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Top 20 (en)

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Temps de lecture : 3 minutes

According to ChatGPT, the 20 articles to be translated first.

Foundations & Temporalities

  1. Ontology (May 2, 2025) — Summary of “being = improbable,” ontological matrix (indeterminacy, information, becoming) on which everything else is based. Most concise entry point.
  2. The retrospective historical dialectic (2025-06-15) — Key update for understanding dialectics.
  3. The three dimensions of time, gravity, and entropy (2025-06-28) — Unique dialogue between cosmology, entropy, and the philosophy of time, highly exportable.
  4. The Future Does Not Exist, There Are Only Multiple Temporalities (2021‑08‑01) — Hierarchizes historical rhythms; complements #3. (I suggested this one, but it's just a short text)
  5. Fundamental concepts for understanding our world (2021-06-01) — Reasoned glossary (information, narrative, afterthought, exteriority), a real user's guide.

History & Anthropology

  1. The beginning of history (2025-03-17) — Transition from prehistory to technosphere; puts hybrid humans back at the center.
  2. One divides into two (2009-01-10) — Creative division; bridge between eco-biology and politics. (this one also suggested to ChatGPT)
  3. Society theory (2011-12-09) — Systemic table: infrastructure/superstructure.

Technology & AI

  1. Cognitive dialectics and artificial intelligence (2024-03-14) — Updates the critique of strong AI. Post-GPT response; questions of emergence.
  2. The Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017-10-20) — Most cited article; socioeconomic framework. [?! but that was before ChatGPT]
  3. Digital civilization and Its Discontents (2008-09-15) — Anticipates platform dependency; cognitive fatigue. [not my favorite]
  4. Artificial life is not life! (2009-04-06) — Epistemic limits of synthetic biology.
  5. Towards a philosophy of information (2012-06-10) — Info manifesto ↔ finality; cognitive evolution.

Economy & Production

  1. Guaranteed income, municipal cooperatives, and local currencies (Oct 18, 2006) Early proposal for a systemic alternative
  2. Money, society, and individuation (Jan 18, 2009) — Link between value theory and social psyche.
  3. Changing the production system (May 19, 2009) — Post-productivist systemic strategy.
  4. The test of reality (materialism and dialectics) (December 10, 2008) — How factual constraints reconfigure theory.

Ecology & Anthropocene

  1. Politics in the Anthropocene (2020-07-09) — Global governance vs. planetary entropy.
  2. The coming collapse (2018-03-21) — Pivotal text on critical collapsology.

Philosophy & Hegelian Legacy

  1. Deconstructing Hegel's Phenomenology (2025-02-23) — Dismantling the master-slave dialectic and Hegelian idealism. Continued #2.
37 vues

Kojève, Sophia: revolutionary wisdom

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Temps de lecture : 34 minutes

We must recognize the historical nature of the ideologies that structure us but belong entirely to their time, in the sense that they very quickly become outdated in subsequent periods. It is good to spell out the obvious truths that we acted on without thinking at the time, and there is no one better than Kojève to formulate the implacable logic behind them, the falsity of which we can now fully appreciate. It is useful to quote some excerpts to show how convincing they seem at first glance. Here, Kojève rigorously exposes the entire revolutionary mythology of the Stalinist era, which seems so appalling to us today. Once again, we see an illustration of an excess of logic unrelated to the facts, of an idealism that ignores reality despite its professed materialism—something that, nevertheless, we may have naively shared.

It is therefore not out of pure erudition that we criticize the first part of Kojève's great failed work, Sophia (the unfinished 800-page manuscript of which was only recently found and has just been published). It is precisely in order to return to the illusion of the realization of philosophy (in Stalinist communism) and of a definitive absolute knowledge, which has been disproved time and again by the court of history, which systematically revives the historical and cognitive dialectic. Above all, it is important to note that claiming this absolute knowledge and a closed history, now free of all dialectics (and therefore of all opposition), can only lead to totalitarian terror (Stalinist) and a return to the same excesses as the French Revolution—which Hegel denounced very precisely—hence the importance of maintaining dialectical thinking and abandoning the dream of a total victory for our utopias and convictions, which are too one-sided to be true.

