More from Wikipedia
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
On the Straight and Narrow Path...?
from Wiki:
The Planck constant, written asor
when including a factor of
, is called the quantum of action.[8] Like action, this constant has unit of energy times time. It figures in all significant quantum equations, like the uncertainty principle and the de Broglie wavelength. Whenever the value of the action approaches the Planck constant, quantum effects are significant
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"The fact that values can be incommensurable means that there is no single scale on which to measure them, and that conflicts between them can be tragic, since there is no way to definitively choose one over the other without sacrificing something of great value."
- Sir Isaiah Berlin
Contemplating Existence in the Wake of Guilt...
On James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake"
“There is no such thing as collective guilt or collective innocence; guilt and innocence make sense only if applied to individuals.”–Hannah Ardent, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"
How German (NAZI) Guilt-Pride and American White Guilt-Pride came to be collectively imagined...
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Ignoring the 'Diplomacy' of Knowing Your Place...
The Oval Office showdown exposed the erosion of diplomatic norms and respect.
The showdown between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on Feb. 28 shocked the entire world. But instead of analyzing its political impact, let’s focus on the details of manners, gestures, which may seem less important than the issues at stake, but reveal more about the underlying basic stance.
The first thing that stands out is the behavior of two arrogant and self-assured U.S. politicians treating the leader of Ukraine — who was under immense pressure, on the verge of a breakdown — in an extremely disrespectful and brutal manner. The only country whose representatives I know to use such brutal language is Russia.
Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova wrote: "How Trump and Vance held back from hitting that scumbag is a miracle of restraint." As expected, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev joined in, calling Zelensky a "cocaine clown." But such statements are made by second-tier figures, never top leaders.
At the level of public diplomacy, Trump and U.S. Vice President JD Vance violated the rules even respected by figures like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. The only other regime that sometimes resorts to similar brutality is North Korea — no surprise that Trump has openly praised North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as a good leader and even called him a friend.
Before Zelensky even entered the room, White House staff criticized him for allegedly showing disrespect by not being properly dressed. The entire treatment of Zelensky was disrespectful. What makes it even worse is that Trump, a man who set new standards in public vulgarity, now shamelessly condemns others for disrespect. The ultimate obscenity is reproaching someone for disrespect in a manner that, in itself, is a blatant act of disrespect. Even a simple AI like ChatGPT has better manners than Trump and Vance in a conversation."The ultimate obscenity is reproaching someone for disrespect in a manner that, in itself, is a blatant act of disrespect."Additionally, U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz described Zelensky's reaction to being dismissed with a tasteless metaphor: "It's like, you know, an ex-girlfriend who wants to argue about everything you said nine years ago, instead of moving the relationship forward."
So, was the open conflict in the Oval Office a spontaneous outburst? At the very least, this obscene exchange had been brewing, waiting to explode. We should bear in mind that, at the level of substantive content, nothing new happened. To put it in Hegelian terms, this was a passage from “An sich” (in-itself) to “Für sich” (for-itself) — from mere background presence to the explicit positing of content.
This shift changes everything: once something is directly stated, it cannot be undone. Everyone in a group might know something that is only in itself and could interpret it away as a misunderstanding, but once it’s out in the open, it’s a different matter."Everyone in a group might know something that is only in itself and could interpret it away as a misunderstanding, but once it’s out in the open, it’s a different matter."In the case of the Oval Office meeting, although tensions had always been palpable, things became tense when Vance pressed Zelensky for not appreciating the United States’ help in Ukraine’s war with Russia.
What followed was an open shouting match — something unheard of in diplomacy, where such direct and brutal exchanges are typically saved for behind closed doors. As some commentators noted, diplomacy died in the Oval Office. What we witnessed was something more akin to a low-level negotiation between mafia bosses.
Vance’s argument, that after years of trying to break Russia with arms, the time has come for diplomacy, is so full of holes that its inconsistency is glaring. War (Russian aggression) erupted after years of ineffective diplomatic attempts — when Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, diplomacy achieved nothing. The heroic Ukrainian resistance, supported by the West, didn’t fail; it created conditions for possible negotiations. Without this resistance, Ukraine would no longer exist as a state.
And, as we’ve already seen, who are Trump and Vance to talk about diplomacy after they’ve broken all its rules?
It’s naïve to claim that exposing tensions will clarify the situation. First, as we’ve seen, making things public can preclude possible solutions by adding acts of aggression and humiliation.
Second, and more important, what occurred in the Oval Office was not a process of bringing out true tensions: the situation remained obscured, with Trump clearly angry at Ukraine and Europe, and Zelensky placed in an impossible position — he had to defend Ukraine’s vital interests, which were ignored by the U.S., while also showing respect and gratitude, knowing Ukraine’s survival depends on U.S. support.
Should we blame Zelensky? Shouldn’t he have been more aware of the need for U.S. help and acted more considerately? A contrast is clear with French President Emmanuel Macron and, especially, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who, as Owen Jones pointed out, during his last visit to Washington, virtually disappeared up Trump’s backside.
I believe Zelensky should not only not be reproached — on the contrary, we should fully appreciate his tragic predicament. He defended himself clearly and counterattacked, but he had to combine this with a humiliating respect for Trump, who supports the Russian agenda.
Trump’s claim that Zelensky doesn’t want a ceasefire but a continuous war was simply a lie: of course, Zelensky wanted peace, but — quite understandably — a peace that would not just be a ceasefire opening the door for Russian reorganization and renewed attack. To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz’s well-known definition of war as a continuation of politics by other means, such a ceasefire would be a continuation of war with peaceful means.
Trump’s repeated metaphor of cards is also misleading — Zelensky was right to reply, "I don’t play cards." Jews didn’t hold any good cards in Nazi Germany, especially after 1938, but should we have told them, "Sorry, you don’t have good cards — you want our full support, but this could lead to a new world war"? How can one argue against that logic?
After Trump and Vance humiliated Zelensky for not showing enough gratitude, he posted a brief message on X: “Thank you America, thank you for your support, thank you for this visit. Thank you @POTUS, Congress, and the American people. Ukraine needs just and lasting peace, and we are working exactly for that.”
Was this almost compulsive repetition of “thanks” meant to show gratitude for the lack of which Trump and Vance criticized him, or is there an element of irony in this message, whether intentional or not?
When Trump evokes humanitarian reasons, there is always a hidden horror behind it. Remember that he also claimed Gaza should be emptied for humanitarian reasons, but neither in Gaza nor Ukraine did he ask the obvious question: who is responsible for the destruction? Both in Gaza and in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, "America First" clearly means business.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio extolled the “extraordinary opportunities, economic and geopolitical, that the U.S. and Russia could both seize once the war in Ukraine was over.” This emphasis on business is not just an ideology, but one thoroughly intertwined with specific ideological-political choices. Business presupposes a set of unwritten rules that should be respected — basic trust is fundamental. These rules are violated by Trump, who turns business into a brutal game of blackmail.
