Franz Kafka was born in Prague, in what now is part of the Czech Republic, on July 3rd 1883. At the time, Prague, was a confused city. Kafka as well was confused himself. The city of Prague, at this time, was consumed with numerous languages and ethnic groups fighting for position. Kafka was a Czech born, German speaking Jewish man. It must be noted that his relationship with his father was poor. His relationship with his father can even be regarded as a motif found throughout his literature. His father viewed Kafka as a failure. He never approved of Kafka's writing.
Kafka should never be considered as a philosopher. This is to say that he never expressed a deep philosophical theory in his writings. His relationship with existentialism is complex, mainly because the label 'existentialist' by itself is rather meaningless.
Most of his works were never published during his lifetime. Three notable works include The Metamorphosis, The Trail, and The Castle.
He considered his writing has a curse from some unknown sin. He insisted that all of his unpublished manuscripts be burnt after his death. Max Brod, Kafka's colleague, saved the manuscripts, despite the author's request.
Kafka is best known for describing absurd situations with simple, cold words. Kafka did not attempt to shock readers with detailed descriptions of horrific scenes; instead, Kafka preferred blunt absurdity. As follows in The Metamorphosis: 'As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.'
Sartre and Camus recognized Kafka as an existentialist.
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Post -War Development of computer technology and “Cognitive Revolution in Society”
Post -War Development of computer technology and “Cognitive Revolution in Society”
Karl Jaspers
- Born FEB. 23, 1883-FEB 26, 1969
-German philosopher, one of the most important Existentialists in Germany, who approached the subject from man’s direct concern with his own existence
-aspers was the oldest of the three children of Karl Wilhelm Jaspers and Henriette Tantzen. His ancestors on both sides were peasants, merchants, and pastors who had lived in northern Germany for generations
-Was severely handicapped in adult life. Diagnosed with Bronchiectasis as child later cardiac decompensation
-Studied law at University of Heidelberg starting in 1901; Studied medicine at Universities of Berlin, Gottingen, Heidelberg. Become doctor 1909
-Volunteered. Worked with clients of interest to learn psychiatry
When Jaspers started his research work, clinical psychiatry was considered to be empirically based but lacking any underlying systematic framework of knowledge. It dealt with different aspects of the human organism as they might affect the behaviour of human beings suffering from mental illness.
-aspects ranged from anatomical, physiological, and genetic to neurological, psychological, and sociological influences…
-aspers tried to bring the methods of Phenomenology into field of clinical psychiatry
-in 1913 entered the philosophy dept.
-Wrote Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (“Psychology of Worldviews”) He did not intend to present a philosophical work but rather one aimed at demarcating the limits of a psychological understanding of man.
-Following Max Weber, a sociologist and historian, he asserted that scientific principles also applied to both the social and humanistic sciences.
In contrast to science considered philosophy to be a subjective interpretation of Being, which—although prophetically inspired—attempted to postulate norms of value and principles of life as universally valid.
-For Jaspers man’s existence meant not mere being-in-the-world but rather man’s freedom of being. The idea of being oneself signified for Jaspers the potentiality to realize one’s freedom of being in the world. Thus, the task of philosophy was to appeal to the freedom of the individual as the subject who thinks and exists and to focus on man’s existence as the centre of all reality.
-When hitler came into power, He became enemy of state because wife was jewish
-From 1933 was excluded from higher council, allowed to teach/publish
-Friends tried to assist him to emigrate to another country. Permission was finally granted to him in 1942 to go to Switzerland, but a condition was imposed by the Nazis that required his wife to remain behind in Germany. He refused to accept this condition and decided to stay with his wife, notwithstanding the dangers. It became necessary for his friends to hide his wife. Both of them had decided, in case of an arrest, to commit suicide. In 1945 he was told by a reliable source that his deportation was scheduled to take place on April 14. On March 30, however, Heidelberg was occupied by the Americans…
- all survivors of this era bore the same responsibility and shared a collective guilt. He felt that the fact that no one could escape this collective guilt and responsibility might enable the German people to transform their society from its state of collapse into a more highly developed and morally responsible democracy
-This revision was guided mainly by the conviction that modern technology in the sphere of communication and warfare had made it imperative for mankind to strive for world unity
-At the time of his death in 1969, Jaspers had published 30 books. In addition, he had left 30,000 handwritten pages, as well as a large and important correspondence.
