Comment by sigbottle
3 days ago
To be fair, LLM's extend well past GOFAI and prove Dreyfus right. We were never going to get AI with formal methods. Literal big data slop is an orthogonal program and far more empiricist than probably the people being criticized here (if the people criticized here were GOFAIers).
Although I wouldn't say just yet that Heiddeger was validated. I don't even know what he's saying 90% of the time, honestly.
Heideggers "ready-to-hand" more or less says that we use things first and understand them later. We experience a hammer first as "thing you hit nails with" and later abstract to "object with these particular properties".
The classic Cartesian view was that we take in raw data from the outside world and process it into more and more abstract concepts (somehow), until we say "aha! I can use this for hammering". Heidegger says that this view is wrong, and our first experience of things is in terms of a social context and in terms of use. That's what's meant by us experiencing them as "ready-to-hand".
From the starting point of the ready-to-hand, we can step back, take a scientific view, and arrive at the present-at-hand, where we examine the properties of the object seperate from its use. The argument is quite compelling, and especially convincing to me is how well this agrees with modern neuroscience. In reality, 3x as many neurons path FROM the high abstraction parts of the brain TOWARDS the visual processing parts of the brain. In the classic Cartesian view of the brain beginning with the signal and abstracting its way towards the top, this is very mysterious. In Heideggers account, where the social context and potential uses of objects are the primary constituents of our experience, this makes total sense.
Is that it? Wouldn't this be compatible with Hume's claims? And yet hume is still quite Cartesian in thinking (as everybody of around that era was)
I have to say my memory on the exact beliefs of Hume are murky. IIRC he did still think that human cognition starts with neutral input data and processes its way to the most abstract concepts. Heidegger inverts this. The context, the use, and the meaning are already embedded in all of your experiences. You don't have "neutral input data".
This is also what he means by "thrownness". Our being-in-the-world, in particular the way things have meaning to us and are intelligable, is conditional on our use and our social context. Not the other way around. We never logically arrive at our context, we were always already "thrown" into it.
I think it's actually quite a profound conceptual shift, which is why Heidegger is so popular. He's still an asshole for writing so obscurely, though.
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