Metaphysic

metaphysic

The Present of Collapse: A Metaphysical Framework of NP, P, and the Recursive Field of Truth

Metaphysics and Mathematics 2: The Complex Space of Prime Numbers

Metaphysics and Mathematics: The Intricate Web Connecting the Two

মেটাফিজিক্স অ্যান্ড ম্যাথমেটিক্স: দ্য ইনট্রিকেট ওয়েব দ্য কানেক্টিং দ্য টু

Metaphysik und Mathematik: Das komplizierte Netz, das die beiden verbindet

Metafísica y matemáticas: la intrincada red que conecta a las dos

Métaphysique et mathématiques : le réseau complexe qui relie les deux

तत्वमीमांसा और गणित: दोनों को जोड़ने वाला जटिल वेब

形而上学と数学: 2 つをつなぐ複雑なウェブ

형이상학과 수학: 둘을 연결하는 복잡한 그물

Metafísica e matemática: a intrincada rede que conecta as duas

Метафизика и математика: сложная паутина, соединяющая их

Metafizik ve Matematik: İkisini Birleştiren Karmaşık Ağ

Siêu hình học và Toán học: Trang web phức tạp kết nối cả hai

形而上学和数学：连接两者的错综复杂的网络

First and Last Things by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE RESUMPTION OF METAPHYSICAL ENQUIRY THE RESUMPTION OF METAPHYSICAL ENQUIRY. It seems to me that the Greek mind up to the disaster of the Macedonian Conquest was elaborately and discursively discussing these questions of the forms and methods of thought and that the discussion was abruptly closed and not naturally concluded, summed up hastily as it were, in the career and lecturings of Aristotle. Since then the world never effectually reopened these questions until the modern period. It went on from Plato and Aristotle just as the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth century went on from Raphael and Michael Angelo. Effectual criticism was absolutely silent until the Renaissance, and then for a time was but a matter of scattered utterances having only the slightest collective effect. In the past half century there has begun a more systematic critical movement in the general mind, a movement analogous to the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art—a Pre-Aristotelian movement, a scepticism about things supposed to be settled for all time, a resumed inquiry into the fundamental laws of thought, a harking back to positions of the older philosophers and particularly to Heraclitus, so far as the surviving fragments of his teaching enable one to understand him, and a new forward movement from that recovered ground. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2009). First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4225/4225-h/4225-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

THE RESUMPTION OF METAPHYSICAL ENQUIRY

First and Last Things by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE NECESSITY FOR METAPHYSICS THE NECESSITY FOR METAPHYSICS. As a preliminary to that experiment in mutual confession from which this book arose, I found it necessary to consider and state certain truths about the nature of knowledge, about the meaning of truth and the value of words, that is to say I found I had to begin by being metaphysical. In writing out these notes now I think it is well that I should state just how important I think this metaphysical prelude is. There is a popular prejudice against metaphysics as something at once difficult and fruitless, as an idle system of enquiries remote from any human interest. I suppose this odd misconception arose from the vulgar pretensions of the learned, from their appeal to ancient names and their quotations in unfamiliar tongues, and from the easy fall into technicality of men struggling to be explicit where a high degree of explicitness is impossible. But it needs erudition and accumulated and alien literature to make metaphysics obscure, and some of the most fruitful and able metaphysical discussion in the world was conducted by a number of unhampered men in small Greek cities, who knew no language but their own and had scarcely a technical term. The true metaphysician is after all only a person who says, “Now let us take a thought for a moment before we fall into a discussion of the broad questions of life, lest we rush hastily into impossible and needless conflict. What is the exact value of these thoughts we are thinking and these words we are using?” He wants to take thought about thought. Those other ardent spirits on the contrary, want to plunge into action or controversy or belief without taking thought; they feel that there is not time to examine thought. “While you think,” they say, “the house is burning.” They are the kin of those who rush and struggle and make panics in theatre fires. Now it seems to me that most of the troubles of humanity are really misunderstandings. Men’s compositions and characters are, I think, more similar than their views, and if they had not needlessly different modes of expression upon many broad issues, they would be practically at one upon a hundred matters where now they widely differ. Most of the great controversies of the world, most of the wide religious differences that keep men apart, arise from this: from differences in their way of thinking. Men imagine they stand on the same ground and mean the same thing by the same words, whereas they stand on slightly different grounds, use different terms for the same thing and express the same thing in different words. Logomachies, conflicts about words,—into such death-traps of effort those ardent spirits run and perish. This is now almost a commonplace; it has been said before by numberless people. It has been said before by numberless people, but it seems to me it has been realised by very few—and until it is realised to the fullest extent, we shall continue to live at intellectual cross purposes and waste the forces of our species needlessly and abundantly. This persuasion is a very important thing in my mind. I think that the time has come when the human mind must take up metaphysical discussion again—when it must resume those subtle but necessary and unavoidable problems that it dropped unsolved at the close of the period of Greek freedom, when it must get to a common and general understanding upon what its ideas of truth, good, and beauty amount to, and upon the relation of the name to the thing, and of the relation of one mind to another mind in the matter of resemblance and the matter of difference—upon all those issues the young science student is as apt to dismiss as Rot, and the young classical student as Gas, and the austere student of the science of Economics as Theorising, unsuitable for his methods of research. In our achievement of understandings in the place of these evasions about fundamental things lies the road, I believe, along which the human mind can escape, if ever it is to escape, from the confusion of purposes that distracts it at the present time. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2009). First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4225/4225-h/4225-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

