firstclass#emergence

As I said in my first blog I was pretty sure to not apply for the courses in presential. I was not confident with my English level and I was supposed to find a job here in athens. However after one semester of following my friends in room A3 every week, I can say I have no regrets ! I was quite surprised by the subjects we dealt with. I was expecting some knowledge about family and group therapy or the influence of social media. I didn’t read the caption explaining the topics in the guide of course. Now I understand it was more like a philosophic course about us. Moreover the professor was so kind to let us express ourselves as much as possible. He was encouraging us with different types of exercises promoting discussion and the importance of any personal opinion. Finally he looked so glad to see students again after the covid lock down and tried to make us comfortable after all this time alone.

 To begin,  reductionism and holism showed me how much things make sense together. On the one hand, explaining a complex thing by subdividing it into smaller and understable parts is helpful in daily life. Actually everything can be used as an example here. Science, which is our common way of thinking, consumes this approach. Then we can name atoms for material or forces for movement or else cells for living beings. Besides in a more spiritual way, a behavior could be defined by personality, feelings and intellect. On the other hand, understanding things on their own and not only as the sum of their parts can add a new dimension and function. This approach highlights the impact of emergence. That’s to say, it’s way more interesting for parts to cooperate for a bigger purpose than individual function. For example ants are able to build bridges and boats only when they work together. Moreover in a more social approach, I’m used to saying that in a group of two we don’t work two times faster but a hundred times. 

Next we’ve discussed Anthropocene and AI. Humanity’s footprint on earth is a disaster and ad hoc solutions make feedback loop snowballs. We all know that we use more than how much Nature can give us. We are at a point where we already use ressources supposed to appear next year. However, I’m personally convinced that we have the capability to innovate and find out a new way to consume responsibly. According to me, creativity and a sense of responsibility can save us. Intelligent people or people able to find a new way by themselves, can create their own way to save, at their level Nature ressources. Moreover if they find out that this new approach out of the box can be useful by others, they would share it. We discussed that our society keeps away intelligence and creativity. Most of the time we consider creativity as a childish skill or reserved for artists while logical-intelligence would be the only way to succeed. I would never stress enough that creativity is the purest form of intelligence because it’s the capability to make links between things whatever the contexts are. Then the subject of Artificial Intelligence appeared. Somebody invented a computer able to learn by itself and then improve its own intelligence as much as we do. To weigh the pros and the cons, I would say that I don’t want to become lazy but a society where everything is done seems equal to everyone.

Finally the last chapter approached was diversity. I remember two intriguing classes. One of them consisted of introducing your home city in the first place and commenting on the others’ ones in the second place. This exercise made us remember and proud of where we come from but above all we could hear about specific cities from countries that we don’t even know the capital of. That made me realize how accessible the world is. Thanks to this class I know people from various places in Europe. Moreover the professor made a graphic representation of our group but highlighting the connections instead of singularities. This network of connections made us appreciate how connected we are all on earth. Even more with social media, I’m only seven people away from the president of the United States ! The second course was about Rhizomes. This last is now totally clear haha. In a philosophical way we are all the same, connected and communicating. This approach compares humanity to a plant which seems like a forest of different beings but is actually only one unique being. 

To conclude I would say that I think understand G. Bateson statements. We all have a role to play in the great systems that the universe is. Ecology was just an example. First we have to understand who we are as a sum of smaller parts and a whole being. Then thanks to creativity and after observing the other’s roles we create our own. A function in the universe connects us to the others and leads all the systems to the emergence.

The 9th class ! the movie ! “The Mindwalk”…. this movie consists of only one dialogue between a poet, a scientist and a politician. The scene takes place in 1990 and deals with issues still accurate these days. 

At the beginning I thought it would be boring because of the image and sound’s quality, stereotypical roles, and a great lesson on morality for two hours. I got interested when I saw that it was not only a debate between a hippy and a businessman/politician . They truly tried to understand each other with consideration. The debate let me put words on my thoughts about those topics, what I would agree or not, what “side” I would defend etc… The main point of the scientist could be summarized as a call to change our perception of our own power and duty.

She also makes a great transition with our class starting her argumentation with a reference to the philosophical concept of mechanistic from Descartes. According to this way of thinking, to understand the whole you just have to divide it into smaller parts easily understable. Moreover they obviously talked about ad hoc solutions benefiting politicians and people in short terms. Finally the system theory is quite mantionned, saying we are all connected. We have the power and the duty to change our minds and realize how grave our situation is.

