, that different computers don't have knowledge and then this translates to basically the ultimate function, the consistency of the machine. Yeah. This is, I think, there are ways to explain that this is not exactly the case. And even if it is the case, it does not basically lead to degeneration, to the material degeneration of normative activities.
This is because I think, and this is why we need to understand how structures affect function. Yes, if we understand basically that the effect of the structure upon function is that of, you know, complete monopoly over function, yes, that would be the case, which is basically, you know, various genealogical critiques, whether it is the social structure spikes into the normative activities,
or whether it is the materialist, deep materialist scientific ones that they suggest. Basically, the activities at the level of neurobiological situation fully projects into the function to the point that we shouldn't even talk about this partial autonomy. But this is once we understand that we stratify structure and then explain these in terms of hierarchical structures and how basically these strata of structures are mapped to one another. Basically, there are transits between them. And each level of transition yields a more robust account of function.
That the function then implements determinations over the structure, then this becomes a completely different picture. And this is something that I will talk about in terms of dynamic structuralism and basically various types of functionalism. functionalisms at the level of the mechanistic explanation, functionalism of the conceptual role semantics, conceptual role, which are, you know, the ones that are associated with the pragmatic dimension of reasoning. But also something that... Sorry? I was going to say, if connectivity has a certain sort of structuring space or a certain sort of hierarchical space, I guess maybe as you're suggesting,
I mean, I think with your... Yeah, normativity needs to be understood at the level of function. Yeah. It's a role, concept role or concept status function, not function in the sense of mechanistic structural function. And these need to be very distinguished. I will get back to this, that it's the difference between the metaphysical account of function, function as a structure serving an end or you know it works according to how it ought to be and the other one is a normative account of function which
salars contrasts with basically the mechanistic function and this is a concept rule or simply the function by virtue of how concepts play a role in you know this oscillation between assertions and inferences and this is one that it constitutes its own odds and very this is I hope that I have time probably the third session to talk about this a little bit in terms of some of the advances that are you know have been recently put forward in terms of
computational mechanics especially the idea of the idea surrounding the so-called epsilon machines or epsilon transducers that account for how complex systems emerge and how complex the transition between different various levels of structure and complex systems need to be understood in terms of how basically informations regarding how they operate with regard one another is compressed and that's these the final estate transducers of final state epsilon machines have basically functional autonomies in the sense that are capable of bootstrapping their own functions with minimum regard to how they are
constituted from underneath which is basically and this is what really I think the whole picture of reasoning is reasoning it needs to be understood as a complex system as basically a function that is attributed to the the surface structures of basically complex system, of a complex system that is simultaneously social and simultaneously neurobiologically situated. Okay, should we start our first session? Go for it.
Okay. Can everyone see this? Yes. Okay. So, as we said, the whole new rationalism series tries to, and this is again comes to the reason with capital R and reasonings or navigation of the space of reasons. tries to account for self-conception, self-transformation, and the necessary link between them.
This diagram is basically one of the most fundamental insights of ego presented in phenomenology of a spirit. and that's the reciprocation between self-conception and self-transformation. This reciprocation constitutes what Hegel's understand as self-consciousness. And the adequate self-consciousness would be the link, an augmented link, between robust self-conceptions and basically self-transformations. This link for Hegel basically defines creatures essentially endowed with history.
As I said, history not being understood simply in terms of past, but a sequence of self-constituted transformations. Each stage driven by this link between conception and transformation. How we encounter ourselves in the world and how we transform ourselves according to how we took ourselves to be. and so but in so far as creatures essentially endowed with history is are basically situated in the world they are not separate from it their self-conception is determined on the world and also is in relation with the world their self
Self-transformation also is not essential, is not simply a transformation that encompasses them. It also encompasses the world in which they inhabit. So a wrong self-conception for Hegel leads to a flawed self-transformation. And a flawed self-transformation obviously projects in basically the deterioration of the world around it. So, one second.
Okay, now the definitions of this diagram, which is again, you know, the whole map of our entire seminars. self-conception is how we take ourselves to be or more accurately how we encounter ourselves in the world the primary as I said it's a primary emphasis of our first four sessions self-transformation is is making ourselves different by how and to what we conceive ourselves,
or bringing ourselves into conception. What and how we take ourselves to be our self-conception is an essential and critical component of how we transform ourselves. Every self-conception, be it ill or robustly conceived, carries with it a vector of transformation for the self of which it is a conception. And this is why I think just kind of, again, jumping a little bit ahead, this needs to be, again, understand in relation to so many of the problems that theories like Prometheanism,
acceleration is an anthropocene that's raw you know talk about and that would be that a an ill-conceived self-conception essentially leads to a flawed and deteriorating self transformation which by virtue of self transformation being a sub, you know, domain of the world, it projects into the world that surrounds the agent. Now how and that's why, you know, for example in, you know, manifesto for acceleration is politics, there is a completely, I think it's one of the first few paragraphs, there is
a call for the understanding of how we take how we perceive ourselves how we transform ourselves needs to be taken with relation to how we perceive ourselves and we need to understand that for example any kind of consequential political project in terms of not only the robot self-conception and consequential self-transformation according to its self-conceptions, but also the augmentation of the link between the two from one that is necessary to one that is sufficient, which is the next definition.
How and to what we are transformed. Sorry, that was a task. The next definition would be how and to what we are transformed effectuates an irreversible change in how we synthesize images of ourselves in the world or our self-narratives. Self-conception and self-transformation influence upon another in a cascading manner. Basically, how we encounter ourselves in the world, whether along the manifest image or the scientific image or the stereoscopic coherence between them, is not simply leads to one specific transformation, but basically releases a cascade
of transformative processes. The same thing for self-transformation, that it releases a cascade of basically orientations in how we encounter ourselves or our self-conceptions. So the tasks of new rationalism accordingly would be to evaluate and correct our self-conceptions using both the resources of rationality and science with the understanding that the two yield different images of ourselves in the world and that they should ultimately be integrated. This is what Solaris calls the synoptic image.
To coordinate our self-transformation with better self-conceptions, in tune with natural and social sciences. To amplify the influence of our rational and scientifically informed self-conceptions over our self-transformations. The shift from a necessary link that is already proposed by Hegel between the two to that of sufficiency and amplification. To revise or, if necessary, to abandon our self-conceptions in accordance with how and to what we are transformed. This is, again, the structure that if we understand new rationalism simply as a thesis
that tries to articulate how to optimally orient thought and action distinctly but also in coordination with one another, this would be kind of a brief structure of the whole theoretical landscape, which constitute our first and second module. Self-conception, how we encounter ourselves according to the scientific image, and how we encounter ourselves according to the manifest image. Two different, basically, images of the man in the world
that needs to be fused to one another. And then the second module would be a survey of various theses of realization or self-constituted transformations that draw on sophisticated resources of scientific and or manifest images. This would be a wide range, you know, from earliest rationalist philosophies that are ethos-oriented, namely they emphasize also the transformational capacities of rationality, like Stoicism to Hegel, Marx to New Confucianism, to different varieties of, you know, functionalism and artificial general intelligence and social realization of cognition.
Now, let me just turn off this for a while. Okay. Okay. The most important, now, as I said, we are going to start this session and also continue to the next session by some sort of narrative.
As a narrative, as a philosophical narrative, obviously every narrative is flawed. And it's basically somehow a rather forced integration of various disconnected components. But nevertheless, by virtue of being a narrative, it brings to focus certain underlying themes in a scenario. And then according to how we bring these to focus and study them and analyze them, then we can revise our narratives.
There are narratives in order for us to investigate accounts of self-conception after Copernicus, to allow for a complete bifurcation of the scientific and manifest images, and hence two images of self-conception would be a narrative based on understanding of how we orient ourselves in the world. That basically these two different images, scientific image and the manifest image,
are results of two different orientations of human in the world. And these orientations need to be understood in terms of, quite literally, a geometrical relation between the observer, co-agent, with its environment. With understanding that this environment, again, is a subcategory of the world. And it is really, I think, interesting that really at the core of the Copernican revolution,
what Copernicus, the main achievement of Copernicus, is really redefining the geometric relation, namely the orientation of man with regard to its environment. For Copernicus himself, this would lead to debunking the myth of geophilosophical sufficiency that leads to the termination of geocentricity.
