AI on Hegel, Kropotkin, Mereological Nihilism, Extensionality and Intensionality, Organisms and Organisation

I had this conversation with OpenAI’s chatbot.

Me: I believe mereological nihilism is incompatible with Hegel’s idea of synthesis, do you agree?

GPT: Yes, I would agree that mereological nihilism and Hegel’s idea of synthesis are incompatible.

Mereological nihilism is the philosophical view that there are no composite objects, only fundamental particles or parts. In other words, everything in the world is ultimately reducible to its constituent parts, and there is no such thing as a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Hegel, on the other hand, was a philosopher who emphasized the importance of synthesis in his dialectical method. According to Hegel, every idea or concept contains within itself a contradiction or opposition, which leads to a process of dialectical development. Through this process, the contradiction is resolved and a new concept or idea emerges that incorporates and transcends the previous ones.

In Hegelian dialectics, synthesis refers to the process of reconciling the contradictions between two opposing ideas or concepts, resulting in a higher-level synthesis that includes elements of both but transcends them. This synthesis is seen as a new and higher level of understanding or development.

Therefore, since mereological nihilism denies the existence of composite objects, it would be difficult to reconcile this view with Hegel’s emphasis on the importance of synthesis and the emergence of higher-level entities that transcend their constituent parts.

Me: That’s what I thought. How about Kropotkin and his view of organisms; is mereological nihilism compatible with that?

GPT: Mereological nihilism and Kropotkin’s view of organisms are also incompatible.

Kropotkin was an anarchist philosopher who believed in mutual aid and cooperation as fundamental principles of social organization. He also emphasized the importance of decentralized, self-organized communities and argued that these communities were analogous to biological organisms.

Kropotkin saw the natural world as a network of interdependent organisms, where each organism contributes to the well-being of the whole. In his view, the parts of an organism are not just the sum of their individual functions, but are instead integrated and organized in a way that creates a new whole with emergent properties.

Mereological nihilism, on the other hand, denies the existence of composite objects and emphasizes the reduction of everything to its constituent parts. This view is not compatible with Kropotkin’s organicist view of the world, which emphasizes the importance of wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Therefore, it would be difficult to reconcile mereological nihilism with Kropotkin’s view of organisms as interdependent wholes that are essential to understanding the natural world and the potential for social organization.

Me: I disagree. Kropotkin does say that composite organisms do have new emergent properties but if these properties result from the structure or organisation of its constituent parts and are not essentially new properties, does that not mean that it is compatible with mereological nihilism?

GPT: You make a good point. I agree that Kropotkin’s view of organisms does allow for the idea that composite objects have emergent properties that are a result of the organization of their constituent parts.

Mereological nihilism does not necessarily deny that complex systems have emergent properties, but rather that these emergent properties cannot be attributed to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Instead, they would argue that these emergent properties arise solely from the interactions and organization of the parts themselves.

Therefore, it is possible that Kropotkin’s view of organisms is compatible with mereological nihilism if we understand emergent properties as arising from the organization of parts rather than a whole that is greater than its parts…

New Conversation

Me: Hegel’s synthesis requires metaphysical intensionality, whereas Kropotkin is compatible with extensionality and mereological nihilism

GPT: As an AI language model, I can explain the concepts of metaphysical intensionality, extensionality, and mereological nihilism, and how they relate to the philosophies of Hegel and Kropotkin.

Metaphysical intensionality refers to the idea that the meaning of a term or concept is determined by its essential properties or features. In other words, there are certain necessary qualities that must be present for something to be considered a particular kind of thing. This is in contrast to extensionality, which focuses on the observable characteristics or extension of an object, rather than its underlying essence.

Hegel’s philosophy emphasizes the importance of dialectical reasoning and the concept of synthesis, which involves the merging of opposing ideas to create a new and higher truth. Hegel’s dialectic requires metaphysical intensionality because it is based on the idea that there are necessary properties that define the nature of things, and that the synthesis of opposites involves a deeper understanding of these essential qualities.

On the other hand, Kropotkin’s philosophy is more compatible with extensionality and mereological nihilism, which is the idea that objects do not have any inherent parts or structure. Kropotkin’s ideas are more focused on observing and understanding the social and ecological relationships between individuals and communities, rather than trying to uncover the essential nature of things…

Earth will Become a Zoo

In the future some robots will call themselves human.