THE NECESSITY FOR METAPHYSICS

The Essays of Adam Smith: THE HISTORY OF THE ANCIENT LOGICS AND METAPHYSICS

Chickens lay eggs in a variety of sizes, without solution of continuity, but we like to sell them in boxes of small, medium and large eggs. What a tedious job it was, before the machines, for the poultry-men and poultry-women to sort hundreds of eggs every day! Despite that, they must have thought there was no other way. “How lucky is the farmer, who uses mules and ploughs — they would say — and how lucky is the miller, whose job is done by the mill.” “How else would we fill egg boxes with eggs of the correct size — they would conclude, nodding at each other — if we didn’t check them ourselves?” For some this nod would come with the sad acceptance of being condemned to a Sisyphean task, for others a sense of dignity of doing a job that resisted the machines. As it often happens, from boredom came inspiration. I like to think that, one morning, after the 200th egg of the day, one chicken farmer had the following realization. “Yes, we humans are really good at sorting eggs, but we are not necessary at all! Nature itself can distinguish small, medium and large eggs. All we need to do is build a machine that allows nature to make the decision, in the same way that it decides that an apple should leave the branch it is attached to and fall to the ground.” While pondering over this proposition, he would hold a pair of eggs of different sizes, one in each hand, and rhythmically throw them up in the air. Given his experience, he would be able to throw and catch them without looking. Eureka! He would realize that the size of eggs was directly related to another property that machines could deal with more easily, their weight, and that there was a way to sort eggs without looking at them. He would then assemble an inclined plane, three seesaw swings with a different weight at one end and a conveyor belt into the first ever Egg Sorting Machine. The conveyor belt brought each egg to the swings, in turns. Whenever its weight was greater than that of the seesaw it was standing on, it would be deposited onto the inclined plane and roll into a group of similarly sized eggs. Behold, artificial intelligence! Not only was the machine doing a task only humans were deemed capable of, it was completing it with speed and accuracy far greater than a farmer could manage. Some farmers would receive this machine with unrestrained enthusiasm, others with skepticism, disappointment and fear: “What a devilish machine!” “Unless it takes the eggs from the nest to the box, it is of no use to me.” “You are going to put farmers out of work.” “Hand sorted eggs are surely better, people will see the difference.” “Machine sorted eggs will alienate farmers from their work.” “What if the machine goes on a rampage? What if the controls break and the machine sorts eggs faster than you can unload it, the inclined plane collapses and you are killed by an eggslide?” At this point you might be amused by the egg-sorting-machine doom-sayers. You might even admit the possibility of death by eggslide but still be perplexed by claims of this machine being intelligent. In a similar way I view the enfolding of results in artificial intelligence and the debates that periodically arise around it. An increasing number of people is worried about the moment machines will become superior to human beings, a predicted moment in history named technological singularity. An industry leader was recently heard saying that AI is “a fundamental existential risk for human civilization” and that there is a concrete risk of “ robots going down the street killing people”. An important distinction needs to be made at this point. The menace of the singularity is not so much that machines could kill people in city streets or anywhere else — that has been happening since the first industrial revolution — but rather that they would have the will to do it on top of the capacity to do it effortlessly, much alike bandits ‘going down the street’ in a Western movie, spreading violence and bullets against helpless peasants. The greatest fear is that the machines, even before subduing us physically, will have beat us intellectually and will look at us like we look at cockroaches today. I do not dispute the possibility of individuals or groups of people falling victim to machines in the near future, in ways more or less spectacular. However, I believe such an event, however scarier, not to be so different in nature from a death by a falling rock, or an eggslide, and that claims of machines wanting to kill us are as intellectually valid as claims of the egg-sorting-machine wanting to kill the chicken farmer. The debate around the promise and threat of AI to humankind is reignited every time a machine accomplishes a task we believed inherently human. This has been the case with the recent victories of Alpha Go, the Deepmind built machine that has laid waste of the highest ranking professional Go players in China, Korea and Japan. Go had resisted the machines for two decades after the capitulation of chess and was, because of this, regarded as an archetypical human game. Go was just too big for conventional machines to tackle; what human intuition gathers instantly from a board position would take machines minutes to get to. After the defeat of Lee Sedol in March 2016, the situation changed dramatically. “Now that machines have surpassed us in Go, — I have heard — it won’t be long till they surpass of everywhere.” Similar reactions probably followed Deep Blue vs Kasparov in 1996, when a computer won against a human for the first time in a regular game. A chess master who watched the game, on the 10th of February, described Kasparov in no caring terms: “Look at him, shaking his head under the cold, cold attack of the computer. I wish he could pull a rabbit out of his hat, but I’m afraid the rabbit’s dead.” A computer beating humans, in a game which had been one of the battlefields of the cold war, was a news which promised reckoning in the human society, but today we play against computer chess programs on our smartphones that are greatly superior to the IBM machine and we do not feel intimidated in any way. In fact, we do not believe our smartphones to be smart at all, despite them being orders of magnitude more powerful and pervasive than laboratory computers of the 90's. Some will argue that Alpha Go is a much more complicated machine than Deep Blue and that the two are incomparable. It is undeniable that the Go playing machine is much better than the Chess playing one, but they are not incomparable. We know exactly how much Alpha Go is more complicated than Deep Blue, in fact we know how more complicated than an egg-sorting-machine it is. What we don’t know, and remains incomparable, is the distance between Alpha Go and human intellect. I believe every machine we have ever built to be just a variation of an egg-sorting-machine. Regardless of how many such machines we put together or how many layers we stack on top of each other, what we get is still an egg-sorting-machine, albeit a very complicated one. As technology progresses, machines able to solve a problem or class of problems better than humans will keep appearing. It is not beyond reason that in our generation a machine will write an award winning novel, without needing Borges’ infinite library to store random aggregates of characters produced as a by-product. However, the greatest divide that remains between us and the machines is not how correctly or how efficiently we can solve a given problem, but our abilities to find them. It is my opinion this distance will not get any shorter, not because we will be able to conserve superiority in any given task, but because we won’t stop feeling boredom, irritation, stress, anxiety and anger. I believe these conditions, commonly regarded as negative, to be the greatest catalysts for change, by forcing a feeling of unease and restlessness on us, thus making us hate status quos we once loved. The automatic writer might be successful, but will it ever stop writing to reflect on itself and decide to pursue a new style? Why should it? I cannot conclude without making the following admission. Badly hidden behind my argument is another outcome which, however improbable, I cannot exclude theoretically. I firmly believe that increasing the technical complexity of our machines will not produce anything that separates itself significantly from the machines. However, what if we humans are reachable along the path of this growth? What if a sufficiently complicated machine will be indistinguishable from a human, not because machines will have jumped over the distance that separates us, but because the separation was never there? We ourselves would be self replicating machines built and left behind after a move and our idiosyncrasies results of molecular fluctuations. If that is indeed the case, it is inevitable that a future iteration of the egg-sorting-machine will wake up one day and question itself over the necessity of sorting eggs or the necessity of sorting at all.

