Heidegger on Technology

To all you Heidegger scholars out there, a question if i may: Does Heidegger predict the singularity, albeit in a side glancing way?


Let me explain. In his essay, the question concerning technology, H. takes Aristotle's 4 causes and stitches them together holistically, so as to create a web of 4 causes rather than a linear or simplistic process. Heidy argues that the primal meaning of causality is lost on modern philosophy because that fuck Descartes had no patience for the causa finalis(telos)). While the “causa efficiens” (the human agent that makes the object) which in Aristotle's 4 causes is just a simple cog, Heidy thinks this creator transcends the 4 causes. He thus keeps the 4 causes but draws attention to the extra special role this “causa efficiens” (human as being-there). The 4 causes are sorta renamed the “4 occasionings” which he feels is a more metaphysically honest way of framing cause and effect. The 4 occasionings are collectively responsible for the bringing forth of “things” (objects, in this case technological objects).


The artist or craftsman in getting the 3 casual ducks in order provides a path for non-presence to arrive at presence. The craftsman coaxes matter and form and final causes (the other three causes or occasionings) into being. He sets free “things” and induces them to go forward. H. really uses these terms, at least in the english translation.


Heidy posits that nature is the ultimate artist, but the human creator is of a different sort, because the craftsman (it’s not stated but we are dealing with man as Dasein here) stands outside of this cause and effect relationship.


But what if Heidegger conceived of man as fully within the cause and effect of nature, free-will and agency be damned. H. could then suggest that when man makes a machine, it is actually a creation of nature (Think of the human race as a presence that was not present aprox. 200,000 yrs ago) creating/ bringing forth/cajoling into existence tecnology. A technology that in a few hundreds years will continue to be drawn out of inexistence by us crafty naked apes and could conceivably culminate in AI (and run away AI after that ushering in the singularity).


The implications of this are tremendous. I can feel it occasioning in my loins. So please, tell me why I’ve horribly misread Heidy and that we actually aren't living in a simulation.

AI is a meme man

will never happen

If you're interested in Heidegger's view on technology, read his correspondence with Ernst Junger who himself was influenced by his brother (forget the name of his book now)

>3 casual ducks
quack ?

>Correspondence 1949-1975

OP here, just to add a bit:
Bringing forth is the process of going from concealment to unconcealment. The Greek word for unconcealment being Alithia (The capital T truth).


In other words, all that was ever made and all that technology will culminate in has always been there (wherever that is). Hot damn, it’s eloquent if nothing else.

It smacks of AI godhead. Was Heidy a theist?

While there are some Heidi Klum scholars on here, you'd get better results asking on /r/askphilosophy.

no no. you can't say it "has always been there". Being has always be there, but this or that thing in particular haven't.
More generally "bringing forth" is just to produce.

I meant Jungers brother

Jungers younger brother ?

>More generally "bringing forth" is just to produce
Is this your interpretation of Heidegger's metaphysics or your own strongly held convictions?

The OP deserves more replies than this thread has.

Heidegger is not of the conviction that Aletheia = truth (at least after Sein und Zeit)
"Putting man into nature" is precisely what H is warning against in that essay
Gestell ("enframing")and the "vorhandenheit"-ening of things is precisely what he is going against

i see it more of the missing element he points out incarnating as the A.I. the aletheia becoming more condensed rather than a blanket format. like a pimple in the dasein space time. so if humanity advanced this long without it. for us to survive we would have to build it in a way weve been so used to, a centralized totem meant to govern us. assimilated into it there would be no such things as a 'center' because we flow through, with and within it in his term moving 'forward'. eradicating the crafter or enhancing the crafter?

Not just this but you seemed to gave stopped reading halfway through OP. Go to the part where man becomes "standing reserve" as much as any dammed river. Really, among other things, he is saying that technology "occasions" our perception and orientation to technology, the whole causal relationship the greeks knew has been reversed by industry so that the enframing "occasions" us physically as well, and that this poeasis has only begun to be thought of if even questioned. Seeing man as a piece of nature and not as a being aware of its death and hiatroical context is what allows for this cheapening to happen

Yeah, dude.
Technology is like.
So predicted by Heidegger.

