Heidegger on cybernetics/science taking philosophy’s place?

Philosophy Forums Science, Technology, and Math
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By “god” - does Heidegger mean AI/Singularity, or Original Being that saves us from that which is no longer a tool for us and uproots us from home (science/tech)? Why does he think philosophy is dead & how is it different from his advocacy of thinking? What does he mean by the possible outcomes of thinking? Excerpt from his der Spiegel interview:

SPIEGEL: Why should we be so overpowered by technology?

HEIDEGGER: I do not say overpowered. I say we have no path that corresponds to the essence of technology as of yet.

SPIEGEL: One could naïvely object: What do we have to come to terms with here? Everything functions. More and more electric power plants are being built. Production is flourishing. People in the highly technological parts of the earth are well provided for. We live in prosperity. What is really missing here?

HEIDEGGER: Everything functions. That is exactly what is uncanny. Everything functions and the functioning drives us further and further to more functioning, and technology tears people away and uproots them from the earth more and more. I don’t know if you are scared; I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the earth taken from the moon. We don’t need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human beings is already taking place. We only have purely technological conditions left. It is no longer an earth on which human beings live today. I recently had a long conversation with René Char in Provence – as you know, the poet and Resistance fighter. Rocket bases are being built in Provence, and the country is being devastated in an incredible way. The poet, who certainly cannot be suspected of sentimentality or a glorification of the idyllic, said to me that the uprooting of human beings who is going on now is the end if thinking and poetry do not acquire nonviolent power once again.

SPIEGEL: Now, we must say that although we prefer to be here on earth, and we probably will not have to leave it during our lifetime, who knows whether it is human beings’ destiny to be on this earth? It is conceivable that human beings have no destiny at all. But at any rate a possibility for human beings could be seen in that they reach out from this earth to other planets. It will certainly not happen for a long time. But where is it written that human beings’ place is here?

HEIDEGGER: From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today’s literature is, for instance, largely destructive.

SPIEGEL: We are bothered by the word destructive here because the word nihilistic received a very broad context of meaning precisely through you and your philosophy. It astonishes us to hear the word destructive in connection with literature you could or ought to see as a part of this nihilism.

HEIDEGGER: I would like to say that the literature I meant is not nihilistic in the way that I defined nihilism. [24]

SPIEGEL: You apparently see, so you have expressed it, a world movement that either brings about or has already brought about the absolute technological state?

HEIDEGGER: Yes! But it is precisely the technological state that least corresponds to the world and society determined by the essence of technology. The technological state would be the most obsequious and blind servant in the face of the power of technology.

SPIEGEL: Fine. But now the question of course poses itself: “Can the individual still influence this network of inevitabilities at all, or can philosophy influence it, or can they both influence it together in that philosophy leads one individual or several individuals to a certain action?”

HEIDEGGER: Those questions bring us back to the beginning of our conversation. If I may answer quickly and perhaps somewhat vehemently, but from long reflection: Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.

SPIEGEL: Is there a connection between your thinking and the emergence of this god? Is there, as you see it, a causal connection? Do you think we can get this god to come by thinking?

HEIDEGGER: We cannot get him to come by thinking. At best we can prepare the readiness of expectation.

SPIEGEL: But can we help?

HEIDEGGER: The preparation of readiness could be the first step. The world cannot be what and how it is through human beings, but neither can it be so without human beings. In my opinion that is connected to the fact that what I call “Being,” using a traditional, ambiguous, and now worn-out word, needs human beings. Being is not Being without humans being needed for its revelation, protection, and structuring. I see the essence of technology in what I call the construct. This name, on first hearing easily misunderstood, points, if it is properly considered, back into the innermost history of metaphysics, which still determines our existence (Dasein) today. The workings of the construct mean: Human beings are caught (gestellt), claimed, and challenged by a power that is revealed in the essence of technology. The experience that humans are structured (gestellt) by some-thing that they are not themselves and that they cannot control themselves is precisely the experience that may show them the possibility of the insight that humans are needed by Being. The possibility of experience, of being needed, and of being prepared for these new possibilities is concealed in what makes up what is most modern technology’s own. Thinking can do nothing more than to help humans to this insight, and philosophy is at an end.

SPIEGEL: In earlier times – and not only in earlier times – it was thought that philosophy was indirectly very effective (seldom directly), that it helped new currents to emerge. Just thinking of Germans, great names like Kant, Hegel, up to Nietzsche, not to mention Marx, it can be proved that philosophy has had, in roundabout ways, an enormous effect. Do you think this effectiveness of philosophy is at an end? And when you say philosophy is dead, that it no longer exists are you including the idea that the effectiveness of philosophy (if indeed it ever existed) today, at least, no longer exists?

