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But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.

✖ Via Wired: “How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web” by Steven Levy, Feb. 22, 2010

Or how Ludwig Wittgenstein helped to improve Google.

First spotted via Kottke.

↳Share Mar 16 link notes technology language context philosophy word computer definition Google

The critical question of the relationship between technics and time is assuming its place on the public stage, daily, superficially, but in a more and more evident way. Each day brings its technical novelty, as well as the demise of things obsolescent and out of date. Innovation is inevitably accompanied by the obsolescence of existing technologies that have been superseded and the out-of-dateness of social situations that these technologies made possible―men, domains of activity, professions, forms of knowledge, heritage of all kinds that must either adapt or disappear.

✖ Via Technics and Time 1, The Fault of Epimetheus, tr. R. Beardsworth and G. Collins, Standford University Press, [1994]1998, p. 4 [Amazon, Google Books]

About this book:

“What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.” (more)

About Bernard Stiegler:

“Professor Stiegler has a long term engagement with the relation between technology and philosophy, not only in a theoretical sense, but also situating them in industry and society as practices. He is one of the founders of the political group Ars Industrialis based in Paris, which calls for an industrial politics of spirit, by exploring the possibilities of the technology of spirit, to bring forth a new “life of the mind”. He published extensively on the problem of individuation in consumer capitalism, and he is working on the new possibility of an economy of contribution.” (more)

Stiegler came to philosophy while being incarcerated for armed bank robbery (five years at the Prison Saint-Michel). He wrote about it in his book Acting Out.

↳Share Mar 14 link notes technology communication author book philosophy evolution innovation obsolescence time Stiegler

An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves. The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition. “The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.” Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.

✖ Via Wired Science: “Your Computer Really Is a Part of You” by Brandon Keim, March 9, 2010

The study “A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand” by Dobromir G. Dotov, Lin Nie, Anthony Chemero is available online (PDF).

The “fondamental concept” to which Chemero is referring is the concept of “readiness-to-hand”. Heidegger explains this concept in section 15 of his book Being and Time : “The Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment” (see Google Books). To understand this concept, one can get help from Wikipedia, from an online Glossary of Terms in Being and Time (edited by Roderick Munday, last updated in March 2009) and from Dean Heckles’ blog (Heckle “is a social–cognitive scientist and a PhD student at Stanford” and he specifically chose to name his blog… “Ready-to-hand” : great introduction to the concept if you’re into technology or communication or media studies).

For a good overview of what’s at stakes today when it comes to our relationship to technology, one should read the “General Introduction” of the first book of the Technics and Time trilogy by Bernard Stiegler. The book has been translated from French by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. The “General Introduction” which run from page 1 to 18 is available via Google Books.

Previously on Skandalon: cognition and media ecology.

↳Share Mar 10 link notes reblogged from Christopher Butler technology communication medium media philosophy cognition Heidegger theory Stiegler author book ecology

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.

✖ Via Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, tr. Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, [1981]1995, p. 1 [full pdf]

Baudrillard is quoting a very (very) short story by Jorge Luis Borges “On Exactitude in Science” or “On Rigor in Science”. Learn more about it on Wikipedia and read one of its English translation.

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Systems work because they do not work. Nonfunctioning remains essential for functioning. And that can be formalized. Given, two stations and a channel. They exchange messages. If the relation succeeds, if it is perfect, optimum, and immediate, it disappears as a relation. If it is there, if it exists, that means it failed. It is only mediation.

✖ Via The Parasite by Michel Serres, tr. Lawrence R. Schehr, Minneapolis, University of Minesota Press, 2007, p. 79 [Amazon]

↳Share Feb 18 link notes reblogged from Leftovers communication technology failure system communion philosophy lost loser separation fragmentation reject waste function

communication philosophy society logic movie film humor comic illustration illustrator

✖ Via XKCD: “Honor Societies”

Previously on Skandalon : XKCD

↳Share Feb 17 link notes communication philosophy society logic movie film humor comic illustration illustrator

The problem with people saying that others have deceptive goals (such as manipulation, hidden strategies and conspiracies, which can fit into what Habermas calls “systematic distortion” in The theory of communicative action, volume 1, 1984, Boston: Beacon press at page 332) while communicating is that if no other ground of justification is provided aside from an alternative view of the deceptive party’s real intentions, that hidden-but-revealed ground means not much more than the accuser’s own preconceptions of the world and the motives of those who participate in it (example: “corporations control our desires” is an assertion which is hardly grounded in any alternative view. As corporations reach into deeper layers of our psyche, as they permeate every aspect of our daily lives, and mostly, as they predate our own generation, who is to know what a genuine desire feels like or how it is autonomously produced ?). The latent character of deception provides a specular avowal of its discoverer’s self-interest (like the weird idea of genuine desire). His accusation cannot be extracted from its context to mean something more “real” or “true”, only another attempt at control or deception.

✖ Via Leftovers

↳Share Feb 06 link notes reblogged from Leftovers communication control power origin genuine real truth impression repetition iteration philosophy

communication psychoanalysis philosophy dreams difference derrida grammar code movie poster brain

✖ Via Internet Movie Poster Awards: Paprika by Satoshi Kon, 2006

“The dreamer invents his own grammar. No meaningful material or prior text exists which he might simply use, even if he never deprives himself of them. Such is, despite their interest, the limitation of the Chiffriermethode and the Traumbuch. As much as of the generality and the rigidity of the code, that limitation is a function of an excessive preoccupation with contents, an insufficient concern for relations, locations, processes, and differences (…)”

Quoted from “Freud and the scene of writing” by Jacques Derrida ([1966]1972), tr. by Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies, no 48, p. 89 (PDF available upon subscription to JSTOR).

Previously on Skandalon : Freud

↳Share Feb 02 link notes communication psychoanalysis philosophy dreams difference Derrida grammar code movie poster brain

The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion

✖ Via The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1872, § 7 (tr. by Ian Johnston, 2009)

Compare with a similar observation by Paul Valery.

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I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete―that’s what scares me. That’s why I quit the Theater Department. Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.

✖ Via The New Yorker, “Franny” by J.D. Salinger, Jan 29, 1955, pp. 34-35

↳Share Jan 30 link notes art author story loser lost nobody nothing dissatisfaction life fame celebrity subject philosophy