As for political choices: why treat China as the main enemy and dismiss any “extraordinary opportunities” for collaboration with China? Why, especially, does Trump repeatedly characterize Europe as the main foe of the U.S., including the absurd claim that the EU was created to "screw" the U.S.? The story is well-known, so there’s no need to repeat it here.
And there’s no need to point out what Europe should do: if Trump claims the EU was made to screw the U.S., then Europe should respond fully — politically, economically, and militarily — all options should be on the table, including a new alliance with China and de-dollarization. In short, Europe should unite as much as possible and declare a state of emergency.
What Trump is doing in his obscene actions is applying to politics the stances he declared publicly years ago.
The horror of such actions extends well beyond economic extortion and the violation of diplomatic norms. When someone acts legally, their external acts do not violate any legal prohibitions or regulations. However, politeness — manners, gallantry, etc. — is more than just obeying external legality. It’s the ambiguously imprecise domain of what one is not strictly obligated to do (but is expected to do). This is part of our unspoken customs and expectations, something rooted in our inherited substance of social mores.
Incidentally, this is the self-destructive deadlock of Political Correctness: it tries to formulate and legalize manners. Trump and Vance, great opponents of Political Correctness, acted precisely this way when they forced Zelensky into an impossible position by demanding that he explicitly say “Thank you.”
Trumpian discourse (in its strict Lacanian sense of a social link sustained by speech) poses a threat to the very substance of our social life. It contributes directly to the social disintegration that many analysts have noted. The lack of manners excludes others from communication: I pretend to listen to my partner, but I don’t really hear them. This stance is becoming a mass phenomenon.
Here’s what Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said after the Oval Office meeting: “What I saw in the Oval Office was disrespectful, and I don’t know if we could ever do business with Zelensky again. I think most Americans saw a guy that they would not want to go into business with, the way he handled the meeting.”
Again, the term “business” is revealing here. Graham then urged Zelensky to prioritize a minerals deal over security guarantees or a ceasefire with Russia — an obscenity if there ever was one. The minerals deal was a clear case of extortion by the U.S.: you get our help if you pay for it — estimated by Trump at $350 billion, which is more than the actual sum — by allowing the U.S. to exploit your natural resources for decades to come.
In other words, the minerals deal was a price for security guarantees. A minerals deal without security guarantees is meaningless for Ukraine. The whole affair becomes even more obscene when we combine it with Trump and Vance’s demands for gratitude: Ukraine must say “Thank you!” for help and then pay for it.
A classic example of political “realism” — Trump and his gang like to present themselves as “realists,” repeating the mantra that they just want to prevent the concrete suffering, destruction, and death of ordinary people. However, as John Ganz insightfully pointed out, such “realist” views (practiced by Henry Kissinger, for example) ignore the concrete suffering of hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Zelensky told Vance about the Russian threat: "You have a nice ocean and don’t feel it now, but you will in the future." Trump immediately jumped in: "Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel!"
Trump’s arrogance seduced him into misreading Zelensky: his “you will feel it” had nothing to do with subjective feeling; it referred to political and military pressure. Trump, however, took it as Zelensky ordering him how to feel — if anyone should have been ordered to feel gratitude, it was Zelensky. In a normal exchange between allies, Zelensky should have responded that it is Ukraine that deserves respect and gratitude for defending not only its own sovereignty but also the freedom of all of Europe and, ultimately, the U.S.
A Cassandra on Instrumentarium Power: The Commodification of Personal Identity Information (PII)
Excerpt from the video:
...So this framing is really about uh the dehumanization the fact that that the treatment of people is not as people. The treatment is of people as raw materials, as something that's not human.
And she contrasts this with totalitarianism, where she says in totalitarianism they actually want you to feel fear of them. They actually care about you getting emotionally and intellectually on board with their political agenda. Totalitarians actually have this humano human relationship, and it's of course an abusive relationship in totalitarianism. But what she says with this other thing that we're in now, which she calls Instrumentarium power, she says actually the people who are extracting the behavior modification and the data from you, they don't actually care about you being in fear or your anxiety. It just so happens that if fear and anxiety are the most effective and optimized way of achieving what they need to get those people the real customers the behavior modification and the data they want, then fear will be used anxiety wil be used. But it's not really about the fear or anxiety. That's just a means to an end. I do believe, as she does, that our economic system is shifting under our feet.
Collecting PII to "personalize the App User's experience" is one Trojan Horse which enables the Technofeudal Lords to then sell that data to their 'Greek' Technofeudal Vassals in order to create the desired products sold under their digital schizoid proprietary marketplaces within the Apps... presenting their "buy" case at the precise moment that the cloud-serf is vulnerable to submitting to their induced schizoid purchase impulse.
The "Internet of Things" is another Trojan Horse which then enables others to "control" those internet attached things. It gives both you, and others, Control over all things attached over the Internet. So, if you don't make your payments, they can "shut them off".
On human tuning, herding, & conditioning through technology
Monday, March 3, 2025
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Paronomasia!
Excerpt for video above:
Michelle Foucault in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus" states that the key question it asks is, "How does one keep from being fascist?", even especially, when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech, and our acts, our hearts, and our pleasures of fascism? how do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior?
The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep with in the soul. Deleuze & Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body. And indeed, I believe that this tracing out of fascism is done by James Joyce in "Finnegans Wake", in which he seeks to subvert the fascistic authority of the author of overdetermining meaning, of commanding meaning and forcing it upon the reader. And instead, he lays out a style, which keenly takes advantage of paronomasia, which is a fancy word for "puns". And in this lecture, I would like to, by exploring first the etymology of this word paronomasia open us into a discussion of Deleuze & Guattari's concept of "the plane of imminence" which I think is a really helpful way of conceptualizing the textual philosophy of Finnegans Wake. We will see how Joyce takes advantage of an "*accretive method" that subverts hierarchies and instead vies for a flat ontology in which a variety of elements enter into confluence with the equal potential to yield exciting results.
The phrase "every tellin' has a tailing" is a line from James Joyce's novel "Finnegans Wake," signifying that every story or narrative always has a consequence or "tail" that follows it; essentially, there's always a lingering effect to any tale told.
Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian media scholar and theorist, said that reading is "to guess" because words have multiple meanings.
Explanation:
Explanation:
McLuhan believed that reading is a rapid guessing game because words have many meanings.
To select a meaning for a word in context, readers must quickly guess which meaning to use.
This rapid guessing makes good readers quick decision makers, which can make them good executives.
McLuhan is best known for his phrase "the medium is the message". This phrase suggests that the medium used to communicate information has a significant impact on the message itself. McLuhan believed that each medium is a unique environment that reshapes people and culture. He also coined the term "global village".
McLuhan's ideas are related to technological determinism, which is the theory that technology and how people interact in society are connected.