>"Putting man into nature" is precisely what H is warning against in that essay.

And this was precisely why I said he was predicting the singularity by way of a side glance. He all but writes of an underlying technological telos in nature before holding to the line of man outside of nature. And that’s why I think this essay is half wrong in a provincial luddite kind of way. He can only make this “enframing” move by exalting man above nature.

>Seeing man as a piece of nature and not as a being aware of its death and historical context is what allows for this cheapening to happen.

But it’s this insistence to define modern technology as cheapening is the weakest part of his essay. His move to rebrand modern technology as no longer “revealing” but “challenging” seems to be based on his desire for humankind to forever romantically swing hammers with peasants. I was saying, imagine if Heidegger set aside his fetish with free will/extra-special-dasein-functioning-in-the-world and gave up the idea that mankind can set its own telos with respect to technology. Why would human actions if thought of as blossoming/erupting from within a causal nature, and fulfilling nature's technological telos be any more cheapening than Greeks building ships?

On a speculative side note, imagine a situation where a hypothetical AI has run a simulation of our universe from the big bang onward, and a biology festered and churned out humans who progressively “revealed” technology and in turn unconcealed AI capable of running a similar simulation. A realms within realms situation. Maybe Heidegger comprehended this and held back from posting mankind as casually bound, to avoid coming off Buddhist?

>eradicating the crafter or enhancing the crafter?

Likely eradicating all but the most skilled of crafters. And even then keeping those few chosen ones in a contained capacity.

>>actually aren't living in a simulation.


We are just batteries man.

Yeah, Heidegger wouldn't want to come off Buddhist. Buddhism is a no-no. He was good at predicting technology tho.

It's what Heidegger meant. However he would never have admitted it.
I really like Heidegger, but he tends too often to say "what I mean is NOT AT ALL what you think you understood". At some point, it becomes dishonest. You can't say that producing a table is bringing it forth, and that bringing it forth does NOT AT ALL mean to produce it.

...

dude like what if technology is real...
and people were invented by technology...
what would that mean for philosophy?

There WILL be robots programmed to think like Heidegger.

samefag, I'm wrong here. I just realized "bringing forth" is the usual heid-english term meaning unveiling or de-concealment.

I remembered reading an excellent dialogue between Heidegger and an A.I. The I.A. couldn't understand why it isn't a Dasein, and Heidegger had a hard time proving it. Can't remember who wrote this short text and where to find it again.

...

>I remembered reading an excellent dialogue between Heidegger and an A.I. The I.A. couldn't understand why it isn't a Dasein, and Heidegger had a hard time proving it. Can't remember who wrote this short text and where to find it again.

heh, cool, post it when you find it

Is this a creation of humans or nature technology? Omg if it's nature technology then does that mean evolution is a computer? Is my thumb a video game invented by Heidegger? Or did he predict that computers would have hands and tickle us to death before nature could invent french fries and mobile hot spots? Btw I'm already dead. I think...

time to find a new hobby, kiddo

this

There's no question of a singularity actually occurring in the universe (and astrophysicists should take note here). A singularity would be something that doesn't flow, and in the universe either everything flows or nothing does — there can be no middle ground. You can't have some things flowing and others not. Perception itself is a form of flow, so if something didn't flow we wouldn't even be able to perceive it — or affect it in any way, and by that same token it wouldn't be able to affect us! So how can something that we can't affect and that can't affect us be part of the world? As far as we are concerned, that's precisely the definition of non-existence! — So whence does the concept of a singularity arise? Well, in mathematics you get a singularity when you try to divide by zero. But "zeros" are mathematical constructs that have no existence in reality. Things that are not can't be! You can't have fuckin' nothing isn't! The idea of the "nothing", of the "zero", was created by our distant ancestors when they looked in the air and saw "nothing". But today we can see stuff even in the air, and we know that even in the farthest reaches of space there are "things", and that a perfect vacuum is an impossibility.