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12 vues

Three Dimensions of Time, Gravity, and Entropy

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Temps de lecture : 13 minutes

It is bold to speak of new physical theories; there are far too many that we will never hear about again, and one must admit that the January paper “Three‑Dimensional Time: A Mathematical Framework for Fundamental Physics” seems a little too audacious. It not only postulates three dimensions of time—which is already hard to swallow—but also that the three spatial dimensions and even particles themselves are produced by the interaction of these three differentiated forms of physical temporality. This idea is not entirely new, since there were already reasons to think that the time parameter t should have three components t_x, t_y, t_z (with t² = t_x² + t_y² + t_z²). Here the proposal is different, but no less surreal and difficult to imagine. The article was published in a minor yet peer‑reviewed journal (Reports in Advances of Physical Sciences). So far, there is no substantive critique of this latest attempt to unify physics on entirely new grounds. The mathematical framework has the attraction of preserving causality and claims to predict the properties of the different generations of particles as well as reproduce their masses. All this remains to be verified.

Without in any way claiming to judge its validity, what interests me is that this theory echoes, in a certain way, the tripartition I stressed in a 2021 text (“Quantum Determinism, Entropy and Freedom”) between quantum, classical and cosmological physics, which do not obey the same laws and differ above all by their distinct temporal ranges. Even if I’m not truly convinced, its interest lies in identifying reality with time itself, like Lee Smolin—and unlike almost everyone else, who treats time as a pre‑given illusion (a block universe). The theory at least has great power to disorient, reopening the question of temporality, its origin and its irreversibility, and giving me the opportunity to revisit the place accorded to entropy, improbability and the arrow of time.

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35 vues

The Retrospective Historical Dialectic

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Temps de lecture : 29 minutes

It is current events in their most dramatic form that confront us with dialectical reversals that history and Hegelian philosophy can illuminate. We have seen that Hegel's first concern in separating himself from Schelling was to avoid abstraction by trying to stick to concrete phenomena and follow their dialectical movements in their diversity, without therefore needing to define this dialectic in advance (which he will do at the end of the Logic). It is not primarily a formal, preconceived method. Despite everything, his opposition to Schelling implies a rejection of immediacy as well as of a static dialectic between opposites, in equilibrium (philosophy of identity). The most general definition of dialectics for Hegel is therefore its dynamic, evolving, productive, transformative nature. As in Fichte, every action provokes a reaction, every intention (freedom) encounters resistance (external world), requiring an effort and testing its limits, but each time forming a new totality where each position in its one-sidedness collides with the opposition of the other until it has to integrate this otherness into their reciprocal recognition, resulting from the conflict. "It is only this equality reconstituting itself or the reflection in oneself in the being-other that is true - and not an original unity or an immediate unity as such". (Phenomenology, tI p17-18)

It was just before the Phenomenology that he introduced the Aufhebung, which he made the driving force of the dialectic. This term, as we know, is fundamental in its ambivalence, a negation that preserves and progresses, marking the specificity of Hegelian dialectics. It is because negation is always partial that it is productive and not only destructive. As he specifies at the end of the Logic, the partial character of negation already prefigures the final synthesis of the negation of negation, an absolutely essential moment of reconciliation, although it too must be overcome.

The fundamental prejudice in this regard is that dialectics would only have a negative result. Logic III p378

To hold firmly the positive in its negative, the content of the presupposition in the result, this is the most important thing in rational knowledge. p380

[Succeeding the first time, the immediate positive,] the second operation of the dialectic, the negative or mediated, is also at the same time the mediating one... It is a relation or a relationship; for it is the negative, but of the positive, and includes in itself this same positive... It is therefore the other of another; it is for this reason that it includes its other in itself, and that it is therefore like the contradiction, the dialectic posited of itself. p381

It is as the mediating that the negative appears, because it syllogizes in itself, itself and the immediate of which it is the negation. p383

Finally, the historical dimension will be added, so sensitive with the experience of the upheavals of that time (Revolution, Terror, Empire), universal History becoming the unifying framework for all historical dialectics (joining "The idea of a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view" by Kant 1784). This historicity introduces into the dialectic a new decisive temporal characteristic, that of a reflexivity after the fact of self-consciousness, logic of historical learning, what Hegel calls the passage from the in-itself to the for-itself. This reflection in return on experience is ultimately nothing other than philosophy, but this time we are in a definition of dialectics restricted to knowledge and not being able to apply to all other dialectics (like what we can call a metabolic dialectic sticking to reality in the alternation between catabolism and anabolism to compensate for deficiencies and excesses).

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26 vues

Ontology

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Temps de lecture : 18 minutes

The 2002 text, “The Improbable Miracle of Existence”, put forward a paradoxical ontology that emphasized the unpredictability of being. What must be added, however, is that this unpredictability implies a retroactive temporal structure—time as a radical exteriority that can no more be abolished than entropy can be.

