Hegel and Heidegger were thinkers about their own time, thinkers about historical events and happenings. Few have the insight and courage to fathom the full depth of the meaning of an historical event, the coming to be (coming of age?) of an historical process. Tragically, it is only some time after the event (the time of monsters?) has hit humanity with full force that Hegel's famous owl can spread her wings. Is it not true that some of what the prophetic author of Sein und Zeit wrote about technology only makes full sense at the present?
This seems to us particularly true of the emergence of the age of the Internet and the age of generative AI which is its logical development.
And yet nothing could be further from our own philosophizing than any form of historicism or historical philosophy. As such both Hegel and Heidegger, for all their interest and insight, must be considered as having crafted systems based on an incorrigible error.
Social progress is not a law of nature but a legitimate hope - even if at present it seems a distant one - and it is our moral duty to work towards it in the midst of uncertain outcomes.
The advent of the internet was the advent of connection between people. This connection carried rhetorically moral undertones and echoed enlightenment ideals about the desirability of sharing and making knowledge available. In the present age of the generative AI based Internet powered and controlled by corporations and governments aligned to anti-enlightenment ideals, it may be that it is morally called upon us to practice instead the process of disconnection and the purification and preservation of knowledge(not obviously in the sense of the 'great simplification' of the Canticle of Leibowitz).
The most basic step is ensuring locality of core information. That is, to be in possession of machines onto which have been downloaded significant portions of Internet Encyclopedias (despite their serious shortcomings) as well as some decently performing LLM. To this, we add, it needs not be said, massive collections of digital versions of human cultures including libraries.
One can use Kiwix and download for offline viewing the most recent English Wikipedia (50GB text-only 150GB with pictures). With a AMD Ryzen 7 5825U processor with 16GB RAM and 2GB Radeon Graphics one can use Ollama and download and use some decently performing LLMs (gemma4 comes in E2B, E4B, 31B and 26B A4B).
Most living beings alternative between states of being awake and of sleep. Can would we design a dynamic LLM which similarly alternates between states of user interaction and re-training based on this interaction? The most important being the correction and/or updating of knowledge or perhaps the removal of harmful and biased content and "thought patterns". If LLMs can improve then it is not only a question of having the number of parameters equal to the number of neurons of the human brain.
Computers can enhance and aid human cognition as well as hinder and destroy it (there is a growing body of evidence concerning the disastrous effect of excessive or inappropriate generative AI use for individual mental health and cognitive development, not to mention for society as a whole).
But the harms of generative AI have little to do with lesser-known extremely powerful and beneficial aspects of the computer for human cognition. We cannot go into this in detail here. Let it just be said that it involves using adequate software for the rigorous formalization of human scientific theories and concepts (specially logic and mathematics and what regards formal methods in the sciences) and the vital feedback-loop between human thought and the software interface (IDE) which results in the simultaneous enhancement of human understanding and production and the quality of the software-based formalization and implementation.
The software in question includes not only Rocq (formerly Coq), Agda and functional programming language but such languages as Python, Javascript and C/C++. Python is a multi-paradigm and highly versatile language with an elegant syntax. Python comes close to achieving the ideal of a universal language in the Leibnizian sense and is a wonderful tool for formalization, implementation, verification and exploration in a variety of areas in mathematical logic and finite mathematics.
We note also the importance of minimalism (using as few dependencies as possible) and building things from the ground up - this goes for scientific and philosophical projects, not of course for commercial and industrial ones. We will address in the future the question of the possible role of machine learning in this process.
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