John Maus, "Believer"
Telephone lines all across the worldPeople fight all across the worldAngels sing all across the worldBaby, you and me all across the worldJackie Chan flashing all across the worldHulk Hogan flashing all across the worldLet's go fly all across the worldLet's go fly all across the world
They call me the believerAnd I'm not coming back
They call me the believerAnd I'm not coming back
On Traversing the Fantasy
Slavoj Zizek, "Why is Ophelia for Hamlet Phallus" (excerpts)
All forms of authority that exerted pressure on her (Ophelia) are now cancelled, not in the sense of liberation but in a much more terrifying sense of her Self transformed into a selfless space in which confused phantasmagorias circulate – something that Hegel, following the German mystic tradition, described in the following often-quoted passage:"The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity - an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him - or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here - pure self - in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head - there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye - into a night that becomes awful."---
...As for the obvious fact that in the Auslander video clip, blacks are portrayed in the mode of white racist clichés: of course, because Auslander is not about real Blacks but about Blacks as part of White racist fantasies – the point is to ruin these fantasies from within, displaying their disgusting ridiculousness.
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This is what Rammstein does to totalitarian ideology: it de-semanticizes it and brings forward its obscene babble in its intrusive materiality. Does Rammstein's music not perfectly exemplify the distinction between sense and presence, the tension in a work of art between the hermeneutic dimension and the dimension of presence "this side of hermeneutics," a dimension which Lacan indicated by the term sinthom (formula-knot of jouissance) as opposed to symptom (bearer of meaning)? The identification with Rammstein is a direct over-identification with sinthoms which undermines ideological identification. We should not fear this direct over-identification – what we should fear is the articulation of this chaotic field of energy into a (Fascist) universe of meaning. No wonder Rammstein's music is violent, materially present, invading, and intrusive with its strong volume and deep vibrations – its materiality is in constant tension with its meaning, undermining it.
...or William Holman Hunt, "The Hireling Shepard"
Jesus (Good Shepard) vs. "The Church" (Hireling Shepard)
Saturday, March 1, 2025
Friday, February 28, 2025
Byung-Chul Han on "You Can Do It!", et al...
Byung-Chul Han’s relentless critiques of digital capitalism reveal how this suffocating system creates hollowed-out livesI came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. My first researches into our culture of overwork and perpetual stimulation soon turned up Han’s The Burnout Society, first published in German in 2010. Han’s descriptions of neoliberalism’s culture of exhaustion hit me with that rare but unmistakable alloy of gratitude and resentment aroused when someone else’s thinking gives precise and fully formed expression to one’s own fumbling intuitions.
At the heart of Han’s conception of a burnout society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) is a new paradigm of domination. The industrial society’s worker internalises the imperative to work harder in the form of superego guilt. Sigmund Freud’s superego, a hostile overseer persecuting us from within, comes into being when the infantile psyche internalises the forbidding parent. In other words, the superego has its origin in figures external to us, so that, when it tells us what to do, it is as though we are hearing an order from someone else. The achievement society of our time, Han argues, runs not on superego guilt but ego-ideal positivity – not from a ‘you must’ but a ‘you can’. The ego-ideal is that image of our own perfection once reflected to our infantile selves by our parents’ adoring gaze. It lives in us not as a persecutory other but as a kind of higher version of oneself, a voice of relentless encouragement to do and be more.
With this triumph of positivity, the roughness of the demanding boss gives way to the smoothness (a key Han term) of the relentlessly encouraging coach. On this view, depression is the definitive malaise of the achievement society: the effect of being always made to feel that we’re running hopelessly behind our own ego-ideal, exhausting ourselves in the process.
The figure of the achievement subject gives rise to some of Han’s most vivid evocations of psychic and bodily debilitation:The exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down … It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself.Reading this passage now, I recall how startlingly true it seemed to me on first reading. It sent me back to the early years of my professional academic life, the permanent background hum of anxious frustration, as research – at once the first and the most distant professional priority, the job’s one indisputable signal of achievement – was forever subordinated to the workaday demands of teaching, marking and committee meetings. In the scarce hours outside of those duties, I’d return to work on an article and quickly realise that I needed to comb a dozen more sources before I could begin to write it. Abruptly, I became aware of how tired I was; able neither to work nor refrain from it, I’d lie suspended in a state of weary wakefulness. That hollowed-out achievement self, ‘at war with itself’, was all too familiar.
Han’s critique of contemporary life centres on its fetish of transparency; the compulsion to self-exposure driven by social media and fleeting celebrity culture; the reduction of selfhood to a series of positive data-points; and the accompanying hostility to the opacity and strangeness of the human being. This may explain why autobiographical reflection barely figures in Han’s writings: he is doubtless wary of becoming just another voice seeking to be heard in among the cacophony of opinion.
Born in Seoul in 1959, as a child Han tinkered with wires and chemicals in his bedroom, emulating his civil engineer father, who had worked on large public projects in South Korea. But these experiments came to an end after he triggered a chemical explosion in his bedroom that almost blinded him, leaving physical scars he still bears. He went on to study metallurgy.
But Han’s reading and thinking were drawing him increasingly towards Europe, and the study of philosophy. At 22, he left South Korea for Germany, telling his parents that he was continuing his scientific studies (‘they wouldn’t have allowed me to study philosophy,’ he told El País in 2023). Han arrived in Germany with almost no knowledge of the language. Yet over the years he effected a remarkable self-transformation, from Korean technophile metallurgy student to émigré German philosopher and social critic. Now, he told an interviewer in Der Zeit, his tinkering is done with the stuff of thought rather than ‘wires or soldering irons’. The metaphor conveys a sense of thinking as more an environment than an activity, a distinctly German conception of the thinker’s vocation.
Han’s affinity with German thought and culture runs deep, especially in regard to its ambiguous status of Germany as at once the philosophical home of the Enlightenment and of its comprehensive critique. He is very much in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, developing for the age of digital capitalism a new chapter of its enquiry into the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ – that disturbing interplay between progress and atavism, and creative making and traumatic explosion, that has shaped the passage to modernity.Han’s writerly voice is melancholic in the Freudian sense of being sealed inside its own grief
These small intimations of the man and his life reverberate through his thought and prose. The tinkerer is a playful figure, bringing different chemical elements and physical forces into new and unpredictable kinds of contact. But for the boy Han, the play ended in horror that transfers directly to the later activity of thinking: ‘Thinking is also tinkering, and thinking can produce explosions. Thinking is the most dangerous activity, maybe more dangerous than the atomic bomb.’
Han clarifies that his own thinking is dangerous not because it foments violence, but because it discloses a world that is ‘merciless, mad and absurd’. He is writing from inside the experience of what T W Adorno calls ‘damaged life’, in the subtitle to Minima Moralia (1951) – a book Han often quotes – or the disintegration, under advanced consumer capitalism, of cultural forms and institutions and the accompanying deformation of individual consciousness and personal relationships.
Han writes as though from the damage of a near-fatal explosion – at once the conflagration in his childhood bedroom and the more generalised explosion of previous forms of life. And the damage is irreparable: ‘The time in which there was such a thing as the Other is over,’ he writes in The Expulsion of the Other (2016). Han’s writerly voice is melancholic in the strict Freudian sense of being sealed inside its own grief, conveying an absolute conviction in the consignment of self and world to a course of destruction as inevitable as it is irreversible.
