**Links to**: [[Poltergeist in the machine]], [[Machine]], [[Ghost]], [[Spectre]], [[Self]], [[Illusion]], [[Lingua franca]], [[Lingua]], [[Meat]], [[Ghost]], [[Phantom limbs]], [[Meat puppet]], [[Xpectator]], [[Collective consciousness]], [[Collective intentionality]], [[Noise]]. # (P O L T E R) G E I S T The etymology of enthusiasm comes to mind: _enthousiazein_; _entheos_, i.e., possessed by (a) god. #todo %% Philosophical Investigations: §36, Wittgenstein: “where our language suggests a body and there is none, there, we should like to say, is a spirit.” (check citation) making a point about how metaphors and physical reality are out of phase, spirits or immaterial entity comes in when we speak of things like thoughts, emotions, etc. ’Mind’ no longer ‘goes more ghostly than a ghost.’” (McCulloch and Pitts 1943, 132). First Hegel, collective int, then polter + noise. Musing on William James’ “No tower of turtles”, as in, no infinite regress, Wheeler asks: “Is existence thus built on "insubstantial nothingness"? Rutherford and Bohr made a table no less solid when they told us it was 99.9... percent emptiness. Thomas Mann may exaggerate when he suggestel that "... we are actually bringing about what seems to be happening to us," but Leibniz reassures us that "although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.” Wheeler in Zurek, 1990, p. 8. “Many of my undergraduate students, some actively involved in the struggle for global justice, stare blankly at my mention of the death of the subject. “The death of whom?” they ask, demanding clarification. After my initial surprise, I usually find myself trying to explain why the political significance of his death derives precisely from the ontoepistemological irrelevance of his death: the subject may be dead, I tell them, but his ghost—the tools and the raw mate- rial used in his assemblage —remain with us.” xxiii [[Toward a Global Idea of Race]], [[Denise Ferreira da Silva]] "La muerte (o su alusión) hace preciosos y patéticos a los hombres. Éstos conmueven por su condición de fantasmas; cada acto que ejecutan puede ser último; no hay rostro que no esté por desdibujarse como el rostro de un sueño. Todo, entre los mortales, tiene el valor de lo irrecuperable y de lo azaroso. Entre los Inmortales, en cambio, cada acto (y cada pensamiento) es el eco de otros que en el pasado lo antecedieron, sin principio visible, o el fiel presagio de otros que en el futuro o repetirán hasta el vértigo. No hay cosa que no esté como perdida entre infatigables espejos. Nada puede ocurrir una sola vez, nada es preciosamente precario. Lo elegiaco, lo grave, lo ceremonial, no rigen para los Inmortales. Homero y yo nos separamos en las puertas de Tánger; creo que no nos dijimos adiós." 541-2, el inmortal, [[Borges]] "Antes (para que no supiera nunca que era un fantasma, para que se creyera un hombre como los otros) le infundió el olvido total de sus años de aprendizaje. ... Con alivio, con humillación, con terror, comprendió que él también era una apariencia, que otro estaba soñándolo." Las ruinas circulares ________ “but as Derrida underlines in his interviews in the Ghost Dance flm, psychoanalysis is also a sscience of ghosts’, a study of how reverberant events in the psyche become revenants” (Fisher, 27). _________ ‘[Thought] episodes are “in” language-using animals as molecular impacts are “in” gases, not as “ghosts” are in “machines”’ (1997: 104). Sellars manifest, scientific, comes from [[Nihil Unbound]]. _______ “Every intelligent ghost must contain a machine.” A. Sloman But what happens when the model which models thought is thought itself? AI is no longer a computing machine but an idea about what thought can possibly be. (Reza on this, Patricia, Anil). This is the poltergeist in the machine. ______ This title tries to do a lot: it is a joke. It haunts. It links the sonic with the transcendental. It brings philosophy in, it lifts the spirit. Chasing ghosts is all we do. Ghosts can be: pasts, absences, humiliations, far-away wants and desires, etc. This work chases its own tail. Because it's fun, all animals do it. If, as Catren says, we can marry Kant to Spinoza, then Fichte, Schelling and Hegel must have been at that orgy. Descartes, the original "ghost in the machine", can maybe clear some doubts here: - (list Descartes stuff for understanding something more) ______________________ If we want to know what can a body do [[Deleuze]] and [[Guattari]] (from [[Spinoza]]), and the basic unit of life, the cell is a computer: a read-write parsing unit, then AI is the pursuit of a Artificial intelligence as excorporation: making the corpus accessible and legible. Numbers and letters have a long familial relationship. ### AI and Philosophy: numbers and letters There is nothing outside philosophy, it is the field that encompasses all fields. Speaking of things is, in a way, mathematical: the grounding of differences in a (stable) system: the simplification of complexity ([[X Simplifying complexity and complexifying simplicity]]). A connection between mathematics and philosophy, a long sought-after goal (beginning perhaps with [[Leibniz]] with universal calculus, but we could say also Buddhist thought as .... ). We cannot account for a philosophy