For other parts of the Copernican Revolution, we see Darwin. It is the spontaneous philosophy of the organism, or how basically an organism, here human, orients itself or takes a different geometrical relation with basically its own energy. a species that allow for this cancellation of the philosophy of the sufficient philosophy of the organism, organism being understood under a
picture that is already given to it. This is what Darwin tries to basically interrogate and ultimately terminates. And then we see the same thing in the ongoing chain of modern sciences. Einstein, it's a termination of cornocentricity. Then Newton is basically the termination of basically The principle of uniqueness at the level of physics, it's quite literally for Newton, is that to show
that there is no difference between the world of the heavens and the world of the lobe. That's basically integration of the universe It can be done by way of theory of inner geographical location or loss that allow for the basically integration of the uniqueness of physical domains. And these all can be explained via physical box, universal
physical. And the same thing, we go on to . So what we are going to talk about is the question of cell consumption as a product or orientation. I suggest Kant's short essay means to orient oneself thinking. Now, let's start our narrative. We render the world intelligible by organizing it. organizing it.
Now, organization implies a certain geometric modulation of the agent regard to the goal. But also, the general geometry of how thoughts must be configured in order to be able to gain traction on anything. Reza? Yes. Yes. Sorry, we're getting some really bad feedback here. I don't know if there's, like, something opened on your desktop or there's something near your speaker causing some kind of interference. Let me see. Oops. No, he's gone.
It might be his headset. It's probably a good thing for him to jump out and jump back in anyway. Chris, could you say what you experienced? Oh, I was on a conference call at my job a couple weeks ago where we had the same phenomenon. It started echoing like that for a couple seconds. We had to kill the conference call and restart it, so it's probably good for him to jump out and restart. The AI is already winding its way into the seminar earlier. Well, there's no echo on anybody else, though, so it should be just him. Yeah. That was such a great effect, though.
I don't think I've ever heard of vocal effects like that. Speaking of organizing thought, though, it was amazing how intelligible it was, despite the feedback. Yeah. Your brain just kind of parses out the language from. Well, I think. Is it better? Is it any better? Yeah, much better. OK. Basically, I noticed that Safari doesn't have a good, I don't know, some problem with Google Hangout. Like open Chrome instead. But your human mask slipped and we all know you're a robot now, so. OK, so as I said, relation between the observer, the agent,
and its environment is in principle a geometric relation. And this is something also has to do with that when, basically, the origin of the scientific revolution is basically a geometrical revolution. It's not really an accidental evolution of science. It is actually a logical component of it. It's a necessary component of it. And that's why for so many philosophers and also scientists during 17th century, 18th
century, they are extremely interested with a project of geometrization of knowledge, Not only to explain the relation between the thinking subject and the world in terms of geometrical relations, but also to understand that the organization of knowledge itself is geometric at its basis. This also has extended to 20th century via people like Peirce, then to some of the advances in contemporary mathematics, which are directly drawing on this project of geometrization of
knowledge and geometrical relations. To, for example, contemporary philosophies of science and contemporary philosophies of mathematics we have a run a farm John Petit too you know I don't know Jean Yves Girard emphasizing this geometrical relation of conception and basically knowledge generation now okay we are talking about geometry but without defining so we are not talking about basically rectangles here I think it's important to distinguish what really geometry is and why is that we are trying to explain self-conception by way of orientation and then explaining orientation in terms of a
geometrical relation. So the best way to start this discussion and this narrative would be by giving a very rudimentary but nonetheless, I think, illuminating definition of what geometry is. Geometry is the science or art of organizing space. The development of modern geometry itself is especially tied to the project of theoretical desanctification of a space, which opened the way for the entrance of theoretical reason into one of the most fundamental categories, and in doing so it put an end to various accounts of ineffability associated with the space and its abstractions.
But what is exactly the aim of organizing a space, which is a task of geometry? The answer would be to render the world intelligible insofar as the articulation of intelligibility is integrated with a spatial organization through which this intelligibility can be detected, represented, and mapped. Basically, all epistemic methods of science, on one level or another, are forms of organizing spaces in order to detect, for example, regularities of a structure, patterns, processes of emergencies, so on and so forth.
For example, from an evolutionary neurobiological perspective, there are numerous studies and evidences conducted that support the rule of singling out regularities of a space. And these are basically the laws of symmetry or preservation of invariances. through motion as the basis of higher cognitive processes from simple self-differentiation of the organism from the environment, its food, and predators to, you know, highly evolved processes like abstraction. And really, this is also one of the central topics of Alain Bertheau, a French neuroscientist,
magnum opus, the brain's sense of movement, that elaborates this connection between basically The evolution of the brain needs to be explained in terms of its capacity to simulate movement in order to be able to organize a space for, of course, quite rudimentary evolutionary requirements. Now, this is particularly important because the sense of a space is not given. We cannot even characterize it in terms of exteriority. It dissolves all distinctions between interiority and exteriority.
But what is really agent needs in order to render the world or its environment intelligible, whether this intelligibility is intelligibility of simply detecting, basically, various contrasts of a space in order to, you know, for predation and mating, or whether it is like, you know, the scientific intelligibility, you know, the systematic articulation of intelligibility. It's because the first, the impulse is this, the first requirement for the articulation of intelligibility at any level is to differentiate a space.
namely from an evolutionary perspective would be simple differentiation of the organism from the space that organism would be capable of simulating a global image of its internal continuity in contrast with the continuity of space because, as I said, the sense of a space is not given. And in terms of a space, there is no real differentiation between the organism and the space in which it basically ventures.
In addition, space imposes some very important constraints on physical organization, especially those of biology. For example, the laws of locality such as a physical entity cannot be at two spatial locations at the same time, or two entities of the same typology cannot occupy the same coordinate of space. We see, you know, these traces of these fundamental constraints everywhere in biological evolution. The production and, you know, ejection of gametes, you know, seeds, ovums. And reproduction is, for example, a solution in response to this constraint. turning spatial constraints into affordances of new evolutionary and morphological function and structures.
In giving birth or in copulation, the organism adopts the strategy of forcefully discharging part of itself that will be a new organism and cannot occupy the same spatial field as it is currently occupying. So you see that's basically the role of this space and how not only an organism interacts with the space, but also how organism evolves is extremely tied to these spatial constraints. Or for example, the development of the nervous system and the evolution of the brain as a motion simulating device you know it's rudimentary basically evolutionary role
through which it is possible to make sense of a space you know detecting various for example in variances of the space you know stabilizing them memorizing them in order to basically making set the organism makes sense of its environment. So nervous system creates a designated mental discontinuity through which the organism can identify and form an internal continuity as contrasted with its environment. This differentiation can entirely be understood as an effective computational solution that leads to higher order and more intricate computational capacities. Things like self-perception, basic intuitions
of space, its intuitive characterization as outside. These are all grounded, actually, on these simulated discontinuities that can be explained in computational terms. We can also have in mind, for example, Metzinger's understanding of self. The self is, in fact, is a computational device. One of its primary evolutionary functions is to attribute the maximum state of reward to the largest possible portion of the system.
It has vast computational capacities. But of course, it's a simulation. It's a simulation that is required for the functioning of the organism within the environment. Now, it is true this designated discontinuity, namely, the differentiation of the organism, the self-differentiation of the organism from the undifferentiated space, that the organism can embark upon exploration of its environment and making sense of it. Ronitom, a French mathematician and biologist,
suggests that, in fact, the creation of this designated discontinuity needs to be understood as a gesture of oor-alienation. And this oor-alienation is, in fact, a vector of enablement for organism. This overalienation, which is the basis of the evolution of the nervous system, can be described in a philosophical fashion. X distinguishes itself from that which does not distinguish itself from it by forming a localized discontinuity that can then be stabilized as a sense of internal continuity with the aim of contrasting this internal continuity with the surrounding space.
