Sound Research WIKINDX

[...]

"Gooding is not a change of taste from one thing to another but the switch from a taste for things to one for commodities. One can taste or experience mere warmth only when, through a central heating plant, warmth has been stripped of its pretechnological interwovenness with culture, nature, and community and has been secured merely, i.e., as a commodity"

“the choice among methods, mechanism, organizations, and formulas is carried out automatically. Man is stripped of his faculty of choice and he is satisfied. He accepts the situation when he sides with technique.”

"I argue that we are not now in the realm of the “posthuman,” as some have proclaimed. Rather, we now have, with the new imaging, a different kind of human-technology-knowledge relation, a relation that I term embodied hermeneutic." 

[...]

"What I am calling translation is a technological transformation of a phenomenon into a readable image. This is one analog to a hermeneutic process, except in this case it is a material hermeneutic process, not one limited to textual or linguistic phenomena. Second, because it is perceivable—usually in science’s favored visualist modes—it also is available to the gestalt capacities of human vision, which can “see at a glance” the patterns displayed. In this sense, it is a phenomenological hermeneutic. So rather than leaving embodiment, the new imaging produces for embodied observers a new way of bringing close something that is both spatially and perceptually “distant.”

COMMENT:

Not in "posthuman" era. It's simply a different type of human-tech-knowledge relation - the embodied hermeneutic.

Phenomenological hermeneutic is when a technological transformation (a translation) of a phenomenon is made into a readable (perceivable) image. Analog to hermeneutic process but material, so not just text or lingustic. As such it's available to the gestalt capacities of human vision. E.g. seeing your unborn child through an ultrascound scan .

"The “praxical” “knowledge” that Heidegger attributes to the manipulation of tools, equipment, is not “cognitive” but tacit—and, I would say, bodily."

[...]

"In astronomy, these may be thought of as instrumental embodiments. Human perception is transformed in each new technological development, situated and placed differently, but implied by each technological context."

“[…] if by tool one understands the technical object enabling one to prolong and arm the body in order to accomplish a gesture, and by instrument the technical object that enables one to prolong and adapt the body in order to achieve better perception; the instrument is a tool of perception.”

As with above example from p. 67 – Technical imagination takes rise from prior elements that can then help constitute future ensembles.

It is the way that an ensemble contributes to the overall operational schema that is important to Simondon. So a concrete example might be the localisation of an element—a cylinder doesn’t need to be placed in a specific place to serve its function, or perhaps the material can be changed, so long as its functional participation is intact.

“The technicity of a spring increases when it is capable of bearing higher temperatures without losing its elasticity, when it preserves its coefficient of elasticity without significant modification within larger thermal and mechanical limits: it technically remains a spring but within a much larger framework, and is suited to a less restricted incorporation into this or that technical individual.”

Good example of what technicity means to a simple object like a spring.

“[…] the function of technical individualization, however, is assumed by human individuals; the process of learning, through which man forms habits, gestures, and schemas of action that enable him to use the highly varied tools that the totality of an operation requires, pushes this man to individualize himself technically; it is he who becomes the associated milieu of these diverse tools; when he masters all of his tools, when he recognizes the moment he must change tools in order to continue working or to use two or three tools at a time, he ensures an internal distribution and self-regulation of the task through his body.”

He continues: “In some cases, the integration in the ensemble of technical individuals happens via the intermediary of an association of human individuals working in twos, in threes, or in larger groups; when these groupings do not introduce functional differentiation, then their only direct purpose is to increase the available energy or speed of the work, but when differentiation is called for, they clearly demonstrate the genesis of an ensemble on the basis of men employed as technical individuals rather than as human individuals”

In other words – more people = more energy and therefore speed, but sometimes more people can accomplish things otherwise not possible. These humans would then all possess separate technical individualities.’’

“The unease of this situation relating to man and machine thus comes from the fact that one of the technical roles, that of the individual, has thus far and until this day been played by men; no longer a technical being, man is, henceforth obliged to learn a new function and to find a place within the technical ensemble that no longer corresponds to the technical individual; the first movement consists in occupying two functions that are not individual, that of elements and that of the direction of the ensemble; yet in these two functions man finds himself to be in conflict with the memory of himself: man has for so long played the role of the technical individual that the machine, once it has become a technical individual, still appears like a man occupying the place of another man, when it is, on the contrary, man who in fact provisionally replaced the machine before truly technical individuals could emerge.”