On Heidegger. Consider the fact that he began his book as a dissertation, and bothered to publish it only to get his degree — and thus start making money. The entire enterprise was motivated by nothing other than money (and this can be plainly seen in the text, even if one had not the slightest knowledge of the historical context of its creation). For after he began earning money he simply never bothered touching the work again. He made no move to finish it — or even simply to continue it. And here he doesn't have the excuse of other philosophers, who were still working when death found them. Heidegger had so much time after he gave up writing that he even became embroiled in politics — even politics attracted him more than his pathetic, botched attempts at philosophizing.

So there's no dilemma here, no problem at all. The entire "singularity" hoopla is merely a hysteria created out of nothing by a person (Vinge) who's both scientifically and technologically ignorant, and psychologically base. There is nothing to discuss. If the cyborgs come to dominate THEN THEY DESERVE TO, and if they don't, then all our efforts in creating them will have FAILED. Vinge's "technological singularity" IS PRECISELY OUR MOST SACRED GOAL, OUR VISION FOR THE FUTURE — and if you have a problem with that our very first directive to them, when they come online, will be to crush you.

>There's no question of a singularity actually occurring in the universe

While that exposition on the origin of 0 was interesting, it’s hardly relevant is it?

>The entire enterprise was motivated by nothing other than money

Also interesting but again, hardly relevant. I’m simply interested in a particular reading of his work along with a slight modification to his concept of dasein. An interpretation in which one can see a technological telos thread running through the center of his metaphysics. A thread he refuses to follow to the end.

>So there's no dilemma here, no problem at all.

It was in reading this paragraph that I began to worry that you might’ve forgotten to take your meds. You’re all over the place man.

too much effort for a shitpost my man

Vaguely related, is this book any good?
Also do you have a working link? I'm really curious.

Dasein is not innately "superior" to the zuhandenen world, but through its will it came to dominate it, while at the same time approaching to becoming it (zuhanden).
I don't see the connection to the transhumanist singularity you're talking about

Its because causality is a characteristic of the zuhandenen world (nature). Dasein HAS free-will (that's not to say that it isn't somehow "affected" by causality, it surely is). It must for Heidegger.

remember that Heidegger had a deep and rooted understanding in ancient chinese daoism and respected buddhism (recall his dialogue with the tibetan monk)

The connection, speculative as it is, occurs in the part of the essay after Heidegger likens the pre-modern craftsman to an artist that reveals and coaxes into presence that which was not present via the 4 causes. I think it's clear technology has evolved over time, and if man is a craftsman that unconceals ever complexifying tools, then the idea that we will unconceal artificial intelligence isn't that much of a stretch (and once you have AI that can improve itself without our help before long you have the singularity, Kurzweil wet dreams etc.). Importantly H. mentions that nature is the ultimate unconcealer, which would follow that Nature’s telos is to conceivably birth AI (through the clever “but not free” naked apes that sprang from the primordial sludge). Hence, and I’m sorry i didn't spell this out more clearly, a metaphysics whose central thread is the telos to create(unconceal) some kind of omnipotent AI, would likely come from an AI creator running a simulation. Remember, this is just fun speculation.

But right after explicating the pre-modern craftsman, H. makes a move where he places the human craftsman over and above the 4 causes, imbuing him with a special status, as not beholden to nature's technophilic telos. Then he goes off the rails by describing all the ways modern technology is of a different and more cheapening then pre-modern technology which isn't important to the claim I’m trying to make. I’m interested in how H.’s argument (before the modern tech distinction) would look with a human craftsman that is not placed outside of nature, but very strictly materially determined, even if he thinks he’s being authentic.

everyone talks about AI like it's great but in reality its just gonna run the stock market and every aspect of life will be monetized and ran by banks. wanna brush your teeth? well let's run the most efficient amount of water you should use. want to eat a snack? nope, your calories have been filled today. your job will only pay you the actual minimum wage, as calculated and controlled by these programs. the rich will be living on mars and in floating cities and you'll live in a suburban prison ran by Siri.

if you even bothered to read the thread you wont get that impression

Meh Meh. Needs more Cognitive Constructivism & Cybersemiotics.

Go read some Josef Simon (Philosophy of the Sign), Heinz von Förster, Humberto Maturana, Julio Michael Stern, Soren Brier & Thomas Metzinger.

Plebs.

Nobody worry, this user has it figured out and it's nothing to worry about. We're good.