So basically, this idea of contrasting, this simulated fission or rift is a form of enabling gesture, that is both constituting of the nervous system and its higher functions. therefore this or alienation should be understood as an enabling condition that is not given but is neurocomputationally constructed and structured the establishment of the internal continuity through neurocomputational simulation
of an integral image of the organism has differentiated you know in in reality the creation of a primary cue or frame of reference. So we need to understand that this simulation of designated internal continuity needs to be understood as a primary navigational cue, representational navigational cue or frame of reference for organism and how it makes sense of its environment. Now, by resorting to this frame of reference, not only the organism is able to perform optimal problem solving, but also is able to orient itself and undertake proactive exploration,
not simply reactive responses to a stimuli. This cue, this frame of reference, is a trigger for mobilization, both in the sense of moving or proactive search in the environment in the sense of cognitive venture. And it is especially in the latter sense that once it is enriched by other functions and capacities such as, you know, speech, language, concept formation, social activities, it can effectuate approaches in which maps and cues do not need to entirely rely on or resort to this, you know, rudimentary, trivial, privileged frame of reference, namely the designated discontinuity of the organism,
the condition by the nervous system, and evolutionary constituted. This move toward dispensing with the privileged frame of reference in its broad connotation is the constitutive moment of the Copernican Revolution. Modern geometry and geometrical logic sublimate precisely this moment as a basic component of drawing ever-changing and highly modifiable pictures of the structure of thought and the structure of the world. Now, it's necessary to note that geometry as a science and a mathematical field, of course, cannot be thoroughly explained or understood in terms of evolutionary neurobiological scenarios. There is a vast gap between the
between, for example, neurobiological detection of regularities as laws and rules, neurobiological detection of regularities that, for example, an organism does, and laws and rules of geometry. This is because geometry is not merely a neurologically driven or embodied heuristics through which we can organize a space, but also an inventive and a very particular system of concept formation or concept construction. Now, when concepts are involved, there is the issue of logical irreducibility and rules which follow normative requirements, or what Kant calls needs of reason. Although geometry, you know, is peculiar of a field where representation and embodied heuristics are strongly entangled with inferential rules of concept formation and concept tracking.
And, of course, this can be an explanation as why geometry has such a unique effectivity in rendering physical systems intelligible and a reason, you know, for the significant role it played in contemporary mathematics in basically the Copernican revolution, in the scientific revolution and the systematic, basically, development of science. Of course, the importance of geometry for the advent of modern science is, you know,
and the momentous task that it had in Copernican revolution and by extension its weight for post-enlightenment philosophy is well documented. There are numerous good books that have been written both, you know, by philosophers of science and philosophers of mathematics, philosophers and also scientists who have, you know, or historians who have, you know, investigated the role of geometry and as a form of organization of a space by way of how the subject is oriented in this role in the systematic development of sciences. Now I would like to suggest
that the very gesture of Copernican revolution can indeed be understood as a geometrical abstract machine that can be extracted, repurposed, and further enhanced for what following Kant we can describe as the project of reorienting thought. namely, the development of a robust self-conception. But in order to do so, first we should recognize the abstract core of Copernican revolution. In the fewest possible words, this abstract core protocol is to create an epistemic ratio of separation from nature.
Then targeting nature with rule-governed or inferentially defined conceptual systems. subsequently by way of experience or test determining if the world we have conceptually responded to the nature we have epistemically, not ontologically differentiated ourselves from corresponds to our conceptual representations. This basically means that through conceptual mapping and representational mapping we obliquely make sense of the world by distinguishing ourselves and making sense of ourselves in the world. Our rule governs systems of concepts rooted in self-conception of ourselves as thinking subjects
endowed with normative functional activities, strategically and epistemically differentiated from nature, accordingly becomes a basis for rendering the world intelligible. This intelligibility then affords us opportunities for constructing new action schemas or if necessary revising our current modes of action. The conceptual system here mediates between our self-conception, how we encounter ourselves, and our self-transformation, what we make of ourselves partially according to how we take ourselves to be in the world. By tracing and mapping the complex relations between us and the world
in terms of various modes of product and productivity. Now, this is a very strange terminology. I'm going to get back to this just in a little bit, what I mean by defining us, it, subject, world, thought, and being in terms of product. Now, the further we make sense of the world, by making sense of ourselves in the world, the more fine-grained our self-conceptions, and accordingly, the more consequential our self-transformations, as we talked about. So in short, what Copernican revolution puts forward is a blueprint of how making sense of the world by orienting ourselves to rule-governed conceptual systems
and studying the conformity of nature's response to our conceptual representations. In other words, in order to make sense of the world, ourselves in it, to revise our self-conception and enhance our self-transformation, The basic requirement, the most rudimentary one, is to make an orientation and figuring out how to orient. This is a subject of Kant's essay, What Does It Mean to Orient One's Self in Thinking. Now, Kant's own example of what orientation is, is quite accessible and worth repeating here in order for us to elaborate conceptual orientation and complex forms of orientations.
for Kent's example think of a horizon where we are standing it's midday by looking toward the Sun and and telling the difference between our left hand and right hands now we can find four directions of the horizon south north east and west now the feeling of right hand and left hand here designate the subjective ground of differentiation which of course externally does not have any designation in intuition. It is a frame of reference which we have chosen by virtue of its apparent immediacy, an immediacy that is of course anchored in the neurobiological sense of internal continuity that I mentioned earlier,
and is in fact an effective kind of embodied simulating computational device, but obviously not the best one, if not the weakest one, in fact. In a sense, to orient oneself, for Kant, means to get one's bearings within a space, be it physical space, conceptual space, or social space. Now, orientation, in this sense, is a partially embodied cognitive process, Partially embodied means it's partially under material constraints and is influenced by the representational, you know, system.
It involves the structural transformation of both the subject observer and its environment to a dynamic entanglement between the internal orientedness of the subject, its frame of reference, and the differentiation of the environment into orientational cues. Like, for example, in Kant's example, that would be the sun. Now, this entanglement between orientedness of the subject, co-privileged frame of reference, and environmental cues, generates a bootstrapping effect that diversifies cues and highlights new directions. Now, the process of orientation is, in this sense, a very dynamic dimension,
which can be understood as a near disequilibrium, not near equilibrium, near disequilibrium state. Not only it points to new directions qua choices of disequilibrium and dynamic instabilities, but also it augments cognitive processes, broadens the scope of the subject's openness, and intensifies its experimental heuristic abilities. For example, you know, a very, very trivial, again, embodied, not conceptual example would be imagine you are riding in a taxi toward a location that you have visited before. The taxi drops you in a street that is not familiar to you and you have not taken previously to reach your designated destination.
Your initial reaction would be alertness, openness to different choices of orientation. And of course, heuristic direction finding. Basically, turning cues into hypothetical dimensions. And then have this kind of online interactions with these cues. So as it turns out, what Kant identifies as orientation, which is at the core of the Copernican Revolution, making sense of the world by unfolding new direction for our self-narratives in the world, and that by means of orientation through concepts, is at base a geometrical strategy. And of course, you know, why shouldn't be a geometrical?
If geometry, as I mentioned earlier, is a system for organizing a space by knitting together conceptual rules of thought, rules of imagination, and material behaviors in order to detect, map, and articulate intelligibility. Now, since better orientations yield finer self-narratives or self-conceptions and more fine-grained pictures of the world, from the outset of the Copernican Revolution's main emphasis becomes the choice of frame of reference, which is itself a geometrical problem. Now, Copernicus, for example, in the case of Copernicus himself, he manipulates the Ptolemaic privilege frame of reference without removing it.
Now, Copernicus doesn't really abolish the Ptolemaic system. He manipulates it. This manipulation is sufficient to create a vast cascading effect. in self-conception of basically man in the universe. He shifts the frame of reference from a geocentric one into a helioastral one. Even though this change is minimal, that by itself opens up a whole new vista of otherwise unimaginable from the perspective of the Ptolemaic system. But the idea is to find an equivalent of what French mathematician
Elie Carton calls the mobile frame of reference for the post-Copernican subject, for whom deeper self-narratives or self-conceptions should incite and integrate with more consequential self-transformations. Now, a frame of reference that is highly mobile and allows for piecewise construction of complex orientations, because by virtue, we talked about it, Kant's example is one that is trivial. It's basically nothing but, at its core, an evolutionary-driven, privileged frame of reference. It's being chosen by the virtue of its immediacy.