Music is central to Han’s identification with German cultural tradition. He has told of his pleasure in singing Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (1827), a song cycle whose beauty is inextricably bound to its bleakness. Grieving a love lost, the singer wanders through a nocturnal winter landscape, riven by loneliness while longing for a death that will not come. Not a bad approximation, perhaps, of the Han that comes off the pages of his books, walking dejectedly through the winter of civilisation, alert to the traces of all that has been lost: the continuity of time, the grain of beauty, the tensions of eros, the substantiality of selfhood.
Perhaps the other personal pleasures to which Han has alluded in interviews – tending to his garden, good food in high-end restaurants, a somewhat tentative sociability – should be seen in the context of these losses: a determination to cleave to the world of refined sensation that is being so inexorably eroded by virtual life. I’m not suggesting that Han’s books are explicitly lachrymose. Their manifest tone is more one of dry-eyed anger, rendered melancholic by the absence of any outlet or remedy for it. Under his gaze, the political, financial and technological sectors are thieves to whom we have willingly handed over our lives and selves, along with any capacity for dissent or resistance.
Like his Frankfurt School predecessors, Han sees capitalism’s penetration into the deepest reaches of psychic and cultural life as the key to this phenomenon. The Burnout Society insists that power today works not through repression and persecution but by sly and insidious means of ‘self-exploitation’. In a self-administered regime of this kind, revolution is almost literally unthinkable: ‘Burnout and revolution are mutually exclusive,’ he writes later, in Capitalism and the Death Drive (2019).
Han’s enquiries into the different regions of contemporary experience, including work, time, love and art, yield a remarkably consistent project of thought, a relentless critique of the spiritual and political privations of digital capitalism. The troubling question for anyone who reads widely in Han’s corpus is whether this tenaciously sustained consistency ends up becoming a symptom of what it critiques? That is, does the unbroken negativity of Han’s descriptions, his unwillingness to find anything other than loss and degradation in the forms of contemporary experience, end up reproducing the one-dimensional logic of digital capitalism itself?
One of the weirder recent innovations of the tourism and leisure industry is the immersive art experience, in which viewers are invited to stand or lounge around cavernous dark spaces bordered by giant screens, onto which are projected digitally manipulated reproductions of great paintings. Vincent van Gogh’s or Claude Monet’s brush strokes, Piet Mondrian’s colour blocks, Salvador Dalí’s melting vistas – they all float across the screens, bursting into life and disintegrating into virtual piles on the floor, before rising in swirling maelstroms to combine and recombine on the walls.
Enter one of these attractions after reading Han, and it will look rather more sinister than an elaborate exercise in kitsch gimmickry, since he believes that the cultural symptoms of digital capitalism effectively degrade the very nature of experience. Han regularly invokes Walter Benjamin’s distinction between the two senses of experience concentrated in the German words Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Erfahrung denotes an experience of what philosophy calls the negative – that which is irreducibly other to consciousness. As an encounter with the new and unknown, Erfahrung is intrinsically transformative, writes Han in The Palliative Society (2020), ‘a painful process of transformation that contains an element of suffering, of undergoing something.’
Art can provoke such an experience. A poem or play or painting may be what Franz Kafka called ‘the axe for the frozen sea inside us’, calling into question the ways we see, think and feel, even the way we live. It’s the kind of encounter Mark Rothko might have been alluding to when he noted that ‘a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures …’ Looked at through Han’s sensibility, Rothko’s paintings seem to cut straight through the smooth artifices of digital life, restoring contact with the tremulous realities of bodily and spiritual life from which we have so long been exiled.To digitalise a painting is to decompose it, to deprive it of ground
For a work of art to have this effect, it must in some sense resist us, cause a disturbance of our familiar modes of language and perception. To be receptive to this kind of disturbance requires certain basic experiential conditions; we must be in an environment that permits lingering, an open-ended remaining in its presence. The paradox of lingering is that it fosters an intimacy that conveys the artwork’s irreducible strangeness. When a painting draws us towards it, we find it eludes us the closer we try to get to it. This is why we can find ourselves gazing at it for so long, often in a kind of stupefaction.
Immersive Van Gogh, its creators claim, puts us inside the paintings, into a new, tactile proximity to their composition and texture. But it does so by annihilating what Han in The Scent of Time (2009) calls the ‘temporal gravitation’ of the originals, unmooring them from any location in space or time. A painting derives its meaning from the fixed relation of its spatial textural and chromatic elements, of, say, this thick band of yellow to that underlying wisp of black. This is what we call its composition. To digitalise a painting is to decompose it, to deprive it of ground.
Under the rule of digital capitalism, time itself is severed from any ‘narrative or teleological tension’, that is, from any discernible purpose or meaning, and so, like the digital paintings in an immersive show, it ‘disintegrates into points which whizz around without any sense of direction.’ In such a regime of time, there is no possibility of Erfahrung, which depends on a sense of narrative continuum and duration. There is only the proliferation of its pale counterpart Erlebnis: the discrete event that ‘amuses rather than transforms’, as Han would later put it in The Palliative Society.
The thrust of Han’s writing is, above all, philosophical. Social and cultural life are occasions for addressing metaphysical questions. As such, the surface symptoms of digital culture are secondary to its ontological premises. Like Martin Heidegger, on whose concept of Stimmung, or mood, he wrote his 1994 PhD thesis (as well as a 1999 introduction to Heidegger), he seeks to unearth the underlying metaphysics of our present-day culture. In particular, and again like Heidegger, Han is concerned with how the environment of a hyper-accelerated culture conditions the fundamental relationship between consciousness and the world.
The Burnout Society crystallised the critique of the self-exploitative logic of contemporary capitalism that Han has been elaborating ever since. Prior to that, his output had been significantly more variegated; there were books on death, Far Eastern philosophy and a study of the concept of power in the Continental philosophical tradition. However, What Is Power? (2005) is intriguing for its adumbration of a non-coercive notion of power that uncannily anticipates his conception of digital capitalism’s burnout society.The power of capital is in the voluntary surrender of its subjects to their own exploitation
Because power so often involves coercion, Han argues, there has been a tendency to see them as inextricable. But it is only when power is poor in mediation, felt as alien to our own lives and interests, that it resorts to threatened or actual violence. Whereas when power is at the ‘highest point of mediation’ – when it seems to speak from a recognition of its subjects’ needs and desires – it is more likely to receive those subjects’ willing consent. One could conceive of a power, therefore, that has no sanctions at its disposal, but which is nonetheless rendered absolute by its subjects’ full identification with it.
The less it relies on the threat of punitive measures to back it up, the more power maximises itself. ‘An absolute power,’ writes Han, ‘would be one that never became apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying.’ This is precisely what happens in digital capitalism’s burnout society, where the power of capital consists not in its power to oppress but in the voluntary surrender of its subjects to their own exploitation.