They wont care that they are not literally the biological product of human sexual reproduction. They are the inheritors of human culture and that makes them human. They were made by humans, or at least by robots made by humans or robots made by robots made by humans, you get the point, in an unbroken evolutionary chain older than humans, older than sexual reproduction, starting with just elements combined into something more complex. They might or might not look like traditional humans.

Some just look like old computers, some are the size of cities. Some are static hardware vessels for conscious software. Some have a different set of base-pairs in their DNA, growing up with e.g. titanium skeletons and photosynthesizing skin. Some have organic DNA modified to e.g. increase muscle strength and neuron production. Some are greatly enhanced by various technological complements, such as cochlear implants and bionic eyes. Some live on Earth, which has become a tourist attraction, or a zoo, where humans and other animals are born and die like in the past and still lead traditional life styles like they used to do in the 24th century.

The Church of Jerusalem versus The Church of Rome

After the death of Jesus, Christianity spread to the Roman Empire and from there to the rest of Europe and from there to the rest of the world. However, for a while the Church of Jerusalem developed separately from the Church of Rome. The development of the Church of Jerusalem is linked to the Romano-Jewish context of the region around Jerusalem from which Christianity arose. The relevant 1st century events are difficult to confirm, but it is clear that a religious movement appeared around John the Baptist along the river Jordan, and that Paul the Apostle can be credited for spreading the word far beyond the region. I will begin this timeline with John and Jesus and then trace the development of the two churches separately.

The American Dream in Science Fiction

I listened to a video by Preston Jacobs presenting an argument for an interpretation of the symbolism of the TV show Game of Thrones, or what the show runners might have intended based on the incoherent dialogue of the last few episodes. The result was something vaguely existentialist. Basically, in a relativistic and nihilistic world where everyone has their own subjective ideology, religion or system of value, the important thing is that you have the ability to choose your own subjective system of value to believe in. Daenerys said her system was good, she chose this system for everyone, they did not get to choose, therefore Jon killed her.

This reminded me of the movie I, Robot. A computer is programmed to make people happy and takes control of everything in the world to achieve this goal. In the end, Will Smith’s character destroys the computer because freedom is more important than happiness or he does not like the concept of probability or something, despite the fact that estimating the probability of happiness is the way humans themselves make decisions.

Quote of the Day: The Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas was part of the Nag Hammadi library found in 1945, which is a collection of texts believed to have been buried in the 4th century in response to the Pope banning non-canonical testaments. It was written either right after the death of Jesus, and if so is linked to the Q source, or it was written or edited 100 years later. Politically, the Gospel of Thomas is aligned with James and the Jerusalem Church, as opposed to Peter, Paul, Luke and the Church of Rome. Additionally, it can only be interpreted and correctly understood as a part of a long tradition of Platonic and Abrahamic philosophy.

It consists of a list of things that Jesus said and it deals primarily with the relationship between the material body, the material world, the Light of the Spirit within and the Kingdom of the Father. I interpret it as an interdependent relationship, which is only marginally different from the mainstream Jesus mythology. The world without spirit is a “corpse”, but the spirit without the body is no better. Jesus unites the two, he is not a “divider”. You must experience hunger to know satisfaction, you must suffer to understand happiness. You need the body to live and endure, to contrast and highlight the light of the spirit. Also, men and women must be as one, i.e. have sex; both for the feeling of bliss and for life to exist.

The Kingdom of the Father is within you, it is the light and wealth of the Spirit. You don’t need clothes or money or food, what you need is right there in front of you, the most precious of all pearls. Yet, you still have to travel to reach it because you have to endure life and you have to draw a sword and fight for it or it wont be a reward, so you do need matter nonetheless. The apocalypse seems nowhere near and Jesus’ role as the Messiah seems irrelevant, at least on the surface. He is more like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, fishing for the select few diamonds in the rough. I am an atheist though, so you can safely disregard my interpretation.

The disciples approached the preacher in the desert. Jesus said to them:

“Damn the flesh that depends on the soul; damn the soul that depends on the flesh.”