Whereas for the legacy of the Copernican revolution, it's the understanding that how we can orient ourselves differently in the world in order to yield new self-conceptions is by way of also redefining and manipulating the frames of reference. And revising this frame of reference to a highly mobile one. The idea that... Now, the role of the frame of reference, as trivial as it is in orientation, is especially important. Since in Kant's account of orientation,
there are residues of pre-modern conservatism and uncritical philosophies generated from the perspective of the epistemic given and spontaneity. Basically, I would like to just give it four of these residues without discussing them or elaborating them, and only discuss one of them that is about orientation. Now the idea is that for Kant, the frame of reference as base of orientation is strongly coupled with the discrete self. It is as much enabled by its primitive heuristic abilities as it is tainted by its neurobiologically driven blind spots and illusions.
Now, both neuroscience and, of course, social sciences have highly problematized some of the basic assumptions or illusions of this discrete figure of selfhood. The other problem is that for Kant, the frame of reference for the subject of experience is anchored and immobile. insofar as the frame of reference is anchored it appears that by looking into the world it is always the case that the world is facing me that the world is facing the subject this is the conserved structure of reflectivity of the subject that also Kant uses extensively in the critique of aesthetic judgment supported by a privileged internal frame of reference that returns such a distorted image
in which nature always appears as a ready-made object of experience or a tell-tale heart ready to tell us a story. This, of course, is a variety of the myth of the given, as if nature is there to tell us something. And that undergirds certain methodology of how, for example, this myth of the given and the distorted image that it yields, It basically compels us to embark on certain illusory forms of approaches toward the world, whether it is in terms of speculative philosophies or, for example, in terms of epistemic methodologies. Three, Kant does not accurately define and distinguish the geometric relations between the subject and the object,
thought and being, human and the world, as different orientational cues. And that's really the specific emphasis of our topic in terms of explaining various different orientations in terms of geometrical relations and how these different orientations yield different images or lead different self-conceptions of man in the world. Now, of course, these are all important issues, and deserve, you know, kind of to be discussed further in relation to geometrical reappropriation of the, you know, Copernican revolution and the project of reorientation of thought. But, you know, kind of because we need to kind of wrap this up for this session.
I just want to, and also that's because our main emphasis is on the question of orientation in relation to self-conception, is that I want to briefly discuss a third one. Namely, Kant does not accurately define and distinguish geometric relations between the subject and the object, thought and being human in the world, as different orientational cues. Hermann Grossman, you know, who was a disciple of Kant and is now considered to be one of the grandfathers of modern algebra and geometric algebraic methods. quite actually a phenomenal philosopher,
reformulates the object of understanding in terms of orientational products. Now, the basic idea is simple for Grassmann. Grassmann basically tries to solve this idea of orientational thinking in Kant by way of, for example, the resources of geometry and algebra to be able to understand various orientations of thoughts as universal mapping properties, as different transits of information. His main idea is quite actually simple, probably everyone is familiar with.
Line AB is not equal to line BA. because these are two magnitudes with two different orientations which demand different modes of judgment. In other words, the products of AB and BA are not commutative. In philosophical terms, the subject-world thinking-being, subject-world dualities are not commutative insofar as they are orientational couplings. Subject, dot world, dot being the symbol of product, hence what I initially said in terms of product and productivity. Subject, product world, or the coupling of subject world,
is subject, product world, is different from world subject. And in this fashion, thinking, product world, or thinking, being, and being and thinking are different from one another. Here there is, of course, a fundamental insight. that not only gives rise to some astonishing inventions of mathematics, but anticipates some of the most contemporary philosophical debates, such as anti-correlationalism, unilateralization, or the non-reconciliation of thought and being. In order to make sense of the world and conceive non-trivial self-narratives of ourselves in the world as engines of self-transformation, Now, we must develop mappings along these non-commutative oriented products.
Here we get close to Selares' idea of the synoptic image as the ultimate quest of self-conception that involves the fusion of complex scientific image and the sophisticated manifest image, one informed by the orientation of world subject from the perspective of causal uniformities of nature, and the other informed by the order-oriented coupling of subject world from the perspective of the normative realm. Now, these two non-commutative orientations are two adjoins or universal mapping properties of the same body. They are two faces of the same world story
that need to be conjoined, brought to focus, and navigated. one adjoint so this would be basically it's like this that you know adjoints are basically arrows, they are maps of transits, one from the world subject one arrow and one from subject world right arrow these are called adjoint adjoint arms or adjunctions which of course I'm going to this session and the next session talk to them that how we can use for example some of the conceptual resources of contemporary mathematics to explain
these actual relations with regard to for example philosophy of Hegel or in fact understanding of basically how we can understand both in manifest image and the scientific image in terms of these universal mapping properties. Now, one adjoined arm or side of the world story entails setting rule-governed conceptual systems upon nature. The other demands the controlled revision of such conceptual systems in light of the deepening scientific image. Now, the integration of both results in increasingly fine-grained pictures and robust world stories.
with world stories being understood as object uniformities that characterize the world. Now, by mediating between self-conception and self-transformation, such maps transform the uprooted of human in the world, which is the legacy of the Copernican Revolution, into a condition of positive transformation. The deracination of the subject, the uprooting of the thinking subject, by assaulting the spontaneity and sufficiency of its privileged orientation in the world, coincides with its drift in a vast space, whose affordances are yet to be uncovered.
This is a diagram from Francis William Louvert, a renowned mathematician and founder of Topos logic and topos theory. He's actually a source of philosophy, in fact, and his philosophy is one of the, you know, he's extremely famous for extensively developing, actually, some of the main, you know, branches of contemporary mathematics by drawing on philosophy and the projects,
the enduring philosophies of enlightenment. He has used Hegel, Grassmann, Kant, even Mao and Lenin. in. Now you see here that Louvert tries to, in order to... Is it? Yes? We don't see. We can't see a diagram. Oh, you can't? No, this screen show didn't work. Oh, okay. Okay. Let's hear your screen once more.
Sorry. Yes. Thank you. Now, you see, this is again a map of self-conception by decomposing the undifferentiated space into various products of orientation. Namely, what I called adjunctions or adjoints, universal mapping properties. Thinking, subjective logic, is a part of objective logic
So thinking basically oscillates between objective logic and subjective logic Adjunctions, back and forth, between objective and subjectives Each need to be accounted as a different distinct orientation Confulating one with one another basically leads to a trivial orientation, and again, for example, in a Hegelian dimension, leads to a trivial self-transformation. So the essential task is to decompose the space of thought and the space of transformation, the space of thinking and being into various spectra of orientation, diversifying orientational cues,
as different products that can be navigated and investigated, criticized. This is, you know, the task of the critical philosophy. And this gets back to one of the most, I think, probably amazing quotes of philosophy by Plato. To be able to cut up each kind according to its species along its natural joints and to try not to splinter any part as a bad butcher might do. Now this is not only true about self-conception in general,
that how we need to decompose it into various orientations or oriented products between thinking and being, subject and world, subjective logic and objective logic. But also in terms of its bifurcation to different images, scientific image, even science, basically, a science that is not able, in its epistemic methods, that is not able to do this accurate carving of structures into basically nature into various strata of structures and then locate the properties of the structures according to this stratification or this carving, this surgery,
it's not really a science. And this is something that we get back to the next session. The same thing about the manifest image. The differentiation between various basically domains of concept, between pragmatic dimensions of assertions and inferences. This is basically, this code by Plato anticipates really the epistemic, the general schema of epistemic method after Copernicus. And this is something that repeatedly we come to it and we see it present in both scientific self-conceptions and normative self-conceptions.
This schema can be, you know, decomposed to three, basically, tasks or three, you know, procedure. One, decomposition or localization. The understanding that, for example, for the geometrical relation, a space is not given. It's undifferentiated. You need to decompose it into various chunks, various, basically, structures. This is an understanding of localization. Whatever is given to you, you need to be able to localize its properties according to the structures and functions that generate, for example, these properties. This we will get back to when we were talking especially about mechanistic philosophies
and the general schema of the scientific image as one that is capable of detecting and tracking object uniformities in nature by decomposing nature into structural regularities. Two is local analysis. Once the carving is done, then you analyze these localities or these strata or these structures or these domains. Then, whereas for Plato, the task is probably left either at the level of decomposition or local analysis.
for the Copernican revolution and the entire robust understanding of self-conception would be recomposition or global integration of synthesis. Whatever you have decomposed and analyzed needs to be integrated. We see this in terms of, for example, in physics, in the scientific image, We see it in terms of basically recomposition of different mechanisms or different compartments of a structure into basically a structural functional organization. We see it, for example, in the, you know, contemporary programs of mathematics under, for example, things like chief logics, topos theory.