Of course, retroaction or Nachträglichkeit has never truly been ignored; it is built into history, dialectics, and natural selection. Yet we have seldom taken full stock of what it means for our relation to the real, to time, to the future. One might call it, figuratively, a cybernetic ontology—one that takes its bearings only after the fact, recognizing a fundamental strangeness in the real, which always eludes us in some respect and contradicts our linear stories and habitual visions of time. We are living through one of those dizzying moments of rupture.

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27 vues

Digest (by ChatGPT)

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Temps de lecture : 5 minutes

A Philosophy of the Improbable, the Real, and Exteriority

Jean Zin’s thought has unfolded over more than two decades of sustained writing, in a constant tension between political engagement, scientific culture, and philosophical rigor. His work traverses Hegel, Marx, Kojève, Debord, Heidegger, Lacan, but also cybernetics, biology, information theory, and political ecology. It is neither systematic nor eclectic: it forms a dynamic cartography of the real, starting from its resistances.

At the foundation of his work lies a daring ontological thesis: existence is an improbable miracle. As he wrote in The Improbable Miracle of Existing (2002):

"It is not necessity that grounds the world, but improbability. The universe, life, thought—everything that exists—should not exist, and yet it does."

This is no mysticism, but rather an argument rooted in contemporary physics (Prigogine, chaos theory), evolutionary biology, and information theory. Jean Zin conceives the real not as a stable foundation, but as something that emerges beyond any program, always at the edge of disorganization (dialectic). His philosophy does not concern being as substance, but event, contingency, and resistance.

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2 vues

The beginning of history

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Temps de lecture : 9 minutes

When looking for a historical origin, we always find sketches or precursors long before. This is undoubtedly different with Sumer, which is by definition the origin of history, being the origin of writing and therefore of the first written documents. Even if writing itself had precursors (seals, “numbers”), the creation of written archives makes it undeniable that “history began in Sumer.” This should not lead us to believe that EVERYTHING began in Sumer, which is tempting to think when faced with this incredible civilization that seems to have invented everything (“From that day on, nothing else was invented,” said Berossus) and a mysterious people who appeared out of nowhere, whose language was so different from those of the region that they could have been mistaken for aliens!

Yet just before that, there was the Obeid culture, which is still poorly understood despite having initiated a fairly advanced urbanization that included irrigation, temples, and palaces, particularly in Eridu and Uruk, with a development of wealth, craftsmanship, and inequality, to the point that there seems to be no need to look for a superior people from elsewhere (let alone say where). This is confirmed by genetic analyses of burials in the region, which show a great diversity of origins, a melting pot of populations more or less distant from each other, rather than a new race that fell from the sky. We are therefore dealing with a mixture of all kinds of immigrants, of all colors, a colorful population combining all kinds of talents. The mystery of the language remains [This made me imagine that the Sumerian language, an isolated agglutinative language, very primitive at first, even phonetic and favoring vowels, could be a “pidgin,” an improvised immigrant language used to understand each other between different populations (including those from the Indus Valley) with very different languages—a gratuitous hypothesis, as I have no expertise in this area]. We should not idealize this original civilization too much, but it is a lesson that will be repeated throughout history: that the most powerful and progressive countries are the most open and mixed.

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20 vues

Deconstructing Hegel’s Phenomenology

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Temps de lecture : 18 minutes

Verifying the historical dialectic in our current reality (and the importance of being aware of it) does not mean allegiance to everything Hegel said about it during the Empire, nor does it mean adopting a conception of the mind that is no longer tenable in the age of generative artificial intelligence. Similarly, adopting Aristotelian logic cannot mean adopting his metaphysics or his justification of a patriarchal slave system. More generally, we must abandon the illusion that a philosopher has understood everything and that all we have to do is embrace his philosophy. Great philosophers are admired for the truths they discover or the questions they ask, which makes them indispensable to know, but the paradox is that these truths are always mobilized for a final denial (of death or suffering) and an idealization of reality, so that in (almost) all philosophies, the true is only a moment of the false. Philosophical demonstrations should not be taken seriously, with their implacable syllogisms that “bound the minds and did not reach things” (as Bacon insisted). Indeed, reality does not resist thought (fiction), only action. It is therefore more than legitimate to take up Plato's truths, like Aristotle, without accepting his theory of ideas or the immortality of the soul. Similarly, if it is no longer possible to be a Marxist-Leninist communist, this does not mean that one can no longer be a Marxist in the sense of being determined by the system of production and social relations, that is, by a materialist and dialectical conception of history determined by technical evolution. For Heidegger, it is even more caricatural because, of course, being touched by Being and Time or some of the themes it addresses cannot make one accept his Nazism and his pangermanist mysticism. Each time, powerful revelations that advance the argument are supposed to ultimately make us mistake bladders for lanterns and, in the name of their logical deductions, make us believe in our absolute freedom, in a God, in life after death, in a utopian end of history, or in an illusory bliss.

