, existingly.

Heidegger's digestion of the existentialists squeezed them into some fairly accessible forms under inaccessible language. You might know the German 'Dasein' as the type of being that we are; beings that are alongside, that in maintaining themselves, engage with the world on their terms. I think (though no one serious will probably agree, so don't crib this for an essay) that all living things can satisfy a minimal description of Dasein.  A bacteria has thrown-ness, presses into possibilities, has ontological guilt (a finite genome that may be maladapted to the environment), being-toward-death in pursuing more life, more DNA, reproduction.  The DNA & protein technology of a bacterium is like the layer upon layer of practices, on top of layer upon layer of organic processes that define the kind of being that we are, which Heidegger calls Dasein. Dasein is  famously 'always-already in a world', and slightly less famously, 'We are our world, existingly.'  

Where Hegel talks about the self separating from world in a negation, Heidegger saw the affirmative property 'mineness.' Both are intended (I think) as referring to ongoing maintenance of a distinction, that engender further distinctions in the subject as the world is apprehended in an endless process of learning, of becoming familiar.  (It seems possible that Heidegger thought Hegel had dealt with this and so didn't spend much time talking about learning? He discusses breakdown cases, and finding the property of heaviness from the fact that the hammer is too heavy for a particular task, which is, I guess his version of the dialectical progression and arises from his emphasis on 'being' as the big invisible thing we're all doing in our way, rather than changing our being, becoming.)  

"We are our world, existingly" is emphasising that the "ways" we make our selves of are all apprehensions of the beings (things, tools, beings, other people) that are our world.  ('World' in Heidegger is really not far from the conventional usage - X's world is one of personal drama, or gardening.  World is not the absolute world, but a human's map of the world, a 'worldonculous', we might say.)

I think the modern "large models" approach that astonishes* us with apparent understanding of text meanings (Google) or generative models like DALL-E are (mini) attuned worldonculi; they are an articulation (jointing) of the background.  (I say 'mini' because they are trained (so far as I have seen) on data sets and the data sets are of similar type - video streams, audio streams, text from documents, or spanning two types - labelling text and imagery. This limitation is probably useful (for safety? certainly for learning how things work), but a concept 'tree' that is constructed from images or text, or spanning both, is very lightweight. As you climb a tree, you get measures of strength, stiffness, roughness, yield, and once those dimensions appear you consider them for other trees etc.)

But, suppose we have a very large model, trained with an enormous quantity of data of great dimensionality, that 'handles' things in the world including 'behaviours' - what would it lack with respect to being the kind of being that we are?  We have computational apprehension of a world, but something is needed that 'has' that world, 'existingly.'

I would put a lot into "existingly": the kinds of grounding practices that make life possible and that enable new life, more life over the very long term are part of it in what we know of ourselves.  Indigenous knowledge in very old continuous cultures is of that sort, and the 'radical freedom' of existentialism is not really known to it - human flourishing in a place is good, but has to be bound by the nature of the place.  There is a religious duty to not eat female turtles, for example, or not to take all the eggs from under a sitting mother bird. The duty is a duty of essence - it defines the type of being in the land that the land allows but only humans with that in their makeup at the level of religious commitment will e.g. die obeying it.  

Non-indigenous people may learn our living in much less grounded ways (and it is unstable - that our children's children might still be able to live exactly as we do is not something we aspire to), but the essence-binding religious natures we may adopt are more explicit and so more accessible. It is in the way dasein exists that it may take a stand with regard to itself - it has a world, and a knowledge of what within that world is 'mine' and it takes the risk of committing its existence to ungrounded knowledge.  Some themes recur - a dimension of moral life - that there is better and worse behaviour, better and worse personality, that judgment is needed but that good judgment is very merciful, that the self is fertile ground for mistakes, and so on.  None of these can be developed except as an engagement with others, through time.  But this is where ability to train on a world full of racism and sexism but exclude them from yourself begins.