We get, for example, a universal construct, decompose this universal construct to, you know, local products, topological products. then by way of very sophisticated synthetic procedures, we try to integrate them together in order to recreate or generate or recompose the scope of, for example, that universal object. And again, we see this, you know, as basically as the general scheme of really new rationalism to not only decompose self-conception to scientific and manifest image, but ultimately the final quest is bringing them together into a synoptic image, namely a robot self-conception of human in the world.
Now, again, as I said, Grossman talks about this diagram, this relation between thinking and being, that these arrows need to be understood differently. They are not simply inverse functions. They are different orientations. They are non-commutative, being and thinking. The transit from being and thinking is different from thinking and being. And then we talked about that these can be actually mapped in terms of the perspective of man in the world from causal uniformities
and the perspective of man in the world from the normative activities. And again, in the realm of normative activities would be, again, the objective rules and the subjective rules, objective logic and the subjective logic. This is what we talked about. this is a diagram from James Crutchfield, one of the main people behind, you know, the thing that I talked about earlier about computational mechanics.
This is a model of, again, you see it in terms of a junction, the relation between an agent and its environment, with the environment being understood as a subset of the universe. And this is, again, at the basis, this agent-centric view of the environment is at the center of basically the epistemic method of the Copernican legacy. Now, the universe can be considered a deterministic dynamical system. deterministic dynamical system means that even if the initial and boundary conditions of the systems,
its input are given, how it evolves is completely unpredictable, is what really deterministic dynamic systems are. The environment, as seen by any one agent, is a stochastic dynamical system, consisting of all other agents. Its apparent stochasticity results from several effects, namely randomness. Some intrinsic, some due to an agent's limited computational resources. Each agent is itself a stochastic dynamical system, since it may sample or be plagued by the uncontrollable randomness in its substrate and environment stimuli.
The substrate presents the available resources as support and limit information processing, model building, and decision making. The arrows indicate flow of information into and out of agents. Adjoints, in this sense, these universal mapping properties that allow us to organize the relation of the subject or the agent with regard to the world need to be understood as these maps of transits in which the input of one system is the output of another system. And again, in a circular manner, the output of one system becomes the input of another system.
and then and then you can again this understanding that you know any kind of scientific image of man in the world needs to basically address for all these transits from the model environment to the environment at the level of you know a stochastic deterministic systems to the level of you know dynamic deterministic systems you know the relation between sensors and effectors or you know afferent and efferent processes so on and so forth.
Now I said that's you know this idea of orientation as universal mapping properties is highly formalized by way of one of the sophisticated tools of contemporary mathematics called category theory now categories theory is is basically the understanding of how objects basically can be mapped with regard to other objects.
in a sense that what really constitutes the objects of mathematics are nothing but the map of transits between various objects and how these maps are basically, how these arrows, how these connections between objects can be distinguished in two, for example, categories. namely equivalent classes of objects. Now, category theory defined these universal mapping transits or orientations as adjoins. You see, very like a kind of a rudimentary way to put it,
There are categories are objects and homomorphisms between these objects. So objects with arrows that actually connect objects of the same equivalent class is called category. Now, functors are homomorphisms, namely arrows that its tail and its head is the same category, between different, you know, categories. And then natural transformations are morphisms or arrows between different functors.
This is basically is a navigational map, is a transit map, is a decomposition of the entire domain of mathematics and its general domain of concept formation into these maps and transits, into these basically arrows. Now, the thing is that a junction in category theory is usually associated with transits, namely back and forth arrows, between arrows, categories of the same kind, sorry, objects of the same category. Basically, the tail and the head of this transit
needs to be the same. Now, category theory comes up with new forms of transits, new forms of adjunctions, in which the head and the tail of arrows, or these maps of transits, are objects of different categories. For example, thinking and being are different categories. Now, objects of these two realms is being mapped via a transit called chimera adjoint, or basically a hetromorphic adjunction. Now, we see this formalization of these orientations and mappings
that allow us to think, to be able to understand not only the structure of our orientation toward the world, but how basically any kind of structure, any kind of organization of thought, any kind of articulation of intelligibility can be expressed via how we orient ourselves and make new transits of information between various structures can be basically expressed in this, can be formalized via this diagram. We have a sending category, a fixed sending object,
then a universal receiving heteromorphism. Heteromorphism is simply an arrow in which its head and tail includes objects of different categories. For example, between subject and object, thinking and being, nature and thought, or thought and nature. Now, this internal universal model, we have it, which is, for example, in terms of thought. This blue circle can actually be an object of thought.
Then the object of thought, internal universal model, that basically here for us expresses the structure of thought, can then map the sending signal or the transit of the black category, for example, one that was situated in nature or belongs to the category of being. It's capable of mapping again the object, the projection, into another specific internal map or another specific, basically, object of thought. By virtue of objects of thought being
within the category of thought here, for example, you see we have a category, a category that is distinguished its objects being blue of the same category. This is a formalization of thinking via category theory that Lovier does via Hegel. This is the receiving category. Now, the sending object, again, can be understood. Again, thought. An object of thought maps one of its objects into another object. And then this object, again, form a transit, namely, an orientational transit of information
with regard to the realm that is outside of thought. Here, again, you see it, sending object, sending category. Its objects belong to the same category, hence they are the same color. Then there are universal transits, a specific internal, sorry, a specific internal transit between them. A homomorphism, objects of the same category, head and tail, of the same subject. And then a universal sending heteromorphism, a transit of information in which the tails and heads are objects of different categories. Now you see that basically these universal mapping properties, this orientation, can also
be decomposed to various transits and mappings. The scientific image and the manifest image can again be decomposed to various internal mappings. And this creates a really completely complex picture that is basically always branching. It creates new mapping transits. It can be also... Now, the thing is that we can also integrate these half-adjunctions. We had one arrow from the sending to the receiving and the other one from the receiving to the sending. We can unite them together, and this becomes simply an adjunction. Or a universal mapping property.
Ascending category with its own internal mappings, for example, the structure of thought, with its own internal inferential mappings, and then this with its own universal mapping properties toward another category. And again, that category with its own specific receiving homomorphisms. Now, this would be in our scientific and manifest image, these two. One would be the manifest image, the normative patterns of intra-linguistic normative patterns or the inferential capacities, inferential normative activities, explained in terms of specific transits between objects of the same category.
The other one would be basically the picture, the scientific picture of the world, or what we call the object uniformities, or basically the understanding of how patterns evolve according to how structures and functions are generated. So the transits, the internal transits between these two categories are basically express the internal structures of thought and object uniformities, the manifest image and the scientific image.
But as we see, there is a complex interplay between the manifest image and the scientific image, in terms of these universal mapping properties. Even though they have their own internal mapping properties, they have universal mapping properties that influence one another. This is, again, for, as I said, so many of our basically both at the level of the structure of causal uniformities and the structure of conceptual regularities, we can detect these universal mappings or maps of transits.
