Auto Pilot

Behaviour for which I have to create a rule because my general conduct is too routine to otherwise exploit an opportunity. If x then y, I tell myself. The rule helps me to ‘recognise’ a situation and the sort of action which should then be engaged in.

Robot Recognition

Suppose … near future, advanced robot technology.   You instruct robot to vacuum the carpet.  Normally it does an impeccable job.  This time half way through there is an earthquake.  A big hole in the floor appears. A crack right across the room.  The robot has never been programmed to recognise such a thing ever happening, in spite of its sophistication in other terms.  It carries on vacuuming.  It starts vacuuming the hole.  Quickly it gets jammed and can’t get out.  What is going on her is an issue of recognition.  Recognition is the defining concept.  It is unable to recognise the new situation because this hasn’t been programmed into it.  In other words what we can say is that it can’t see anything new; it can’t see change … One could look at human behaviour in similar terms; at bureaucratic behaviour as showing this kind of blindness for example.  The bureaucrat carries on insisting on his forms even when they have become absurd.  Or: the slaughterer does not recognise his victims as human or as people.  He sees only the ‘problem’ that stands before him.  Ultimately a question of human responsibility.

The robot doesn’t care

The unoccasioned object of self-expression: let’s put it like that.   The position in which we find ourselves is paradoxical: the deliberate act of creating something for its own sake, which can be defined as art, or as as a person’s cultural expression, is paradoxical in so far as the demands that it sets are contradictory.  Expressing feeling creates the need for a mechanism that stands outside any specific individual identity. Culturally to be individual is to be rational . If it is feeling that is to be expressed in this circumstance therefore then something other than the sense of self is required. This independent mechanism might be a natural skill for example, with words or music and so forth. The skill bestows a freedom because technique then replaces identity. Someone trying to express themselves simply by working according to their feelings will fail, if their first thought isn’t a technical one. Feeling is not a linear process but rationality is – and again, first and foremost as individuals we are rational beings: we lack feeling -

I no longer recognise me either

At this point I ceased to negotiate with language and scratched the whole thing out.

The moment I hated

“She looked at me as if she no longer recognised me.”

The interval in which we are transparent to each other

… I will think of what I was going to say later …

We are alive through recognition. 

Think of what its absence means.

A Bridge of Infinity

The tension between male and female.

What is my secret weapon – ?

You ask what is my secret weapon as a philosopher?

It is the fact that I am a moron.  Ha ha ha.

The robot with no idea

Put the cat in the bin.  The money in the fridge.    Tore up the stair carpet and used it for curtains.   Hid its necktie diamond in a place it couldn’t remember and which it could not guess.

The robot with its idea

You know the most annoying thing about a robot? It wont look you in the eye. It’s always got something better to do. It will look sideways, down, up in the air; anywhere but straight in front of it where you happen to be standing. It is like traffic veering to avoid a collision and sliding across the road.