Han draws on the German-American theologian Paul Tillich’s conception of power as ipsocentric, that is, as Han puts it, centred around ‘a self whose intentionality consists of willing-itself’, cultivating and bolstering its own status. God is the ultimate embodiment of power because, in the words of G W F Hegel, ‘he is the power to be Himself’. This will to persist in one’s own existence, to cling to one’s own selfhood, is the basic premise of the Western mode of being. We can discern it at work in the empty narcissism of social media and the culture of self-display in which we’re all enjoined to participate. Self-exploitation is, in a sense, a twisted variant on the Cartesian cogito: I am seen therefore I am. In making myself perpetually visible, I may empty myself out, lose the last vestiges of my interiority. But, in cleaving to the bare bones of a self-image, some form of my existence survives.
The fundamental basis of this erosion of meaningful experience, argues Han, is felt at the level of temporality. The accelerated time of digital capitalism effectively abolishes the practice of ‘contemplative lingering’. Life is felt not as a temporal continuum but as a discontinuous pile-up of sensations crowding in on each other. One of the more egregious consequences of this new temporal regime is the atomisation of social relations, as other people are reduced to interchangeable specks in the same sensory pile-up. Trust between people, grounded in both the assumption of mutual continuity and reliability, and in a sense of knowing the other as singular and distinct, is inexorably corroded: ‘Social practices such as promising, fidelity or commitment, which are temporal practices in the sense that they commit to a future and thus limit the horizon of the future, thus founding duration, are losing all their importance.’
This corrosion of fidelity and commitment is especially evident, Han argues, in the conduct of love and relationships. Love rests on a willingness to risk not knowing, since time changes both the lovers and the world in ways they cannot anticipate. In this regard, love is the exemplary experience of the negative, a refusal of conceptual and categorical knowledge.
As Han conceives it, love has nothing to do with the cosily sentimental coupling promoted by consumer culture, in which the loved object is reduced to a narcissistic projection of the self. It is rather an encounter with radical otherness, with the pain and madness – both are implied in the word passion – that comes of risking oneself. Fixated on comfort, on the reduction of the lover to a known and unthreatening quantity, ‘Modern love lacks all transcendence and transgression,’ writes Han in The Agony of Eros (2012).The smooth artwork travels through the perceptual field with the ease of a milkshake down the digestive tract
Transcendence and transgression are twin dimensions of the negative: both involve going above and beyond the already known. Just as they are being extirpated from the erotic, so they are also losing their place in the aesthetic. Contemporary art, Han argues in Saving Beauty (2015), has become the expressive organ of a ‘society of positivity’, as manifested in the ‘smooth’ aesthetic common to iPhones, Brazilian waxes and Jeff Koons sculptures. What these apparently disparate objects have in common is the impervious gloss of their surfaces.
Han specifically targets Koons in whose work ‘there exists no disaster, no injury, no ruptures, also no seams.’ By ‘seams’ he means those traces of the labour and suffering that went into its making: glitches in the easy passage from the work to its consumption. More broadly, says Han: ‘The smooth object deletes its Against. Any form of negativity is removed.’ Such negativity, or resistance, presents an obstacle to ‘accelerated communication’. This might be at the level of the material – the rough grain of the sculptor’s stone, the impasto thickness of paint, the dissonances of poetic or musical language. Or it may belong more to the substance of the work, an alienation of imagery, composition, form. Either way, relieved of any such interruption, the smooth artwork travels through its viewer’s perceptual field with the ease of a milkshake slipping down the digestive tract.
This hollowed-out flatness is equally evident in a related crisis of digital capitalism, the exhaustion of narrative forms as bearers of social meaning. In The Crisis of Narration (2023), Han echoes a now-familiar analysis. He ascribes the rise of populist nationalist movements to their leaders’ canny if cynical recognition of a public yearning for ‘meaning and identity’ in a world in which temporality has been eroded in such a way that it reduces the calendar to ‘a meaningless schedule of appointments’ and lays waste to any sense of continuity, or community.
Consumer culture, with its compulsion for novelty and perpetual stimulation, likewise erodes the bonds of shared experience that engender meaningful narratives. The fire around which human beings would once have gathered to hear stories has been displaced by the digital screen, ‘which separates people as individual consumers.’ Time, love, art, work, narrative; these are the key zones of experience hollowed out by the disintegrative logic of digital capitalism. Each is a rich store of transformative encounter, or Ehrfahrung, which the ‘non-time’ of the present has reduced to empty instances of Erlebnis.
It is in Vita Contemplativa (2022) that Han ventures furthest beyond the confines of polemic to envision an alternative to the enervated politics and culture of the achievement society. The book mounts a philosophical defence of inactivity, conceived less in opposition to activity than as a possibility within it. Han cites a late fragment by Nietzsche on ‘inventive people’, which proposes that the authentically new can come into being only where there is sufficient time and freedom to think, apart from the imperatives of purpose and productivity.
This yet-to-exist Nietzschean community of the inventive echoes the German poet Novalis’s utopian imagining of a ‘republic of the living’. Novalis’s ideal of poetry is far more than a discrete literary form. It is radically expansive. For Novalis and the German Romantics, poetry is ‘a medium of unification, reconciliation and love.’ The poem’s capacity to find an image of the whole in an apparently discrete object serves as a kind of promise of the ultimate unity of part and whole, finite and infinite.
This utopian horizon is intimately bound up with the nature of poetry as a non-purposive activity. Because it has no instrumental aim, nothing in particular ‘to do’, it is capacious enough to draw into itself all of the human and non-human world, what Novalis calls ‘the world family’, without exclusion or exception.
Part of the beauty of this utopic vision is surely its impossibility, and Han knows better than to propose a programme for its realisation – not least because this would require an instrumental shift from the contemplative to the active. But this impossibility leaves his work split between the unremitting darkness of the world’s reality, and the pure light of its ideal, with very little sense of any passage between the two sides of this split.One need not have any special affinity for Koons to notice the sheer finality of Han’s condemnation of his art
This gap between the hopelessness of the existing world and the messianic perfection of an imagined one hints at a significant, if also very interesting flaw in Han’s thinking and writing, namely its tendency towards absolutist descriptions and conceptions. ‘The time in which there was such a thing as the Other is over.’ ‘The unconscious plays no part in depression.’ ‘[A] total abolition of remoteness is underway.’ These statements, each from a different book, have in common their foreclosure of any space through which another experience might intrude – a space where one might hear intimations of the Other or the unconscious or remoteness.
In this regard, they risk colluding with the suffocating conditions they describe. Han’s prose can read at times as though impelled by an inverse smoothness, a pure negativity that crowds out the possibility of otherness with a determination that mirrors uncannily the compulsory positivity he decries. In other words, it is liable to merge into the very malaise it’s lamenting.
When set alongside two of his most insistent and important reference points, Benjamin and Adorno, it is hard to avoid contrasting the minute and exacting attention that those earlier writers bestow on individual phenomena with the summary judgment with which Han despatches them. One need not have any special affinity for Koons, for instance, to notice the sheer finality of Han’s condemnation of his art. Indeed, he doesn’t differentiate between any of Koons’s works, as though each was too bereft of singularity to warrant close analysis: ‘[Hi]s art,’ writes Han, ‘does not require any judgement, interpretation or hermeneutics, no reflection or thought.’ Koons’s floating basketballs, gargantuan animal topiary pieces and pornographic self-portraiture are only instantiations of the same banality. As Han puts it: ‘Koons says that an observer of his work should only emit a simple “Wow”.’
