Category Archives: Philosophy in Paradise

Sartre and de Beauvoir: on essence, existence, and becoming woman

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were the two leading lights of French existentialism during the middle decades of the 20thcentury. Sartre’s theory of existentialism is known as phenomenological ontology, which is one of the most difficult topics in twentieth century continental philosophy. A somewhat simpler idea is the expression ‘existence precedes essence’. Apart from Sartre’s own elaboration of this idea, it was also used by de Beauvoir to discuss her thesis that ‘One is not born but becomes (a) woman’, a central concept in the development of the post-war feminist movement. Both Sartre and de Beauvoir also discussed the concept of ‘the Other’, an expression which was central in later discussions in continental philosophy of the concept of ‘alterity’. Sartre and de Beauvoir were lifelong companions and lovers, although they were not monogamous and did not live together.

Origins

Jean-Paul Sartre was born 1905 and, after an unorthodox education, he studied at the Ecole Normale Superieurebetween 1924 and 1929 so as to sit the teaching qualification agregationexam. He failed the exam on his first attempt, but on his second attempt in 1929, he was awarded first place, although he and Simone de Beauvoir, whom he had only met that year, were virtually equal in marks. In 1930, Sartre became aware of the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and the phenomenological ontology of Martin Heidegger. Sartre taught at various lycees in Le Havre before winning a scholarship to study phenomenology in Berlin between 1933 and 1935. His first book ‘The Transcendence of the Ego’ was published in 1936 and ‘Sketch for a Theory of Emotions’ and ‘Nausea’ in 1938. Sartre returned to teaching in various lycee in Paris from 1936 until the outbreak of war in 1939. Sartre was drafted into the French army as a meteorologist but was captured in Padoux in 1940. He spent nine months as a prisoner of war but was released due to poor health. He returned to teaching in Paris and was involved in the formation of an underground group ‘Socialism and Liberty’. He was strongly opposed to collaboration with the Germans. In 1943, he published his major work ‘Being and Nothingness’. After the war, Sartre became one of the leading figures of French existentialism. His 1945 public lecture ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ was one of the most important statements of existentialist philosophy. Sartre wrote little on politics during the thirties, but after the war he became a defender of Stalinist Russia.

Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 and educated in a Catholic school for girls until 1925. She then studied at the Sorbonne and although not a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure, she attended the lectures and sat for the agregationin 1929, coming second to Sartre by the barest of margins. At the age of 21, she was the youngest student to have passed the exam. From 1929 to 1943 she taught at various lycee until her licence to teach was revoked for seducing a female student. In 1943 she published her first book, ‘She Came To Stay’, which established her as a writer and secured her financial independence. This was followed by ‘Pyrrhus and Cineas’ in 1944, ‘The Ethics of Ambiguity’ in 1947, and her major work ‘The Second Sex’ in 1949.

Philosophy: Existence precedes essence

Sartre’s philosophy of phenomenological ontology is a complex system of various difficult ideas such as absolute freedom, bad faith, and authenticity. However one simple introduction to his philosophy can be found expressed in the phrase ‘existence precedes essence’. For the Christian scholastics of the medieval period, essence was said to precede existence, such as in the example of a essence of rationality leading to the existence of a human. Sartre opposed this view, arguing that there is no predetermined essence to be found in any human and that any such essence is defined by how an individual person creates and lives their life. As he expressed it in ‘Existentialism is a humanism’: “…man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up into the world – and defines himself afterwards.” It is only through the exercise of choice, of absolute freedom, that a human essence can be created.

De Beauvoir transformed the phrase ‘essence precedes existence’ into the feminist proposition ‘One is not born but becomes (a) woman.”[1](“On ne naît pas femme, on le devient”) The importance of this sentence was that it distinguished for the first time between sex and gender. One may be born as a female sex but becomes a woman as having a certain gender as involving specific ways of acting, speaking, dressing, etc.. A woman may then choose to act ‘like a man’ in being assertive, confident, out-going, sexually promiscuous, etc., rather than, ‘like a woman’ such as being quiet, reserved, sexually ‘pure’, etc..

Philosophy: The Other

In ‘Being and Nothingness’, Sartre argued that the way we perceive the world is altered by the appearance of ‘The Other’. Hegel, in the 19thcentury, had argued that when the Self moves beyond its own self-conscious awareness, it must confront the Other (i.e. Not-Self) as an object of experience. The Other, in this sense, is part of the defining of one’s own Self. Husserl, at the start of the 20thcentury, had argued that the Other must be the basis of intersubjectivity (i.e. the relations between people) although for Husserl this conception of the Other was primarily a problem of knowledge. Sartre took this idea of the Other to be the issue of the psychological presentation of the Other to the experience of our Self. We experience the Other as an expression of who we are.

De Beauvoir took the idea of the Other to be something which is determined by gender. A woman is only Woman as she is determined by Man. In the history of philosophy, women were represented as inferior to men. Aristotle stated that women were “female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities”, while Aquinas referred to woman as “imperfect man”. In other words, traditional western culture was a patriarchy where women were a ‘second sex’. Further, this conception of women as the Other was also the basis of systematic injustice against women. Irrespective of identities such as race, religion, ethnicity, or class, women are always ‘second’ to men in terms of power, status, wealth, etc. and even so far as to the ownership of their own bodies. De Beauvoir also argues that in the creation of the woman as Other, an aura of ‘mystery’ is created whereby women cannot, in principle, be understood, which negates any attempt by men to do so (See quote below).

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[1]In the 1952 translation of ‘The Second Sex’, the translator Howard Parshley, a professor of biology with only a basic familiarity with French, under pressure from Blanche Knopf, the wife of the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, excised more than a third of the original text and translated one of the more important sentences in the text as‘One is not born but becomes a woman.” This translation suggested that the idea of ‘becoming’ simply referred to woman as a particular. i.e. that one becomes awoman, either as an individual or a part of a group, whereas the sentence should have been rendered ‘One is not born but becomes woman.” which implies that ‘becoming’ relates to woman as a universal ideal. i.e. that one becomes woman. Despite constant requests over the following decades for a new translation of the book, this was not done until 2009, and in 2010 the original missing third of the book was re-instated.

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Questions

“In the chapter “Woman: Myth and Reality” of The Second Sex, de Beauvoir argued that men had made women the “Other” in society by application of a false aura of “mystery” around them. She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them, and that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy. She wrote that a similar kind of oppression by hierarchy also happened in other categories of identity, such as race, class, and religion, but she claimed that it was nowhere more true than with gender in which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy.”

What do you think this quote means and do you think its true?

“In a patriarchal culture, the Man-Woman relation is society’s normative binary-gender relation, wherein the sexual Other is a social minority with the least socio-political agency, usually the women of the community, because patriarchal semantics established that “a man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of [the word] Man to designate human beings in general; whereas [the word] Woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity” from the first sex, from Man.”

