Being-in-the-world

What Hacker News says

1. thanatropismJun 2019
   Goes back to Heidegger at least if you trust Hubert Dreyfus. Maybe more.

   Heidegger at its core is an "antiplatonism of lived experience". I really can't recommend enough reading two very different interpretations of him, namely "Tool-being" by Graham Harman and "Being-in-the-world" by Hubert Dreyfus.

   Books are cheap. Get these. Most Netflix shows are bad. Read these books instead for two or three weeks.

   thread
2. mbrockApr 2016
   Lately I've been going through Dreyfus's book about Heidegger's Being and Time, called Being-in-the-world, and I've found it majorly inspiring and wonderful. Now I rave about Heidegger to anybody who will listen, more or less coherently.

   Dreyfus has made important and influential critiques of "cognitivist" AI grounded in Heideggerian arguments... which can be a fascinating angle to approach existentialism for computer scientists.

   I gladly recommend bringing a book of philosophy while travelling. You get new impressions to somehow apply ideas to, which gives a new depth to the travels and the book... plus you might form some interesting associations.

   I read this Dreyfus Heidegger book a lot during a stay in rural Thailand, and I had lots of time to reflect... And, for example, part of the book is about this background of cultural habits that we rely on daily, and that only manifests consciously when it turns unfamiliar—like when in a foreign culture. So that was fun to think about.

   Yeah, a relaxing vacation mixed with the mental stimulation of good philosophy—add a cup of coffee and that's heaven...

   Show morethread
3. mbrockJan 2016
   Maybe you're familiar with Dreyfus's critique of "cognitivism" in AI, as explained in his book What Computers Can't Do. His recent article "Why Heideggerian AI Failed" is also relevant... and his book on Heidegger, Being-in-the-World, which has some philosophical background for his anti-cognitivism.
   thread
4. walterkMar 2008
   Without a doubt, Heidegger's explanation of readiness-to-hand in Being and Time has done more for my usability and process inefficiency evaluating skills than even Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things or any HCI book I've ever read. While Norman's book comes in a strong second, the benefit of the first few chapters of Being and Time is the incredibly low-level cognitive access it gives you to the work your brain does when engaged in a task. (If you're interested and don't mind slogging through some tough writing, pick up the hardcover version and Dreyfus' Being-in-the-World and read them together. Reading a Wikipedia article or some other summary fails to deliver the same degree of low-level access.)

   I'll also mention Ayn Rand as someone who wrote inspiringly about the entrepreneur as a (potentially) heroic figure, but hasten to add that her sociology of looters and movers is way too simplistic to ground some of her views on ethics.

   John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism" was my first assigned reading in a political philosophy class, and remains my favorite.

   Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals prompted me to question whether the values I had always held were really all that valuable.

   Eleanor Rosch's work on basic categories and prototype theory (without which Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things--not to mention Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous--would likely not have been written) is fantastic, debunking empirically the Aristotelian theory of categories as being defined by necessary and sufficient conditions (they can be, where we intentionally define them to be from a top-down point of view, as in geometry, but bottom-up the construction of categories is much looser and based on family resemblances with one or several prototypes serving as the central point of comparison: hence, when I say "bird" you're more likely to think of a bluebird-type bird than a penguin or an ostrich). Knowing this does a lot to help loosen up your understanding of things, which can become rigidified by traditional mathematical, scientific, and analytic philosophical education.

   Several others worth mentioning, but I've got to get back to work!

   Show morethread
5. mbrockNov 2018
   How do you see the influence of the Heideggerian critique of cognitivism, via Hubert Dreyfus, on the "Heideggerian AI" movement which preceded the shift away from classical symbolic AI towards connectionism and embodied learning?

   Here's from the introduction to his paper Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would require making it more Heideggerian:

   > When I was teaching at MIT in the early sixties, students from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory would come to my Heidegger course and say in effect: “You philosophers have been reflecting in your armchairs for over 2000 years and you still don’t understand how the mind works. We in the AI Lab have taken over and are succeeding where you philosophers have failed. We are now programming computers to exhibit human intelligence: to solve problems, to understand natural language, to perceive, and to learn.” In 1968 Marvin Minsky, head of the AI lab, proclaimed: “Within a generation we will have intelligent computers like HAL in the film, 2001.”