HEIDEGGER: I just said that an indirect, but not a direct, effect is possible through another kind of thinking. Thus thinking can, as it were, causally change the condition of the world.

SPIEGEL: Please excuse us; we do not want to philosophize (we are not up to that), but here we have the link between politics and philosophy, so please forgive us for pushing you into such a conversation. You just said philosophy and the individual could do nothing except…

HEIDEGGER: … this preparation of readiness for keeping oneself open to the arrival or absence of the god. The experience of this absence is not “nothing,” but rather a liberation of human beings from what I called the “fallenness into beings” in Being and Time. A contemplation of what is today is a part of a preparation of the readiness we have been talking about.

SPIEGEL: But then there really would have to be the famous impetus from outside, from a god or whomever. So thinking, of its own accord and self sufficiently, can no longer be effective today? It was, in the opinion of people in the past, and even, I believe, in our opinion.

HEIDEGGER: But not directly.

SPIEGEL: We have already named Kant, Hegel, and Marx as great movers. But impulses came from Leibniz, too – for the development of modern physics and therefore for the origin of the modern world in general. We believe you said just now that you do not expect such an effect today any more.

HEIDEGGER: No longer in the sense of philosophy. The role philosophy has played up to now has been taken over by the sciences today. To sufficiently clarify the “effect” of thinking, we must have a more in-depth discussion of what effect and effecting can mean here. For this, careful differentiations need to be made between cause, impulse, support, assistance, hindrance, and cooperation. But we can only gain the appropriate dimension to make these differentiations if we have sufficiently discussed the principle of sufficient reason. Philosophy dissolves into the individual sciences: psychology, logic, and political science.

SPIEGEL: And what takes the place of philosophy now?

HEIDEGGER: Cybernetics.

SPIEGEL: Or the pious one who remains open?

HEIDEGGER: But that is no longer philosophy.

SPIEGEL: What is it then?

HEIDEGGER: I call it the other thinking.

SPIEGEL: You call it the other thinking. Would you like to formulate that a little more clearly?

HEIDEGGER: Were you thinking of the sentence with which I conclude my lecture on “The Question Concerning Technology”: “For questioning is the piety of thinking”? [25]

SPIEGEL: We found a statement in your lectures on Nietzsche that seems to us appropriate. You say there: “Because the greatest possible bond prevails in philosophical thinking, all great thinkers think the same thing. However this sameness is so essential and rich that no one individual can exhaust it, but rather everyone binds everyone else more rigorously.” It appears, however, that in your opinion this philosophical structure has come to a certain end.

HEIDEGGER: Has ended but has not become for us invalid; rather it is again present in conversation. My whole work in lectures and seminars during the past thirty years has been mainly simply an interpretation of Western philosophy. The way back into the historical foundations of thinking, thinking through the questions that have not been asked since Greek philosophy – this is not breaking away from tradition. But I say that traditional meta-physics’ way of thinking, which ends with Nietzsche, no longer offers us any possibility to experience the fundamental characteristics of the technological age, an age that is only beginning, through thinking.

SPIEGEL: In a conversation with a Buddhist monk approximately two years ago, you spoke about “a completely new method of thinking” and said that “for the time being only very few people can execute” this new method of thinking. Do you mean to say that only very few people can have the insights that are, in your opinion, possible and necessary?

HEIDEGGER: “Have” in its very primordial sense, that they can, in a way, “say” them.

Full interview:
lacan.com/heidespie.html

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The connection is the problem but can be solved by the pseudo example of meta checking if the cat is alive or dead in the box.

Checking is the opening of the trap door of the doubt which reverts back to the evil genius of the cogito.

The singular and The Singularity treat transcendent and immanent firms of language as if they were interchangeable in the same level.

Not so.

God’s eternal permanence becomes realized only on an ubiquious level, and ‘He’ is eternally realized , but reality is relative to such realization

He IS What He Is by necessity , for if not IT could never have become a proto problem and since IT is, IT must Be and always HAS BEEN

No doubt about IT, since evolution including IT’s cybernetic illusion signifies IT.

Therefore THE LOGOS EXISTS by more then definition, it exists over the finite.

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The blending of moments is not reverse causality, or forward causality for that matter. It is before or without or beyond causality—that is, causality in time.

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Your response embedded in time indicates casualty, weather it’s before or reversely after You had a chance to think about it, is not a casual observation, it is not coincidental or fated to be spoken.

It is an indication of … the very limit of the ground of con templating.