“Wow, I’m late for the 8th blog. What was it about again ?! Drawing ! What ?” Actually the course was titled “Rhizome”. This last strange noun is apparently a biological concept that we extrapolated to the human condition.

As reminded by the slides, the Pando is a living organism with numerous expressions of itself. If you are not aware of its true nature, you would only see differences between its members and not see them as parts of a single organism (it truly looks like a forest). Then we compared our society to this “rhizome” and we realized again how similar we are. To be honest this exercise highlighted how much we try to differentiate the others and how much we want to stand out. Anyways, we are now all parts of the same great single organism which is Humanity ! If we refer to the philosophical definition, the rhizome that we are parts of is… a chaotic mess. That’s to say that there is no hierarchy or path, we are just in expansion, communicating and evolving all the time. 

Then the professor decided to make us draw. You had to see my eyes when I saw the pens and understood the practice part for this week. With my teammates we all agreed on the idea of a tree to demonstrate the importance of what we understood about the concept of rhizome. “Many leaves, One tree : we are all individuals, but we’re still connected” (Epic-Movie). Once inspired we had to discuss colors. In the first part they were chosen at random and in rainbow order in the second part. Finally ,between the branches of the tree, we added some words linked to the philosophical concept of rhizome.

Last week we didn’t need slides to learn the importance of our experience and how lucky we are.

First, we only used a map and shared personal details about our home cities. I was quite confused about having to share other things than opinions or basic stuff about myself to introduce. This exercise made me think about how much I like my home city, Puteaux, and it’s not a common thing. I realised the importance of having a city that I can consider as a home, where I know people and have my routine. Personally, as I said in my little note on the map, Puteaux is the city of something like a rebirth and this is where I felt thankful to my mother who brought my sister and I there. Looking for a photo which highlights only good parts of the city was difficult because so many things are important ! No but to be honest I couldn’t choose and I decided to take only my street because of the routine. 

In a second time, we read the other notes on the map, those about the others’ home city. And then I realised I didn’t understand the exercise ! I only had to describe my city and not my personal point of view on it. But the most interesting thing then is that I realised that the others had a life before coming here in Athens. This life before being a stranger, a student, and a tourist like me had a totally different context. Beyond liking clubbing as we all do, we have our own culture and personal way to see our home city. To conclude, the last lesson was an original way to show us how much this mobility in Athens linked us from so many different backgrounds.

During the 6th lesson we defined the concept of singularity and we talked about our perspective about AI. 

To be really honest I don’t remember anything about singularity maybe because i didn’t understand anything. The only thing I can learn from  my notes is that technology defies singularity as an independent computer. We can easily imagine a computer able to create a more intelligent computer and then a good feedback loop would be created.

About AI I remember a video dealing with the evolution of technology’s purposes. At first they decided to invite a computer able to beat the world champion in chess and once it’s done they had the idea of a computer able to learn from its mistakes. When we imagine a future with technologies always more intelligent the same scenario appears : AI would control us with or without our agreement. In that case most of us must be afraid of robots and everything. 

In my case, I studied transhumanism with my philosophy teacher and we arrived at this conclusion. On the one hand a society where everything is done by robots, humans would become lazier and lazier again but on the other hand inequality would be fixed. So basically , we all have seen the Disney movie Wall-E. There you can see a society poisoned by the non-necessity of working. People are not healthy of course and are losing passion in life. In contrast they are all equal under the cup of robots. There is no need to congratulate someone for his work and we all have access to the resources because robots don’t need.

During the last lesson we started by defying “Complexity”, then we dealt with an “Ad hoc solution” with the example of DDT used in 1947 and we finished with the concept of Homeostasis.

The term “Complexity”, in my opinion, meant the compilation of our experiences, personality and way of feeling and thinking, which is what makes us special. Actually I learned it was just the opposite of simplicity. I mean if we define Simplicity by a linear causality. We can take the example of clapping your hands, it would make noise. Complexity is a situation with various possible results which depends on the initial conditions. Those results are so sensitive that we can’t say in advance what’s going to happen while controlling the initial conditions. For example, if I throw marble on a xylophone from the side with closed eyes, I can’t tell what music notes are going to appear while I’m the one supposed to control the situation. 

Actually those situations are not as rare as my example. Actually, in most cases, we can’t predict everything. And sometimes, the results go in the opposite way of what we imagined. If we are not lucky our behavior can lead to a worse situation. This is called the “Ad hoc solution”, that creates more problems than it cures. We can talk about using petrol. At the beginning it was supposed to help us to go faster and further.  Today fossil fuels are one of the main issues on earth for evident reasons. In class we used the example of DDT in 1947, but I was truly thinking about our vaccines.