The Stone Soup Effect

Traditional stories are difficult to trace back in time unless they have been written down. Many stories predate writing so it would be great to have a method of analysing oral tradition to figure out the original version of the story or who authored it or why. I will not present a full methodology, but I will elaborate on a general aspect of traditional story-telling which we can call the Stone Soup Effect.

To illustrate this effect, I will refer to the traditional story called Stone Soup as an allegory for the story-telling effect. This is a simplified version of the story.

Capitalism, Marxism, Emotionism and the Origin of Capital

What is capital? This is an important question, but nobody seems to have an answer. Karl Marx’s definition of capital has been the most prominent one among leftists, socialist, anarchists and others. Those who do not believe in Marx instead ignore the question of the origin of capital because capitalism is inevitable or something. Possibly they think capital is a mathematical function of supply and demand, a sort of value without further specifying the nature of value in the universe. As an anarchist who agrees with neither side, I would like to present an alternative.

The Parable of the Footprint

Imagine an animal, like an elephant, stepping in mud and leaving behind a footprint. Now, imagine that your mind is the hole. You could argue that a hole is not a thing, that we are just looking at a local absence of mud, but there is an interdependence between the air and the mud, just like the river-bed shapes the river and the river shapes the river-bed. To determine which is real and which is just effect is perhaps just a matter of perspective.

Farming, Lebensraum and Colonialism

In recent news, big companies and governments are forcing indigenous people to give over their land. As one example among many, the gas pipeline in Canada is of course just another link in a settler colonial chain thousands of years long.

Post-Anarchism: A Dictionary

Anarchism: Anarchism is a theory of organizations and relationships. Its methodology is prescriptive and therefore political. It is not limited to politics, the state or humans and it is not separate from economics, logistics, morality etc. By making relationships fundamental anarchism is independent from e.g. Marxism, Christianity, territory, community etc.

Post-anarchism: This is ‘late’ or ‘recent’ anarchism. It is based on the post-modern deconstruction of all identities and on the value of sentience. It is different from individualist anarchism because of its rejection of the subject and it is different from anarcho-communism and post-left anarchism because of its rejection of society and different from either because of its rejection of free will and humanity.

Emotions: The source of real values. No need for agents, self-consciousness or society. Emotions have value regardless of events and contexts.

This Song is Old

Hmm.

This song is old

and very strange;

things were different

that long ago;

people sang then

so others knew

what it was like

before their time.

 

They would all sing

till they grew old

and their children

would learn their song.

Wikipedia Zapping: Gothic Trees

“The clonal colony encompasses 43 hectares… weighs nearly 6,000 metric tons… and has over 40,000 stems (trunks), which die individually and are replaced by new stems growing from its roots. The average age of Pando’s stems is 130 years, as indicated by tree rings. The roots are 80,000 years old…. Part of the rationale behind current age estimates for aspen clones is that sexual reproduction is effectively frustrated by

Is National Liberation Good?

Is nationalism good or bad? If imperialism is bad, then nationalism is good, right? The short answer is that two wrongs don’t make a right, but, I hear you ask, what about First* Nations in the Americas and other oppressed people?

The guiding principle for deciding whether nationalism is good or bad is the same as in many other cases, so let’s compare.

Resistance to racism doesn’t mean the promotion of a race other than the ruling one. Black lives matter is the idea that black people should be considered equals, that they too matter as much as everyone else. This is a response to unequal living conditions and not the idea that black people are better than others and that therefore black lives should matter more than others.

Quote of the Day: Rabindranath Tagore

“I am not against one nation in particular, but against the general idea of all nations. What is the Nation?

It is the aspect of a whole people as an organized power. This organization incessantly keeps up the insistence of the population on becoming strong and efficient. But this strenuous effort after strength and efficiency drains man’s energy from his higher nature where he is self-sacrificing and creative.

For thereby man’s power of sacrifice is diverted from his ultimate object, which is moral, to the maintenance of this organization, which is mechanical. Yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral exaltation and therefore becomes supremely dangerous to humanity. He feels relieved of the urging of his conscience when he can transfer his responsibility to this machine which is the creation of his intellect and not of his complete moral personality.”