What do you think this quote means and do you think its true?

 

Further reading

de Beauvoir: The Ethics of Ambiguity

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/#EthAmbBadFaiAppArt

https://www.iep.utm.edu/beauvoir/#SH2b

de Beauvoir: The Second Sex

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/#SecSexWomOth

https://www.iep.utm.edu/beauvoir/#SH3a

Sartre: Authenticity: https://www.iep.utm.edu/sartre-ex/#H6

Sartre: Ethics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#Eth

 

Being and Drunkenness: How to party like an existentialist (Aeon blog by Skye Cleary)

https://aeon.co/ideas/being-and-drunkenness-how-to-party-like-an-existentialist?fbclid=IwAR32RC8_5Kg8xXawiJayrVfhPSwQsya3o1MAQHVrFzCgjdiu2S0daImz4xA

This Digital Life

Since the beginning of the 21stcentury, we have been living in a world of greater digital connectivity. Technology, and particularly mobile technology, is part of our way of life, and is so in so many ways that were unimaginable in the last century.  This move into a digital lifestyle is part of a broader technological movement known as transhumanism.

Transhumanism is a transitory period from a biological, evolutionary, humanity (homo sapiens sapiens) to a post-human future where humans in this traditional sense are only one of three possible sentient entities, the other two being artificially intelligent robots (robotus sapiens) and technologically altered human known as cyborgs (homo cyborgus). There is no fixed date by when we become post-human but it is generally assumed to be several hundred, and possibly even a thousand, years into the future. The transitory period to this post-human future is known as transhumanism. Since the start of the 21stcentury, we have been living in the transhuman period.

Since the start of the 21stcentury, we have been experiencing vastly changing social and economic conditions and with the advent of the digital lifestyle a new discipline has emerged which studies the impact of technology on our lives. This discipline is known as cyborg anthropology (http://cyborganthropology.com/Main_Page). (All of the concepts discussed below can be found in more detail on this web site) Cyborg anthropology studies at least four distinct subject areas: the second self; the social experience of technology; digital space and time; and cognitive enhancement.

The ‘second self’ is an area of our digital lifestyle that is occupying more and more time of our everyday experience although we are often unaware of the demands that it makes on us. The ‘second self’ is the self that we create, develop, and maintain in social media platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, e-harmony, etc. To understand this phenomenon, think of the ways we presentourselves on Facebook and how this might differ from the presentation of our self on, eg, Linkedin or e-harmony. We spend a lot of time creatingthese second selves, maintainingthese presentations e.g. by updates, and further developing these presentations. This second self becomes in time a separate, though related, entity to our original self and my original self will experience a range of emotions when the second self is supported or criticized.

There are various concepts that cyborg anthropology studies that are related to the second self. There is the process of Identity Formationwhereby our second self is created, perhaps with the assistance of a Templated Self, which is the area a social media platform allows us to provide information in the creation of our self. For example, a Linkedin template will be quite different to an e-harmony or Facebook template. This multiplicity of different presentations is known as a Distributed Persona. One important aspect of the second self that relates to cyber-security is Location Sharingwhere people freely share information about where they are and what they are doing at any moment in time. One final interesting aspect of the second self is the idea of Celebrity as Cyborg. While the use of the word ‘cyborg’ may be misleading here, the key point is that the creation, maintenance, and development of a second self is not dissimilar to the process of identity formation that a celebrity employs to market their image. This might include such activities as the creation of manipulated ‘air-brushed’ images of the self, the telling of overwhelmingly emotional, whether positive, tragic, or comic, narratives about their lives, the inclusion of stories and images of the extended family, and so on.

The social experience of technology is an area of critical importance to our own positive and healthy social relationships. One of the key areas in this respect is Social Punctuation. This occurs when ordinary social interaction is interrupted or punctuated by the need to refer to a technological device, typically a mobile phone. Also important in the experience of Ambient Awarenessand Ambient Intimacy, the former being when we are aware of another’s experiences without being physically close to them or without directly requesting specific information, while the latter is the experience of intimacy through technology, where our intimate connection with another is only ‘the click of a button away’. This is also called Continual Partial Friendship. This state of being as close as a click of a button is also called The Technological Womb. When all connection and socialisation is available at a click of a button, this can be called a womb-like state. In a very real sense, every thing – every emotion, experience, or thought – is the same distance away.

Another important aspect of the social experience of technology is called Simultaneous Time. This refers to our capacity to be in several different digital locations – Facebook, SMS, Twitter, etc. – at the same moment in time. Our capacity to experience time in its immediacy is disrupted by the various requirements of social media and other forms of technology. Related to this experience is Elastic Timeor Plastic Timewhich refers to social experiences which are highly interruptible and centred around the immediate concerns of technology. Relevant to this experience is that known as Temporarily Negotiated Spacewhere a technology user, such as someone making a mobile phone call, occupies a public space on a temporary basis and which is often implicitly negotiated with those people around him or her. This is also relevant to Boundary Maintenancewhere certain boundaries are delimited in digital or physical space, for the purposes of using the technology. The concept of Tele-Cocooningis similar to this, where one person connects with another in a digital ‘cocoon’. Another related concept is Hyperpresence where, due to the accelerated speed of social interaction  through technology and social media, the self of a person is present in a variety of different locations.

Other related ideas include Compulsion Loopswhere a system of intermittent reinforcing by social media requires a constant or compulsive monitoring of our technology, the Little Brother Syndromewhich is where, instead of ‘Big Brother’ watching down on us all the time, we continually share our information so that we can be constantly monitored by others, and Junk Sleep, where deep REM sleep is not achieved because we are using digital technology right up to the moment that we fall asleep. As a result, we often have very unsatisfying, ‘junk’, sleep. One final important idea is that of Persistent Paleontology. This refers to the way that a person, in relation to electronic media, increasingly act in a way that is paleontological. That is, electronic data about our personal identity is stored in layers that we need to excavate in order to recapture its meaning.

The third important area of our new digital lifestyle is the digital enhancement of our cognitive and emotional abilities. One aspect of this is Distributed Cognitionwhere we can access knowledge banks, such as Wikipedia, that are spread, or distributed, across the web. Another is the use of a Device as Memorywhere, when we wish to recall a particular item of information, we know longer attempt to remember that item but, instead, access it through a device such as a mobile phone. Related to this activity is a Hyperlinked Memorywhere we access our own memories through data stored on an external device. The combination of all of these factors and processes is called the Extended Nervous System. The nervous system extends beyond its present physical boundaries and incorporates various digital cognitive and emotional attributes. The sum effect of all these processes is not always positive and sometimes lead to an experience called Mental Fragmentation. This occurs when a person performs several tasks at once (known as a ‘Multitasker’) cannot recall all the various bits of information and suffers in the performance of those tasks. The demands of Multitaskingleads to a need for Unitasking, or the simplification of tasks done to the most basic unit. Unitasking describes the act of focusing on only task at a time, such as reading and understanding this sentence.