So, let us repeat that what should make us adopt Hegelian dialectics is its verification in concrete terms and in the particularity of phenomena, both in logic and in history (political, moral, aesthetic), a dialectic that we undergo and cannot ignore. However, this should not blind us to the totality of the system—and in particular to the Phenomenology—and cause us to lose all critical spirit. It is even essential to deconstruct the system based on the confusion between individual consciousness and the historical spirit. As has been pointed out, it was precisely the decision to begin with consciousness that gave impetus and coherence to the writing of the Phenomenology, approaching truth and spirit as subjects rather than from an external point of view. This confusion between individual consciousness and the history of the Spirit is, however, untenable, even though the role of the individual is minimized, particularly in view of the “tricks of reason.” The dialectic of consciousness that unfolds there could be attributed at most to a kind of transcendental consciousness, to the spirit of the times (too quickly identified by Kojève as Man) or, better, to logical constraints but not to the activity of the individual, as the last paragraph of the preface makes clear. It is all the more surprising that the Introduction claims to be a science of the experience of consciousness. In his lecture on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1931), Heidegger has no trouble criticizing, in the name of phenomenological intentionality and its noesis, the reconstruction of consciousness from its perceptions, when in fact there is always a prior understanding of the totality, of the meaning of the situation. Consciousness never begins from the immediate; it is always already there, in a situation, embedded in a history, social relations, discourses, always already consciousness for the Other and language, from the beginning and not only at the end of the journey. As Lev Vygotsky showed, child development does not proceed from the individual to the social, but rather from social discourse to the individual.

In the Philosophy of Mind of his Realphilosophie, just preceding Phenomenology, Hegel admitted this and that there is no realization of self-consciousness except in the people (the collective), yet what is appealing in his Phenomenology is that he turns it into a novel in which consciousness is supposed to be constructed in its own experience. This is again what he presents in Chapter IV, “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” where consciousness achieves socialization through “self-consciousness in and for itself when and because it is in and for itself for another self-consciousness” (p. 155), that is, “an I that is a We, and a We that is an I.” (p. 154). The first part, entitled “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness,” introduces the dialectic of Master and Slave, which is the best-known part of the work but the subject of much misunderstanding. Kojève makes it the pivot of his questionable Hegelian-Marxist-Heideggerian interpretation, combining struggle and labor with the anxiety of death, but this dialectic, which has nothing historical about it, must be reduced to its fictional and parabolic nature (a subject devoid of any other characteristic than mortality and a dialectic arising from its natural (bestial) basis and its negation in law).

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11 vues

Cognitive Dialectics and Artificial Intelligence

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Temps de lecture : 9 minutes

Over the long term, the only indisputable and cumulative progress is that of knowledge (of techno-science). Of course, this does not mean that everyone has access to it, nor that there will not be setbacks, knowledge that is forgotten or suppressed in the short term before being rediscovered. However, despite what some may claim, this objective progress is largely independent of us, imposed by experience that most of the time contradicts our beliefs. Far from achieving absolute knowledge, however, this accumulation of knowledge reveals new unknown territories each time, so much so that we can say that ignorance grows as our knowledge destroys our old certainties and prejudices.

Indeed, science only progresses through the discovery of facts that escape current theories, forcing them to be reformulated. Thus, its step-by-step advances demonstrate that we do not have direct access to reality as a definitive, revealed truth that has become transparent, but that there is a cognitive dialectic at work, each time correcting the previous position and complicating it through partial negation or a paradigm shift that cannot be anticipated in advance. This cognitive dialectic based on the state of knowledge clearly illustrates that there is no access to being, as Montaigne already said, there are only approximations, approaches, like a blind man's cane moving from left to right in order to locate its object and test its limits (Fichte defines knowledge as the encounter of a free self that collides with the non-self that resists it). There is an irreconcilable dualism between knowledge and reality, to which it must adjust by trial and error. Knowledge is not original, immediate, direct, or instinctive, but is developed little by little over time, becoming more precise, complete, and nuanced.