   > [...] As I studied the RAND papers and memos, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, the pioneers in CS had learned a lot, directly and indirectly from the philosophers. They had taken over Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a “universal characteristic” – a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed, — Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Russell’s postulation of logical atoms as the building blocks of reality. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.

   Dreyfus agrees with you, in a way, although where you criticize philosophers doing AI, he criticizes the philosophical prejudices of AI practitioners, who often hold beliefs derived from Cartesian views on the mind. He especially criticized the grand claims of early AI researchers, but I think the criticism is still easily applicable.

   Here, for example, from his book Being-in-the-world:

   > Having to program computers keeps one honest. There is no room for the armchair rationalist's speculations. Thus AI research has called the Cartesian cognitivist's bluff. It is easy to say that to account for the equipmental nexus one need simply add more and more function predicates and rules describing what is to be done in typical situations, but actual difficulties in AI—its inability to make progress with what is called the commonsense knowledge problem, on the one hand, and its inability to define the current situation, sometimes called the frame problem, on the other—suggest that Heidegger is right. It looks like one cannot build up the phenomenon of world out of meaningless elements.

   Show morethread
6. mbrockSep 2017
   I'm not really the right person to answer, but some recent philosophy that's been influential to my thinking, and also to a lot of people in the humanities and art, is the "object-oriented ontology" as put forth by people like Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost (whose main object of investigation has been video games) and others.

   For something more obviously relevant to this crowd, you could look at the work of Hubert Dreyfus, a Heidegger scholar whose insights into the limits of viewing intelligence as symbolic cognition has actually been influential in the history of AI. It's not super recent, but maybe it takes some time for philosophy to become intelligible; when it is really interesting, it also probably seems weird when it's fresh.

   A few references for Dreyfus:

   1. His recent paper "Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would Require making it more Heideggerian"; a quote below. http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf

   "As I studied the RAND papers and memos, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, the pioneers in CS had learned a lot, directly and indirectly from the philosophers. They had taken over Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a “universal characteristic”—a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed,—Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Russell’s postulation of logical atoms as the building blocks of reality. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.

   At the same time, I began to suspect that the critical insights formulated in existentialist armchairs, especially Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, were bad news for those working in AI laboratories– that, by combining rationalism, representationalism, conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a research program, AI researchers had condemned their enterprise to reenact a failure."

   2. David Chapman's curious autobiographical book review of a somewhat hokey book on "integral philosophy", that goes into his own story at MIT's AI lab and his encounter with Dreyfus's critique; quote below. https://meaningness.com/metablog/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artif...

   "In 1987, we wrote a computer program called Pengi that illustrated some of what we had learned from Dreyfus, Heidegger, and the Continental philosophical tradition. Pengi participated in a life-world. It did not have to mentally represent and reason about its circumstances, because it was embedded in them, causally coupled with them in a purposive dance. Its skill came from spontaneous improvisation, not strategic planning. Its apparently intelligent activity derived from interactive dynamics that—continually involving both its self and others—were neither subjective nor objective. Pengi was a triumph: it could do things that the old paradigm clearly couldn’t, and (although quite crude) seemed to point to a wide-open new paradigm for further research. AI was unstuck again! And, in fact, Pengi was highly influential for a few years."

   3. Dreyfus's book about his reading of Heidegger, called Being-in-the-world, and if one wishes, a recent movie of the same name. Here is one of my many highlighted passages from the book, which is flattering to computer scientists, but also might make you wonder if there is any philosophy that is critiquing current AI research in a way that will seem prescient years down the road:

   "Having to program computers keeps one honest. There is no room for the armchair rationalist's speculations. Thus AI research has called the Cartesian cognitivist's bluff. It is easy to say that to account for the equipmental nexus one need simply add more and more function predicates and rules describing what is to be done in typical situations, but actual difficulties in AI—its inability to make progress with what is called the commonsense knowledge problem, on the one hand, and its inability to define the current situation, sometimes called the frame problem, on the other—suggest that Heidegger is right. It looks like one cannot build up the phenomenon of world out of meaningless elements."

   Show morethread