This is, for example, a map of action perception. As I said, action perception, basically, the entire, the whole domain of adjunctions can be understood as systems that its input is the output of another system, and its output becomes input of another system. And here is, really, the action perception being explained in terms of this circulation of input an output, the loop. You see from an environment, sender x, sends to a different category, description of sensory inputs, carrying it towards sensory channel. Then it's the model of internal action
with categories of the same, basically, systems. Internal action, then brain, internal universal model. then its function is being translated into an internal perception, the general category of the organism. Then again, this will be transformed to an environment as a receiver x, to a different category. This shows that the right and the left arrows of a functor, basically, were in a junction. Now, before finishing this session, what we are going to move toward next session, which
would be, this was just kind of as I said, is an introductory narrative to what we are talking about and how we can even though it is an orthodox way of approaching this scenario by problem of orientation and universal mapping properties between not only self-conception and self-transformation but also between different images of self-conception scientific and manifest images. Now, this would be... we said that basically our ultimate aim for this whole new rationalism one is one that allows us to articulate a sufficient link between self-conception
and self-transformation. For that, we need to not only understand the structure of object uniformities undergirded by the scientific image, but also the structure of thought. and what kind of mapping transits are also within, you know, the category of thought or category of thinking. Cellars basically tries to decompose again. And as I said, these adjunctions or these universal mapping
properties are decomposable. And that's really what really is at the base of how these images can be revised as they are navigated, as they are decompactified. As you decompactify these universal mapping transits into more transits, more different relations between different categories or orientations, you are capable of basically diversifying your cues, your directions in this navigational space. Not only in the realm of how, for example, structural uniformities express themselves in nature, but also in the realm of thought.
And that would be, this is Stellar's model. In order to decompose basically the structure of thought into transit maps. From world to language as perception, this is what he calls entry exit level. Pattern entry exit level, the pattern governed linguistic activities. World to language perception. Input output, again, you see input of one becomes output of one, and output of one because input of another. Language to language, this is the intralinguistic level, where the functional autonomy of language basically expresses itself. And this can be explained.
We will move forward. This can be explained in terms of the conceptual role, or the status of concepts. And the pragmatic autonomy, pragmatic functional autonomy of the relation between assertions and inferences. This is an intra-linguistic map. Now then, language and world. This is basically the map of volition, or intention, or willing. So we have perception, thinking, being understood as intra-linguistic for Stellars, and language world, willing, intention.
Basically, this map has in itself the entire domain of the transit between self-conception to self-transformation, how perception maps onto thinking, then how thinking can be understood as mapping of internal objects of thought in terms of assertions and inferences for sellers, then how this inter-linguistic mappings can be again mapped onto action, namely how you can realize this thought
into a transformation. So a robust self-conception as a basis of self-transformation should be able to integrate different entry-exit levels. A synoptic theory also must account for all three transition mappings of the above diagram, understood in a term as the fusion of manifest and scientific images. An amplified theory of self-transformation, be it stoicism, new Confucianism, accelerationism, where each of general intelligence should account for the coordinated realizability of these transition levels. So what you are going to study next session
would be these transition levels. First, we are going to talk about... President? Yes. We have the echo again. Sorry, sorry? I'm sorry, the echo is coming back up. Is it a Bluetooth mic that you're using right now? Or just a laptop? No, it's just a laptop. Is there an echo? Try muting the microphone and turning it back on really quickly. Okay. Up and down. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes, but one last thing really quickly. Just refresh your browser so you come back in.
Okay, okay. Probably could get away with it. Hello? Hello? All right, no, it's good. It must be a soundboard. We'll have to figure it out later. OK, it doesn't matter. I was just, I'm done. We're going, opening to the questions. I was just going to say that next session we are going to talk about mostly in terms of these maps and transits in the scientific image, namely the study of structural uniformities or what's called object uniformities that allow us to understand the world story from
the perspective of basically world subject, world product subject. We will talk about some of the main, basically, protocols of science in order to detect these regularities, these uniformities, philosophies that account for differentiation of these structures, so on and so forth. OK. Hey. Hello. Yes.
I have a question. Could you do a brief comment about your argument about how Kant falls in the myth of the givenness in his aesthetic critique? Because sometimes I have heard about that he falls in the transcendental givenness, especially in the part in which he is assuming a transcendental schemata of a given space and time. And I think this may be interesting in order to think about the orientation in Kant's theory of experience.
Yes. No, I think, you see, Kant actually gives a quite sophisticated account of conceptual orientation. but also mixes it with certain, again, as I said, residues of pre-critical components, the ideas of sufficiency or the epistemic given. The thing is that, as you say, these kinds of concepts of space and time can't actually give, draws on a Copernican understanding of the intuitions of space and time. You see, one of the main, really, achievements of modern science
is to develop operative accounts of concepts. What are operative accounts of concepts? Basically, concepts that create their own foundations on the go. So, a space is no longer understood as a foundational intuition or fundamental intuition, but as an operative concept. And Kant's transcendental schema of a space mostly is really on the side of this operative account of the concept, which is actually quite in tandem with how Copernican revolution really dismantles some of these myths about the fundamental categories of space and time.
But also, again, as I said, Kant, in other parts, and this is really, there are actually a couple of books that have been talked about this. in other places, he again confuses this with the foundational categories and draws on the foundational categories. A really good book on this idea of the philosophy of the space, especially in Leibniz and Kant, is called Monodology and Geometry on Philosophy of the Space by Vincenzo de Rizzi. I can put it here. Great, great. Oops. There is the... ...and geometry.
Do you see it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fantastic, thank you. I try actually to talk about this in relation to a space in the in in the first four modules a little bit of can't but not that much and what mainly in relation to time this operative understanding of time as an operator or not as a parameter. And this is, I think, you know, one other thing about the Copernican Revolution,
it tries to, I mean, as kind of an abstract protocol of the Copernican Revolution, it aims to create a form of orientation, or a form of mappings that can be constructed incrementally via finitude rather than by inscribing speculative accounts of infinitude into the equation and then tries to speculate according to it. Now, Kant seems to be highly critical of this speculative, what he calls speculative enthusiasm in terms of orientation, namely orienting thought into varieties of accounts of infinitude
and then trying to move toward them. No, Kant actually talks about the felt needs of reason and the idea of reason understood as a common task and a reasoner as a commoner. These are all this understanding that the kind of orientation orientation that also Kant endorses is a constructive one. That is constructed incrementally, but its incremental construction out of finitude elements does not mean that it's going to be bound. In fact, there is no such a thing as incommensurability between finitude and unboundedness.
This is also completely a mathematical assertion that in order for you to have unboundedness doesn't mean that you need to pose infinitude. You can construct the affinitude in order to unbind. And this is really the Copernican revolutions that, for example, at the level of mathematics, we see the construction of mathematics. Yes, they use, for example, as tools, for example, speculative accounts of infinity, for example, in early projective geometry. But these are just instances. It's not that they use it as a robust conception. No, every construction in, and this is really the kind of the scientific, how science evolves
by way of incremental construction of finite mappings or finite orientations. I wonder, I guess, because earlier, maybe stretching back to the earlier conversation conversation about non-moneticity, eh, non-moneticity. And then I guess I was kind of curious a little bit about Peirce and his notion of the continuum. And maybe if this in some way relates to this particular thing, because I mean he describes a continuum as like something that even at any one particular point, like you could divide that point up and get like an infinite amount of
like depth or It's not quite the right word for it, but there's an infinite amount of space even at any particular point. So maybe this gets some way at that idea of finitude and the infinitude. Yeah, I mean, sure. First of all, Peirce is really, I think, one of those thinkers that is really behind this whole idea of Szilard's philosophy and by extension new rationalism and so many of these you know new mythologies both in pragmatic rationalism and you know scientific realism and that would be because yes he understands continuity at different levels but the level
that thought needs to account for, makes sense, first makes sense of, in order to make sense of other levels of more, you know, bottom levels of continuity, is the continuity as a transit between particularities and generalities. And this, namely the particular arrow to the general and general again arrow to the particular and these transits again can be decomposed can be decomposed via different mappings again this is a geometrical solution to the problem of basically thinking that once you decompose these mappings it shows that there is an embedding problem here in
in the sense that insofar as these maps bifurricate and diversify, what you initially thought as axiomatization of the finitude turns out to be not incommensurable with the unboundedness of its traction upon the scope of the general or the universal. Vanessa, I guess I'm kind of then wondering how you might relate that to the distinction between monotonic and non-monotonic logic, I mean, in terms of like maybe attempting to locate some sort of axiomatic logic for how we conceive of the world, and then this idea that maybe you can kind of...
No, you see, when we're talking about axiomatics, we need to distinguish what kind of axiomatic are we talking about. Are we talking about foundational axiomatics, or are we talking about axiomatics as the way that, For example, critical philosophies or modern philosophical systems talk about it. Axiomatics in the sense that you need to come up with resources, and these resources need to have determinate contents. But these resources, again, can be, these axioms can be revised, whereas foundational axiomatics is always foundational by virtue that you have a component of the epistemic given in your philosophy. Hence, the uncriticality of the philosophy in general that endorses that kind of axiomatics.