The final aspect our digital lifestyle is the creation of technological time and space. For example, with Space and Time Compression, objects and possessions, such as music and photos, that traditionally occupied significant areas of the physical world now exist in a digital format on tiny devices with large digital memories such as hard drives or USB sticks. This is also called the Automatic Production of Space. The ease of this compression leads to a phenomenon known as Digital Hoardingwhere we keep digital items which we don’t review but simply keep in their multiplicity because it is so easy to do so. Also relevant is the existence of Technosocial Wormholewhich is the compression of an experience of space and time due to technology such as taking a mobile phone call. As we take the call, we exist in a ‘wormhole’ that is independent of the Space and Time we are currently inhabiting.

Beyond the present environment of transhumanism, there are a number of challenging ideas that present themselves in the post-human future. A Consciousness Slumis a dystopian afterlife condition where an uploaded consciousness exists only in a digital state. An Artificial Heavenis the suspension of a body while the mind continues to exist, either in a simulation or in a connection with others.

 

Postscript

The leading commentator in cyborg anthropology is Amber Case. Here are two brief talks by her on cyborg anthropology (from a 2010 Ted Women talk)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXOoEFqIOwI

https://www.ted.com/talks/amber_case_we_are_all_cyborgs_now?language=en

And this one from 2018, especially on Calm Technology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2gP1dst_Kc

And from 2015 on Designing for the Internet of Things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WOMe6cg0yc

Calm technology is a type of information technology where the interaction between the technology and its user is designed to occur in the user’s periphery rather than constantly at the center of attention. Information from the technology smoothly shifts to the user’s attention when needed but otherwise stays calmly in the user’s periphery. This is in contrast to Panic Architecture which is a participatory architecture such as Facebook, that demands compulsive interaction and attention. Digital panic occurs when multiple systems of intermittent reinforcement concurrently demand a user’s attention.

What is stupidity?

Do you ever act in stupid ways? Do you know stupid people? Are you stupid?

What is stupidity? Is it a state of mind? Is it a way of acting? Is it a type of personality?

The English word ‘stupid’ originated in the 16thcentury and meant mentally slow, dull, or inane: it is a look of not knowing what to say or do. The modern sense of the word can incorporate various meanings from slowness of mind, a state of insensibility (stupor), dullness of feeling (torpidity), or lacking in interest (uninterested). The word ‘stupid’ derived, through 16thcentury French stupide, from the Latin stupidus– to be amazed, confounded, dull, or foolish – which in turn had originated in stupere, meaning ‘to be struck senseless’. This word had a further origin in the Proto-Indo European language group (4,000 yrs BCE) as stupe- meaning ‘to hit’ – which itself meant ‘to push, stick, knock, or beat’ – thereby indicating an expression of senselessness when one is beaten or hit.

Stupidity is distinct from idiocy. The word ‘idiot’ derives from the Greek idiotesmeaning a private citizen, an unskilled layman, who, in virtue of their lack of skill, did not participate in public life. Some commentators have taken this fact to mean that a person who does not take part in public life is selfish and foolish. In the Roman period, the word came to mean someone who was crude, uneducated, and ignorant and eventually, in the Middle Ages, it was used as a synonym for stupid. In 14thcentury England, an idiot was someone who was ‘mentally deficient’. By the 20thcentury the word ‘idiot’, along with its cognates, ‘moron’, ‘imbecile’, and ‘cretin’, was a legal term defining a psychiatric condition of profound intellectual disability – a person with a mental age of two or less. These terms came to be regarded as offensive and fell out of use, although ‘idiot’ is still used as a derogatory term for a stupid or foolish person.

Stupidity is also distinct from foolishness. Foolishness is a way of thinking that is dogmatic and rigid. Foolishness may refer specifically to acting contrary to social norms and may include a lack of empathy and an incapacity to co-operate. A foolish person may also have illusions of grandeur. We think that a person is foolish when they make a statement that is not thought out. So while stupidity and foolishness are closely related, a foolish person makes statements on subjects on which they know nothing, while a stupid person may know their subject matter quite well but, for various emotional reasons, makes an assertion, or acts in a way, that is contrary to the logic of the situation.

Bigotry is an unthinking way of acting: does this make us stupid? No doubt, many bigoted statements are also quite stupid assertions, but a bigot can also be a relatively intelligent person. Many bigots rise to positions of great power and authority, although they do not rise to high levels of education. Bigotry, meaning an intolerance for those who hold different beliefs or customs, seems to derive from a lack of emotional intelligence and empathy, rather than a state of stupidity.

Finally, stupidity is not simply ignorance. We are, by definition, ignorant of a great many things. We are not omniscient. So ignorance does not make us stupid. Nor is stupidity a lack of education. Uneducated people can be quite intelligent, while educated people can exhibit a special type of intellectual stupidity. More on this later.

Stupidity refers to a certain way of acting that is unreflective and not thought out. I make a rash statement and then realise that that was a stupid thing to say. We all probably do this at some time in our lives but this does not make us a stupid person. To be a stupid person, we would have to act in an unthinking manner on a consistent basis.

So what is stupidity?

The philosopher, Walter B. Pitkin, believed stupidity to be the ‘Supreme Social Evil’ and did so for three reasons: Firstly, the number of stupid people is so huge that they are inestimable; secondly, for some reason, stupid people succeed to positions of great power in business and politics (we might call a government by idiots, an idiotocracy); and finally, people with highly developed abilities can also be afflicted with serious stupidity.

James F. Welles, in his book Understanding Stupidity, argued that stupidity must have at least three characteristics: that it is maladaptive, deliberate, and informed. That is to say a stupid person acts in a way that it will prevent adaption to new data or to changed circumstances. Such behaviour brings no benefit to the person and may actually occasion harm to themselves. Further they must know that they are acting in a way that is not beneficial for them and finally they must make a choice to act in this way. Stupidity then, is self-defeating behaviour. We gain no advantage by acting in a stupid manner or saying stupid things, even though we know that we will gain no advantage but yet still choose to act in that way.

Why would we do this?

Otto Fenichel, a psychiatrist who had an important influence on Jacques Lacan, argued that “…people become stupid ad hoc, that is, when they do not wantto understand, where understanding would cause anxiety or guilt feeling, or would endanger an existing neurotic equilibrium.”This appears to capture an essential truth about stupidity. Stupidity is a choice originating from an emotional blockage. We act or speak in a stupid fashion when we do so impulsively and without regard to the consequences, knowing that such actions or words will not benefit us one bit.

