- tags
- Cybernetics
Notes
Dedication
Epilogue
Contents
Acknowledgments
At times this book may appear to be a historical-critical exposition of the subject, but I would not want to pretend that it is a work of history. It is first and foremost a study in the philosophy of technology. It aims to provide a critical analysis of Martin Heidegger’s assertion that cybernetics marks the historical culmination of metaphysics and the end of philosophy, and suggests ways of moving beyond the current technological paradigm toward what I call a multiple cosmotechnics.
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Preface
Introduction: A Psychedelic Becoming
primarily a treatise on cybernetics.
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interrogating the concept of the organic, a concept that marks a rupture with the dominating mechani- cal worldview of early modernity.
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study the genesis of systems according to two guiding concepts: recursivity and contin- gency.
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§1. Adventure of Reason
since the publication of Kant’s third Critique in 1790, the concept of the organic has been the new condition of philosophizing.
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What is the meaning of “the organic”? Instead of following conven- tional discourses in biology, this book proposes to analyze it accord- ing to the two key concepts of recursivity and contingency.
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organic mechanism, in which the organism is considered as a nonlinear algorithm producing complexity beyond the grasp of the understanding;
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organicism, which emphasizes the whole (community) and the exchange between the parts (reciprocity);
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Recursivity is not mere mechanical repetition; it is characterized by the looping move- ment of returning to itself in order to determine itself, while every movement is open to contingency, which in turn determines its singu- larity.
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Recursion is both structural and operational, through which the opposition between being and becoming is sublated.
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The singularity of every being is constituted by the play of recursivity and contingency.
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§2. Invisible Nature, Visible Mind
While in a circular loop, the beginning is only tem- poral, but not necessarily a cause.14 The cause is the totality of the loop.
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This image of the prime mover is the fantasy of the epoch of mechanism, because mechanism presupposes a linear causality.
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In Giordano Bruno’s philosophy of nature,16 as well as Spinozism or the doctrine attributed to it (pantheism), God is immanent, since it is no longer conceived of as a deity who is somewhere outside of the earth, but rather as the internal principle of motion.
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takes the mind and nature as two analogical structures and operations, as in his famous claims that mind is invisible nature and nature invisible mind.
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If one goes to a concert, the chance of being killed by a falling stone on the street is one of the possibilities
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§3. Contingency and Finality
§4. Beyond Mechanism and Vitalism
the continuation of this organic condition of philosophizing gave us organicism and organology in the twentieth century.
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organicism is what stands between mechanism and vitalism.
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Driesch found that a half can also develop into a whole: There is a vital force in the organism that cannot be exhausted by mechani- cal explanation.
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“cell is not a name for a thing but for a type of organisation,”
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noise here stands for contingency and, against meaning, acquires a negative meaning. When a machine learning algorithm is added to the amplifier it is possible that this algorithm will make good use of noise; in other words, contingency acquires a positive meaning,
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§5. The Great Completion
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Feedback is used not only to comprehend being as such—see- ing being as looping processes—but also to grasp being as a whole—a whole in the sense of the Greek to panta. This trajectory from being as such to being as a whole in cybernetics also characterizes the pas- sage from first-order cybernetics to second-order cybernetics, of which Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory is one of the highest achievements.
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Luhmann famously claimed that “the system emerges et si no daretur Deus (even if God doesn’t exist),”
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The system absorbs contingency by turning it into something prob- able—that is to say, that which is expected.
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On the one hand, technologies become more and more specialized; on the other hand, there is a totalizing tendency that is effectuating.
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he is “caught in a milieu and in a process, which causes all his activities, even those apparently having no voluntary direction, to contribute to technological growth, whether or not he thinks about it, whether or not he wishes it.”41 The technical system has become a superorganism
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Moloch
modernity should be understood not as an epoch but rather as the capacity to tolerate contingency, which is called resilience today.
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if we follow Needham and others in saying that the organicism of Whitehead and neo-Confucianism is the antidote to mechanism, and cybernetics is that which surpasses mechanism in the West, will cybernetics be the superior war machine and what will be its appropriation?
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§6. The Conflict of Organs
Stiegler sees a third type of heredity, one that is nei- ther somatic nor genetic but rather technical.
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Cosmotechnics means primarily the unification of moral and cosmic order through technical activities;
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§7. After Ecology, before Solar Catastrophe
automata are eliminating contingency on one level—the level of calculative reason (like replacing Paul the octopus with a machine learning algorithm to predict the World Cup champions)—and elevat- ing it to another level—the level of speculative reason.
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The incalculable is the preindividual reality with which the soul is able to elevate, to unfold itself, that is to say, to exercise its freedom.
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cf Privacy as Protection of the Incomputable Self
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§8. The Future Cosmologists
is it possible to have an absolute contingency, a contingency that cannot be absorbed at all and that exceeds any expectation?
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For Meillassoux, absolute contingency is an attempt to break away from the nature and mind correlation, to go behind it to show that it is possible to have a new epistemological foundation. This epistemological foundation does not start from the Absolute as Unbedingt but from the Absolute as contingent.
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the Absolute has to be posited outside thoughts, outside the reach of the mind, outside all causalities.
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Chapter 1
Nature and Recursivity
§9. Kant and the Model of System
§10. The Organic Condition of Philosophy
§11. Recursivity in Fichte’s Ich
§12. Circularity in Soul and Nature
§13. Recursivity in Naturphilosophie
§14. Organicist and Ecological Paradigm
§15. General Organism, Gaia, or Artificial Earth
Chapter 2
Logic and Contingency
§16. Recursivity in the Phenomenology of Spirit
§17. Organicist and Reflective Logic
§18. “Feebleness of the Notion in Nature”
§19. Death of Nature as Affirmation of Logic
§20. General Recursivity and Turing Machine
§21. Wiener’s Leibnizianism
§22. Cybernetics of Cybernetics
§24. Incomputability and Algorithmic Contingency
Chapter 3
Organized Inorganic
§ 25. From Organicism to Organology
§27. Descartes and the Mechanical Organs
§28. Kant as Philosopher of Technology
§29. Organology in Creative Evolution
§30. Norms and Accidents
§31. The Uncanny Fire
Chapter 4
Organizing Inorganic
§32. Universal Cybernetics, General Allagmatic
§33. Recursivity in Psychic and Collective Individuation
§34. An Organology of Contingency
§35. Nature or Art
§36. Tertiary Protention and Preemption
§37. Inorganic Organicity or Ecology
§38. The Principle of Ground
Chapter 5
The Inhuman That Remains
§39. Postmodernity and Recursivity
§40. Technosphere or Christogenesis
§41. Inhuman contra System
§42. Contingency after System, or Technodiversity
§43. Sensibility and Passibility
§44. Organicism, Organology, and Cosmotechnics
Bibliography
Index
About the Author