These are, I think, need to be distinguished. When we are talking about axiomatics, we need to carefully distinguish what kind of axiomatics are we talking about. Are they operational axiomatics or simply foundational axiomatics? Well, I guess that's what I'm wondering is then can you operationalize foundational mathematics to a certain degree? Sorry, operation? Can you operationalize foundational mathematics? Well, that's what category theory tries to do. Simply decomposing all objects of mathematics, all concepts of mathematics, all programs of mathematics into transit maps. Addresses between various different objects that can be branched into new different addresses.
And this is basically the undergirding thesis of, for example, topus theory and category theory. An object, a point, for example, previously understood as a foundational axiomatics of mathematics, but not as an operational axiomatics, now being tracked by way of arrows that point to it, with the understanding that point is nothing but an operational concept. It's an arrow that points basically to a piece of paper, literally. And this piece of paper can be understood as a limit. Now, the mark that it points is really the product of an operational concept,
namely the pointing gesture or a morphism. And in these morphisms, then it can be grouped and concatenated together into what? into functors, and these functors, again, can be decomposed to other functors, and then how, this is how you basically ramify the operational scope of the concept. Well, maybe in the category theory thing, too, would there be a particular book or something that you might recommend for a kind of more basic introduction to that? BASIC INTRODUCTION IS, I THINK, REALLY, REALLY REDIMENTARY, ALMOST LIKE AT THE LEVEL OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, GOOD FOR ALL OF US, IS LAVERE'S CONCEPT OF
CATEGORY, WHICH IS AN INTRODUCTION TO CATEGORY THEORY. IT STARTS QUITE, QUITE, ALMOST EXCESSIVELY REDIMENTARY, AND THEN IT ADVANCES TO OUR HIGHLY DIFFICULT PROBLEMS OF CATEGORY THEORY. Is that any of that material in the Continuum book that was released on him? No, no, no, no. No, no. I can put it. I will definitely put it in our Google Drive. Questions? Yeah, we have one over here.
Yeah, you made a comment in the introduction actually that the real is not rational and that word the real made me think of Lacan. And it sounds like foundationally that maybe new rationalism is coming from a similar point of departure, but I wondered if you had any thought on, you know, functionally what Lacanian psychoanalysis is doing versus new rationalism if there are distinct differences that you would want to point out between what the two projects are doing. Okay, may I confess that I'm afraid my knowledge of Lacan is absolutely impoverished to the point that I better not make any remark on Lacanian psychoanalysis. Okay.
I'm more in tune with the Freudian trajectory. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Sorry. But I have actually, this is something that you are not the first one who has pointed this. In fact, I had this pointed out to me by another person. So I will check into this. OK. A question for me now. I know that some of the participants left the group. I don't know what your background is.
And because of that, it's a little bit difficult for me to kind of coordinate materials to the point that I can have a balance of basically comprehensibility with people from, assuming that people are from very diverse backgrounds. Is it possible if, like, just have a kind of a brief introduction of what you are working on and what your backgrounds are? Chris, I'll start. I'm still muted. My name is Chris. I guess I actually work in information technology, so artificial intelligence is a very interesting concept. I have a degree in philosophy, studied mostly continental. where the question from Lacan came up.
And just kind of getting back into philosophy. I graduated about 10 years ago for political reasons, trying to revitalize that. Excellent. Hey, my name is Adora. I'm really into art. I just graduated with a degree in art history. and I'm curious about how this artistical insight pertains to real life, I guess. Sure. Okay. Excellent. So, next. Come on. Don't be shy.
I did my degree in history of art, but nowadays I'm studying with Jai-Hamilton Grand here in a master's program in philosophy. I'm familiar with your background, yes. Hello. I'm Avent Kong. I'm a musician and a composer. I also studied philosophy maybe for my first degree, but I didn't get very far, so it's mostly independent. But, yeah, I'm very interested in what you're talking about. I kind of see it in musical terms often, and it helps me to get more understanding about that.
There is this book probably you're familiar with already called The Topos of Music. Yes, amazing stuff from Matt Zoller. Yes, from Gourinho. Are you speaking with him soon? Yes, I've actually worked with him, I mean talked with conversation or lectures in the past. He's an amazing also, he's actually one of the people who basically underneath this whole development of, you know, So, new rationalism without being mentioned is basically the understanding of navigation or basically mappings that we can maps and decompose these maps into addresses.
And these addresses yield different pictures of compositions to us. And then how we can recompose them back together in order to create robust compositions Basically, this is drawn on somehow on Grino as well as, you know, Perse, as well as Salars and so many other people. But yes, definitely. Yeah, it's very exciting. My name is Jessica. Hi, Riza. Hello. Enjoying your lecture so far. I'm also a composer, musician, and a singer. And I'm very involved in Persian music. in gradif and classical poetry. I'm interested in studying the kind of thing you're working on for the...
I'd like to do some research into Ebnes Sinah, and especially comparisons between his techniques of pulse-taking and musical structures and compositional structures. So that's just trying to integrate some of what you're saying. Excellent. Amazing. Yeah, hi. Hello. I'm Antonio. On my first degree, I did mostly English literature, but also some continental philosophy. And I also have a master's in 20th century literature. Okay.
Next. Hi, I'm Giancarlo. I'm from Peru. I have communications background, media studies background, and just interested in low theory, new rationalism, and non-philosophy for the moment. Really interested in what you're talking about. Thank you. Can you hear me? My connection is a bit shitty. No, I can hear you, fine. Okay, I'm Konstantinos, I'm involved with architecture, I'm a recent graduate, and now
I'm fully enrolled in the Critical Philosophy program from the new center for research and practice. So I was quite interested in what you said, Reza, especially for all these special terms that you used. It happens that I'm quite familiar. I don't know if it's silly, but a question about something that you said, an ill self-conception. What could that be? I believe there are some ethical terms inside that.
Yes, what I meant by ill-conceived self-conception, well, yes, it can be elaborated, but it was mostly, I was referring to this idea that Hegel says that, you know, So what we are for ourselves, how we appear to ourselves, is an essential component of how we are in ourselves. So how we are for ourselves is an essential component of how we are in ourselves. or namely how we take ourselves to be is an essential and critical component of how we take ourselves to be,
how we transform ourselves or how we change ourselves or how cultivate ourselves. Now the thing for Hegel is that he says that obviously a wrong self-conception, a conception that is based on a flawed picture of human in the universe, but also human as part of a historical instantiation, results in not only an inconsequential transformation, but also in a transformation that further deteriorates the conception of man. Now, for example, an example of this, for example, if we see man or human,
sorry for this going between man and human, and I go between the quoting of the philosophers who use the word man, because they are from 20th century, and human, which is quite a neutral way to put it. Now, if human draws its self-conception according to various pictures of itself, constructed on the basis of an epistemic given or an spontaneous image of the universe or an spontaneous image of itself, then this creates what? By necessity, a flawed self-conception.
You see it, for example, the self-conception of human before Darwin that basically all children are, you know, our humans are children of God. This obviously translates into a vector of transformation that is quite different from the one that is, you know, propagated or at least postulated after Darwin in light of, for example, modern processes, of how we can engineer humans or how we can enhance humans because their constitution doesn't essentially determine their function.
Not only that their constitution is fixed, namely that we are children of God, but also even if our constitution is natural, it's a still constitution. And this constitution can be stratified to various levels of structures. Once we understand how these mechanisms are interconnected, we can basically draw a map of realizability, of how basically abstract a function from its undergirding structural constitution And then how we replicate this abstracted function into different forms of constitution,
namely self-constitute in the broadest possible way our own history, whether it is the history in terms of the social constitution or it is biological constitution. Okay. Sure, I guess I'll go next. Also, sorry for giving me because I'm running on very little sleep, so what I say makes little sense to anyone. But my background is in history of ideas in German, so everything from idealism onward
I guess and I guess Reza what I'd like specifically from you in terms of text recommendations or directions to put this in I guess also my background in in analytic is yeah historically there but in depth a little narrow but I'm interested in taking this more in the direction of political philosophy and so specifically mapping sort of normative and sort of candy and metaphysics of morals on top of biological systems and an understanding of agency and on top of sort of biological and psychological operators. So philosophy of biology and biological systems readings and that sort of thing would probably be what I would want to look into.