The economist, Carlo Maria Cipolla, formulated several laws of stupidity. Firstly, reflecting Pitkin’s point, non-stupid people always underestimate the number of stupid people that there are. For some unknown reason, intelligent people always assume that there are less stupid people than there actually are, or, conversely, that there are more intelligent people than there actually are. Secondly, intelligent people typically underestimate the harm that stupid people can actually do. This is due, in part, to the fact that intelligent people underestimate the number of stupid people, but mainly it has to do with the fact that stupid people typically act against their own best interests. If both of these points are true, then stupid people can inflict enormous damage and harm. Thirdly, a stupid person, and this fact defines an essential aspect of stupidity, that stupid people will cause harm to other people, and even, quite perversely, to themselves, without experiencing any personal gain. As intelligent people, we often assume that no-one, for no good reason, would do something that brings no benefit to themselves. But this is exactly what stupid people do. They act in ways where, not only is no benefit gained, but they may eventually be harmed by their actions. And when this is true for themselves, it is doubly true with relation to other people. Fourthly, the occurrence of stupidity is quite independent of any other personality characteristic. Musicians, artists, scientists, business leaders, politicians, etc., etc., can all be quite stupid people. Finally, when we add all these attributes together, we discover that a stupid person is the most dangerous sort of person that there is. It is a wonder that we have survived as long as we have. This world of stupidity is indeed a bleak place.

Apart from these laws of stupidity, there are also various types of stupidity.

Tactical stupidity, otherwise know as willful ignorance, occurs when people are aware of certain facts but refuse to acknowledge them. Their stupidity is a tactical maneuver, designed to forestall objections or criticism. They know there are facts out there which would contradict their position, but they claim ignorance of these facts and, in doing so, claim the right for the truth of those facts to be established. They have to, they claim, need to examine the basis of these facts themselves, and hence postpone the debate proceeding forward.

Protective stupidityoccurs when the thinking process stops at the threshold of what it takes to be dangerous thought. It involves not seeing logical errors, not grasping the power of an analogy, misrepresenting simple arguments, or being bored or repelled by any line of thinking that leads in a dangerous or heretical direction. George Orwell, in 1984, described this as Crimestop: we stop thinking along a certain line if we think it will lead to heresy or some other intellectual crime.

The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak. . . . He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions — ‘the Party says the Earth is flat’, ‘the Party says that ice is heavier than water’ — and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them.

A final, important type of stupidity is intellectual stupidity. Doris Lessing wrote “…there is no fool like an intellectual … (They possess) a kind of clever stupidity, bred out of a line of logic in the head, nothing to do with experience.” For anyone with experience of intellectuals, this type is well known. The sophisticated intellectual, with all their fine theories and grand ideas, can really, when we get down into the real world experience, be quite stupid. Their headful of ideas actually inhibits their experience of the real world.

Not surprisingly, that pin-up boy for post-modernism, Michel Foucault, made the same sort of point when he argued that we need stupidity to re-connect with those experiences that our articulate, conscious categories exclude: that is, we require stupidity to recapture the alterity of difference. Foucault’s point is that the categories by which we understand the world are in fact obstacles to directly experiencing, and thereby understanding, the world around us. Hence we require stupidity to experience the world directly! Without wishing to say the Foucault is wrong in this respect, and there is no reason to assume that he is, or he isn’t, the important point remains that there is an important connection between intelligent people and stupid people.

The stupidity of intelligent people is that they believe that the stupid are far more intelligent than they actually are. This is despite the fact that, time and time again, stupid people act in a way which is, quite simply, stupid. On the other hand, the intelligence of stupid people is that they believe that intelligent people are far more stupid than they believe themselves to be. The correctness of this view is based on the fact that stupid people, despite their stupidity, recognise that intelligent people consistently underestimate the extent and strength of stupidity within a community, and consistently over-estimate their own importance.

Perhaps one of the greatest obstacles to the spread of stupidity within society is not the stupid people themselves – they have always existed in great numbers and always will so exist – but rather the arrogance of intelligent people who believe that stupid people should act in what they deem a more intelligent way, which, in itself, is an indication of their own stupidity.

The New Democracies

‘New Democracies’ is a generic term for a number of different alternatives to the traditional problems of large representative democracies. Since the emergence of the internet at the start of the 21st century, a number of theories have been proposed to return democracy to a direct system of government.

The first of these is Electronic Direct Democracy (EDD) which is where people vote directly on issues of concern. This may be done either in terms of special referenda or by regular voting on issues, particularly at local government level. A ‘hybrid’ model of both representative and electronic mediums is often proposed as a means of transition to a pure electronic model. The security of the electronic vote is cited as the most common criticism of this view.

The second option is a wiki-democracy. This is also a variation of an electronic democracy. On this system, a publically editable ‘wiki page’ is established at the start of each calendar year and citizens contribute to the development of policy on that page. At the end of the calendar year, the page is closed down and the various policies are then put to an electronic vote. Apart from the usual concern about voter security, another criticism is the question of how resources are going to be allocated to the implementation of policy. Votes would need to be taken on those issues as well.

The third form of new democracy is liquid or delegative democracy. On this system, individual voters allocate their vote to a delegate who then votes either in person or electronically. Liquid democracy is distinct from both representative and direct democracy. One thing in favour of liquid democracy is the use of blockchain technology. This appears to give some security to the vote.

The fourth form of new democracy is known as Issues Based Direct Democracy (IBDD). The system is based on a voter credit allocated to each voter which can then be used either directly, allocated to a delegate, or saved and used collectively on a decision which they regard as important. One Australian party that promotes IBDD is Flux.

The last form of new democracy is known as Citizen-Led Democracy. In Australia, this model is based on the Kitchen Table Conversation (KTC) concept used so effectively by Cathy McGowan in defeating Sophie Mirabella in the seat of Indi over the course of two Federal elections.

The KTC model operates by small informal groups getting together ‘around kitchen tables’ and discussing the issues that they think are relevant for their local electorate. The results of this conversation are then collated and published in either a physical or electronic form. At this point, the results are either presented to the local member to gain agreement to address these issues or are presented to a ‘town hall meeting’ where the conversation on the importance of the issues raised are discussed further.

The significance of this model is that it is not necessarily concerned with standing candidates for election. Rather it is a model that seeks to build community and get local issues addressed. Hence networking, community action, local resource development, etc. can all be important outcomes for a KTC. However it may be that standing candidates against sitting members will be a legitimate outcome of this process.

 

Woodbox Café, West Burleigh 14th November 10.30-Noon

Robina Tavern, Robina 14th November 5.30-7.00pm      

GC Arts Centre, Bundall, 15th November 11.30-1.00pm

 

Casual Rate $10 per class

Reading booklet $10

What are the cardinal virtues?

