Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 374.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2024-01-07 10:33:58+00:00
        From: maurizio lana <maurizio.lana@uniupo.it>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.365: flip/flop into 2024

hi Bill,
this morning i was reading an italian newspaper article which can
contribute to the discussion (ilSole24Ore, Mauro Ceruti, "Fearful
complexity and adventurous unknown". It is a simplification that does
not work to compartmentalize knowledge. We need to conceive the unheard
and the possible hidden behind things - here in edited Deepl translation).

> "It's complex!" Here is an expression that, like a mirror, reflects
> the unease felt by the reporter narrating the war in Ukraine or the
> Middle East, the citizen questioning democracy or the digital
> revolution, the business executive pondering strategy in a globalized
> and volatile market, the project leader called upon to coordinate a
> work team.
> This expression translates a kind of powerlessness to account for what
> one is about, the phenomenon of which one is an actor or observer, and
> a disorientation of spirit or thought. Why? The fundamental reason
> leads us back to the deepest layer of the crisis we experience today:
> a crisis of thought. The fact is that we have learned to
> compartmentalize knowledge, to study objects in isolation from their
> contexts, to reduce a multidimensional reality to a single dimension,
> to crystallize "false dichotomies" such as natural and human, mind and
> environment, emotions and rationality, culture and technology,
> creativity and logical rigor, knowledge and skills, virtual and real,
> and so on.
> ...
> By rejecting the idea of a nature-mechanism and a society-mechanism,
> complex thinking does not reject clarity, order, determinism at all:
> it knows, however, that these are insufficient, that discovery,
> knowledge, and action cannot be planned; it prepares us for the
> unexpected, the uncertain, and to devise a strategy as soon as they
> arise. For Dominici [the author of the reviewed book Oltre i cigni
> neri. L’urgenza di aprirsi all’indeterminato, Franco Angeli, 2023],
> moreover, and as a consequence, the increase in social complexity
> calls for a profound revision of the conception of democracy,
> technology, education, and government practices.
> ... relevant is his call to be vigilant about what he calls "the
> complexity of complexity." That is, the contradiction between, on the
> one hand, the tendency of the hyper-technological and hyper-connected
> society to complexify itself (an example is the integration that takes
> place between human and artificial in artificial intelligence...) and,
> on the other hand, the opposite tendency not to recognize this
> complexity, continuing to educate to a simplified view of culture and
> reality based on dichotomies, to always seek "simple solutions" to
> complex problems. The development of digital technologies and Big data
> perpetuates the illusory certainties of control and predictability,
> and the tendency to "trivialize" and simplify the human.
> To think complexity and accept uncertainty, Dominici argues how we
> need to change the way we think. Making Hannah Arendt's warning his
> own, he argues how "thinking", threatened by the passivization and
> de-empowerment induced by technical devices and hyperspecialization,
> must be defended. And he suggests how the same now-widespread emphasis
> on "black swans" often betrays a surreptitious desire to reassure with
> respect to the fact that, despite some unforeseen events, everything
> in essence remains "under control" and predictable.
the main points are, for me:
> we have learned to compartmentalize knowledge, to study objects in
> isolation from their contexts, to reduce a multidimensional reality to
> a single dimension, to crystallize "false dichotomies" such as natural
> and human, mind and environment, emotions and rationality, culture and
> technology, creativity and logical rigor, knowledge and skills,
> virtual and real, and so on
> a simplified view of culture and reality based on dichotomies, to
> always seek "simple solutions" to complex problems
> the tendency to "trivialize" and simplify the human
> "thinking", threatened by the de-empowerment induced by technical
> devices and hyperspecialization, must be defended