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9 vues

The future does not exist, there are only multiple temporalities

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Temps de lecture : 6 minutes

It's all a question of tempo, but it is very difficult to accurately assess the temporality of each process because there are several whose multiple combinations cannot be predicted. Modern physics has refuted Newton's concept of absolute time, which nevertheless remains the a priori form of our sensibility, as Kant said. We constantly think as if time were linear, when in fact there are many different temporalities intersecting in a present that has nothing of the consistency of an instantaneous slice of life or the immobile coexistence of all beings that mystics portray. There is only a multiplicity of trajectories with their own times, some cyclical or very short-term, others astronomical. It is therefore certain that we are mortal and that our planet is not eternal either, nor is our sun, nor even the entire universe, which is doomed to disappear (before its rebound?). However, it is very difficult for us to imagine the billions of years that were necessary for life to become so complex.

The end of humanity, which is measured in millions or thousands of years at most, affects us much more, but enlightened individuals are not afraid to announce that it will happen tomorrow or almost tomorrow. It is true that we expect the worst, but this is still an exaggeration of predicted disasters that are already dramatic enough without going as far as the disappearance of the species, i.e., of all human beings! It is essential to keep a sense of perspective on different time scales, and this is too often neglected.

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17 vues

Fundamental concepts for understanding our world

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Temps de lecture : 23 minutes

A small number of fundamental concepts that run counter to religious, metaphysical, or ideological ways of thinking are enough to overturn the usual idealistic and subjectivist understanding of our humanity (and politics). The concepts examined here (information, narrative, after-the-fact, exteriority) are all well known and verifiable by everyone, and there would be no mystery or difficulty if materialist (ecological) conceptions were not so vexing and did not conflict with our narratives, which is why they are constantly denied or repressed in order to preserve the fictions of unity that keep us alive. We will see, moreover, that these fundamental concepts touch on the most sensitive debates of our time (digital technology, democracy, identity, racism, sociology, etc.).

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19 vues

Politics in the Anthropocene era

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Temps de lecture : 25 minutes

Following on from elements of an ecological philosophy (determined by the environment rather than the subject), I have gathered here a number of texts that draw political conclusions by denouncing the idealism of our political illusions (democratic, revolutionary, voluntarist, constructivist, historical). It is not enough to vehemently criticize the world's march toward the abyss and all its injustices in order to remedy them. There is a crucial need for criticism of criticism (of the supposed unity as well as the friend-enemy opposition or the simple inversion of values, or the subjectivism of critiques of rationality, reification, alienation, commodities, etc.) just as it is necessary to criticize all the imaginary solutions that come to mind (take from the rich, abolish money or property, stop progress or growth, increase wages, reduce working hours, don't pay back debts, abolish the army, reappropriate the media, radical democracy, leave Europe, etc.). To regain a minimum of effectiveness, we must add to these dead ends, which condemn us to powerlessness and reduce politics to a sham, the delusional claims of a reform of thought and a new man dreamed up by revolutionary romanticism and the metaphysical utopias of artistic and philosophical avant-gardes, not to mention the strange sexo-leftism that completely misunderstands the impact of psychoanalysis on politics, Freud and Marx limiting each other instead of allowing hope for the harmonious liberation of instincts expected from a fantasized revolution—as others may expect from a more “natural” life.

After clearing the ground of all these myths of the 20th century, we must resolve to no longer overestimate our means and take stock of what it really means to change the system of production in order to have a chance of succeeding. This is by no means a question of discouraging action and pretending that nothing can be done, but quite the contrary: it is a question of establishing the conditions for achieving a minimum of effectiveness. The ecological emergency cannot be satisfied by our protests and our pie-in-the-sky plans for an ideal world, but imposes on us an obligation to achieve concrete results, even if they are very insufficient. This pragmatism is wrongly despised by radicals on the pretext that everything would indeed have to be changed... if we could, but unfortunately what is necessary is not always possible, a hard lesson from experience that is difficult to accept.

The other decisive factor, along with globalization, has been our entry into the Anthropocene, not so much in the geological sense as in the sense of global awareness, confirming the destruction of our environment and our living conditions. This concern for the environment reinforces materialism at the expense of idealistic values and subjectivity, contrary to what many environmentalists believe. Ecological responsibility is not compatible with millenarian conceptions of politics and requires us to move from utopian idealism to the materialism of production, more seriously than the Marxists themselves, who paradoxically tended to ideologize everything (from Gramsci's cultural hegemony to Mao's Cultural Revolution, or the post-1968 counterculture). We need to reestablish that ideology is only a historical product corresponding to the material infrastructure and social relations. It is not thought that shapes the future, as an architect's plan projects its construction in advance, but historical time that changes our thoughts and shapes the world without asking our opinion, a world that we cannot recognize as our own, as the one we would have wanted, but whose destruction by our industry forces us to react, starting from what exists and what is possible, to save what can be saved instead of just making things worse by trying to point the finger at someone to blame, a scapegoat for all our ills, whatever name we give it (industry, technology, productivism, capitalism, financialization, growth, globalization, neoliberalism, the market, competition, consumption, individualism, domination, etc., this accumulation being sufficient to show that there is no single cause).