The cardinal virtues comprise a quartet set of virtues articulated by the philosophers of Ancient Greece. The term “cardinal” comes from the Latin cardo (hinge); the cardinal virtues are so called because they are regarded as the basic virtues required for a virtuous life. They are: justice, temperance, courage, and practical wisdom

Justice

For Plato, justice is a virtue establishing rational order, with each part performing its appropriate role and not interfering with the proper functioning of other parts. The just individual is someone whose soul is guided by a vision of the Good, someone in whom reason governs passion and ambition through such a vision. When, but only when, this is the case, is the soul harmonious, strong, beautiful, and healthy, and individual justice precisely consists in such a state of the soul. Actions are then just if they sustain or are consonant with such harmony. Aristotle says justice consists in what is lawful and fair, with fairness involving equitable distributions and the correction of what is inequitable. Aristotle treats the virtue of individual justice as a matter of being disposed to properly respect and promote just social arrangements. An individual who seeks more than their fair share of various goods has the vice of greediness, and a just individual is one who has rational insight into their own merits in various situations and who habitually (and without having to make heroic efforts to control contrary impulses) takes no more than what they merit, no more than their fair share of good things. Justice, then, is the settled disposition to act, so that each person receives their due. This settled disposition includes a practical knowledge about how to bring it about, in each situation, that each receives their due. It also includes a strong positive attitude toward bringing it about that each receives their due.

Courage

Courage is a settled disposition that allows one to act reliably to pursue right ends in fearful situations, because one values so acting intrinsically. Physical courage is courage in the face of physical pain, hardship, death, or threat of death. Moral courage is the courage to take action for moral reasons despite the risk of adverse consequences. Intellectual courage is having a consciousness of the need to face and fairly address ideas, beliefs or viewpoints toward which we have strong negative emotions and to which we have not given a serious hearing.

Temperance

Temperance is the espousal of moderation, marked by personal restraint. It is one of the cardinal virtues because no virtue could be sustained in the face of inability to control oneself, if the virtue was opposed to some desire. Temperance is generally defined by control over excess, so that it has many such classes, such as abstinence, chastity, modesty, humility, prudence, forgiveness, and mercy, each of these involves restraining some impulse, such as sexual desire, vanity, or anger.

Practical Wisdom: also called prudence or, in Greek, phronesis

Phronesis is a Greek word for a type of wisdom or intelligence. In Aristotle’s ethics, it is distinguished from other words for wisdom and intellectual virtues – such as episteme  and techne  – as the virtue of practical thought. For this reason, when it is not simply translated by words meaning wisdom or intelligence, it is often translated as “practical wisdom”. Phronesis involves reasoning concerning universal truths and combines a capability of rational thinking, with a type of knowledge. It is concerned with particulars, because it is concerned with how to act in particular situations. One can learn the principles of action, but applying them in the real world, in situations one could not have foreseen, requires experience of the world.

In the Roman world, phronesis was translated as prudence. Prudence is the application of universal principles to particular situations. In scholastic philosophy, the integral parts of prudence are the elements that must be present for any complete or perfect act of the virtue. The following are the integral parts of prudence:

Memoria — Accurate memory; that is, memory that is true to reality; an ability to learn from experience

Docilitas — The kind of open-mindedness that recognizes the true variety of things and situations to be experienced; the ability to make use of the experience and authority of others to make prudent decisions

Intelligentia — the understanding of first principles

Shrewdness or quick-wittedness (solertia) — sizing up a situation on one’s own quickly

Discursive reasoning (ratio) — research and compare alternative possibilities

Foresight (providentia)  — capacity to estimate whether a particular action will lead to the realization of a goal

Circumspection — ability to take all relevant circumstances into account

Caution — risk mitigation

The cardinal virtues became the fundamental virtues for western culture and even though the so-called spiritual virtues of faith, hope, and charity were added during the Middle Ages, the cardinal virtues retain a central place in modern discussions of virtue theory.

The other history of the early Christian church

We are all more or less familiar with the early history of the early Christian church… persecution of the early Church by the Roman authorities, martyrdom and sacrifice, before the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early 4th century AD and the creation of an official ‘New Testament’ of Christian belief. But what of the other streams of early Christianity that existed during these centuries but were excluded from inclusion in the ‘orthodox’ doctrines? What do we know of these unorthodox voices?

After the death of Jesus (around 33 AD), Christianity grew from a small Jewish sect of apostles and followers to a religion that began to spread around the Roman empire. The uniqueness of early Christianity is that even though its early leaders were Jews, the Christian message was addressed to people of all nations and classes. For the first forty years of the movement, the records of Christ’s life and the acts of the apostles were primarily verbal ones, but after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70ad the first gospels were committed to writing. The gospel of Mark was written at this time and over the next twenty years (to 90ad), Mathew and Luke were written, followed by John (95ad). These gospels were all ‘narrative’ gospels in that they essentially recorded the activities of Jesus’ life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Christianity The remainder of the New Testament is believed to have been written by 150 ad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament

This early period was known as the Apostolic Church and after 100ad the Christian church moved into the Post-Apostolic period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ante-Nicene_Period Justin Martyr (100-160ad), in the early 2nd century (around 120ad) mentions the memoirs of the apostles which are called ‘gospels’ and around 185 ad Irenaeus of Lyon insisted that the four gospels were the ‘pillars of the church’. The religious scholar, Elaine Pagels, argues that the gospels chosen by Ireneaus were concerned with providing moral instruction to the Christian community which helped served the institutionalising of the Christian movement. Ireneuas also referred to other Christian works (which he described as ‘heresies’) but these were excluded from the Christian Canon because they did not serve the purpose of institutionalisation. By the early 3rd century, Origen of Alexandria may have been using the same 27 books as exist in the modern New Testament.

During this time, Christianity suffered various persecutions, but continued to spread because of its appeal to Jews and Gentiles alike. However this persecution came to an end with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 323ad and Christianity became the official State religion of the Roman Empire. In 367ad, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, provided the earliest preserved list of the New Testament canon and the African Synod of Hippo of 393 approved the New Testament as it stands today. The Councils of Cathage of 397 and 419, presided over by St. Augustine, repeated the decision of 393 and Augustine regarded the canon as already closed.