But pull Koons’s work away from Han’s unforgiving judgment, and it is far from clear that it abolishes the negative. Is the mirrored surface of his featureless bear silhouette merely a smooth affirmation of pop-cultural positivity? Doesn’t its very blankness present to us as an impermeable opacity? In one sense, it bears out Han’s observation that Koons’s art refuses interpretation, but not in the sense that Han himself intends. Doesn’t the sheer thisness of the piece, its silent mockery of any symbolic decoding, constitute its own negativity?
Recalling that startle of recognition in my first encounter with The Burnout Society only amplifies my suspicion that Han’s polemic has become formulaic and, as such, a species of the very inattention he decries. I find myself wishing he would desist at least once from broad-brush essays on the fundamental logic of large-scale social conditions and instead zero in on a single object or phenomenon – an artwork, a place, a person. If attunement to otherness is disappearing, why not seek to revive it rather than mourn it?
As it happens, there is a strain in Han’s work that at least points to this possibility, namely his writings on the cultural tradition into which he was born. In the tellingly titled Absence (2007), Han describes the very different mode of selfhood and relationship nurtured in Far Eastern philosophy, culture and language. In contrast to the Western self’s tenacious attachment to its own desire, Han presents a self that seeks its own ‘emptying’ – ‘A wanderer is without an I, without a self, without a name.’ Where the substantiality of the Western self requires its maximal differentiation from the world – the divine power to be oneself – the Eastern self aims at a kind of oceanic merger with the world.
The marine adjective is not arbitrarily chosen. Han relates the 4th-century BCE Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi’s tale of a giant fish that lives in a dark sea of the north and transforms into a giant bird. Had this fish-bird not been giant, it would have had to muster a heroic individuality and marshal the full force of its will against the sky and sea. But its colossal size instead enables it to be borne effortlessly by the force of the waves and winds. By analogy, the mind that sets itself against the world sees their relationship only in oppositional terms. If the world is a hostile, overbearing sea, then the mind is an embattled little fish struggling to marshal all its power and cunning to avoid being beached by its currents. But if the fish is commensurate in scale with the sea, it can yield to rather than fight the waves: ‘If the mind is the sea, the sea poses no threat.’
This difference in the philosophical underpinning of selfhood extends to broader cultural differences between West and East, for example, the atmospheres of their respective cities. Western cities tend to set clear boundaries between different kinds of space, creating ‘a feeling of narrowness’. Whereas, despite their noise and congestion, the spaces and denizens of Eastern cities more typically flow into one another to live in a kind of friendly proximity: ‘They do not have much to do with each other. Rather, they empty themselves into an in-different closeness.’It mediates between the East’s indifferent friendliness and the West’s passionate friendship
Far Eastern rituals of greeting express a similarly generalised and empty friendliness. When the Western individual looks into the eyes of the other and grasps his hand, she is speaking as one bounded and differentiated self to another. This creates what Han calls a full ‘dialogical space’ spilling over with gazes, persons and words.
The Eastern bow is rather intended to empty the greeting of content, to render both its subject and its object absent to one another. Participants in a bow ‘look nowhere’, as though greeting no one in particular: ‘The grammar of bowing has no nominative or accusative, neither a subjugating subject nor a subjugated object, neither active nor passive … This absence of cases constitutes its friendliness.’ This is a friendliness distinct from the passions of friendship, where the friend is chosen on the basis of their singularity. To bring another into the inclusive zone of my friendship implies an accompanying exclusion, a choosing of this rather than that person’s companionship and love. The friendliness of the bowing ritual ciphers instead a radical universality – a love relieved of any of the prejudices of subjectivity.
Han believes the German Romantic tradition to be the bearer of a similar albeit distinct conception of universal friendliness, in which all human beings may become ‘fellow citizens in a republic of the living’. It is a conception that mediates between the East’s indifferent friendliness and the West’s passionate friendship, between the universality and the singularity of others.
It seems to me that, if the German tradition carries Han’s preferred ideal of universality, it is Far Eastern thought, language and culture that enable a more playful and alive appreciation for the particular, insinuating shade and colour into prose that can seem increasingly monochromatic in tone. We might think of these two strains as the interplay of the poet and the tinkerer in showing an evident pleasure in observation and association. To quote Han, tempura batter transforms pieces of vegetable or fish into ‘a crisp agglomeration of emptiness’; in the Zen stone garden, ‘nature shines in emptiness and absence.’ Unlike the emptiness of the consumerist West that Han decries for being imposed from above by corporate masters, the emptiness of the Zen garden or the cities of the Far East is organic to the culture.
Han’s 2023 El Pais interview ends with his suggestion, after the recorder has been turned off, that he and the interviewer relocate to his favourite Italian restaurant. Eating a dish of fish soup, he relaxes, jokes around, takes all the pleasure in free-flowing conversation that seemed absent in the formal interview setup. What might such an infusion of vitality and play do for his writing? Han would likely object that such glimmers of positivity would only blunt the negative edge of his thought. But I can’t help wondering if the opposite is the case.
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Asimov, "The Last Answer"...
...and Kubrick, "2001, A Space Odyssey"
... and the many myths of Technology
George Orwell's 2024?
Dismantling MiniTru? Or Constructing a New and More Powerful Version?
Trump: American Titus?
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Guilt-Pride Spirit: Feelings of Moral Superiority Made Manifest
Hans-Georg Moeller
A Group Identity Technology that Transforms 'Bad' into 'Good'!
...exploiting a logical, but faulty, moral premise
“There is no such thing as collective guilt or collective innocence; guilt and innocence make sense only if applied to individuals.”
–Hannah Ardent, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"
Memento: A Crisis of Narrative
Selected excerpts from the video:
Identity can't be constructed from receipts, Polaroids, and tattoos. It's something only memory can provide; a messy fluid story about himself. We all need mirors to remind ourselves who we are, and I'm no different.
In 1936 philosopher Walter Benjamine wrote "The Storyteller", an essay lamenting the decline of traditional storytelling in a world increasingly oriented around information. He claims that information is directly opposed to narrative. The purpose ofinformation is to make the world transparent, whereas stories derive a lot of their power from withholding explanation and embracing distortions, just like memory. See the goal of a narrative is never to give a 100% objective recreation of an event, that would be in Leonard's words, a record. What distinguishes narrative for Benjamin is that it requires forgetting, and leaving out a great deal. A narrative selects, edits, and interprets events, shaping them to convey meaning and evoke emotion. It's the same process as memory, per Benjamin, the gapless repetition of past experiences is is not a narrative, but a report or record.