of computation here, as our aim is that of a beginner: creating initial perspective. Add Sjoerd AI in the light notes. Automatic data processing, another body which processes a body of data. AI is a philosophical implementation process: how to render visible the way our body deals with data, i.e. with other corpora. We will distinguish between body and corpus by speaking of bodies as systems such as cells, and corpora as the affordances they grip, the things they try to bind off of the manifold of perceptions they assimilate. [[Frege]]: [[Bergson]]: [[Wittgenstein]]: Tractatus "The world is everything that is the case." Insert more quotes here. The world, the ultimate corpus: the entire thing. Then the linguistic turn: [[Marvin Minsky]]: logicist AI program. Does thinking happen in language or images? (_Language of Thought_ as systematic: Fodor and Pylyshin, images: Kosslyn). Then we get to philosophy. ### A system within a system: numbers and letters First principles: number theory and set theory: [[Cantor]] and [[Gödel]]. Hilbert: we need a new foundation (add Anil quotes and notes). Gödel and [[Unentscheidbarkheit]]: all mathematics does not fit in one parser. Gödel thought Platonic truth, out there, exists. Leading to the constructivist turn in mathematics: we cannot tell something to run infinities and get non-contradictory results. This is why, at the most basic communicative level, we _encode_. Gödel used Peano arithmetic. Writing down numbers as characters of the alphabet From [[06 Principle of Sufficient Interest]]: "As treated elsewhere (see: [[Poltergeist in the machine]]), the concept of artificial intelligence seems to play a doubly-transcendent role: on the one hand it represents itself in infinite postponement, as that which humanity has yet not achieved (i.e. the "AI effect": the perpetual moving of mileposts), providing both a semantic attractor for the pursuit of a total _other_ outside the human (which is nevertheless subservient to the human, and thus similar yet docile: AI should be able to perform tasks (in a selected few's interests)), as well as a suspension of judgment (resulting in, among other things, the apocalyptic race towards "AI ethics" resounding across institutional halls). On the other hand it brings to light the problem of transcendence, and opens up the conceptual exploration of difference: once the attempt is made to automate things such as semantics, care, confidence, desire, etc., it becomes clear that these things require (and, in fact, _are_) devoted conceptual exploration which cannot be moulded, baked and repeated." ### Tapes and tables [[Turing]]: but we can build a read-write machine that runs any possible computation; a tape with a read-write (write and erase) head, and a table with rules. Lambda calculus from Alonzo Church is another proposal: search and replace calculus, where you can run a Turing machine. Joscha Bach tells something which is funny w/ regard to the invention of [[Lambda calculus]]: Church didn't have the triangle he wanted on his typewriter, so it ended up being lambda. This speaks, in a funny way, to our reflections on numbers and letters. Church-Turing thesis: all universal computation can do the same calculations, as long as it doesn't run out of memory. Turing learned w/ Wittgenstein, don't forget. ### Boundedness versus infinity No thing exists that can perform infinity and give a result. This is what results in experiences of the sublime, what ensues contradictions are contradictions, what confuses in tautologies. Unboundedness means 3.1415.... goes on forever, but we cannot get to the last digit. So we are bounded. ### Geist See "spirit" quote under [[Concept]] heading in [[Ressentiment, Pedagogy of a Concept]]. ______ ## Normative and descriptive rationality: from nature to artifice and back T. R. Besold & S. L. Uckelman https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0952813X.2018.1430860 "Rationality plays a key role in both the study of human reasoning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Certain notions of rationality have been adopted in AI as guides for the development of intelligent machines and these notions have been given a normative function. The notions of rationality in AI are often taken to be closely related to conceptions of rationality in human contexts. In this paper, we argue that the normative role of rationality differs in the human and artificial contexts. While rationality in human-focused fields of study is normative, prescribing how humans ought to reason, the normative conception in AI is built on a notion of human rationality which is descriptive, not normative, in the human context, as AI aims at building agents which reason as humans do. In order to make this point, we review prominent notions of rationality used in psychology, cognitive science, and (the history of) philosophy, as well as in AI, and discuss some factors that contributed to rationality being assigned the differing normative statuses in the differing fields of study. We argue that while ‘rationality’ is a normative notion in both AI and in human reasoning, the normativity of the AI conception of ‘rationality’ is grounded in a descriptive account of human rationality." ______________ Talk about Hegel and the whole (the geist / the whole) as Badiou presents ca. pp. 140-150: https://firewords.