Early church writers such as Ireneaus and Tertullian (150-220ad) wrote against alternative accounts of Christian doctrine and theology known as ‘Gnosticism’, although little precise detail was known about these views. Some fragments of Gnostic doctrine and theology were preserved in the ‘refutations’ of these Christian writers but it was not until 1945 when a large collection of Gnostic manuscripts were discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt that the original documents of Gnosticism were first known. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library The word ‘gnosticism’ is derived from the Greek word gnosis which means knowledge of a revelatory or salvationist nature (as against ordinary knowledge of the world). The intellectual movement known as Gnosticism incorporated Christian, Jewish and pagan belief systems and existed from the early first century to the end of the fourth century

The Nag Hammadi codex is a collection of non-orthodox writings (52 separate texts in total) dating from the 1st to the 4th century ad. Apart from texts relating to Christian Gnosticism, the other Nag Hammadi texts include discussions of Jewish Gnosticism (usually referred to as Sethian Gnosticism – Seth being the third son of Adam and Eve after Cain and Abel), Gnostic criticisms of Neo-Platonism (the late Platonic movement – 3rd to 5th century ad – dating from Plotinus (204-270) through to Proclus (412-485)) and discussions of hermeticism (also known as the Hermetica), the occult tradition of late antiquity incorporating elements of alchemy and astrology. Sethian Gnosticism is often thought to predate Christian Gnosticism and may have been influenced the Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria (25 bce – 50 ce). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo

Apart from its emphasis on the esoteric nature of gnosis, a consistent theme in Gnostic writings is the view that the creator of the physical world (known since the time of Plato’s Timaeus as the ‘demiurge’) is an inferior spiritual being or fallen angel. According to the gnostics, no truly spiritual being would consciously seek to create the physical world and this is the reason why the Neo-Platonic philosophers, who saw rational order in the physical world, were so hostile to the gnostics. Within the Nag Hammadi codex, dialogues which make use of Neo-Platonic ideas include Allogenes, Marsanes, The Three Steles of Seth, and Zostrianos, while those relating to Sethian Gnosticism include the Apocalypse of Adam, the Apocryphon of John, and the Thought of Norea.

The texts relating to Christian Gnosticism are diverse in number and dating, although in discussing these texts it must be remembered that early Church writers such as Tertullian and Origen had a hostile view of Gnosticism. Hence there is much dispute by modern orthodox writers as to the dating of any Gnostic gospels before the second century. (Elaine Pagels argues that the creation of the Nag Hammadi codex was in fact a reaction to the persecution and destruction of Gnostic communities during the 4th century).

Remembering that the original gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John were only written down in the late 1st century, it is significant that there are several Gnostic gospels which date from the early 2nd century and perhaps as early as the late 1st century. These include the Gospel of Thomas, the Dialogue of the Savior, the Gospel of Truth, and the Apocalypse of Adam. The most well known of these is the Gospel of Thomas which is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus and has been dated as early as 50ad. An example of this gospel:

“Jesus said ‘Blessed are the solitary and the elect, for you will find the kingdom. For you are from it, and to it you will return.”

This gospel also mentions a conflict between Mary and Peter which is a theme of the Gospel of Mary:

“Then Mary wept and said to Peter, ‘My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my own heart, or that I am lying about the Savior?’”.

The Dialogue of the Savior is an elaboration of traditional sayings and has a close relationship to the Gospel of Thomas. From the Dialogue of the Savior:

“The Lord said ‘Right. For do they see you? Do they see those who receive you? Now behold! A true Word is coming forth from the Father to the abyss, in silence with a flash of lightning, giving birth’.”

Within the corpus is a complete account of the Gospel of Truth, written by a 2nd century Gnostic (about 150 ad) Valentinus. Valentinus was an extremely important Gnostic and was, at one point, a candidate for the position of bishop of Rome within the Christian church. Another important Gnostic text (20 pages) was the Apocryphon of John which dates from before 185 ad and was still in use in the 8th century by the Audians of Mesopotania. Part of the importance of this text lies in its criticism of the Old Testament such as when Jehovah says “I am a jealous God”, this author of this gospel states:

“But by announcing this he indicated to the angels who attended him that there exists another God. For if there were no other one, of whom would he be jealous?”

A similar theme is treated in The Second Treatise of the Great Seth:

“And then a voice – of the Cosmocrator – came to the angels: ‘I am God and there is no other beside me.’ But I laughed joyfully when I examined his empty glory.”

And:

“For the Archon was a laughingstock because he said ‘I am God and there is none greater than I. I alone am the Father, the Lord, and there is no other beside me. I am a jealous God, who brings the sins of the fathers upon the children for three and four generations.’ As if he was stronger than I and my brothers! But we are innocent with respect to him, in that we have not sinned, since we mastered his teaching. Thus he was an empty glory.”

Both of these texts emphasise the common Gnostic theme that the God of the Old Testament (Jehovah), by his own words, demonstrates that he is not the only God in the heavens and that there must be others greater than him.

The Teaching of Sylvanus (dating from the late 2nd century) is not a standard Gnostic text but does present a unique view of Christ:

“Light the lamp within you. Do not extinguish it. Certainly no one lights a lamp for wild beasts and their young. Raise your dead who have died, for they lived and died for you. Give them life. They shall live again. For the Tree of Life is Christ. He is Wisdom”.

In the Apocalypse of Peter (a 3rd century text) the crucifixion of Christ is understood to be an illusion. In this docetic passage, Peter is standing next to Christ watching Christ’s own crucifixion:

“When he had said those things, I saw him seemingly being seized by them. And I said ‘What do I see, O Lord, that it is you yourself whom they take, and that you are grasping me? Or who is this one, glad and laughing on the tree? And is it another one whose feet and hands they are striking?’ The Savior said to me, ‘He whom you see on the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But the one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails in his fleshy part, which is the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into being in his likeness. But look at him and look at me…. But he who stands near him is the living Savior, the first in him whom they seized and released, who stands joyfully looking at those who did him violence, while they are divided among themselves. Therefore he laughs at their lack of perception, knowing that they are born blind.’”

Many of the texts present ascent rituals whereby through the uttering of certain sacred words and phrases, the Gnostic was able to ascend through the various layers of reality and return to the true God. In the Trimorphic Protennoia the overcoming of the Underworld is described:

“Every bond I loosed from you, and the chains of the Demons of the underworld, I broke, these things which are bound on my members, restraining them. And the high walls of darkness I overthrew, and the secure gates of those pitiless ones I broke and smashed their bars …indeed all these I explained to those who are mine, who are the Sons of the light, in order that they might nullify them all and be saved from all those bonds and enter into the place where they were at first.”

The Protennoia is the Voice of the First Thought and in this gospel she describes her nature:

“I am androgynous. I am Mother and I am Father since I copulate with myself. I copulated with myself and with those who love me, and it is through me alone that the All stands firm. I am the Womb that gives shape to the All by giving birth to the Light that shines in splendour.”

A similar idea is treated in The Paraphrase of Seth and the explicit imagery used makes it clear why some of these texts were not acceptable in the early church. The text describes Nature as a giant womb and the Savior puts on his Trimorphic garment and has intercourse with Nature. Nature has an orgasm and casts off its Mind in the form of a fish and as a result the physical world is created.