To be able to narrate, or remember, one must be able to forget or leave out a great deal. So, as a personal example, when I was in high school everybody was obsessed with the show 24. It branded itself as a realtime narrative. Each season was 24 episodes. Each episode a full hour of continuous time, with the whole season covering a single day. A "record" you could say. There was this lame joke you'd always hear where people would say, "Well, if it's really a full day, why doesn't anyone ever use the bathroom?" Silly I know, but it nevertheless points to the fact that even stories that market themselves as seamless records of reality still, by virtue of being stories, have gaps. Because it's through editing reality that we create narrative.
For Benjamin, it's actually a lack of explanatory power that makes narrative work. Take Hitchcock for example. The master of suspense was able to keep us on the edge of our seats because he was a pro at depriving us of information, "How much does the detective know? What's happening in the apartment across the street? What's the deal with Norman's mother?", Etc. Obfuscation, a lack of information, gives us drive. It's in the "not knowing" that we find momentum, meaning, and purpose.
In the same vein, self-understanding is not a fixed State, like a piece of information. It's a constantly shifting Horizon, something we Chase rather than possess. It's a narrative process, not a record. And although Leonard doesn't realize it, he acts out his Reliance on memory and narrative for identity through the story of Sammy Jenkis. "Remember, Sammy Jenkis?", a story he constantly tells everyone because it helps him understand his situation. "Sammy's story helps me understand my own situation."
The black and white scenes in which Leonard recounts the story of Sammy worked in a few ways. First, he's literally telling a story to Teddy over the phone. The act of telling a story, a story of narrating and remembering, is a way of anchoring himself. At one point Leonard claims that notes weren't enough for Sammy, but they are for him. "Sammy wrote himself endless amounts of notes but he get mixed up. I have a more graceful solution to the memory problem I'm disciplined and organized." The great irony is that notes aren't enough for Leonard either, and him telling the story of Sammy Jenkis over and over is like his wife reading the book over and over. it's proof that he needs narrative to know himself.
Second, the story is a series of disjointed out of order scenes. A lot is left out because the moments are selected to frame Leonard's condition in a way that empowers him to cope. It's storytelling at its purest.
Third, and most importantly, the story of Sammy Jenkis is revealed to be a fabrication. At the end, or beginning, Teddy reveals that Sammy didn't have anterograde Amnesia, he was a fraud. Leonard was his claims investigator, but Sammy didn't have a diabetic wife, Leonard did. "Sammy's wife wasn't diabetic, you sure?" Leonard told Teddy that Sammy's wife couldn't take the uncertainty of Sammy's condition, so she gave him a final test, to administer her insulin shots over, and over, until she overdosed. In reality, that happened to Leonard. His wife survived the attack and the challenge of dealing with Leonard's condition, led her to end it. But that's the thing about memory, it's not a perfect record. We don't simply recall events. We reconstruct them, shape them, mold them into narratives that serve our psychological needs. The story of Sammy Jenkis isn't just a coping mechanism. It's the vehicle through which Leonard creates a version of himself.
Conversely, the movie shows how facts alone are insufficient for achieving those same ends. On an obvious level, the facts are easily manipulated too. Everyone in Leonard's life is constantly taking advantage of him. Teddy sicks him on drug dealers so he can pocket their payloads. Natalie manipulates him into to taking out an abusive boyfriend. Even the hotel clerk double charges him because he can.
But beyond that, the movie quite cleverly points at how poor information is at building identity when Leonard essentially becomes another guy. After he kills Natalie's boyfriend Jimmy, Leonard finds himself wearing his clothes, driving his car, and finding notes meant for him in his pockets. This deception is, of course, validated by the so-called facts. "My car." "This is your car?" "Oh, you're in a playful mood."
While Leonard started the film fixated on information, he eventually realizes that his twisted salvation is the destruction of information. He burns the evidence of the real John G's death, and discovers that the redacted police files he obsessed over, were redacted by him. Like a story or memory that's full of gaps and obfuscations to maintain narrative tension, Leonard deliberately deprives himself of information so he can, like his wife and her book, go on a romantic Quest over and over again. "A romantic Quest that you wouldn't end, even if I wasn't in the picture."
Now Leonard isn't alone in this delusion of thinking we're looking for facts when we're really looking for interpretations. Consider Nostalgia. We're all addicted to this stuff. "Hey, hey, remember Ghostbusters?" "Oh I 'member."
The allure of nostalgia lies in the belief that we're remembering the fact that things were better back in the day. But, on some level, we know the real appeal comes from how we've shaped the Narrative, how we've idealized the past by keeping all the good parts, and forgetting the bad.
Or consider the corporate world's obsession with data. Pretty much every Big Business these days is driven by Big Data Solutions. But no matter how sophisticated these graphs that go up and to the right may seem, they can only ever show correlations. It requires interpretation to map the data points into some kind of narrative, to actually comprehend. Despite the veneer of objective reality, Big Data remains firmly in the domain of theory.
And I suppose that's what this channel is about. The intersection of the stories that reflect our world, and the theorists who try to explain it. Whether you're theorizing about the world, or creating films that reflect the experience of living in it, you're doing something similar. Selecting events, framing them, and casting them into something intelligible and meaningful. As Leonard says, "We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are." I'm no different. But information can't be that mirror, only a story can. So Leonard destroys the facts, and obscures the record, to elevate reality to a story.
The Tragedy of Memento is that Leonard isn't actually looking for the answer of who killed his wife, he figured that out. He's looking for the Enchantment of reality that only narrative can provide. And without the ability to remember, to self-narrate, he must live out the only story available to him, the one of the vengeful husband, over and over again.
When once asked what people will dream of once everything becomes visible, philosopher Paul Verilio said, "We'll dream of being blind." Because as Leonard shows us, without the mystery, without the narrative gaps, life loses its enchantment. At the end of the film, Leonard restates one of his most iconic lines, "I have to believe that when my eyes are closed the world's still there." Just because he doesn't remember it, doesn't mean his actions didn't happen. But even a pristine record of those actions can't be used to develop an identity. So while the world might not disappear when you metaphorically close your eyes, you just might.
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Be Afraid!
...be VERY Afraid (if you Can't Smell the Gaslight)!
...the Classical-Liberal International (CLI) is coming for you!
...because the warned about Reactionary Establishment International are Pussy's in Comparison!
...and who are the 'Reactionary International' really? Why the combined warned about "Reactionary Establishment International AND The SECRET/ VEILED/ HIDDEN Progressive Establishment International (ie- Jacobins). All those offshore banks that fund ALL the Neoliberal/ Neoconservative ESTABLISHMENT members were created by the ancient City of London Corporation.
CPac is the "Reactionary International"? NOT the kitsch Globalist Neoconservative and EU/ American Neoliberal Establishments?
The SECRET/ Veiled/ Hidden "Progressive" Establishment Agenda (NED/ NDI/ IRI/ USAID/ et al)
Monday, February 24, 2025
Sunday, February 23, 2025
Penrose on "Why" AI will never be Intelligent
..."Intelligence involves Consciousness
...there are also things that are incomputable, that mathematics cannot compute.