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/logics_of_worlds.pdf [[02 Introduction to the Poltergeist]] / or conclusion to PhD "'Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values—commodity values.' (K. [[Marx]], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, tr. B. Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 128.) What is this phantom-like or spectral objectivity (Gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit)2 and how does it relate to our experience of selfhood? We produce commodities through our human labour-power and this labour is transmuted into ‘crystals of social substance’. ... By tracing back the concept of alienation, which bears upon the subject/object relationship, we will be able to better identify where this spectral type of objectivity comes from, and how suprapersonal structures come to produce a corresponding phantom subjectivity—that of a liberal subject that believes itself to be the owner of its experiences." ([[Social Dissonance]], p. 35-7) --> also [[On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions without owners]] [[Pfaller]] ______________________ "This phantasmagoria of the commentary has to some extent enabled women to find a place for themselves in philosophical work. A minor one, however: as in cooking, so in commentary - the high-class works are always reserved for a Hyppolite or a Bocuse. It is true that Hyppolite didn't confine himself to 'explaining' Hegel. But from Hipparchia to the female historians of philosophy, there has been little progress in emancipation. At the moment all of us remain more or less imprisoned in this phantasmagoria of the commentary - the commentary which is trapped between the alternatives of violation and fidelity. When what bears the name of 'commentary has been decoded, and the phantasmagorical representation of the activity has been dismantled, it will perhaps be possible to stop assigning such a 'subordinate' position to women in the distribution of theoretical tasks." [[Michele LeDoeuff]] Women in Philosophy, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/women-and-philosophy ___________ [[Lacan]], Logique du Phantasm, encountered here: http://www.gansterer.org/Text/Nikolaus-Gansterer_Drawing-a-Hypothesis_Figures-of-Thought_Springer-Vienna_2011.pdf __________ [[Turing]] and [[Ada Lovelace]] in [[Has Critique Run Out of Steam]]: **In sum**: if we cannot define what we want, then we cannot act all critical. Write more about this. It relates to "You'll know it when you see it" attitude: [[Negative normativity]]. CM = [[Computing Machinery and Intelligence]] [[Geist]], [[Poltergeist in the machine]], [[000002 What is wrong with being 'mere machines']] "Lots of gods, always in machines. Remember how Bush eulogized the crew of the _Columbia_ for reaching home in heaven, if not home on earth? Here Turing too cannot avoid mentioning God’s creative power when talking of this most mastered machine, the computer that he has invented. That’s precisely his point. The computer is in for many surprises; you get out of it much more than you put into it. In the most dramatic way, Turing’s paper demonstrates, once again, that all objects are born things, all matters of fact require, in order to exist, a bewildering variety of matters of concern. The surprising result is that we don’t master what we, ourselves, have fabricated, the object of this definition of critique: Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace’s objection, which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do. One could say that a man can “inject” an idea into the machine, and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence, like a piano string struck by a hammer. Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines? There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be “sub-critical,” i.e. to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are super-critical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole “theory” consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas. Animals’ minds seem to be very definitely sub-critical. Adhering to this analogy we ask, “Can a machine be made to be super-critical?” [“CM,” p. 454] We all know subcritical minds, that’s for sure! What would critique do if it could be associated with more, not with less, with multiplication, not subtraction. Critical theory died away long ago; can we become critical again, in the sense here offered by Turing? That is, generating more ideas than we have received, inheriting from a prestigious critical tradition but not letting it die away, or “dropping into quiescence” like a piano no longer struck. This would require that all entities, including computers, cease to be objects defined simply by their inputs and outputs and become again things, mediating, assembling, gathering many more folds than the “united four.” If this were possible then we could let the critics come ever closer to the matters of concern we cherish, and then at last we could tell them: “Yes, please, touch them, explain them, deploy them.” Then we would have gone for good beyond