Salon Philosopher

The house philosopher of the Netanya School seeks a student

Socrates and his student  (source)

In the philosophy of the future, will is a force from the future that drives the present. There is no vision without hope, without purpose, and there can be no perception without will. Therefore, a computer without will and purpose will not perceive reality; it will only be a tool through which reality is processed, like a tool that processes the soil, as opposed to a plant that turns it into part of itself. It's a bit like Schopenhauer and Kant - categories without will and direction are merely information processing, but without knowledge. That's why our interests and tendencies so greatly influence perception - this is not a mistake or malfunction, this is how it should be. And this is how perception and knowledge are defined.

The Jewish concept of intelligence saw it as divided into three distinct categories: wisdom, understanding, and knowledge (the lowest). There is no knowledge without sexuality, hence the age of criminal responsibility is the beginning of puberty. A computer today is certainly lacking knowledge, like a deaf person, a fool, and a minor. Knowledge is a condition for responsibility and the validity of a legal act, but it is also what happens in sex, as in the tree of knowledge and in knowing a woman [Translator's note: "to know" in Biblical Hebrew can also mean "to have sexual relations with"]. Therefore, it should be understood as a minimally functioning moral perception system, which includes sex as an immanent will, that is, the interest of the biological future. That's why it begins precisely at the onset of puberty. It's not enough to just understand what's good and what's bad, but there must also be an internal motive and internal temptation - to be of sound mind. In other words, translated into philosophical terms: epistemology cannot be separated from ethics.

The most neutral will, the purest epistemological will, is the will within learning, the interest in learning - the interest itself. Because once a will from the future is involved, we need to talk less about perception and knowledge and more about learning. And here, the computer is the best laboratory to understand epistemology - a gift that technology has given to philosophy. Because in a situation where mere information absorption is not enough and we understand that knowledge cannot be disconnected from the desire to know, and therefore knowledge is always part of learning, then the categories themselves in computerized (and human!) learning stem from the very desire to learn and generalize, otherwise they have no justification.

The categories are not just an addition of information processing, but they have an aspect of progress, of constant improvement, and of purpose (for example, prediction). Therefore, the more the goal will be will, that is, less of a force entirely under your control towards the future, and more of a force from the future that drives, something that captures you from within, like sex or interest, the more the computer's perception will be knowledge. And here lies a great message for the world of spirit - in the transition to a philosophy of learning, which is a more sophisticated version of the philosophy of the future, for the next generation.

Because a central goal of philosophy in the world of spirit is to secularize and explain spiritual miracles - to find explanations for them. For example, to explain the inconceivable effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Or the miracle of Athens and the Bible. Or the miracle in which the world so fits and confirms our preconceptions (this is Kant, for instance). Or the psychophysical miracle (Descartes), or the very ability to recognize concepts in a material world (the Greeks), or the miracle that language works (Wittgenstein). And one of the last miracles that the science of philosophy has not solved is the miracle that Hegel tried to solve: how everything always happens together. The miracle of interdisciplinary synchronization.

How is it possible that in a certain period, the same idea can be found starting in so many independent places in the world of spirit? For example, language in the twentieth century, which suddenly appeared in every possible discipline, including empirical discoveries in many exact sciences (such as genetics, computer science and mathematics, various information theories in physics), and in countless unrelated geographical locations simultaneously, and not after they read Wittgenstein, or were influenced, but autonomously. In fact, the opposite is true - Wittgenstein received his aura of tremendous influence precisely because of the rise of the idea of language in every possible place. This is the miracle of the accumulation of trends, which Hegel tried to explain with the help of another spiritual miracle - the spirit that drives the world, which is like trying to explain a miracle through God.

But, and this is perhaps the work of philosophy in every period, and the work of the historian in past periods, when there are many different trends in the world - it is often possible to find one or two dimensions that explain them - or do most of the work, and everything else is relatively small variations on them. In linear algebra, there can be a very complicated matrix on the surface, of vectors influencing in different directions, but if you find the eigenvectors, you understand in which dimensions to look at the matrix so that in them it is simple and understandable. The miracle was a miracle only if it had prophetic value, meaning it was unlikely. But if there are many parallel ideological directions in philosophy, and one of them is more sensitive to change than others, and therefore manages to capture it more accurately, and to point in the exact direction of the vector that explains the matrix in the best way - this is the great philosopher of the period.

And if its explanatory value is not too great, and can be related to natural processes, then there is no enormous miracle in the fact that the world of spirit does not disperse into countless different trends, but in each period there is a seemingly coordinated trend. That is, the value of finding this general direction is educational. To understand the past. But there is no way to derive the future from it, as Hegel or Marx wanted. If you are an especially great philosopher - then you can understand the present.

The important philosophers of each period and its central intellectuals are the eigenvectors of the spirit, which span its possibilities. And so it is in literature with the central writers, and so on. And that's why they are remembered, because not the entire matrix is important, but only the new directions they spanned in that period, and these are the exemplary writers and thinkers. The exemplarity is a compression of the history of the spirit. And that's why it's so rich, almost illogical in its layers - another apparent miracle, which as part of the great secularization of the spirit will also die.