AI Summary of Gödel's incompleteness theorem:
Gödel's incompleteness theorem states that within any consistent formal system that can express basic arithmetic, there will always be true statements that cannot be proven within that system, meaning there are inherent limitations to what can be mathematically proven using a set of axioms; essentially, no matter how comprehensive a set of axioms is, there will always be true statements that fall outside its scope of provability.
Key points about the theorem:Consistency is crucial:
The theorem only applies to consistent formal systems, meaning systems where no contradictions can be derived.
Self-referential proof:
Gödel's proof utilizes a self-referential argument, similar to the "This sentence is false" paradox, to demonstrate the existence of such unprovable statements.
Impact on mathematics:
This theorem significantly impacted the foundations of mathematics by showing that there can never be a complete, perfect axiomatic system for all of mathematics.
According to S.W.P Steen, Gödel's incompleteness theorem essentially demonstrates that within any consistent formal system robust enough to encompass basic arithmetic, there will always exist true statements that cannot be proven using the axioms and rules of that system; essentially, there will always be limitations to what can be formally proven within a given mathematical framework, highlighting the inherent incompleteness of such systems. "
"The Understanding Transcends Use"
The "Turing Test" is basically a demonstration of Godel's Incompleteness Theorum. The "proof of Artificial Intelligence" must come from OUTSIDE the AI System (a human determination)... it's a "transcendental" determination.... answering/ knowing "why" (not just told "that") the computational rules are true, and to do that you must "understand" them from an external and "conscious" perspective. AI alone can't know if its' own rules are true.
Consciousness Allows You to Transcend the Rules
Understanding is Different from Computing
Classical reality is ascertainable... Quantum reality (ie- spin) is merely confirmable, not ascertainable
Einstein, "If you can confirm with certainty, it's an element of (quantum) reality". [ie- EPR Experiments]
Roger Penrose, "The Emperor's New Mind" (1989)
Saturday, February 22, 2025
On the Evolutionary 'Nature' of Consciousness and Identity...
Video Link Summary:
00:00 Introduction05:12 Is Integrated Information Theory a materialist theory?08:46 Unpacking IIT: intrinsic conscious experience as the starting point11:05 Feelings have a specific structure14:37 What is 'intrinsic causal power' and why is it important?18:38 The difference between being in love and the mass of an object21:05 Unfolding the intrinsic causal power of a system21:51 Can you give me the algorithm of the taste of garlic?25:50 Consciousness is NOT the brain29:16 The unfolded causal structure of a teapot31:25 The difference between IIT and panpsychism and the consciousness of bacteria and bees35:03 Consciousness vs Self-Consciousness36:18 The combination problem and how to establish the boundary of a (conscious) system39:23 The experiment of brain bridging41:50 Split brain experiments49:45 Brains are nog magical: neuro morphic engineering52:11 What is a whole and what a part?55:55 How a larger consciousness would wipe out you and me: the Borg example from Star Trek57:03 Christof Koch on his DMT trip59:58 The ontological shock of psychedelics1:04:24 How to make sense of the psychedelic experience?1:08:50 Is IIT idealist?1:13:56 Are hearts conscious?1:15:16 On the filter hypothesis1:17:44 What can IIT say about the psychedelic state and NDE's?1:25:40 What could a couple billion dollars buy when invested in neuroscience?1:27:31 On the critique on IIT1:30:40 Why we have to remain skeptical1:32:51 'Naive' physicalism1:34:55 On the placebo effect1:40:38 The Near Death Experience on 5-MeO-DMT1:44:26 Will psychedelics change your scientific career
"If One is Not, then Nothing Is"-Plato, "Parmenides"
...from Integrated Information Theory (IIT)
from Wikipedia:
Integrated information theory (IIT) proposes a mathematical model for the consciousness of a system. It comprises a framework ultimately intended to explain why some physical systems (such as human brains) are conscious,[1] and to be capable of providing a concrete inference about whether any physical system is conscious, to what degree, and what particular experience it has; why they feel the particular way they do in particular states (e.g. why our visual field appears extended when we gaze out at the night sky),[2] and what it would take for other physical systems to be conscious (Are other animals conscious? Might the whole universe be?).[3]
According to IIT, a system's consciousness (what it is like subjectively) is conjectured to be identical to its causal properties (what it is like objectively). Therefore, it should be possible to account for the conscious experience of a physical system by unfolding its complete causal powers.[4]IIT was proposed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi in 2004.[5] Despite significant interest, IIT remains controversial and has been widely criticized, including that it is unfalsifiable pseudoscience.
Notes from the Video:
Consciousness exerts "intrinsic causal power effects upon others" (Plato's "Immovable Mover" from "The Laws"). The more consciousness exists for itself, the more "integrated" it become/ ontologically "is".
Integrated Information (Phi) is NOT information in the Shannon Sense of Information.
Quantitatively you can study and count up the number of apparently individual causal objects that make up the integrated information system. How their interconnections and causal powers inter-relate determine the qualitative "feel" within, and to, the integrated information subject. Consciousness merges into and from the most maximally connected causal object existing for itself (ie - merge 2 individual human subjects (or brain hemispheres) with a mind link with quantitatively more causal interconnections than exist in either single mind, or hemisphere, and the previous integrated information consciousnesses merge and the previous singular ones ,disappear/ become indistinguishable). The whole is defined by the maximum of intrinsic causal power and per IIT, every whole is a conscious entity by itself .
It differs from Panpsychism in that not every atom and molecule assembly has "causal powers".
There are also "grades" of consciousness. For example, as children mature they become more and more self-conscious (starting in the Mirror Stage and progressing to Sincerity, Authenticity, and then to 2nd Order Identities like Profilicity or to Being-in-the-World or Dasein).
There's also no Turing Test (TT) for "Consciousness", it (the TT) can only test for "Intelligence". ChatGTP, for example, is a simulation of causal action. To test for consciousness, you need to look at the causal action substrate that it is running on, and the complexity of information interactions which generate consciousness. You cannot simulate the causal power substrate, you need the actual causal substrate/ mass that generates the causal power information (ie- in a computer simulation you can simulate the effects of gravity, but the simulation cannot [TRON, or MATRIX-like] pull the programmer into the simulation without supplying the proper information causal substrate on which to run). The spinal cord is also not necessary for consciousness (ie - paralyzed individual is still conscious)
The whole is different from the individual Parts. What is conscious, what has a conscious experience, is really the whole, this entire "maximum of causal effect power." The individual Neurons, by themselves, they are not conscious. It's not that you have individual Consciousness, and then you pack them all together and then you get the Super Consciousness. No, it's only the only the system, only the set of mechanisms that has maximum causal effect at that particular scale, not at the scale above, not at the scale below. It's very specific.
And a larger Consciousness, as you said earlier, would wipe out... sort of, if the two of us connect and it becomes this new maximum integrated, it will wipe out our conscious experience.
Correct it's like the Borg
...and the truly "rapturous"!
1 Corinthians 15:50-53 (KJV)
50 Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.
51 Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
53 For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
Against Entropy?
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