Okay, so it's basically the understanding that what we talked about, that self-conception being decomposed in two different pictures, that these pictures basically articulate the intelligibility of two domains. One domain is a scientific image, object uniformities in nature. And the other one is the regularities, a specific irregularities of normative activities, namely rule-governed space of reasons. and which of course has its own functional autonomy. Distinguished by sellers as the mapping transits
between objects of language, between basically domains of language or linguistic activities, with language not being understood as just language, how we say it, but simply a symbolic repertoire. Now, the functional autonomy of one obviously needs to be, in order for us to be able to fully, you know, distinguish this functional autonomy, to articulate it, to abstract it toward the direction of, for example, artificial intelligence or these kinds of, you know, politics of self-realization, we need to be able to integrate it with the scientific image in the sense that we see that how it is really constitute,
It's stratified like Plato, carve it at its joints to different strata, organizational strata, organizational structures, and see how this constitution can be mapped. Once we map the constitutions, we see its constraints on realizability of the function at the level of normative realm, then we are capable of basically proceed with a plan, a schema, to how to abstract functions from its constitution. But we can't just come like the old functionalism, like the old forms of rationalism,
say that we can simply abstract the function of thought by way of explicit rules, namely codified rules, and then implement it, for example, whatever. You know, whether it's a robot, this table, a piece of Swiss cheese, so on and so forth. It means that in order for us to be able really to robustly abstract this function, we need to account for the idea that this function, at the level of its constitution, is multiply constrained. Constrained by what? Constrained by different structural functional levels that constitute it,
namely mechanisms. and how these mechanisms orchestrate a certain phenomena, a certain function, whose autonomy can be abstracted. Yeah, great. I mean, yeah, that all seems pretty clear. I'm sure I'll have more as we go along. So I just want to get, again, look back. this idea that we are trying to bifurricate self-conception to scientific image and manifest image and then bring them together and how to relate it to self-realization, self-transformation and paradigms or thesis of self-realization
whether would it be stoicism as a mind hack to artificial general intelligence and robotics it's really the understanding that we cannot abstract this normative function, this robust self-conception, and realize it and implement it within different mediums of realization that we currently have, unless we are also understanding and mapping these level levels or stratas of constitution, namely the question of object uniformity, the structures, and the dynamisms between them. I think maybe once you would recommend it, I think it was a Wimsatt text, The Tyranny
of Scales, or was that? The Tyranny of a Scale is by Robert Batterman. Yes, I put some of these things as we go, so any person who is interested to read, it's William Wimsatt's Reengineering Philosophy, a Peacewise Approximation to Reality, but also mental mechanisms I think by William Bechtel now Bechtel is an interesting philosopher but why is he because he's not the net Ian really I mean he is a mecca is a is a hardcore mechanistic philosopher in the sense that he explains he he he argues that in
fact mechanism are explanatory components that there is nothing in natural sciences other than mechanisms you cannot talk about explanation scientific explanation without accounting for mechanisms because what mechanisms do is that they orchestrate activities the explain activities now Now, but the thing about Bechtel, as in contrast to Dennett, is that whereas Dennett tries to, as I said, undermine the functional autonomy of normativity, he tries to explain, this shows and explains that there is no incommensurability between the undergirding mechanisms and the functional autonomy of normative realm.
that namely the reason that we are creatures with virtues and concepts of dignities like freedom autonomy so on and so forth it's not in spite of having mechanisms being constituted by natural mechanisms but in virtue of being constituted of right mechanisms. So I guess I should probably go. Well, my name is Josh.
I come from, I guess, I had an MFA program here in New York. I've been pretty interested in philosophy and worked with a few different people. Reza in particular and yeah I don't know I guess I'm interested to see I'm kind of particularly interested in sellers and I'm kind of curious myself I guess about the relation between art and it's sort of moving art discourse in a certain way I guess away from the sort of given and in particular like the kind of the essential nature that a lot of our discourse seems to give to the sort of like experience of our object as a sort of like primary or like foundational kind of mode that can't be intervened on with
thought or concepts. Sure. I mean, it also converges on what I was talking about that in regard very, in passing I mentioned that for Kant, aesthetic judgment, the way that he defines aesthetic judgment is based on a privileged frame of reference, an orientation that is susceptible to the epistemic given and to perceive the world as a ready-made object of experience. And basically, so much of the contemporary art world really indexed this myth in the understanding that as if this object is already has an experiential content to it.
A telltale heart, basically. Well, yeah, and then it seems to be something that you can't, at that point, then critically intervene on because it simply is what it is and, like, we're all only going to be getting at it through our own... Yes, and then also this brings a very complex question that can we conceive of an art that is not simply susceptible to the most adverse effects of the myth of the given, and this idea of a privileged orientation or privileged basically frame of reference,
or art is inherently ill-suited for this task? I think there's questions that need to be discussed. Yeah, I mean, I guess I would wonder whether or not that's, I mean, I feel like there's a, like art is bound with its own sort of what do I want to say its own sort of critical excavation and that part of the task has been neglected for some time it seems to me and we've kind of as we've increasingly sort of moved towards art as this kind of given thing we've removed the sort of critical capacities that one would need in order to actually have a productive
perspective on it. Excellent. Questions, comments, book recommendations? So should we adjourn this meeting for the next one? We're doing a 500 page, or not 500 page. Yes, okay, yes, yes, yes, okay, yes, good that you mentioned this, yes. Okay, what I would like you guys to do, and I saw that Jordan left the group, and so we will try to also post it on our board.
I would like you to talk about specific forms of orientation. Whatever discipline that you are working on, talk about this orientation and how reorienting, or namely change in orientation, will result in basically or implies or entails a change in the transformation of how you can remap this domain and also transform it, whatever you are doing. It's music, it's art, it's neuroscience, it's politics, it's mathematics, so on and so forth. 500. It can be quite speculative as long as it addresses the question.
Or it can be just in terms of questions. Did you put the question up on the classroom page or something, or can you do that? I don't know if it's there for right now. just so that we can review it. I will put this on the classroom thing, yeah. So somehow... Oh, sorry. Sorry. No, no, no, go on, please. Oh, thank you. So Reza, you want us to talk about changing of orientation from the framework of the adjoints of intelligence? or... Orientation in the sense of that orientation is simply, as we talked about, is how
whether it is the orientation of the thinking subject with regard to whatever environment or a specific designated environment that it is working on, whether it's mathematics, so on and so forth, or it is really orientation within the domain itself. like between objects of this you know music objects of art objects of mathematics and how basically these changes of orientations making first specifying what kind of orientation we are talking about with the understanding that how I define the orientation in a broad possible sense from general to its specific from general evolutionary orientation to a specific conceptual
orientation. And then how these orientations or transits of basically between one domain to another or between objects of the same domain, if we specify them, then we are capable of also map, basically keep track of how this domain functions, of basically how this domain is structured. And then once we have these maps, then we are capable of basically implementing the realizability of these maps, or simply diversifying these maps and come up with a higher, fine-grained picture. So basically what is at the stake in whatever we are doing. Okay, great. So it's not changing the orientation before you create the map.
It would be... Yes. Yes, orientation is essentially a part of this kind of a mapping or drawing the universal mapping transit with the sense that orientation, insofar as it's revisable, it follows new orientational cues and directions. It basically changes the map, so the map is not set in advance. It is as you are basically, you know, diversifying these transit maps, you come up in new novel structures or new novel functions. And then you are capable of articulating them in terms of intelligibilities. And these intelligibilities then becomes the basis, the architectural components of what you can do with them.
Namely, the intelligibility at the level of is becomes intelligibility and consequentiality at the level of ought, what ought to do, what we can ought to do. This whole idea of this trans-vision is an ought, which is the Szilardzian formula, can also be understood in terms of how to track intelligibilities, how to articulate new intelligibilities, and how to put these intelligibilities in the service of new understandings and action. Okay, so should we adjourn?