Reversibility may be a test of faith or a moebius construct of interf(h)a(it)h{s<>e}ing…

( will be out ( 4 a phase for a non preventible while 4 being out of range ) cut bit still signed in.

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Final words before cut off

Can I be in time without Being in Time?

Cut

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I’m not sure I can parse everything you said, but…there can be no time (immanence, sequentiality &/or simultaneity) without being in Time (transcendence, which is beyond the timeline; source of Being). Note that it is impossible for us to actually be the source of Being… but… we can live, move, and have our being in the source of Being… without that, we would not (nothing would) exist.

Because we are both mind and body/matter/universe we are free and constrained by material and other conditioning. Without that setting, we would not be able to exercise freedom. This is covered by both Immanuel Kant and Simone Weil (into Kant). And others, but I have miles to go before I read everything there is to read. Which will never happen on this earth.

See you at the other side of the cut? :slight_smile:

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Thanks to Oughtist for recommending this interview, btw.

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There may be no other side or, there is a point until then there is and after that point there may not be.

What’s the point?

Being through time may be the cost of existing. The Moebius represents that point’s illusive appeal

Otherwise there is no point and that is freaky , to say least.

Say most and then existing is everywhere, everyone for all times.

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Or Are We Something More Than Temporal?

Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time."

— Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

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Einstein thinks it all exists—all moments together.

Kant & Plato both distinguish between the visible/phenomenal and the invisible/source of being (Thing-in-Itself). For Kant, time drops out at the source of Being.

Sequentiality and simultaneity are relative, like Einstein said.

In the acausal causer (source of being), we live, move, and have our being.

I’m pretty sure we’ve figured out how to mess with time without destroying it (as if!).

We can’t fathom what it’s like to be the source sustaining it—the only one who truly creates/destroys, is not subject to it (but can be “in” it)…the uncreated one who can never be destroyed. We can only glimpse. But if we stay at glimpsing… and don’t let him shine through our cracks into where we’re at… we’ve glimpsed nothing.

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And is thise sequential patterns formed through the ages, not responsible for the subtle and not so subtle embarrassments suffered by philosophers, wherein, literally tons of manuscripts and organized rationale can be reduced to their points of relative irrelevance, as the hidden truths if abridgement constructed volumes into mere points of reference?

Not to mention millions of tons of script inferring progress derail into mountains of irrelevant support that prey victim to aa cast away and elusive methods?

But then epistemology owes it’s lineage to ontology, but few admit that for fear of being marginelized.

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history is a ladder like Plato‘s Republic. I cringe every time I hear the Greeks called archaic. However, the word archaic may not be that bad of a word, depending how it is being used. Architectonics and what not :slight_smile:

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"Philosophy dissolves into independent sciences. They are called: logistics, semantics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, political science, poetology, technology. Simultaneously with the dissolution into the sciences, philosophy is replaced by a new kind of unification of all sciences. The overpowering of the sciences by a basic trait that rules in them takes place in the emergence of what tries to expand under the title cybernetics. This process is promoted and accelerated by the fact that modern science itself meets it according to its basic character.

Nietzsche has expressed this basic feature of the murderous science in the year before his collapse (1888) with a single sentence. It reads: ‘It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our 19th century, but the victory of scientific method over science.’ The Will to Power, n. 466. - Method is conceived here as no more than the instrument by means of which scientific research processes its already determined objects. The method constitutes the representationality itself of the objects, provided that here we may still speak of objects, provided that the positing of determinations of representationality at all still has an ‘ontological valence’.

But the end of philosophy is not the end of thinking. Therefore, the question becomes pressing whether thinking accepts the test that awaits it and how it survives the time of the test."

  • Translation from: Martin Heidegger, “Speech on the Eve of Eugen Fink’s 60th Birthday”, 10 December, 1965.
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I agreed with Your analysus, except the lack of a positive influence vis. Thd Vienna Circle’s possible application, when stated as if a dissolution were a proper usage in this context.

This nay be an essential ingredient for if philosophy dissolves. the question of the nature of such dissolution come up.

Dissolution may belong in the same family if references, but it can convey inferential difference.

Specifically to dissolve may point to a change od texture mixed into a different element, merging with it, but settling down on a lower ground due to specific gravity differentials, or if may fuse to an inseparable element.
Thirdly it may convey a totally separable tableau, such as expressing a dis-solution, a conscious cut or break away of observable states, I.e… Of other substances, including states of consciessness.
Such d is solution implies another state when cut from the other, may offer no solution on either a conscious or lessconsciousor even a non conscious level.