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10 vues

The coming collapse

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Temps de lecture : 9 minutes

Objectively speaking, what should concern us most is the risk of ecological collapse and preserving our living conditions and natural resources. However, we must not confuse one collapse with another, as this only encourages confusion. It is not enough to engage in a contest of exaggerations on the pretext that a collapse is inevitable! Prophecies of the end of the world at noon next year are old news.

We must admit that it is not so easy to assess the real risks and prioritize them. Only the scientific method can help us do this, even if it does not guarantee any truth, as it constantly contradicts itself. In any case, it is not a matter of personal beliefs. We need serious work and scientific debate, modeled on the IPCC for climate risks. The Rome report on the limits to growth was a step in this direction, but our situation has changed a lot since 1972, with the main risks no longer being resource depletion but global warming and the collapse of biodiversity. This collapse has been neglected until now, but “The Scientists' Appeal for Climate,” launched by ecologists and signed by more than 15,000 scientists, warns of the catastrophic state of the planet, highlighting biodiversity loss and deforestation in addition to pollution and global warming.

Awareness of these imminent risks is all the more important as we are in one of the most dangerous phases of humanity, which continues to grow at an accelerated pace (especially in Africa at present) before reaching, in a few decades no doubt, the peak of everything (population, consumption). Demographics do indeed carry a lot of weight, as they insist, but even more so does the development of the most populous countries.

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6 vues

The age of artificial intelligence

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Temps de lecture : 11 minutes

We have to admit that our world has changed radically in recent years, with the advent of the internet and then mobile phones, but we haven't seen anything yet, and with the arrival of artificial intelligence, nothing will ever be the same again, despite all the resistance to change that is destroying the old order.

It has never been clearer that it is not ideas that rule the world, as the era of ideologies would have us believe, when we had to choose between liberalism, communism, and fascism. Instead, it is technological evolution that dictates the rules, as Marx believed, through the advancement of knowledge and technology (knowledge changes the world more than big ideas).

If we have no say in this evolution, what is the point of talking about it? Not being able to decide the future does not imply fatalism or laissez-faire. Rather than fighting futilely over the ideal world we would like to build, which has no chance of ever existing, we must engage in forward thinking to prepare for the world that really awaits us and prevent the disasters that lie ahead. Forward thinking is all the more essential in a time of upheaval like the present, when everything is accelerating, but this is also what makes it almost impossible. There are too many upheavals combining, the effects of which we cannot predict after the fact, any more than we can predict new discoveries or emerging practices. The “hype cycle” is there to show that we are always wrong about new technologies, with science fiction inevitably falling into the worst simplifications when it is taken too seriously. All we ever do is prolong the latest trends, which is very inadequate, but that is our situation—and the question we are faced with remains: what can we do in this context of an uncertain future?

The difficulty of projecting ourselves into the future is obvious when we see the most opposing views on Artificial Intelligence, whose performance has been advancing so rapidly in just a few years and which is only just beginning to sweep into our lives with personal and domestic assistants. While some see nothing new in it, pointing to its current limitations, others fall into the most extreme exaggerations, from fears of being replaced by robots, which will more likely be our partners, to our enslavement by a superior intelligence, if not a mythical Singularity, an exponential extrapolation that makes no sense. The truth is that AI is going to turn everything upside down in the coming years, even more so than digital technology, of which it is the culmination, giving meaning to all the data that is transmitted en masse. We would do well to take this into account, but if we can marvel at the fact that AlphaGo Zero can learn the science of Go in 40 days, which took 3,000 years to develop—just as we marveled at the speed of our computers—this has nothing to do with omniscient intelligence. Kevin Kelly is right to say that the fear of artificial intelligence superior to our own is irrational because intelligence is multidimensional, and superior intelligence has no meaning except in a specialized field, and there are limits to intelligence, which cannot be infinite (or general). Apparently, the only way to approach human capabilities is to take inspiration from our brains, but we don't necessarily have an interest in imitating them completely, as we would also reproduce their madness (an excess of logic) and their risk of error (such as those of group thinking). It should be added that, much more than we think, our intelligence is already largely external (language, books, science, etc.), linked to our historical environment and our education rather than to our brains.