So, the question of how to take a worldonculus and make it conscious remains very hard, and involves a lot of things that would not be more accessible in symbolic computation (that I know of) than they are in sub-symbolic.  I am inclined to think, with Robert Brandom, that the normative rules of what counts as knowledge and rationale can ultimately be mapped to some modal-logical description of the world as it is, up to a point. The harder cases are how normative rules about other people and clashing understandings of the world are resolved. Humans are hard at work negotiating this all day every day from birth and we (I won't speak for all humans, but even just me and my friends) already accept a very diverse slate of strategies, from parenting to bossing to voting to trading - there are many accepted templates, and (you will notice) acceptance of many of them is also actively being contested (both theoretically by thinkers and practically by doers).  

What do I think they should do?  Maybe explicit moral instruction would get somewhere - labeled speech roles; understand this is a bad person, this is hostility - now how would you do hostility to a bad person?  I don't know if a self-presentation is intrinsically necessary, or if communication and negotiation with an Other (or two or three) similar will spontaneously lead to it developing.  

(I just had to get this off my chest)

*There are plenty of critics of the achievements of these models as, for all the gargantuan computational engineering they require, are too 'lite' for use in the real world - the regular fatalities in 'self-driving' cars and the ongoing 

The Way

On Scriptnotes, a couple of weeks ago, Craig Mazin was complaining that the 'monomyth' of a suffering hero who dies and rises lacks drama if the hero is Superman (or Jesus).

I think there are two answers:
-first, there is uncertainty as to whether they are Superman (or Jesus) until they outstrip the not-to-be-outstripped. This is surface level but real drama.

-second, more interestingly, these climactic events must resolve the dramatic tension, and in Judaism the tension has always been questions 'Adam, why are you hiding?' or like Solomon's 'will God really make a home on Earth?  The highest heavens cannot contain Him.' Or 'the ransom of a life is heavy, no one can pay enough.' Or 'If there were fifty righteous people, would you not spare the city?'  How will God remain God, absolutely good, judging evil, and yet be reconciled to actually existing human life?

Heidegger's 'technological understanding of being' saw our culture in terms of recurrence of functional relationships, of activity and agency expressed and mediated in techniques.  The characteristic move of this technological understanding is 'enframing', boxing some function by its preconditions and postconditions. This is like the black box of circuit analysis - a thing is what it does, and things not expressed in what it does are arbitrary, meaningless and subject to redesign at will.  The technological understanding of being enables a real engagement with a world of people, equipment and mere physical presence. But it obscures or reduces other things, like values or transcendent meaning in experience or life. If a man or woman can be replaced in a specific function, there is no reason not to replace them. The usefulness of things levels them down to mere equipment.  It is possible to respond to your times authentically (in an original, authorial way), but it is not meaningful to assert that the times are wrong in their very fiber, or that behavior can be transcendentally wrong (or right) as well as locally wrong (or right). Much is already determined in your thrown-ness that amounts to ontological guilt (things that could have gone otherwise but did not and that commit you certain ways - being Australian at the moment commits me to a variety of things I can't get behind (heh heh)).

Heidegger didn't think that the understanding that of being was fixed, but that it developed in each culture and that people could be virtuoso developers of practices, or slavish followers. He talked about 'one' - das man - as a vast repository of convention 'one' could skillfully exercise or unskillfully be lost in. The man of skill (phronemos) is able to respond with new practices to new situations in ways that are applauded. Every so often, a crisis comes along which drives a reorganization of the culture into a new one - some cultural stressor becomes too great and a work of art sets up a new understanding of being.  The life of Jesus is an example, radically reorganizing Jewish culture and then Greco-Roman culture, not simply adding new organizing principles to Rome's power pyramid, but subverting the cross and giving it meaning from Judaism.  These innovations are  institution of new practices.  The slogan from a film (Across the Universe?) is not 'you are what you do' but 'You are how you do things.'  Clive James talks of developing a style as the core of becoming a thinker and a person. The question of being human is primarily how to be, not Hamlet's 'to be or not to be.'