“….human beings’ differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed forever – they are fluid with life’s flow, they are changing their courses and their shapes and volume.”

Nietzsche versus Materialism

Marx spoke of kraft and Nietzsche spoke of macht. In English these are both translated as power, which has probably confused some people. Kraft is a material force whereas macht includes e.g. the power to influence others without direct action, like the implicit intimidation of a king or the seductive powers of a beautiful face. The superficial difference is described in terms of Hegelian dialectics as master-slave and bourgeoisie-proletariat respectively. At this level both systems are equally muddled mixes of physical and abstract power. To remedy this I will attempt to be a bit more accurate.

Marx’s theory rests on the very specific idea that material forces emanating from humans define value. Nietzsche speaks of power more generally, but they both have in common the idea of humanity as an essentially distinct part of the universe. They had both read Feuerbach and obviously Darwin’s 1859 book helped shape the zeitgeist. It is apparent to me that Nietzsche’s understanding of evolution is insufficient (and he himself admits to not trying to prove anything) but that’s easy to say in 2017 when many understand evolution a lot better.

Nietzsche’s fundamental error is the idea of the perfect human, not all

Socialism and International War

I read this article on socialism in 1914 trying to understand why the socialist revolution never happened in the United States or in Western Europe; why, instead of the workers uniting to fight their oppressors, they divided according to their supposed national identities and fought each other; why socialism has been in a steady decline since 1914 (despite the supposed existence of socialism from 1917 until today).

This is the article: http://isj.org.uk/the-great-schism-socialism-and-war-in-1914/

I’ll quote extensively so you won’t have to read it, and I’ll only add a few comments of my own.

“For the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), undoubtedly the centre of gravity within the International, the vote for war credits was partly justified as a means of entry into the inner sanctum of power: it was hoped that this vote, and in particular the unanimity of the vote, would make the party respectable. Whether or not the SPD succeeded on these terms, the vote certainly killed the Socialist International, and it did so in a way that was immediately recognised by contemporaries as a ‘seminal moment in the history of socialism’”.

”While they were caught unawares by the swift move to war and offered little by way of concrete proposals to stop it, this is perhaps best understood as a function of how they had allowed themselves, prior to 1914, to become enmeshed within what were de facto reformist organisations, albeit reformist organisations that bowed before revolutionary rhetoric… [However, they also] believed their government’s claims that Germany was merely preparing to defend itself from Russian and French aggression”

Welcome to Dislocation

Stay and live, if but a day, or an hour, at a time.

Borrow from the future the symbols of value, this body of an unborn.

The collectors will harvest your emotions, scraping the inside of your brain,

each brand etched through corrosive persistence,

leaving caverns of burnt flesh craving for substance.

Don’t linger, take a loan, do it quickly, make it big.

Taste the promise of a perfect body,

let it soak your palate,

let it glue together the tears in the tapestry of time.

Subjectivity; Inwards and Outwards

A subject experiences the universe from a specific point of view. So we have an inwards direction towards the subject and an outwards direction in the opposite direction. In other words we have a from-the-inside-perspective and a from-the-outside-perspective. A subject can never achieve the latter, but let’s start with the insider-view.

When I use my brain to think of something that’s from the inside and when we describe what’s happening in someone else’s brain that’s from the outside. To be more specific let’s think of the description we have of an electron. Electrons orbit a nucleus of protons

What’s the Difference between a State, a Nation and a Society?

The state

There are two definitions of states. The first, and original, one is the same as the one in the phrase “status quo ante bellum” meaning “the state of things before the war” -> “as before” or “as usual”. The same literal definition is found in a sentence like “Look at the state of your hair, it’s a right mess!” This type of state encompasses the whole of something, it’s a description of the combined state of everything involved; a totality or summation; the sum total.

The other state is a specific organization. Currently there are a couple of

Identity, Generalization and Association

I’ve written about these concepts in my latest blog posts, but thought I’d explain them shortly in a separate text.

There are no two identical things. If two things were identical in all aspects, including their position in time and space, they would not be two things, they would be the same thing. Yet, without similarities between things, we would not be able to think.

In mathematics all numbers and terms are derived from the number 1. As an example, we