In Simondon’s argument here, this function of a technical individual never actually belonged to humans, it just had no yet been realised. In modern day, this is the holy argument of AI – become the leader of AI agents, the conductor of machines (the ensemble), and rise above this role of technical individual, which was never actually an essence of humanity. Interesting take.

Simondon values both the ‘magical’ knowledge that is attained often from childhood, describing it as lacking intellectual schema, as well as the intellectual knowledge of knowing exactly what to do (important to note that he is not making claims of one being superior, merely describing why they occur).   

“The secret and stable aspect of such a technics is thus not only a product of social conditions; it produces the structure of groups as much as this structure of the group conditions it. It is possible that every technics must to a certain extent contain a coefficient of intuition and instinct necessary for establishing the appropriate communication between man and the technical being. But besides this first aspect of technical formation, there exists a second aspect that stands in an inverse relation to the first, and which is essentially aimed at the adult. As in the preceding case, there is a dynamic action exerted on the individual man and on the group, leading him to possess an adult mentality.”

Referring here to the embodied technics without intellectual schema. It happens because of the group or community, but it also acts as the glue of the structure of the group.

Because our understanding of our collective self (though I don’t believe there can be said to be just one for all of humanity) changes, se can we never truly determine what it is to be human. It will inevitable evolve.

“The autodidact is tempted to bring everything back to the present: the past, insofar as he assembles it within his present knowledge, and the future, to the extent that he considers it as necessarily flowing in a continuous manner from the present through the intermediary of progress.”

The autodidact neglects historicity of technical objects, and regards them as fully formed tools rather than steps in the ongoing evolutionary lineage of the technical object. In this same way, the autodidact views the future as a simple extension of the present, and so progress seems completely natural, but technological evolution is not linear in reality. Essentially the autodidact completely misreads the genesis of technical objects.

The autodidact in Simondon’s view is the encyclopedic learner. They accumulate knowledge in a horisontal way, so the inventions are sort of presented in what might appear a continuous, “side-by-side” fashion. This leads to a view of the technical invention as merely assembly, which is not what real genesis and concretisation looks like.

Although he doesn’t mention embodiment spefically, he makes mention of skills that just belong to a person and are not ‘recorded’ knowledge so to speak. The encyclopedic learner doesn’t possess this knowledge/skill.

“However, this maturity can only be fully achieved to the extent that society is stable and is not evolving too rapidly, otherwise a society that is in the process of transforming itself, in privileging the order of succession, communicates a dynamism to its adult members that turns them into adolescents.”

Concludes a part – my takeaway from the whole thing:

AI can be seen as a forced transformation within society itself, in which leading actors determine the narratives that guide the internal tensions that influence the transduction of society as a whole. Transduction in this sense is an illusion, until it is not. In this analogy, the internal tension comes from society itself—its people, who see things a certain way. The external tensions come from those in power, attempting to enfroce their ideology onto those who exert the internal tensions, and they do so leveraging the very technology that will in turn be affected by the tensions. They try to force those who represent society to adopt certain ways of thinking, in turn aligning the interior and exterior tensions and shaping the ultimate transduction of society.

This view is purely mine, and the use of Simondon’s terms might need a bit of adjusting here.

“This alienation grasped by Marxism as having its root in the relation of the worker with the means of production, does not only derive, in our view, from a relation of property or non-property between worker and the instruments of work. Beneath this juridical and economic relation exists an even more profound relation, that of the continuity between the human individual and the technical individual, or of the discontinuity between these two beings.”

[…]

“It [alienation] also emerges outside of all collective relation to the means of production, at the physiological and psychological level of the individual properly speaking. The alienation of man in relation to the machine does not only have a socio-economic sense; it also has a physio-psychological sense; the machine no longer prolongs the corporeal schema, neither for workers, nor for those who possess the machines.”

Continues on Marx’ theory of alienation by including here the lack of embodied connection to the machines, much like LLMs.

“[…] there is no order in the preservation of recordings by the machine, which does not possess the faculty of selecting forms. Human perception distinguishes forms, perceptual units, when looking at or listening to recorded documents. But the recording itself does not really contain these forms. The inability of the data-preserving function of the machines is relative to the recording and reproduction of forms. This incapacity is general, it exists at every level.”

Any modern machine capable of ‘understanding’ recordings still does so in relation to inherently anthropocentric heuristics.