Much more could be said about the unique texts contained in the Nag Hammadi codex, although it should be clear that from a very early point in the Christian period, there were many other views apart from those that we have come to regard as orthodox. These views were not united by a single religious perspective but were simply alternative accounts, not only of Christianity, but also Judaism and Platonic philosophy. However there is a general theology that does characterise Gnosticism and this will be discussed in a later post.

 

In the Year 2025

Even though the year 2025 is only eight years way, it will be a transformed world to the one we now inhabit. We know quite definitely there will be less jobs and less hours to work. It has been estimated in a number of national and international reports that there will be 40% less jobs by 2030 due to the impact of AI and robotic labour. And with less hours worked, there will be less money to go around. Will we have to change our expectations of what we want in life? But the things we want may also be much cheaper. 3-D printing could change the way we build our houses and will cost a fraction of the price to build. And with less work, we will have more leisure. But what will we do? Will we spend our leisure time thinking of new ways to make more money or will we think about the meaning of making more money? Will we, in other words, engage in philosophy? Not if there’s going to be all these sex and companionship robots walking around. What will we do then?

Woodbox Café, West Burleigh 6th June 10.30-Noon $5

Krish restaurant, Easy-T centre, Robina 6th June 5.30-7.00pm $10 (includes nibbles)

GC Arts Centre, 7th June 11.30-1.00pm $5

 

Robots and Work

The landmark 2013 Frey and Osborne report predicted that 40% of jobs in countries such as Britian, the US, and Australia will be lost to robots and AI by 2025. However a Forrester report predicts only a 6% loss by 2021 and some writers think the danger is completely over-blown. Accurate industry figures can be found at the World Robotics Organisation.

Frey and Osborne 2013 report

http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/view/1314

Robots eliminate 6% of US jobs by 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/13/artificial-intelligence-robots-threat-jobs-forrester-report

Robotenomics: over-stated fear of job loss

https://robotenomics.com/tag/frey-and-osborne/

World Robotics Organisation

https://ifr.org/worldrobotics

https://ifr.org/downloads/press/02_2016/Executive_Summary_Service_Robots_2016.pdf

https://ifr.org/img/uploads/Executive_Summary_WR_Industrial_Robots_20161.pdf

https://ifr.org/downloads/press/02_2016/Presentation_12_Oct_2016__WR_Service_Robots.pdf

However the generally accurate recognition that many jobs will disappear has prompted speculation about a future world without work – will it be a utopia or a hell? In fact, the catch-phrase ‘robots are coming for your jobs’ has become so popular that it yields dozens of direct hits on a google search. An example of the rapid development of highly mobile robots can be seen on the links for Boston Dynamics. In 2016, a driverless bus was tested in Perth. This example illustrates how quickly these changes are happening.

World without work

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/19/world-without-work-utopia-hell-human-labour-obsolete

Google search: ‘robots are coming for your jobs’ multiple references eg on the need for digital literacy http://www.iflscience.com/technology/robots-are-coming-your-job-why-digital-literacy-so-important-jobs-future/

Robots at Boston Dynamics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7nhygaGOmo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqn_TyFMPOA

Driverless bus in Perth

http://www.afr.com/technology/australias-first-driverless-bus-starts-service-in-perth-20160831-gr5yka

Humanoid robots

The World Robotics Organisation distinguishes between industrial robots and personal service robots, the latter generally having a humanoid appearance. Humanoid robots are either gendered (gynoids (F) or androids (M)) or are gender neutral.   They will be employed in a variety of occupations including aged care, domestic workers, and sex workers. The Pepper robot is now being sold for use in retail and domestic situations.

Japanese gynoid video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpO57NltoAI

German gynoid video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTGOjWv9fcQ

Non-specified gender robots

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/04/02/high-court-recognises-third-category-gender

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/neither-man-nor-woman-norrie-wins-gender-appeal-20140402-35xgt.html

Domestic robot gynoid

http://cooluniverse.blogspot.com.au/2011/10/gynoid-female-robot-domestic-servant.html

Gynoid sex worker

http://sexwork101.com/archives/1308

Pepper robot

http://singularityhub.com/2016/08/17/adorable-robot-assistant-pepper-now-available-in-the-us/#.V9B7yYvnMnc.facebook

Over the past five years, humanoid robots have developed so quickly that they are now almost physically indistinguishable from humans. There is currently a large demand for sex gynoids for men (at a cost of around $US15,000) but there is also development occurring for sex androids for women.

10 humanoid robots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7ex3YDoNMo

10 robots that will change the world

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6feEE716UEk

8 robots that look human

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCRCVhzjYx8

Sex robots for men

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLVOnVsLXqw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vN0cs_-RSs

Sex robots for women

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKFHZuCvvS4

Robot psychologists

One unexpected area where robot growth is expected is in the field of robot therapy and psychology.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/02/07/i-robopsychologist-part-1-why-robots-need-psychologists/#.WTE4-sZL1N0

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/02/09/i-robopsychologist-part-2-where-human-brains-far-surpass-computers/#.WTE5N8ZL1HQ

Robot therapist

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/media-spotlight/201411/the-rise-the-robot-therapist

http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/meet-ellie-the-robot-therapist-treating-soldiers-with-ptsd/news-story/0201fa7cf336c609182cffd637deef00

Psychological intimacy with robots

http://depts.washington.edu/hints/articles/Kahn%20et%20al.%20psychological%20intimacy%20HRI%20paper.pdf

Robot Intelligence

AI programs have now surpassed human capacity in a number of games including Chess and Go and as this capacity increases in the future, there will be the development of super-intelligence in A.I. programs. This intelligence will have the capacity to connect wirelessly with robots, thereby creating super-intelligent robots.

Superintelligence https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2015/11/05/qa-philosopher-nick-bostrom-on-superintelligence-human-enhancement-and-existential-risk/

Intelligent robot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhVu2hxm07E

Robot intelligence

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2015/11/02/robot-intelligence-a-primer/

Conclusion

In this brief summary view of the future world of 2025, I have focused exclusively on the role of robots even though there will be many other technological impacts including nanotechnology, cyborgs, 3-D printing, electronic surveillance, etc. There is no definitive resource for this topic and it is one of those issues where your own research will take you far.

Two interesting literary resources are the writings of Isaac Asmiov who looks at the development of robots into the far future and the TV series ‘Humans’ (derived from the Swedish noir ‘Real Humans’) which examines many of the issues raised here.

 

 

 

 

What is a syllogism?