best
Maurizio




Il 03/01/24 09:36, Bill Pascoe <bill.pascoe@unimelb.edu.au> ha scritto:
> Here's just a few idle background thoughts when thinking about when and where
> binary matters.
>
> I notice that a great many arguments in the world could be resolved if the
> protagonists recognised that the issue was a matter of degree, rather an a
> binary is/isn't. So many adult arguments boil down to the simple formula of
> children shouting 'IS SO!' and 'IS NOT!' at each other. One of the common
> reasons for such confrontations is that they are using different definitions
of
> terms. But another common way to resolve such arguments is to change the
> question from being "Is it or isn't it?" to "How much is it? More or less?"
and
> given that, the question follows, "At what amount should we do something about
> it? What action should we take?" As well as every day kitchen sink arguments,
> many political arguments are like this.
>
> Then there is a big difference between the world around us being fuzzy, and a
> matter of degree, and the way we interpret it in order to make decisions on
our
> course of action. Often an action is necessarily binary. Do I jump or not? (As
> well as how high.) To make a decision much of our thought process is devoted
> into taking in a lot of information, deciding if one thing or another (risky,
or
> not), based on information that tells us either way, so we interpret into
binary
> or exclusive categories, and binary and quantised mutually exclusive
categorical
> decisions. This fish looks like that fish a bit, but I think it's the
poisonous
> one someone told me about, because they said it had a blue tail, and this one
is
> kind of purple, but I'm going to put this in the 'poison fish' category, and
> choose action 'not eat'.
>
> This point about a matter of degree is one of the most fundamental to the
> modernity (or whatever you want to call it), in particular, science. The point
> of science is to go - hang on, it's not just is or isn't, it's a matter of
> degree, and that means we can measure it, and with that measure we can
> demonstrate whether this is more than that, and at what level of degree it
> matters - and not only that, but what degree of change in this correlates with
> what degree of change in that, which means we can predict this given that, and
> what degree of action we should take on this to change that.
>
> In the practical working life of a DH practitioner, I almost always find
myself
> having to cajole fuzzy information into mutually exclusive categories or
> binaries, with a special column in the database for commentary notes so that
all
> these forced choices can be qualified with some remarks, like 'This is only a
> best estimate of the date, the narrative actually says 'Winter, 1846' etc etc
-
> I explain to non DH Humanists, "If you want the computer to put it on a time
> line, you have to tell it where. If you were to draw a timeline, you'd have to
> put it somewhere - where would you put it? We'll put 'circa' in this other
> field." (You were asking specifically about binary, but perhaps we are really
> talking about mutually exclusive categories - which might be two - or
> quantisation, or precision, more generally etc) Needless to say, there are a
lot
> of problems this forcing could cause, especially if there is an error. Failing
> to recognise realities that get erased; failing to recognise things that can
> only be put in commentary, and don't fit the data structure; valorising
> countable and repeatable phenomena at the expensive of the great many
important
> and unique phenomena and truths in the world; not recognising things go in
more
> than one category; etc. But there are workarounds and information designs to
try
> to handle most of these things.
>
> I seem to remember Hegel had some thoughts that might be relevant. It was
> something about how, typically, in the world, phenomena increase in quantity
to
> a threshold to a point where they change in quantity. Perhaps he was arguing
> this to the point of saying that what a change in quality actually is, is
change
> in quantity. Some examples might be - increasing quantity of temperature in
> water reaches a threshold where it changes quality to a gas. Or perhaps
> increasing frequency of red light waves, they eventually become yellow - and
so
> on until their quality as 'colour' itself changes to 'invisible'. This
probably
> applies to social and subjective phenomena too. At the moment in looking at
the
> history of violence, I'm grappling with questions like "How many murders does
it
> take for a set of isolated policing and justice incidents, to be called a
> insurrection/revolution/war?" (there are of course other factors to consider,
> but this is one of them). Then at the bottom of this is the age old 'heap'
> problem from the Greeks - we can call a grain of sand a grain of sand, and a
> heap of sand a heap, but as you keep adding grains, at what point does it
become
> a heap? Important of course to distinguish real 'things' from subjective or
> social convention things - the sand doesn't care if it's a heap or a grain.
>
> So too, to answer the question, 'When in human experience does binary matter?'
-
> in perception, for decision making. Perhaps that is stating the obvious, and
> just raises the original question again - which perceptions, which decisions?
> When and where does it matter? Maybe we should ask at what degree does binary
> start to matter? What degree of noise and confusion causes us to apply binary?
> What degree of complexity collapses our perception of binary into gradients?
At
> what point do we start to need it? At what degree does it become a problem?
How
> much binary is too much?
>
> Bill

[...]
------------------------------------------------------------------------

s'il n'y a même plus l'humour pour nous alléger
comment lutter
prohom, comment lutter

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maurizio Lana
Università del Piemonte Orientale
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici
Piazza Roma 36 - 13100 Vercelli


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