“In human memory, on the contrary, it is the form that is preserved: preservation itself is only a limited aspect of memory, which is the power of selecting forms, of schematizing experience. The machine would be capable of performing a similar function only if the already-recorded magnetic tape was superior to a new tape in recording certain sound figures, which is not the case. The plasticity in the memory of machines is that of the medium, whereas in human memory it is the plasticity of the content itself. One can say that, in man, the function of preserving recollections resides in memory, because memory, conceived as a set [ensemble) of forms, of schemas, receives the recollection it records because memory connects the recollection with its forms; in a machine, on the contrary, recording occurs without prior memory.”

We do not learn numbers for the sake of being able to re-create them purely in a technical sense. We learn the numbers in order to count and calculate real world scenarios. As such, the forms to us contain not merely shape, but signification. Signification fundamentally cannot be ascribed to text-in-itself, and as such an LLM cannot grasp form in any sense of the word beyond its technical properties, purely as they exist within the system on which it operates. This system again is inherently anthropocentric and merely a heuristic that serves humans, no machines. Is it nothing more than measurements translated into a format that we as humans have decided are suitable for a given type of data.

“For the machine lacks the plasticity of integration, which is the vital aspect of memory through which it distinguishes itself in that very instant from machine memory: the storage of the calculator or the translating machine (which is nothing but a classical calculating machine coded in a certain way) is very different from the function of the present through which memory exists, in man, at the very level of perception, through perception, making sense of the present word according to the general turn of phrase and of earlier phrases, or even according to the totality of experience acquired in the past regarding the person who speaks.”

On differences between human memory and machine memory.

“Content introduced into human memory will superimpose itself on prior content and take form on it: the living is that in which the a posteriori becomes a priori; memory is the function by which a posteriori matters become a priori.”

This is the alleged promise of LLMs tools with all their “memory”, “attention” and “context” modules – but they are merely analogous, and do not function nearly the same way.

[…]

“A complex technical operation, however, requires the use of both forms of memory. Non-living memory, the memory of the machine, is useful in cases where faithfulness in the preservation of details outweighs the syncretic nature of a recollection integrated into experience, having signification through its relation with other elements. Machine memory is the memory of the document, of the result of measurement. Mans memory is that which, after an interval o f many years, evokes a situation because it involves the same significations, the same feelings, the same dangers as another, or simply because this similarity makes sense according to the implicit vital coding constituted by experience.”

This is not to diminish what machines can do, but instead to acknowledge what either one can do, and what their possibilities and limitations then are.

“[…] there is coupling when a single and complete function is carried out by both beings. Such a possibility exists every time that a technical function has a defined self-regulation. Functions that contain a self-regulation are the ones where the accomplishment of a task is directed not only by a model to be copied (according to an end), but by a partial result of the accomplishment of the task, intervening as a condition. In the artisanal operation, this control through information gathering is frequent; man being at once the mover [moteur] tool and the perceiving subject regulates his action according to instantaneous partial results. The tool is at once tool and instrument, which is to say a means of action prolonging the organs and a channel of recurring information. The machine, on the contrary, as a complete closed individual replacing man, generally has no system of self-regulation: it goes through the motions of a stereotypy of successive gestures according to a predetermined conditioning. This first type of machine is what one could call a mechanical being without self-regulation. It is indeed a practical technical unit, but not a technical individual stricdy speaking.”

Interesting take in regards to the collaboration-with-LLMs perspetive. The issue then becomes that the LLM itself is given a role of self-regulation, of which it is fundamentally incapable. This dilutes the human’s autonomy in the regulation, which leads to reliance on what appears to be actual self-regulation, but is merely statistical approximation. This is precisely the lure and the fault of LLMs:

“Despite appearances, it is, on the contrary, the truly automatic machine that least replaces man, because the function of regulation that exists in this machine presupposes a variability in its operation, an adaptability of its functioning to the completion of this work. A rather elementary enthusiasm for self-regulating automata lets us forget that these machines are precisely the ones that are most reliant on man; while the other machines need man simply as a servant or organizer, self-regulating machines need man as a technician, which is to say as an associate; their relation to man is situated at the level of this regulation, not at the level of elements or ensembles.”

”There are a certain number of outstanding places in the world, exceptional points that attract and stimulate aesthetic creation, as there are a certain number of particular, radiant moments in a human life, that distinguish themselves from others, that call for a work of art. The work, resulting from this requirement of creation, from this sensitivity to places and moments of exception, does not copy the world or man, but rather extends them and becomes integrated with them. Even if it is detached, the aesthetic work does not arise from a rupture in the universe or in the life time of man; it comes as a surplus of already given reality, bringing it constructed structures, but constructed on foundations that are a part of the real and which become integrated into the world.”