In my biology class in high school we used to say that Nature is perfect thanks to Natural selection which is a radical negative feedback loop. We noticed this way of evolution leads only to the best solution to survive and procreate. But it means that Nature has tried all the other ways and learnt from those mistakes. So if we have to take lessons from this, I think we should learn from our failures in order to bring perfection and equilibrium.

During the fourth class we saw the concept of the anthropocene and then we linked it to intelligence.

First we watched the trailer of the movie Anthropocene : the Human Epoch. It dealt with the impact of humanity on Earth. It must be a documentary about how bad our way of using natural resources is. Actually the only thing in my head was not the last time I went to sort out recycling but my course in philosophy about the opposition between Culture and Nature. The video was a compilation of many beautiful images of both of those last. It made me think that we usually forget we are not the only ones who influence the other : Nature inspired us in any invention. I think that invention is only a compilation of things we know or see. For example planes have been created because birds already existed. Moreover, all we can do is use Nature by stealth. We can take phones or radio for example. Finally, after all this creativity, we have to understand that Nature will always be more efficient than us with all our technology. The speed of light is so impressive that we use it as a hypothetical tool of measure in space. As a conclusion, we obviously know we moved the planet out of its limits but moreover we should not forget that this same planet made us what we are.

The second part of the course was about intelligence and creativity. We had to talk about Sir Ken Robinson’s conference. We tried to put ourselves on intelligence and creativity scales. But we finally agreed to give a 10/10 to everyone because we believed that everyone has his own way to be “intelligent”. In my opinion, the problem is not to consider any form of intelligence. The problem comes from our society which gives too much importance to logical intelligence. Then people frustuated to be called “dumb” acted in order to put the word “intelligence” on every usefull and essantial abilities like creativity or socialisation. Finally we decided to declare the most “intelligent” person the one who would be able to reach his personal purposes and to be happy.

During the third lesson we talked about reductionism, self-organisation and emergence. Then we shared our opinions on those questions and how we could extrapolate those was of thinking to our lives.

First, Reductionism, as I understood it, is the way of explaining phenomena by dividing it into the most possible simple parts. It reminded me of the History of Psychology class and that the opposite philosophical movement is Holism or Emergence. On one hand they consider things as systems, but on the other hand, things are seen as different and more than the sum of their parts. I must usually try to explain phenomena by the Reductionism way. In my opinion it looks more scientific. “Everythings is made of smaller things which interact with the others and produce phenomena.” : that’s what I learned in high school and what I believe in. The image of a duck seen by Reductionism reminded me of the dualism of Descartes : mind and body are linked as a vaisseau and its pilote. Our body can be made of multiple different parts, they need a leader to work in my opinion.

Then, Sefl-organisation appeared. As I understood it again, it is a phenomenon produced by different actors but without a leader. We saw for example the construction of a lifeboat by ants or the synchronization of 32 metronomes. Scientifics explain those spontaneous behaviors by short communications from close to close. I instantly thought it must be the worst way to communicate orders but they did it ! They reached the other side ! We explained this by a common purpose.

Finally, the practice time made us my group and I understand how much human beings need leaders whereas they have the same purpose.

First of all, you have to know that I study Psychology. It means I only had to go to one course per week to validate the semester. Some of the students convinced me to try the courses in English, whereas I was not interested in those subjects in psychology. Then I went back the day after for a course on Systems theory, Psychology and Social media. The only way for it to be interesting would be to show how useless and selfish Facebook or Instagram are. Instead of this, we talked about things thousands of times more captivating : Philosophy and Humanity. I am not saying that I am an expert only satisfied with abstract topics, I mean I am not sure about my understanding. Just to say that I was surprised by the depth of our study which will lead us to the current social media. 

Furthermore, the most surprising thing must be the teacher on his own. He looked really happy to see students for the first time after one and a half years. He was welcoming and truly interested in all of us and our home country. I liked the way he tried to make us confident about our personal knowledge in the English language with the metaphor of a growing flower. Moreover, his pedagogy looks really good. He asked us to write down our feelings in order to improve our self understanding which is essential in our studies. Last but not least, our homework consists of expressing ourselves about the course on a blog. What a “mise en abîme” for a class on social media ! I suspect this to be a new way to work on our last class, our feelings and our writing expression at the same time.

To summarize, I am definitely interested in this course !

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