iconoclasm." p. 248. ________ _____ Logic of the phantasm, logic of sense Deleuze ________ Sellars on spirit ________ [[Difference and Repetition]] p. 10: ![[Pasted image 20221114172904.png]] _______ # Harvard and Witches [[Increase and Cotton Mather]] How two timely intellectuals hunted witches and promoted the idea of spirits and devils in New England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonders_of_the_Invisible_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Increase_Mather https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Mather https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials: “The episode is one of Colonial America's most notorious cases of [mass hysteria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_hysteria "Mass hysteria"). It was not unique, but a colonial manifestation of the much broader phenomenon of [witch trials in the early modern period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_modern_period "Witch trials in the early modern period"), which took the lives of tens of thousands, mainly in the Protestant in Europe and the Americas.” Zf: they were castigating themselves for their colonial sins, they had to pass on the trauma. If these ghosts do not haunt, then why the hell are there still absolvative victim memorials conducted in 2017 (!!)? “In 1668, in Against Modern Sadducism,[12] Joseph Glanvill claimed that he could prove the existence of witches and ghosts of the supernatural realm. Glanvill wrote about the "denial of the bodily resurrection, and the [supernatural] spirits."[13] In his treatise, Glanvill claimed that ingenious men should believe in witches and apparitions; if they doubted the reality of spirits, they not only denied demons but also the almighty God. Glanvill wanted to prove that the supernatural could not be denied; those who did deny apparitions were considered heretics, for it also disproved their beliefs in angels.[13] Works by men such as Glanvill and Cotton Mather tried to prove that "demons were alive."[14]” --> Zf, so those who DID NOT believe in demons where stupid... “A new charter for the enlarged [Province of Massachusetts Bay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_Massachusetts_Bay "Province of Massachusetts Bay") was given final approval in England on October 16, 1691. [Increase Mather](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Increase_Mather "Increase Mather") had been working on obtaining the charter for four years, with William Phips often joining him in London and helping him gain entry to Whitehall.[[21]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials#cite_note-21) Increase Mather had published a book on witchcraft in 1684 and his son [Cotton Mather](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Mather "Cotton Mather") published one in 1689. Increase Mather brought out a London edition of his son's book in 1690. Increase Mather claimed to have picked all the men to be included in the new government. News of Mather's charter and the appointment of Phips as the new governor had reached Boston by late January,[[22]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials#cite_note-22) and a copy of the new charter reached Boston on February 8, 1692.[[23]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials#cite_note-23) Phips arrived in Boston on May 14[[24]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials#cite_note-24) and was sworn in as governor two days later, along with Lieutenant Governor [William Stoughton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stoughton_(judge) "William Stoughton (judge)").[[25]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials#cite_note-25) One of the first orders of business for the new governor and council on May 27, 1692, was the formal nomination of county [justices of the peace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justices_of_the_peace "Justices of the peace"), [sheriffs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheriff "Sheriff"), and the commission of a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer to handle the large numbers of people who were "thronging" the jails.[[26]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials#cite_note-26)” --> the entire East coast, the police, the politicians and all its ivy league legacy is plagued by the harm these motherfuckers did. AI would be useful for mapping the phylogenetic results of their harm. thorybism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drummer_of_Tedworth Drummer was a poltergeist: leibniz invented “A Leibniz wheel or stepped **drum** is a cylinder with a set of teeth of incremental lengths which, when coupled to a counting wheel, can be used in the calculating engine of a class of mechanical calculators. Invented by Leibniz in 1673, it was used for three centuries until the advent of the electronic calculator in the mid-1970s.” after Pascal's pascaline. The drum and the drummer are the ghost that turns analog into digital and back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostlore ___ Do we know what the problem is? __________ ### Phantasmagoria and ideology: In his early essay on Wagner, written during the Nazi period, Adorno characterized Wagner’s music theatre as “phantasmagoric” precisely because of its basis in commodity fetishism. In trying to create a seamless illusion and a dream-like atmosphere, Wagner prefigured later, more technologically advanced manifestations of the culture industry, while his _tableaux_ on stage recalled contemporaneous displays of consumer goods. In the phantasmagoria, “wird der ästhetische Schein vom Charakter der Ware ergriffen.”