-The cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences. It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research. The relevant areas of interchange where the combination of psychology, anthropology, and linguistics with approaches developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience.
-In his book The Blank Slate (2002), psychologist Steven Pinker identified five key ideas that made up the cognitive revolution:[12]
- "The mental world can be grounded in the physical world by the concepts of information, computation, and feedback."[12]
- "The mind cannot be a blank slate because blank slates don't do anything."[13]
- "An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind."[14]
- "Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across cultures."[15]
- "The mind is a complex system composed of many interacting parts."[16]
The dominant paradigm for most of the century, Behaviorism, has given way to a new, powerful synthesis known as cognitive science, which owes its impetus to the creation of the digital computer.
-In the nineteenth century, when the new field of psychology was emerging from natural philosophy, the dominant paradigm was Introspectionism. People reasoned that if they wished to explore the workings of the mind, the best way to approach this task was to reflect on the contents of what William James, founder of the first school of psychology in the United States, called the “stream of consciousness.”
-spent a lot of time reflecting on their own perceptions, sensations, intuitions, memories, habits, motives, dreams, desires, emotions, goals, and so on.
-Positive/negative reinforcement. Respond to stimuli
-describe a computer in terms of its inputs (“stimuli”) and its outputs (“behaviors”)
-Computers gave psychologists an entirely new model for their science: the brain is the machine, the wetware, that takes care of processing and storage, and the mind is the program that runs on that wetware. In Steven Pinker’s words,
-The mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation . . . . This insight, first expressed by the mathematician Alan Turing, the computer scientists Alan Newell, Herbert Simon, and Marvin Minsky, and the philosophers Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, is now called the computational theory of mind.
solves one of the puzzles that make up the “mind-body problem”: how to connect the ethereal world of meaning and intention, the stuff of our mental lives, with a physical hunk of matter like the brain…
-The computational theory of mind resolves the paradox. It says that beliefs and desires are information, incarnated as configurations of symbols. The symbols are physical states of bits of matter, like chips in a computer or neurons in the brain. They symbolize things in the world because they are triggered by those things via our sense organs, and because of what they do once they are triggered. If the bits of matter that constitute a symbol are arranged to bump into the bits of matter constituting another symbol in just the right way, the symbols corresponding to one belief can give rise to new symbols corresponding to another belief logically related to it, which can give rise to symbols corresponding to other beliefs, and so on. Eventually the bits of matter constituting a symbol bump into bits of matter connected to the muscles, and behavior happens. -The computational theory of mind thus allows us to keep beliefs and desires in our explanations of behavior while planting them squarely in the physical universe. It allows meaning to cause and be caused. (24-25)
-Another name for the computational theory of mind is cognitive science, a discipline now almost synonymous with psychology in America and much of the rest of the world but encompassing, as well, the sciences of neurology and artificial intelligence
3 Main Points…
- the brain does not simply take in information through the senses and store it. Instead, it processes the information in various ways that are dependent on the design of the processor….In other words….nothing is experienced as it is in itself but rather as it is as a result of a certain kind of processing that the brain was designed by natural selection to do
- the brain is made up of interconnected modules, each with its own functions. Much as a personal computer can contain a separate math co-processor dedicated to arithmetic operations, so the brain contains separate, dedicated processors for such activities as recognizing faces
- as one would expect of a machine, the modules of the brain were designed, but not, according to standard cognitive science theory, by an intelligent designer but rather by the blind forces of natural selection.
To summarize, the brain processes information, different parts of the brain are specialized for particular processing, and the processors that exist in the brain were designed to meet the needs of our evolutionary ancestors.
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