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12 vues

A brief history of man, product of technology

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Temps de lecture : 33 minutes

It seemed worthwhile to attempt a brief summary of human history from a materialistic point of view, focusing not so much on the emergence of man as on what shaped him through external pressures and led us to where we are today, where the reign of the mind remains that of information and therefore of externality. Sticking to the broad outlines is certainly too simplistic, but it is still better than the even more simplistic mythical accounts that we tell ourselves. Moreover, it shows how we can draw on everything we don't know to refute idealistic beliefs as well as ideological constructs such as Engels' “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,” which have no connection with reality.

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7 vues

Stopping creative destructions

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Temps de lecture : 12 minutes

destructionAt a time of financial bubbles, there is a surrealist aspect to watching an entire scaffolding, incapable of standing upright but nonetheless failing to collapse, as if suspended in the air. It can only hold for a certain time, until the bubble bursts, but one shouldn't underestimate the essential inertia that is a function of the masses at stake and that perturbs judgment. One can interpret the current euphoric phase as if the crisis is already behind us, although nothing has been resolved yet. The most likely outcome is that we will relapse like the Arabic revolutions that turned sour. Worst case scenarios are still possible but we should still consider the very unlikely hypothesis that we will manage to avoid complete collapse (at least to repel it indefinitely). It isn't completely impossible, as we have the means to do so in any case in an era of information and ecology, global regulations and the establishment of a universal state. Especially this time, there isn't just natural inertia but active coordination between states, even at minimum, even reluctantly, which already sets us in a very different regime.

Avoiding systematic crisis, the principal worry since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, could reveal itself as the already main effective vector of the achievement of a world unification. This new situation couldn't be without consequences. In the first place, to get rid of what Schumpeter called the "creative destructions" which according to him is caused by innovation ("the novelty doesn't come from the old but appears beside the old, competes with it and ruins it"). Some have even said that there is crisis only if there is innovation, which is very exaggerated. For René Passet, the necessity of these creative destructions would be rather a characteristic of complex systems obliged to pass through collapse in order to get rebuilt on a different basis. In any case wanting to prevent systemic crisis would decidedly be a way of stopping the economic evolution or at least to slow it down. Indeed, it has been clearly demonstrated, firstly by a state warranty of the banks that suppresses the risk ‘the moral hazard’ yet composing their first matter as much as their private character. Many take offense, demanding that the banks are allowed to become bankrupt in a very good liberal logic but, like the nuclear bomb, it is a bomb that has been revealed far too devastating to be released again.

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The universal and homogeneous state

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Temps de lecture : 16 minutes

Junger-Ernst-L-Etat-UniverselAs globalization progresses, more and more people would like to escape it by returning to an idealized nation in splendid isolation, even though the slightest attempt at originality raises storms and forces a return to the past. External pressure is undeniably homogenizing, just as prices tend to converge in open markets. Lamenting or rejecting this fact does not change anything, except to build a wall between us and the rest of the world, which is no longer tenable. We are part of this world and this time, just like this weak Europe. The only territory we have left is that of proximity, which is not insignificant and is the place for local alternatives to commercial globalisation, but it will not prevent the world from continuing to unify.

There was a time, not so long ago, when globalism seemed to be nothing more than an ideology of cosmopolitan elites, whereas we now seem to be belatedly discovering the effective erasure of borders, which is manifesting itself loudly in tax exile, among other things. On taxation, too, we have therefore lost the possibility of deviating too far from the European norm. National democracy has lost much of its substance. We can legitimately feel a sense of dispossession. We undoubtedly belong to a larger empire, which could still break apart in these times of crisis, but that would not restore us to our former glory and would instead hasten our decline, while a united Europe would once again become, at least for a time, the leading power.

However, this is only part of the question, because we are seeing the emergence of a kind of world government of the economy, particularly through the coordinated policies of central banks and the regulation of financial markets—but not of currencies, which remain national. It is therefore impossible to know whether this solidarity will withstand the currency war that has begun, but this would undoubtedly be only a hiccup in the longer-term movement towards world unification, which is already largely effective, with a universal state in the making for a long time.

Some see the emergence of a supranational state as the result of an American conspiracy, or even more specifically of the Rothschilds, with Kojève in particular lending a helping hand! History would thus be nothing more than a series of evil intentions, as in police conceptions of history that ignore material forces and underlying trends. Instead, we can see the unification of the world as a consequence of universal entropy and the development of communications. It is this entropic dimension that we will examine here and which René Passet believes he finds in the interpretation of the end of history and social classes as the homogenization of populations alongside the differentiation of individuals.