Again this method of description differs from the general change of state that philosophy appears to morph into, namely thd method if describing differing states by comparing them qualitatively.
To say that dissolution of matter is observable by application of heat, whets changes in state ars easily aftributable, seems pretty straight foreward , but can it be argued reversely that disssolution of substantially conscious awareness gives rise to this approach to it’s limited function, therefore Kant’s metaphysics immediately and dramatically breaks any logical interaction with the empirically devised probable causitive assumptions undsd thd guys of empiricism, break away or cut from it’s previously held general laws?

Or put simply , can the two types if 'dussolution ’ form in between states of blending philosophy and science into a paradigm of both: where the former philosophy of science can foreshadow an upcoming science of philosophy , through quantum progression through AI intelligence expansion.?

In that way, dissolution began. With the Cogito and progresses into the cogitates.

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Notice that Heidegger said (translated): “But the end of philosophy is not the end of thinking. Therefore, the question becomes pressing whether thinking accepts the test that awaits it and how it survives the time of the test.”
MH.jpg

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“When you quote this thought with the dangerousness of the atomic bomb and an even greater dangerousness of technology, I think of what is developing today as biophysics, that in the foreseeable future we will be able to make man, i.e. to construct him purely in his organic being, in such a way as he is needed. Skilled and unskilled, clever and stupid. This is how far it will come. The technical possibilities are ready today and have already been expressed by Nobel Prize winners in a conference in Lindau, which I already quoted in a lecture years ago in Meßkirch.”

  • Translation from: Martin Heidegger in conversation with Richard Wisser, 1969.
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Science does not think," Heidegger said in a Freiburg lecture.

“And this sentence ‘Science does not think’, which caused quite a stir when I uttered it in a Freiburg lecture, means: Science does not move in the dimension of philosophy, but it is, without knowing it, dependent on its dimension. For example: physics moves in the realm of space, time and motion; what is motion, what is space, what is time, science as science cannot decide. One cannot say by physical methods what physics is. One can say that only philosophically.”

  • Translation from: Martin Heidegger in conversation with Richard Wisser, 1969.
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The following picture shows Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Augstein (journalist from: “Spiegel”) in front of Heidegger’s hut in the Schwarzwald (“Black Forest”) in 1966, when the famous interview took place (which, by the way, was not allowed to be published before Heidegger’s death).

MH_RA.jpg
MH_RA.jpg644×974 47.2 KB

Enlargement: hubert-brune.de/heidegger_bilder.html#h36 .

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Again, science thinks or not depends on how thinking is defined.

If thinking is re-defined as that which dies not simulate human thought as an absolute re flexion of intended meaning, then, still, options of relative meaning can be inferred per wittgenstein’s analysis thriugh the games if language.

Wittgenstein considered Heidegger, and they were sort of contemporaneous. How did that work out for post modern thinkers following WW II is an interesting topic in it’s self.

Have You any info. on the progressive dialogue between the logic of language post Heidegger-Wittgenstein and the relative state of current AI research on the topic? ( generally speaking- it continues the essential problem of relatiinahips, as brought out with the use of the term : ‘dissolution’. The implication from the Heidegger quite touches on it, in absolute terms, as if not really considering the progress made in AI, which is understandable for it had only began to show a very minimal architecture in Heidegger’s time.
Correction of this assessment would be appreciated.

Here I found an excerpt from a ecourse which may help the assessment:

“it is no coincidence that language moves to the forefront in the later Heidegger Braver seeks to make it a weight-bearing bridge between Heidegger’s meditations on being and Wittgenstsein’s reflections on grammar. In emphasizing this connection, however, he downplays the sense of mystery in Heidegger compared with Wittgenstein’s critique of the need for mystery as a symptom of the desire to transcend finitude (a need expressed in the Tractatus as the mystical). While acknowledging this difference, Braver does not account for it in detail, nor does he address the further difference beneath it: the sense of finitude as historical, that is, as temporal facticity, as opposed to finitude as the limit of a non-epochal space.”

From:

Lee Braver, Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger

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As far as the definition of “thinking” is concerned, there is no final solution in it either, because there are far too many different definitions.

According to ILP, “thinking” is something that has to do with “posting”. If a member has 500 posts, then his thinking starts, and at 999 posts it stops (at the latest now the member should start to avoid ILP!). :laughing: :sunglasses:

We do not need to reformulate thinking because such a reformulation will only lead to more chaos. After all, we know from the language (everyone from his mother tongue) what the word “thinking” means. We know the semantics of this word and how it is and must be used grammatically. We can not refer to anything else, because then everybody wants to have considered the own definition. We do not need Wittgenstein for that either. We only need to know ourselves what “(to) think(ing)” means. If we know it, then we can start to think in elaborated form - otherwise not.