Tag: Philosophy

A.I. as a Thinking Tool

I have become more amenable to the reasons why A.I. should exist.

The reasons why are as follows.

In this blog post I will try to convince readers that A.I. is helpful to humanity. Indeed, I have called out A.I. in the past. And, perhaps I will continue calling it out in certain aspects. But I find that A.I. is indeed quite helpful to humanity.

Indeed it has been said by many that A.I. poses an “existential threat.” But I will dismiss that outright. I don’t think it does. People should be more concerned with how they can use A.I. to their benefit than how A.I. poses an existential threat, in my opinion. A.I. can help people become more productive, for example.

And no, no company is paying me to say all this positive stuff about A.I. I have come to realize it myself.

Even deeper and more profoundly, I have found a very compelling reason to use A.I. I mean generative A.I. This compelling reason has to do with a book I read a few years ago about the power of asking questions. I think just this about A.I. – you can ask it literally anything you want. This of course is governed by the policies these generative A.I. companies have laid out, of course. You’re not going to ask A.I. what someone’s social security number is and expect that it is going to tell you that.

What I have found about A.I. however, more profoundly still, is that it can assist human beings in thinking more clearly. This is all deep stuff, but I find that if I ask A.I. something, and perhaps it will give me a general answer, but I will think more deeply about that subject. This is how A.I. is shaping my life during these days.

I hope to find better solutions for business problems, in other words, for my translation business, among other answers from A.I. Or better said, I hope to utilize A.I. in the future and now to generate better responses to humanistic problems. This is a radical shift from what I used to think about A.I. But I realized I was being quite cynical about it. I was a grumpy guy. But anyway, I have come to realize and learn that A.I. can be quite useful, especially in the ways I have mentioned, and I am sure it is useful to many other people in a myriad of ways.

The most intriguing thing about A.I. in my opinion is that it can literally help engineer your thinking around a certain subject. Okay, maybe that sounds too profound for now: I get it. It sounds out of this world. But A.I., if understood in the right, moral, correct way, can truly help people (mostly individuals), to think in clearer, more profound ways. And here’s how I’m going to get to the more philosophically juicy part of this entry: you can literally ask A.I. a question every day, and you will become smarter. How? Because A.I. will give you a different answer. And this simple act of prompting the A.I., this simple action, will make you think about things in a different way. I am not even talking about the A.I. “giving” you or “transmitting” information to you. That I think is hogwash. However, if you are to really think about it, and philosophically consider the implications of asking an artificial intelligence module what you are questioning most, it will most likely help you in your thought process. I have yet to prove this. It is just a thought that has been running around my head that I’d love to capture. And I think I’ve done just that in my post.

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Law of Metaphysics

There was a professor I had in college who said you should write your introduction last, a piece of advice which always puzzled me. I wonder if he was onto something though. This is because sometimes we are so hasty to introduce ourselves that we forget the rest.

I am not trying to introduce some metaphysical principle of the fact that we miss time by writing (or living) introductory parts while we don’t get into the so-called meat of things. (Or that might be just what I’m trying to say.)

Here’s an example, and read it as a question: why do people say, “Hey, I’m Joseph, and I studied aeronautical engineering,” rather than saying outright: “Hey, I’m Joseph, and I am an astronaut.”

Perhaps the example strikes as extreme, but it is a paradigmatic shift in my view. I think it increases self-accountability, but let’s leave the theory for later.

That is, if it’s Joseph’s dream to be an astronaut, why would he not introduce himself as an astronaut? Or if he has even already completed many prerequisites for being an astronaut, why not introduce himself as one? Why not introduce ourselves as our dream professions? Why not introduce ourselves as what we want to be, rather than what we think we are?

You see, there’s a phenomenon out there called “minimization.” I won’t get into the psychology of it too much, but I think what it means to me is that we minimize what we are or want to be. For example, instead of calling myself, “translator, philosopher, writer, musician, and reader extraordinaire,” I could say, “Hey, I am into writing,” and leave it at that. (I forgot that I’m a poet, too, in the first.) But you get my point, correct? One introduction is far more forceful than the other. You could even say it has more energy than the other in a metaphysical or physical sense. I don’t write much about physics, but there are certain laws of the universe that go something like, “An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an opposing force,” and if you’re a physicist, please refrain from correcting me, as I don’t have the proper impersonal status of the “Laws of Physics,” but please spare me if you notice something incorrect in my statement of said “Law of Physics.” What I really intend with my statement of the laws of physics is that the fact that I am all of those things tends to keep me in motion toward those goals. If I state that I am an “aspiring writer,” then all I will do is “aspire,” which is not necessarily my goal. So, there you go, a theory of motivation.

So I guess take that with the knowledge that I don’t intend to cause a theory of motivation into the world, all I do is observe, and generate interesting patterns about important matters to me. If this matters to you, then, so be it.

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What is a Noumenon?

I will not bore you with the dictionary definition of “noumenon,” although I’m not even sure it exists in too many dictionaries. That is to say, it probably is not in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. It may be in their Unabridged Dictionary. However, that is beside the point.

The point is that I’d like to discuss what a noumenon is and what it isn’t. I guess it’s a tricky thing to talk about because noumenon literally means that which we cannot know. It’s sort of like the opposite of the word “phenomenon.” Other than the fact that the etymology of “phenomeonon” is Greek, I don’t know much about the word’s history. I know that Immanuel Kant used it in his famous Critique of Pure Reason.

I also know that Jean-Paul Sartre used a similar, but not exactly the same, concept in his Being and Nothingness.

Noumenon, then, is something that we have no knowledge of, yet it is still going on out there in the world, but it is unknowable. I thought it’s kind of a cool concept to speak of, yet it’s almost as if we cannot even begin to describe it, because we don’t know what it is. It’s out of our league, if you know what I mean, phenomenologically.

Is a guitar a noumenon then? No, because we know what a guitar is and what it does.

I think what Kant and other authors were talking about when they described concepts or other things as noumena, was that those things were unknowable or unconceivable by human minds. So, things like pure reason itself, by Kant’s account, were noumena.

And so on and so forth.

Yet the reason I wanted to talk about noumena again is because I think in translation a similar process is going on in the “black box” explanation of translators’ minds.

Because we don’t quite know the cognitive processes going on in translators’ minds while they translate, we can say the cognitive process of translation is a sort of “noumenon.”

I have written on this subject before, and what Friedrich Schleiermacher alluded to as a “tertium comparationis” is sort of what goes on in translation, in that there’s a third element going on in between two languages in translation.

So can we say that the tertium comparationis is essentially a noumenon? Potentially. And because the tertium comparationis is a sort of “meta-language,” I’d say it is apt to describe it as a noumenon because we cannot really know what is going on in a translator’s mind in this case. Obviously the translator has a certain cognitive process occurring. However, we cannot generalize about this process in all translators. Otherwise, we might run the risk of calling translation a science, which it seems not to be, at least in my opinion (perhaps I’ll write another post on that line of thinking).

So, there is some more credibility for the “black box” explanation of translation in translators’ minds as a cognitive process. I don’t think it’s necessarily true – i.e. the “black box explanation” – yet what it reveals is interesting because it posits that what is inside the translator’s mind while he/she translates is unknowable. This, I think, is false. Yet, my point is that we cannot generalize about any of these things, and doing so would run the risk of trying to generalize among all translators, which I think a quite hefty (and quite impossible), task, indeed.

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