Dialectic vs. Technocracy

This book is about reasoning. Is it scientific and technological? I cast doubt on that now-conventional view by presenting readers with a more traditional style of reasoning which is dialectical and philosophical. True, mechanical computation is impressive in its efficiency and precision, but these count only for so much in the total view. We are now so impressed with quick computers and brightly lit space shuttles that they blind us to many other things, indeed to superior things. The technocratic culture has its merits, but it is merely useful and servile. It is like a body without a head. The contemporary context for this discussion arises because the sphere of automata is constantly expanding. Robots steer airplanes, invest in stock markets, and generate algorithms for advertizing to affect predictable consumer behavior. The popular keyword is Artificial Intelligence (AI). But it is less often noted now that computation requires no real intelli gence, no interpretation, intuition, mind’s eye, natural light, self, person ality, or consciousness of any kind. There is no ghost in the machine.1 With automata much can occur — or at least seem to occur — in life and the universe without anyone really being there. Not only are there no Gods and no heroes anymore but there is not even a free will or a self. You think you decide? Well, it is your blood vessels that do it, or the wiring inside your skull. This prospect is totalitarian or dystopian according to some authors because increasingly the mechanical model threatens to control all of life and reality. But the word ‘totalitarian’ can also be misleading, given that there can now be no great dictator with a plan: even he would be a puppet of impersonal forces. No one is in control. \[...\] What then is the opposite force? What is philosophical or foundational reasoning? And what is its relation to the technocratic model that has just been sketched? In this book the cues concerning this are taken from the dialectical philosophers of ancient Greece and modern German Idealism, though similar lines of thought are familiar also from India, China, and numerous further cultures. In India there is what is called Hinduism as well as Buddhism. From China we have Daoism but also Confucianism. The main Greek philosophers include Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato. In German Idealism the two dominant names are Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Beyond these, there are dozens of further -isms and personalities. Fundamental to all these dialectical perspectives is a distinction between merely relative things and absolutes, or in other words between conditional or dependent things on the one hand and unconditional and independent ones on the other. The former class is lower because it is always qualified: If A is true only if B is, then that means that A needs backing up by B. Therefore A by itself is not quite true yet, and so it is true and not true, or true and false at once.