“One can thus say that the aesthetic object is not strictly speaking an object, but rather the extension of the natural or human world that remains integrated within the reality that bears it; it is an outstanding point in a universe; this point is the result of an elaboration and benefits from technicity; but it is not arbitrarily placed in the world; it represents the world and focalizes its ground forces and qualities, like a religious mediator; it keeps itself in an intermediary state between pure objectivity and subjectivity. When the technical object is beautiful, it is because it has been integrated into the natural or human world, just like aesthetic reality.”

“Like the tool, the aesthetic object is an intermediary between objective structures and the subjective world; it is the mediator between knowledge and will. The aesthetic object concentrates and expresses aspects of both knowledge and will. Aesthetic expression and creation are at once knowledge and act. The aesthetic act comes to fulfillment, like knowledge, within itself; but aesthetic knowledge is mythical: it harbors a power of action; the aesthetic object is the result of an operation that is an intermediary between knowledge and action”

“[…] [A]rt plays a preparatory role in realizing a commonality of the most diverse attitudes. There are technicians and priests, there are scholars and men of action: the original magical load that allows these men to have something in common and to find a way of exchanging their ideas resides in aesthetic intention. The category of the beautiful, in a specialized thought, is what announces that the needs of complementary thoughts are immanently and implicitly fulfilled by the very accomplishment of this specialized thought; the impression of beauty can hardly arise at the beginning of an effort, but only at its end, because this effort must first have followed its own direction, and it must furthermore arrive at the accomplishment of something it neither hoped to accomplish nor had already accomplished […]”

“One could even ask oneself whether art, to the extent that it observes, is not also what somehow sums up and renders an ensemble of realities transposable to another temporal unit, to another moment in history. Art, in the celebration and final investiture that it brings about, transforms the fulfilled and localized reality hic et nunc into a reality that will be able to traverse time and space: it renders human fulfillment non-finite; it is commonly said that art eternalizes different realities; art, in fact, does not eternalize but renders transductive, giving a localized and fulfilled reality the power to pass to other places and other moments. It does not make eternal, but grants the power of rebirth and the capacity to fulfill oneself; it leaves the seeds of quiddity; it gives the particular being realized hic et nunc the power to have been itself but also to be itself one more time and a multitude of other times; art loosens the bonds of eccéité; it multiplies ecceity, giving identity the power to repeat itself without ceasing to be identity.”

Simondon says that these objects can only exist by virtue of imagination, and that humans can make use of these schema in their minds to envision how things will work. This is why the milieu is purely virtual until the invention of the technical object itself, which in turn puts the new milieu into existence, and so they affect each other.

"The reason the living being can invent is because it is an individual being that carries its associated milieu with it; this capacity for conditioning itself lies at the root of the capacity to produce objects that condition themselves."

Here Simondon mentions that psychologists missed not schemas, forms or operations, but the dynamic ground upon which these schemas confront each other, combine and participate:

"[...] a deeper analysis of the inventive process would no doubt show that what is deterinant and plays an energetic role are not forms but that which carries the forms, which is to say their ground; the ground [...] is what harbors the dynamisms; it is that through which the system of forms exists"

"For the ground is the system of virtualities, of potentials, forces that carve our their path, whereas forms are the system of actuality. Invention is the taking charge of the system of actuality through the system of virtualities, the creation of a unique system on the basis of these two systems."

Forms then, are actualised potentials and virtualities.

Speaks for itself.

Simondon argues that automatism is a low degree of technical perfection, because automating a machine means sacrificing a wide range of possible usages.

Instead, raising the technicity of a machine corresponds to a certain margin of indeterminacy, which allows the machine to be sensitive to outside information - an "open" machine. 

Said in relation to technology that didn't directly replace humans, but rather animals or tools. The automatic weaving loom, for instance, is a bearer of tools much like humans.

Simondon points out that alienation is certainly a result of the worker no longer being the owner of his means of production, but also at the physiological and psychological level of the individual. He says that: "the machine no longer prolongs the corporeal schema, neither for workers, nor for those who possess the machines" (p. 133), meaning that the machine doesn't function as an extension of the mind, but instead we feed ir ot manage its logistics.