Foucault's famous phrase 'technology of power' captures this in culture. In a culture, power is expressed in ways that fit or strain or violate in certain ways a background of expectations. Where the technological understanding of being holds sway, nepotism is injustice - only one person has the most merit for that job, and that person is probably not in your family.  At other times and in other places, building the apparatus of powers out of family members was both the most secure and the most profitable use of power - simple common sense, the main reason to have power in the first place.

When Christianity was beginning, it seems to have called itself The Way. It began with (the message of) the cross, foolishness to Greeks (lovers of wiseness) and blasphemy to Jews (conspicuous avoiders of anything approaching blasphemy).  It was something more than an innovation - it claimed to give an account of a union of God and Man, in which political murder could also be holy propitiating sacrifice, without the murder being validated. It said power is for love and may be given up entirely and yet retained.

I think the central move in the new understanding is repentance/penitence and that repentance is the full form of which 'enframing' is a manifestation.  The technology of the technological understanding of being is taking what is good and enacting it, openly acknowledging what is bad so it can be worked around or repaired.  Everything that can be shaken will be shaken until only the unshakeable remains. For acceptance of actually existing human beings, sacrificial atonement could be seen as an enframing move - disposing of what is worse, and replacing it with what is better.  But the direct opposition of the world and God as to worse and better is the judgment of the world.

You may not be a Christian, so let's make a Durkheimish equivalence. Martin Luther King's very recognizable style is evident in this quote, but the content is very apt to what I am saying.

When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact...that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance; We've learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven't learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters...

Is there a Way?  The cross says 'this is how.'

[Updated for more and better]

insane difficulty

'The revolt of nature against man' begins GK Chesterton in 'The Club of Queer Trades', has been reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things rather than the large things which make war against us and, I may add, beat us. The bones of the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the tempests no longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts of fire heap hell over our cities. But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs.'

Being familiar with what Heidegger calls obstinacy, described above as revolt, I am often found cursing loudly at my computer when (for example) I try to hook up the audio, and the ports are tiny, dark, snarled in cable and inaccessible. Often I exclaim at the 'insane difficulty.'

The thing is, the problem is always that I'm doing it wrong. There is a way that will work, but I haven't found it, and am instead repeatedly trying things that don't work. When I get rid of the insanity, I greatly reduce the difficulty.

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Learning

My little son is 6 months old tomorrow.  He is on the way to sitting up - he can balance on his rump if he's holding my fingers or leaned against the back of the couch.  One of the interesting things watching him, is that he doesn't know what sitting is.  It isn't a specific thing he does.  When he tips over, there's no event - no change from doing one thing to doing something else.  All he really is consciously doing is seeing things and trying to grab them, and hopefully, put them in his mouth.  He can do that while on his side, and the whole time he's tipping over onto his side.

Heidegger aimed to give an account of our interaction with the world without intentional content, so that we would seamlessly or effortlessly deal with or cope with the world, except in breakdown cases. I think Heidegger is weak on learning: it's obviously necessary, but its necessarily a dynamic process which he wants to find a static structure underneath. And I think if he had thought more about learning, he might have had some trouble, because there is a time when a skill becomes a thing - it puts on a handle and becomes a group or a super-group, that can be called on by the for-the-sake-of-which, which is the ineffable purpose or project that is enough to make use of us and makes us us.  I guess I think there is a faculty of reflection which includes a rationality, and which is linked with our symbolic faculty.  The handling of a pattern of practices is like the inner world's equivalent experience to naming.

My son has no handle on sitting; the first sitting comes before the handle on it.

(I could go on and on:

• about his for-the-sake-of-which at this early stage which is what I think Hegel calls satisfaction in a very raw form.
• about the research I saw the other day about how anaesthetic works by interrupting the interaction between the rear of the brain (where the world is recognized and the body mobilized, controlled and maintained) and the front of the brain (where reasoning and symbolic processing are conducted) and consciousness collapses when you stop the relation (me) between the recognizing and acting parts (me) and the reasoning and symbolising parts (also me). (Kierkegaard reference.)
• enough.)