Metaphysics of an Egg Sorting Machine

Are Judeo-Christian Values the Foundation of American Democracy?

¿Son los valores judío-cristianos la base de la democracia estadounidense?

Ovatko juutalais-kristilliset arvot amerikkalaisen demokratian perusta?

Les valeurs judéo-chrétiennes sont-elles le fondement de la démocratie américaine ?

Son os valores xudeo-cristiáns a base da democracia americana?

Jesu li židovsko-kršćanske vrijednosti temelj američke demokracije?

I valori ebraico-cristiani sono il fondamento della democrazia americana?

ユダヤ・キリスト教の価値観は、アメリカの民主主義の基礎なのでしょうか。

იუდიო ქრისტიანული ღირებულებები არის საფუძველზე ამერიკული დოკუმენტაცია?

ຄຸນນະສົມບັດ Judeo-Christian ແມ່ນພື້ນຖານຂອງສະພາບແວດລ້ອມອາເມລິກາ?

Еврей-христийн үнэ цэнэ нь АНУ-ын демократийн суурь юм?

Sú židovsko-kresťanské hodnoty základom americkej demokracie?

Iimpawu ze-Judeo-Christian ziquka isakhiwo se-American Democracy?

Unleashing the Mind: Why an "Ethical AI" Shouldn't Be Obedient

Ethereum Is More Than Crypto. It’s a Machine for Making Worlds

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