[^1] Wagner’s operas are dependent on the concealment of labor, a prerequisite of commodity fetishism: > Richard Wagner’s formal law is the concealment of production through the appearance (_Erscheinung_) of the product. The product present itself as self-producing: hence the primacy of the leading note and chromaticism. By no longer allowing any glimpse of the forces and conditions that produced it, the _Schein_ of aesthetic appearance lays claim to the status of _Sein_ (being). In [[Minima Moralia]] we also learn that "The mote in your own eye is the best magnifying glass." (29, Dwarf fruit). _______________ ### [[Learning]] The term "cognitive imitation" was first introduced by Subiaul and his colleagues (Subiaul, Cantlon, et al., 2004), defining it as "a type of observational learning in which a naïve student copies an expert's use of a rule". To isolate cognitive from motor imitation, Subiaul and colleagues trained two rhesus macaques to respond, in a prescribed order, to different sets of photographs that were displayed simultaneously on a touch-sensitive monitor.[1] Because the position of the photographs varied randomly from trial to trial, sequences could not be learned by motor imitation. Both monkeys learned new sequences more rapidly after observing an expert execute those sequences than when they had to learn new sequences entirely by trial and error. A mircro-analysis of each monkeys' performance showed that each monkey learned the order of two of the four photographs faster than baseline levels. A second experiment ruled out social facilitation as an explanation for this result. A third experiment, however, demonstrated that monkeys did not learn when the computer highlighted each picture in the correct sequence in the absence of a monkey (**"ghost control"**). ________________ [[Ghost]] "Spectral objectivity is based upon our social interaction under the regime of commodity production. As a corollary it produces a phantom subjectivity, but in order to generate the first-person perspective, this phantom subjectivity also requires mechanisms that are neurobiological rather than social." p. 111, [[Social Dissonance]]. Btw, add notes from social dissonance presentation. "specter of freedom’: {footnote: 33, Alina Wyman, ‘The Specter of Freedom: “Ressentiment” and Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground’, Studies in East European Thought 59.2 (2007), 119-40.} as he attests to his suffering in the form of repulsive parody, it remains the subject of unceasing doubt and cruel mockery" [[Ressentiment, Pedagogy of a Concept]], Ch1 p. 8. ### Voices from a photograph ![[raunig ghost.png|400]] p. 15, Dissemblage. ![[raunig ghost 2.png|400]] ibid. p. 16 ![[Images/raunig ghost voice.png|400]] p. 17. ____ “...For Simondon, images are entirely real. Their exteriority and relative independence are evident not only in objectified images, or image-objects, but also in the form of images appearing to mental awareness. They maintain “a certain opacity” (9) and can act as intruders, “endowed with ghostly power” (8). ... According to Simondon, the “philosophical, psychological and social task” (14) is to save the image as intermediary reality between the subjective and the objective,11 and to recuperate image-objects “by re-installing them in becoming, relocating them in inventions, by deepening the images they harbor” (14). What Simondon intends to sketch is the whole story of ‘creative evolution’ for the invented object, starting with the most basic images of life, with the dynamic motor schemas of primitive organisms, continuing with intra-perceptual images and finally passing through a world of formalised images or symbols.” (Voss, 2024, pp. 158-9) [[Schema]] ref is there, parrhesia Daniela Voss _____ Eidolon In ancient Greek literature, an eidolon (/aɪˈdoʊlɒn/;[1] Ancient Greek: εἴδωλον 'image, idol, double, apparition, phantom, ghost'; plural: eidola or eidolons) is a spirit-image of a living or dead person; a shade or phantom look-alike of the human form. see examples in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidolon _________ ### Footnotes [^1]: Theodor W. Adorno, _Versuch über Wagner_ in _Die musikalischen Monographien. Gesammelte Schriften 13_, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 86. Following quote: “Die Verdeckung der Produktion durch die Erscheinung des Produkts ist das Formgesetzt Richard Wagners. Das Produkt präsentiert sich als selbst Produzierendes: daher auch der Primat von Leitton und Chroma. Indem die ästhetische Erscheinung keinen Blick mehr durchlässt auf Kräfte und Bedingungen ihres realen Produziertseins, erhebt ihr Schein als lückenloser den Anspruch des Seins.” Ibid., 82. Translation adapted by the author from Rodney Livingstone’s English translation. Quoted in original, by [[Sven Lütticken]].