It came to my attention last week, that I often use a word in class that many people don’t have a clear understanding of . That word is ‘syllogism’. The word itself dates back to ancient Greece and is a combination of two parts – ‘syll-’ (derived from ‘syn-’ meaning ‘with’ or ‘together’ – for example, ‘syllable’, ‘syllabus’, ‘syllepsis’, ‘synthesis’, ‘synthetic’, ‘synoptic’, ‘syntactic’, etc) and ‘-logos’ (meaning ‘reason’, ‘word’, ‘idea’, ‘theory’ or ‘discourse’ eg ‘logic’, ‘psychology’, ‘geology’ (and almost any other science you care to name), ‘logocentric’, ‘logorrhoea’, etc.), so that the word ‘syllogism’, etymologically speaking, means a combination of distinct ideas. The word itself was first used by Aristotle in his Prior Analytics, which is also the source for the term ‘logic’.

For Aristotle, logic had two meanings: dialectic and analytic and it was the latter meaning which was understood in terms of syllogism. Aristotle’s theory of syllogism effectively defined the field of logic for over two thousand years. His key texts in logic were widely used during the Roman empire, but after the collapse of the empire in the 5th century AD, these texts were lost in the Latin Western Europe. However the texts were preserved in their original Greek in the Eastern Byzantine Empire and after the rise of Islam in the 8th century AD, many of these texts were translated into Arabic. The dispute between the Platonist Avecinna and the Aristotelian Averroes was an important stimulus to the development of medieval philosophy, especially the theology of Aquinas. It is only since the start of the 20th century that philosophers such as Frege, Russell, and Quine have discussed non-Aristotelian (syllogistic) forms of logic.

Despite its long history, a syllogism has a very precise meaning. It is the connection between two propositions (known as premises) which imply a conclusion. A classic example of a syllogism is as follows:

Socrates is a man

All men are mortal

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

The first two propositions are the premises; the final proposition is the conclusion. The conclusion follows logically from the premises. In technical terms, the conclusion is deduced from the premises; and this deduction is indicated by the expression ‘therefore’.

There is much more that can be said about syllogism – its components and conditions, for example – but to understand that the relationship between the three propositions is a logical relationship (as against, say, a temporal relation – eg ‘This happened, and then that happened, and then something else happened’ as so often occurs in narrative or story telling – is to understand the key feature of the syllogism.

 

Should humans be allowed to marry robots?

What is marriage? We all know what it means, don’t we? Traditionally it has been conceived as a legally recognised union between a man and woman. This is still the accepted view amongst a large number of Christian and conservative people. However in recent years, there has been a move to allow gay and lesbian people to marry – commonly called ‘same sex marriage’. This move has prompted a lot of debate about the nature of marriage. Is marriage to be defined exclusively in terms of its traditional connotation reflecting past values and arrangements or should the definition be extended to include more modern relationship arrangements?

In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court legalised same sex marriage across the US. In its decision, the court emphasised that in a free society, individuals have the ‘fundamental right’ to choose the relationships that they pursue. No doubt this debate will rage for many years to come, although it may, in time, become a side issue.

 

 

 

 

Poster for 2017 Brisbane sexpo

Over the last decade, the development of robots has occurred so quickly that it is difficult to keep up with the changes that keep taking place. On the one hand, the appearance of humanoid robots are becoming more and more lifelike while on the other hand, the development of AI is creating a semblance of intelligence which is difficult to distinguish from the human mind.

AI programs are currently world champions across a number of games including chess, Go, and Jeopardy, and the development of AI programs which are emotionally intelligent are reaching the point where they may soon passed the equivalent of the Turing test for emotions. Also the development of humanoid robots have reached the point where life-like companion and sexual robots can be purchased for a reasonable price.

 

 

 

 

Man with robotic sex doll                                           French woman with robot she wishes to marry

It appears to be a foregone conclusion that humans will have sex, and sexual relationships, with robots in the not too distant future, perhaps 15 to 20 years. Many android robots for this very purpose are already in prototype development and this prospect already seems very appealing to some humans. Certainly the possibility of this development within 20 years, will have important implications for the prostitution and sex industry. Further, the prospect of ‘loving’ relationships between humans and robots may only be another 15 to 20 years after that.

When these two technologies – humanoid robots and emotionally intelligent AI – converge (say between 10 and 20 years), we will have humanoid entities which are sentient. Sex with these robots will be fairly well common by that time and, given that human nature is what it is, it is inevitable that some people will wish to marry their robots. This raises some interesting philosophical questions.

Will governments be able to prevent human to robot marriage? Assuming, for example, that a male human wishes to marry a female robot, there can be no argument that this is a male-female union. It will be objected that the intention behind the idea of marriage is that it is only humans who can be married. But if this intention is no-where clearly expressed as such, then it remains only an assumption.

Perhaps the more pressing point behind the concept of marriage is that is a choice, a contract entered into, between two rational beings. But if the issue is one of sapience, then there is no reason to assume that robots cannot be as intelligent as, if not moreso than, humans. And if this is the case, then the current dispute about same-sex marriage will, in the future, be irrelevant. Not only might we have human to robot marriage, but perhaps even human to AI marriage. Now that would be something to see.

 

What do you think your next job will be….. and why you’re probably wrong.

 

Are you under fifty? Do you think you will you be working for at least another twenty years?

Yes?

Then there is more than a one in three chance that your current job will be automated during that time.

A raft of reports over the past few years have emphasised the significant impact that technology will have on future employment. In a report for the Committee for Economic Development, it was estimated that 40% of jobs in the Australian workforce will be lost to automation over the next fifteen years.

And these wont just be the unskilled labouring and trades jobs that have traditionally been lost through the automation of the manufacturing industry. They will also include white-collar clerical and sales positions which have seen such strong employment growth over the past forty years.

Automation will even impact on some professional occupations such as accountancy, law, and architecture that were previously thought immune to technological unemployment.

In fact, it is unlikely that there will be a field of work that wont be impacted by technological change over the next fifteen years. And as workers are pushed out of their traditional sphere of employment, they will crowd into a labour markets where opportunities will be shrinking.

So how can you protect yourself against future unemployment?

Quite simply… become creative.

The single consistent feature that has been identified in those jobs most under threat from technology is the routine nature of the work task and the one skill that will not be impacted by automation is creativity. Workers in the future that will have the most secure and profitable employment will be creative workers. But this creativity wont be a special skill of artists and musicians.

All future workers will need a moderate level of creativity to thrive in the future workforce. These workers will need to be problem solvers. They will need to think laterally, both in their jobs and in the ways they get their work.

These workers will be curious about future trends and good at imagining alternative scenarios where they might profit. They wont work for any one employer for more than a few years and their work will be contractual, flexible, and part-time.

These workers will need to be creative in way they approach their home-life balance. They wont be going off to their office in the city anymore. Their home and their community will be their work hub and they will need to negotiate a whole new set of domestic relationships as a result.

What is creativity? Is it a skill I can practice? Can I test my creativity? Will my current job be under threat from technology?

Find the answers to these questions in a ‘Creativity and the Future of Work’ workshop, next Saturday 8th April 2-5pm at Robina Community Centre. Cost $30.