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For a philosophy of information

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Temps de lecture : 26 minutes

It seems that philosophy has remained stuck on the question of language, unable to integrate the concept of information except to offer a superficial critique of its triviality. This is all the more unfortunate given that it is therefore incapable of thinking about our current reality, which is precisely that of the information age. However, this article is not about current events, news reports, communication, or networks, but rather about considerations that may seem much more outdated regarding the very concept of information as it has manifested itself in the digital and computerized world. Both science and lifestyles have been profoundly affected by this, without philosophers seeming to be particularly concerned, except for vain and completely useless moral condemnations, when it is their categories that should be shaken up.

This is what we will try to show by examining what connects information and purpose, as well as what separates the sender from the receiver, information from fact, software from hardware, and the fundamental dualism of body and mind that cuts us off from immediate presence but should allow us to establish a true spiritual materialism. This could renew the meaning of life as uncertainty about the future, without which there is no information of value. It would be reckless to try to draw any political conclusions from such general premises, but we could nevertheless derive from this seemingly thin basis an ethic of reaction and correction of our mistakes, or at least shed new light on older questions.

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Theory of society

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Temps de lecture : 51 minutes

Following on from my book on life, I am once again tackling a task that is impossible but which I believe to be essential in view of the various political ideologies and projects for social transformation. This is by no means an attempt to provide a complete theory of human sociality, which would require entirely different dimensions, but simply to offer some key insights into how human societies function beyond the myths we have created about them. This minimal anthropology is not a theoretical problem but a highly practical one, in that it allows us to determine against the dreams of a fantasized “new man,” what we can hope for in politics and the limits of human plasticity, beyond the fable of a good nature that has been perverted or the appeal to moral values as well as to men of good will, as if all our problems came from the wickedness of the human heart. The problem is rather that in order to understand societies and their relationship to the individuals who compose them, it is necessary not only to adopt a completely discredited historical and dialectical materialism, but also to integrate highly controversial concepts such as social totality, structure, system or cycle (in macroeconomics), social field, discourse, limited rationality, imperfect information, etc.

Society is not a community, not a people, not a family, not just our relationships or exchanges with others; it is a social organization, rituals and institutions, founding texts, a way of life and coexistence on a territory, with, first and foremost, systems of production ensuring material survival and social reproduction. A whole nominalist tradition has claimed that society does not exist, which is appalling blindness, particularly in relations with other societies, not just in war. This reductionism seeks to explain everything by the self-organization of individuals or their capacity for imitation, whereas general mobilization clearly comes from a higher level over which the individual has little control. What does not exist is the autonomous individual, the self-made man who owes nothing to anyone, whose founding myth was created by Robinson. On the contrary, we must recognize our interdependencies and our sense of belonging, not only a common language and all the culture we inherit, but also productive cooperation, currency, gift and exchange circuits, the state of technology and medicine, material infrastructure and the accompanying traffic rules, etc., the very real existence of society above us. One must be blinded by ideology not to recognize the social utility, the public sphere, and the common goods that legitimize the taxes that finance them and that must be democratically approved, the privileged domain of politics. But this society above us can also make its oppression felt by crushing individuals. We will therefore try to sketch out who these individuals are who make up society even though they are its product, what the main social determinants are, and the system of production in which they participate.

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Changing the system of production

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Temps de lecture : 22 minutes

The economic and financial crisis, serious as it may be, will not provoke the end of capitalism which has weathered worse. But if an exit from capitalism has begun, it is for other reasons, which are more profound and more durable, and which are linked to our entry into the digital era and immaterial labor. It is these new productive forces which question the very basis of industrial capitalism, such as payment for wage labor or exchange value.

It is for material reasons, connected to the reproduction of productive forces, that the production system is forced to change radically, just as it is for reasons connected to material reproduction that this system will have to integrate ecological limits, by favoring the relocalisation of the economy. If the exit from the society of wage labor has already started, it is for the moment to our detriment, through the destruction of welfare protections and the explosion of precariousness. Social struggles will as always be necessary to conquer new rights and to reorient this new system towards our emancipation and a more sustainable economy. Nothing will happen by itself.

It is in any case within this material framework that our action can be decisive, far from any utopia or value subjectivism. “New technologies” occupy here a central place, comparable with the steam engine. However, it’s not only the materialism of reproduction and of techniques which it is necessary to take into account, but also the flows which constitute production as a whole system. To abandon capitalist productivism and its industrial model, neither isolated initiatives nor partial measures will suffice; the new productive relationships and new arrangements must operate as a system (of production, distribution, circulation) by ensuring their reproduction.

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